The Visual Novel Thread

[animeapple]

I've played Ever17 and trust me, it's REALLY good.

I'd recommend YU-NO as well, but that one is NSFW. It's worth mentioning because it did a lot of things the Zero Escape series did, but over a decade earlier.

okay ill give both games a look. but it looks like it will be alot of work to get yu-no to run properly... this is going to be fun....

[Azure Sen]

I've played way more visual novels than I initially thought I did: Hatoful Boyfriend, 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, Corpse Party, Digital: A Love Story and don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story (and a couple of other freeware ones that I can't recall the names of). Hatoful Boyfriend is still one of my favorites, since I can always appreciate a good affectionate parody and the Bad Boys Love route is still amazing. I've done all of the endings and such for it. I also have Holiday Star, but I have yet to get around to it. 999 and the Dangan Ronpa games are pretty good mystery games. Digital: A Love Story had an interesting premise but the actual gameplay was basically memorizing/writing down a bunch of fake IP addresses and passwords, and don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story had a lot of good about it ruined by an awful ending.

Oh, and I did try to play Narcissu once upon a time, but got bored and quit about 20 minutes in.

EDIT: Oh right, I also mentioned Corpse Party. It's a horror VN that makes the cardinal mistake of killing off all of the interesting characters because they weren't in the original game (which was on PC-98), and while the premise is scary it isn't really taken advantage of to the most of its potential.

Edited May 25, 2016 by AzureSen

[The Geek]

When it comes to VNs, you've got to mention TYPE-MOON's VNs: Tsukihime, Fate/Stay Night, and Mahou Tsukai no Yoru. Sadly, none of them have official English releases (it still baffles me that there's no official English release of F/SN at least considering its popularity. The only reasons I can think of that there isn't one is either TYPE-MOON won't give any translation company the rights or there is an official translation in progress but it hasn't been announced yet) and I don't think Mahoyo even has a complete fan translation.

[Soledai]

I think Mahoyo has a beta patch...? I might need to confirm that, I'm out of touch with Type Moon nowadays

Digital: A Love Story

Easily one of the best I've ever read, it's good to find another person who's read it.

That said, have you read Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus? While I positively enjoyed Digital, Analogue was the best of the three for me.

[Taka-kun]

I am in love with the visual novels by Key, i.e. Kanon, Clannad, Little Busters. The writing and storytelling is (mostly) superb and has a way of tugging on your heartstrings. Little Busters is especially good at this, due to not focusing only on romance, but also on friendship. Rewrite is probably my most favorite however, due to its different take, which came out of the left field for me when I played it.

Ace Attorney is probably known to many, so there isn't much to add there.

[Azure Sen]

That said, have you read Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus? While I positively enjoyed Digital, Analogue was the best of the three for me.

Not yet. My game backlog is a bit ridiculous at the moment, so I'm focusing on beating the games I already have before I move on to buying new ones, but both of those games are high on the list for when I do. In general I really do love Christine Love's writing, even if she can get a bit preachy at times (which I hardly noticed any of in Digital, but the whole ending of don't take it personally babe was really guilty of).

[Daiya]

http://www.ricedigital.co.uk/steinsgate-0-english-2016-release-in-europe-north-america-confirmed/

I've been waiting for this day...

[Gulcasa766]

There's no need for an official release of Type-Moon VNs, as Mirror Moon does super quality translations.

It'd also just complicate things heavily.

[Wist]

Danganronpa is one visual novel with game elements that managed to draw me in from the beginning. It is full of anime stereotypes mixed with what you'd expect from the mystery and suspense genre, added with Ace Attorney-esque investigations and trials. Still, it is fun for those who are ok with anime pandering.

How blatant is the pandering? Do the characters have any depth? I have the first two games but haven't given them a try yet. I was excited to jump into them soon. Now I'm not so sure.

okay ill give both games a look. but it looks like it will be alot of work to get yu-no to run properly... this is going to be fun....

It looks like you've been convinced to look into Ever-17. But I'll add that Ever-17 is quite similar to 999. Given you like Zero Escape, chances are good you'll like Ever-17.

A remake of YU-NO is actually being released this year. But unfortunately I don't think there are yet any (public) plan to bring it to the PC.

Edited May 28, 2016 by Wist

[Rapier]

How blatant is the pandering? Do the characters have any depth? I have the first two games but haven't given them a try yet. I was excited to jump into them soon. Now I'm not so sure.

I think they do. It's been a long time since I've watched a LP of the first game. Also, about the pandering, the characters' personalities are as stereotyped as Awakening, there is due fanservice and typical anime stuff, but that isn't so bad imo. I recommend giving it a try anyway, especially if you have played AA / likes mysteries.

