When I told my friend I was going to buy a com­mer­cial OELVN to check it out, the response was “Why would you do that!?”

Even west­ern fans of Japan­ese visual nov­els often frown upon the OELVN (Orig­i­nal Eng­lish Lan­guage Visual Novel) com­mu­nity. Pro­duc­tion qual­i­ties are always a con­cern, as the ama­teur teams formed by west­ern enthu­si­asts sim­ply have no chance of com­pet­ing against fan-translated famous Japan­ese visual novel titles. But there’s always a start— the Key staffers’ first big title, ONE, cer­tainly had nei­ther good art­work nor detailed sto­ry­writ­ing, even com­pared to ani­ma­tion from back then. But just as the early visual nov­els offered some­thing dif­fer­ent from the ani­manga medium, OELVNs have their own appeal. Yet as far as I can tell, OELVN groups haven’t made much progress at all in expand­ing over the recent years, espe­cially in com­par­i­son to vis­nov local­iza­tion com­pa­nies like Man­gagamers. Read the rest of this entry »

We all know the gen­er­al­iza­tion: that the shoujo genre is filled with sparkles, bub­bles, and chap­ters of cute and fluffy romance. Being a big fan of shoujo with strong leads, I first picked up Crim­son Empire, an Otome Game adap­ta­tion by Quin­rose (pro­duc­ers of the famous Heart no Kuni no Alice) because of an sur­pris­ing aspect: its hero­ine is an ex-assassin secu­rity guard in ser­vice to the crown prince— sure don’t see that one every day =o. Nev­er­the­less, five chap­ters of the manga did not pre­pare me for the actual game itself. Read the rest of this entry »

A story of unre­lent­ing revenge, heart­felt redemp­tion, and ever­last­ing love after ten years of agony…

G-Senjou no Maou [Lit: The Devil on G-string] is an Akabeisoft2 visual novel released in 2008. Made by the cre­ators of Sharin no Kuni (my favorite), the acclaimed G-senjou with its com­bi­na­tion of a sus­pense­ful crim­i­nal schemes & detec­tive mind games, brilliantly-executed char­ac­ter drama, an awe­some & well-developed core cast, and one of the best story finales ever. For fans of non-generic visual nov­els who enjoy either a mys­tery thriller or a won­der­ful romance/drama, this is def­i­nitely a must-play~ (Much thanks to TLwiki for their won­der­ful Christ­mas present to the com­mu­nity) Read the rest of this entry »

Merry Christ­mas every­body~! ^o^ Hope your hol­i­day has been going great~! In the mean­time this’ll be the final of my hol­i­day post spam (seri­ously, 13! I’m spent! I have no clue how those episodic blog­gers keep all this up xD)

It’s been pre­ciously one year since I start play­ing Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo, and com­pared to my 2010 anime expe­ri­ences, this visual novel eas­ily blew them all out of the water to take my #1 spot. With a unique premise, an imag­i­na­tive back­ground that was taken advan­tage of to its fullest, an awe­some set of char­ac­ters includ­ing one of the best pro­tag­o­nists ever, not to men­tion a high-impact dra­matic buildup that would even have the famed Key staffers envi­ous— this is one visual novel that’s a must-play if you’ve got any inter­est in the medium at all~ Read the rest of this entry »

“This game is insane… I don’t mean insanely good or insanely bad, but that it leads to insanity.”

Remem­ber 11: The Age of Infin­ity was devel­oped by KID in 2004; it’s the last title in the Infin­ity series, which includes Never 7 and the hugely-popular Ever 17. It’s a mys­tery thriller visual novel that’s com­pared with the likes of When They Cry series at times. The story is fast-paced and addic­tive. The strange ‘body-displacing’ phe­nom­e­non will suck you in quickly and bog­gle your mind. But it’s also rather short— I got both good end­ings and most of the infor­ma­tive bad end­ings in just ~15 hours of game time; also unfor­tu­nately, the end­ing to Remember11 is extremely unsat­is­fy­ing, and although amaz­ing in its own rite, the lim­ited rev­e­la­tions cer­tainly don’t match up to its pre­de­ces­sor Ever17. Nev­er­the­less, much thanks to its trans­la­tion staff over at TLWiki. Read the rest of this entry »

I want to become an ally of justice…

In any other local­iza­tion, Emiya Shirou’s wishes would prob­a­bly have been trans­lated to ‘hero of jus­tice’. But Nasu­verse has made it remark­ably appro­pri­ate not to do so. Fate/stay night has already approached the ques­tion of ‘what makes a hero’ from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives, from the ide­al­ized (Unlim­ited Blade Works) to the per­sonal (Heaven’s Feel). Yet as Fate/stay night mixes the Black & White of mod­ern hero­ism, the tragic and cyn­i­cal nature of Fate/zero takes it up even another notch:

True jus­tice may be heroic, but it was far too inhu­mane for heroes. Read the rest of this entry »

Much thanks to Dakko­dango Trans­la­tions for trans­lat­ing this game, although they really should think about invest­ing in a game descrip­tion page; I almost skipped this because I had lit­tle clue what it was about.

Eien no Aselia [Eng: Aselia the Eter­nal] is a visual novel strat­egy game hybrid made by Xuse nearly a decade ago, and unlike the usual visual novel, it’s got enough game­play to be com­pa­ra­ble to true SRPGs. While its story is rather straight­for­ward for a vis­nov, Eien no Aselia remains remark­able in its own right by envelop­ing its audi­ence with a vividly-depicted orig­i­nal fan­tasy world while engross­ing them in an epic story bal­anced along­side addic­tive turn-based strat­egy mechan­ics. It’s essen­tially an epic fan­tasy adven­ture x mil­i­tary fic­tion stuck into a JRPG… some­what like Utaware­ru­mono, except bet­ter imo. Read the rest of this entry »

Bad social rep­u­ta­tion is some­thing the Visual Novel fan has learned to accept. But if you thought the whole Rapelay inci­dent didn’t really hurt our inter­est that much, think again…

The recent edit war between Minori (Wind, Ef) and the trans­la­tion group NNL may just lead to the com­plete scrap­ping of the Eden trans­la­tion project, one that is highly antic­i­pated by the vis­nov com­mu­nity and reviewed by Choux to be “one of the best” with Shinkai-Makoto-worthy art­work. But while an entire com­mu­nity vents against Minori for being xeno­pho­bic, Minori explains them­selves in self-defense, which included:

“Each coun­try has their own cul­ture.… we real­ized that there are coun­tries that pun­ish mere pos­ses­sion of prob­lem­atic forms of expres­sion… Cur­rently, The bill that allows to lim­it­ing the con­tent to all ERO­GEs is being dis­cussed in the Diet because intel­lec­tu­als and politi­cians said ‘Japan­ese EROGE were being prob­lem­atic and trou­bled with the for­eign coun­tries.’”

Pick­ing my mem­o­ries brings up that Minori started their xeno­pho­bic streak because of the Rapelay inci­dent.

Read the rest of this entry »