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 »

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 »

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.

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My first impres­sion was that this game is just out­right ridicu­lous: premise of steam-powered trans­form­ing mechs launch­ing from a secret base beneath a Broad­way the­ater, stereo­typ­i­cal char­ac­ters as flat as their card­board cutout pre­sen­ta­tion, plenty of super-shounen tropes in the story… It’s even got wee­aboo cul­ture all over — espe­cially when the open­ing scenes involve a half-Japanese half-Texan cow­boy samu­rai fea­tured as the main hero­ine… Wat? （￣～￣;）

But you know, I love not grind­ing, or wor­ry­ing about expe­ri­ence dis­tri­b­u­tion, or max­i­miz­ing expe­ri­ence gain from every bat­tle. Because in Sakura Wars V, you level up by talk­ing and forg­ing inter-party bonds, visual novel style; kind of like Per­sona social links, except bet­ter since it actu­ally lev­els you up. So take all of that frus­tra­tion out and add some fresh inven­tive­ness to each bat­tle (Valkyria Chron­i­cles style, this is by the same dev team) and you have some real Tac­ti­cal RPG gam­ing, like hop­ping between sky­scraper roofs destroy­ing artillery or an aer­ial bat­tles in the New York City sub­way — yes really.

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Netto first got me think­ing when he reported the eroge indus­try to be in a state of peril, but I’ve been put­ing it off until this past week­end, when I (finally) fin­ished Per­sona 4 and got started on my UK ver­sion of Agarest Wars. As one might guess, those two games are very much on the topic here.

Tears to Tiara Visual Novel on the PS3 (those graph­ics aren’t bad at all)

The bound­aries between JRPGs and Visual Nov­els has always been blurred. After all, IGN recently iden­ti­fied the JRPG “talk­ing card­board cutout” tra­di­tion in their Top 10 Ways to Fix JRPGs, and the most rec­og­niz­able image of Visual Nov­els has got to be that win­dowed screen­shot of bishoujo char­ac­ter CGs atop a class­room back­ground with dia­logue box beneath it. Not to men­tion, there are Vis­nov pro­duc­ers like Alice-soft (Rance) and that branch of Leaf/Aquaplus (Tears to Tiara, Utaware­ru­mono) who seems to spe­cial­ize in import­ing RPG ele­ments into their Vis­novs. But com­bin­ing JRPG and Vis­nov ele­ments goes far deeper than just the graph­ics corner-cutting of pre­sen­ta­tion or the addi­tion of a basic com­bat system.

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