Edited May 28, 2016 by Rapier

[Taka-kun]

http://www.ricedigital.co.uk/steinsgate-0-english-2016-release-in-europe-north-america-confirmed/

I've been waiting for this day...

The anime was pretty good though, so I don't feel a need to play through the long visual novel. It was the same for Clannad. I watched and cried with the anime, I only played the VN for some routes the anime didn't cover in its entirety.

[DeoxyRibose]

The only visual novel i've ever played is Danganronpa 2. I skipped the first one because I watched the anime adaptation.

Well, since Ace Attorney does count, I did play the first case of Investigations. Then I gave up and watched it on youtube.

That's my experience with playing visual novels, but i've watched a couple on youtube either out of interest in the story/characters or how ridiculous the premise is.

Overall, my review of Visual Novels is:

They're pretty dope.

[Jave]

After finishing the A and B routes in Root Double I can definitely say this VN is amazing. If you liked the atmosphere from the Infinity and Zero Escape series, you'll most definitely enjoy.

Route B has a lot of exposition until around the halfway mark, but trust me, at the end it's worth it.

And the game is not over yet! Looks like there's still plenty to go!

[Soledai]

I played a quick run of Bad End because it looked really lol, since I was looking for something short while I was getting Magical Eyes - Red is for Anguish.

And it was indeed really lol. If you're looking for some that was quickly made, cliche(The plot was kind of okay, until it turned predictable), and will probably only spook you once, then there you go.

Edited June 6, 2016 by Soledai

[Lann La Mirah]

I've played more VNs than I would like to admit. XD

Hatoful Boyfriend and Holiday Star: It looks like some cheap, forgettable otome game (the ones that star girls who are surrounded by a harem of guys), but it's better than every other one I've ever played. The characters are likable, and the BBL route is so worth playing. Holiday Star was great.

Clannad: Great story overall, but some of the routes felt unnecessary. Didn't really dig the anime to this one, but that's probably because I played the novel first.

Ever 17: My first VN. Phenomenal story, but there are a couple things that bother me about it.

Shikkoku no Sharnoth (NSFW): Really pretty, but it dragged. The minigame was kinda fun, but it got old fast.

Hakuouki: Cheesy, but cute otome game. Nice visuals, and the ps3 package comes with the fandisc.

Yo-Jin-Bo: Hilarious otome game that can be sweet too. I haven't finished it yet.

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: I played the first one and part of the second one, and they're pretty great. Too bad MangaGamer's translation is a bit dry.

Umineko no Naku Koro ni: Only played the first one. I loved it, but seeing how expansive the cast becomes I haven't bothered to read more.

Amnesia: Mystery otome game. The cast was unappealing to me, and the story was uninteresting. I had high hopes... D:

Narcissu: Cute VN about two terminally ill people taking a trip together. Not exciting, but charming.

True Remembrance: Cute VN about a little town where people go to get their memories erased. Not exciting, but charming.

Planetarian ~Reverie of a little planet~: Short VN that made me cry.

Rewrite: My favorite Key game so far. I've been slowly s l o w l y playing through it though.

Ace Attorney 1 and 2: Plan on playing the third one. Pretty awesome games!

999: Great game. It reminded me a lot of Ever 17, only I liked the cast a lot more.

Gotta play Zero's Escape, Hotel Dusk, and pick up Sweet Fuse and DanganRonpa. Neverending backlog!

[Soledai]

I heard about the minigames in Sharnoth, wasn't there a way to skip them?

Was that something you unlocked or something?

Ever 17: My first VN. Phenomenal story, but there are a couple things that bother me about it.

Can I hazard a guess about one of them?

Blick Winkel?

[Jave]

Finished Root Double. Totally recommend it if you like the psychological horror/suspense stuff. And while it's not as mind-blowing as the Infinity Trilogy or the Zero Escape games, it does have a similar atmosphere and it does a great job at character building. It also has its fair share of plot twists, some of which are kinda dumb, but the good stuff is REALLY good.

Definitely give this one a shot.

[Aquakat]

One of my favored VNs (and sorry if this was mentioned earlier) is Code Realize. The common route is very long (8 chapters), but the story is very interesting imo. Steampunk and alchemy and the like.

Norn9 was also a fun read, but the story can get really confusing, really fast, probably because of all the routes available (9, three for each heroine).

[Rapier]

Reading Virtue's Last Reward for 22 hours almost nonstop. It's been so long since I've played the first game that I lost interest on playing the second, but when I forced myself to read it... It is that good. So far I've reached five characters' endings. I'd say they're more basic than the first novel's characters, but the game's premise is much better and so are its puzzles.

[spoiler=K's ending]

The game blatantly threw his true name on our faces since the beginning but I never thought about inverting the K. Damn, that was brilliant.

Still don't know why he is like Sigma (or the true Sigma, or a clone of Sigma, or his twin or whatever)

[Lann La Mirah]

I heard about the minigames in Sharnoth, wasn't there a way to skip them?

If you finished the game at least once before, you can skip the minigame in Sharnoth. Or you can download someone's completed save file. At any rate, it was lengthy even without the minigame and I just stopped reading. Maybe I'll try again when I start finishing my backlog off. XD

Can I hazard a guess about one of them?

Blick Winkel?

Yes, more specifically

them mirroring what happened in the past to save one girl. Theme parks don't just appear. How on earth did they raise the funding for that??? And what if people died while sinking it the second time??

My memory is hazy, so I could have gotten some details wrong. And I will admit that 999 had a similar problem, and I still enjoyed it.

[yuriyume]

Am a big fan of VNs, and my backlog is huge. There's just too many hours that are necessary to play so many of them, which is nice but is why I haven't gotten to playing so many.

My favourites are Saya no Uta and Sweet Pool (both NSFW, the latter is a BL ((Boys Love)). SP is surprisingly charming and emotional for the rather weird storyline it has. I wasn't expecting it to be as brilliant as it was, having played other Nitro Chiral games. It may be my favourite VN company, but I've always been disappointed due to hype when playing through their games. SnU is also from another branch of the Nitro company, and it's such a thrilling ride. The music, art and story from both VNs are top tier stuff.

On handhelds, I've gotten into Ace Attorney, and almost finished 999. I'm so in love with the latter. The characters are surprisingly well done and have their own depth of characteristics and well-being unlike most other games I've experienced. It really makes you care about them. I feel the need to get the other Zero Escape games now.

I've just recently started Ever 17, Amnesia and Lamento. Really enjoying the atmosphere of Ever because it reminds me of the frantic dread I felt during 999. Amnesia on the other hand is disappointing me. It's probably due to the same reason why I ended up not caring about Dramatical Murder: expectations. Lamento was high on my hype list with the English translation having been in works for a good while and only recently being finished. I got straight to it, but it's such a long game, it'll be a good while until I get to the end. I'm so excited, and from where I've got to, I love it. Exactly what I had hoped for and got.

Edited July 19, 2016 by yuriyume

[Enaluxeme]

Ok, I recommend Song of Saya (NSFW) to everyone who isn't scared of some gorey scenery, loli sex and rape (those two are two different things and are actually important to the story, not just there for the lolicons).

Also, does someone know how to play Phantom of Inferno in english? I downloaded a dvd once but the subtitles aren't completed.

RIP for all the abandoned translations. I'm still waiting for 11Eyes. Now that this topic reminded me, I'm gonna cry in a corner for a bit.

[shadowofchaos]

11Eyes was "mehhhh" in Japanese. Especially for the... what's her face... Yuka? Main girl in the anime route.

Like holy crap "what".

If you're in it for sap, Kotori Love Exp from Da Capo is pretty good.

Especially since they include all the side stories for her from the Circus bonus discs. And the bonus one of married life.

Kinda hate that he doesn't get punished for a "bad end" in said sap filled married life story, though.

It's kinda nice it's the expanded edition for the first part instead of the initial version.

Edited July 19, 2016 by shadowofchaos

[Jotari]

Oh hey. Never saw this thread...And it's been four months since anything's been posted in it...Oh well. I'll go ahead and post anyway. So last year I played Tuskihimie and was intending to make a video review of it for one of my youtube channels but just never felt motivated to do so. Still have the script lying around though so I might as well let it see the light of day here.

[spoiler=review]

Today I'm going to be reviewing a visual novel instead of an anime. Because apparently an anime for this visual novel doesn't exist even though it clearly does. Anyway this is Tsukihimie from Type Moon the guys behind Fate/Stay Night. Though they're pretty different works in many regards I'm still going to be unfairly comparing them throughout this review since I assume most of you are more familiar with Fate/Stay Night and because its by the same writer it does have some of the same pitfalls.

First off, from a technical standpoint the game is pretty poor. Skipping scenes can keep the same music track (particularly bad for background sound effects), and colour blending which won't disappear until another one plays and for the latter that can be a long time. Scenes don't have names so it's hard to know what you're skipping. Scenes also seem to be spread out entirely on a mechanics basis instead of narratively. That is to say a scene takes place purely between decisions and branching paths, not split up based on what's happening in the game's story. This makes it harder to navigate. So it's probably good to save often and try to limit the amount of times you need to use the skip function. I think it was actually self published when it came out way back in the year two thousand. Aside from the technical problems this shows in regards to the cgs. There aren't many of them, they're reused often and several scenes with pretty detailed descriptions feel like they should have a graphic but just don't. However I have to commend the artwork overall. It's pretty standard anime style but the sprites really manage to convey what a character is feeling and every character has a ton of sprites that work very well with the text. Even the same exact frame can convey completely different meaning depending on the context of the story. One character in particular will look very different to you upon learning more about their backstory, despite using the same artwork throughout.

Tsukihimie follows a character named Shiki. The story starts off when he's a kid and he finds himself in a horrible accident. Upon waking he notices everything has these strange lines on them and if he cuts along these lines, things fall apart. The ability is called the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception which is basically the ability to kill anything. But being a nice guy who doesn't want to kill people this isn't all that useful. It's also giving him a brain haemorrhage. Fortunately however the protagonist from some other story gives him a pair of glasses that cover up the lines leaving him free to ignore them until he turns seventeen and vampires start deciding his city is a nice place to live. Shiki then proceeds to not use this ability much at all and instead just hangs around with his potential girlfriends the whole time. I praised the artwork just now but the is one area I feel it falls down. The lines Shiki sees that are meant to signify the death of things aren't really that intimidating. In universe they're described as eerie and unnatural. Shiki gets sick just from seeing them and too long without his glasses will make him pass out. Yet in the artwork they're just lines in the background and are quite commonly omitted. They don't even appear on the character sprites. The whole point of them is that life is a dangerously precious thing yet the artwork does not convey this well.

The game is split into five routes, each focusing on a different heroine. These routes are further split into two super routes, called the Near and Far Side of the Moon. The two Near Side routes are the ones you have to play first which focus more on vampire lore while the three Far Side routes explore Shiki's past and his connection with the main villain. Like Fate/Stay Night it still has Nasu's signature style of being pretty wordy but overall the story is shorter. The fact that it's split up into five routes means there's a lot more overlap. Not just in plot points but sometimes in exact text that can't be skipped. Like in Fate/Stay Night, and quite a lot of Japanese media coming to think of it, it has a crippling fear of parents. Which is particularly disconcerting for me since Shiki has a pair of foster parents who he lived happily with for eight years that never show up once despite him going through some pretty heavy stuff. You learn in one of the later routes that he never wanted to burden them so he avoided them despite having a good relationship with them, but I find that a weak justification. The game starts with him moving out of their house and, as far as we know, never even thinking about speaking to them again.

Mini rant aside, Shiki as a protagonist is probably more likable than Shriou who is a bit of a base breaker. While Shriou has his hero of justice shtick Shiki's more of an everyman who has no strong feelings one way or the other. While this might make him sound boring he is written pretty well. The first person style in particular is utilized very well when his mind starts being affected by some of the stuff that's going on. The cast in general is pretty likable overall which only makes it more frustrating when they're underutilized. If you're not following a character's route they'll be lucky to get a word in at all. The worst case is with Nero Chaos, one of only two villains in the game. He's a pretty bad ass guy who is literally made of monsters and can even summon a dragon yet his screen time is reduced to about two scenes on the Near Side routes and not even a cameo on the Far Side routes. Arcueid, also suffers from it pretty bad, not appearing in the far side routes either despite the fact that the game promotes her as the main heroine.

I guess that's a big thing about the game overall. It doesn't give you what you expect. It presents pretty cool ideas and concepts and then proceeds to show you something else. Shiki's mystic eyes of death perception is another example of this. It's the first plot point you're introduced to and will likely be the main factor mentioned in any synopsis of the work yet it is far from the main focus. In fact it's more of an aside. You could give Shiki a sharp knife that can kill vampires and little would change in story. Instead the game focuses more on Shiki's mental state of mind with the main focus on being what the mind of a killer is like rather than the methods. Which isn't bad, just misleading.

Ultimately with a story like this the quality of it almost entirely depends on how much you like the characters. It might seem like I've said a lot of negative things but at the end of the day the characters are still well made and there are plenty of interesting ideas to keep one entertained. However it still is an early work from the company and is flawed in many areas. Which is why type moon themselves want to remake it. Though they've been talking about doing that for the last ten years so I'm not sure how much of a reality it is.

Also Ciel's lessons aren't nearly as good as the Taiga Dojo.

Edited November 7, 2016 by Jotari

[eclipse]

Due to the really long and relevant review, I'll let this slide. Next time, ask a mod first!

I'm a bigger fan of the Melty Blood series - while it probably isn't an absolute word-for-word translation of what the Tsukihime characters can do, it gives us an idea of what each of the characters are capable of.