No.24212[Last 50 Posts]
Im making a thread about VNs because there isnt one on the catalogue and i wanna talk about my experience. I just finished danganronpa 2, which im not certain counts as a VN or if it's a point and click murder mystery social deduction game, and i think im pretty confident to say that it presents a pretty interesting moral dilemma. On one hand, the hope faction is pretty clearly a technocratic organization who obsesses over "Ultimates", or people who possess immense talent in a particular field or study, for example the world's best scientist, or the world's best doctor. It is revealed in the story of goodbye despair that before despair took over, hope's peak academy created a method of artificially forcing someone to become extremely talented, which dialectically had the potential to equalize mankind and develop the talents of anyone, which would make the idea of meritocracy, or ruling over others due to better talents or knowledge, completely obsolete. Despair on the other hand spawned as a result of the mass movement of reserve students, malcontents who became disaffected with the idea that people with talent mattered more than the rest, since hope's peak academy was formed to research peoples' talents and how to cultivate them.
I think it would be pretty easy to side with the latter out of frustration, especially if you're talentless like i am, but i think the idea that talent could be forcibly cultivated out of someone who never realized it before would be the "productive forces" argument. Not to mention that junko destroyed civilization, which is dialectically bad.
Your turn to die is a great game too, very similar to danganronpa on a surface level, i finished it a while ago and im glad i played it. Free btw. Anyone got visual novel recommendations? I need a weeb fix.
No.24213
Danganronpa series is very gud. Play Danganronpa Another Episode and watch Danganronpa 3 (in that order) before moving on to Danganronpa V3, however.
>Anyone got visual novel recommendations? I need a weeb fix.
I have to shill Steins;Gate because I'm a huge fan. If you didn't play it (or didn't watch the anime adaptation), just be advised it starts slow, especially for the original VN. It's an intriguing story about time travel. It's very gud too, but the true ending is difficult to find without a guide. Characters don't have much development, but they're easily likeable if you get into it. Also, I fucking adore picrel
I can't say much about the other franchises that are part of the Science Adventure Series (Chaos;Head, Robotics;Notes and so on) because I didn't play them at the moment.
The Ace Attorney games are great too, gameplay is about exposing the contradictions in your opponents' arguments, which is pretty dialectical, and the series influenced Danganronpa to an extent.
As far as other VNs go, I have a bunch in my library but I didn't start the vast majority of them, so that's all the recs I've got. Pretty normie stuff, I have to admit -_-
>Your turn to die is a great game too, very similar to danganronpa on a surface level, i finished it a while ago and im glad i played it. Free btw
I'll make sure to check it out then ^^
No.24214
>>24213One thing i should mention about your turn to die is that it kind of has dwarf fortress syndrome as it is developed by a single person. Its not finished but id say at least half of the story has been completed and is playable. The art is very cool, traumacore even, which is why i screenshotted it several times.
No.24230
>>24214Apparently, it's getting a Steam release soon. Would you recommend waiting for it or trying it out right now?
No.24234
>>24230How soon? If it's this year then I'd wait for it. Of course, the webpage version is still free…
No.24235
>>24234Steam page just says it releases this year without a specific date:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2067780/Your_Turn_To_Die_Death_Game_By_Majority/But who knows, there might be issues and they might report it to next year.
No.24242
>>24237>>24239Gee, I wonder who's your favorite Danganronpa character :D
>>24238I can feel the hypnotic power of this guy (gal?) through this image.
No.24244
>>24242Safalin is a girl. And nagito isnt my *favorite* character. Hes just very cute. Hes really obsessive and a little bit ridiculous. I could probably fix him though.
No.24246
>>24244>Safalin is a girlThank you for clarifying!
>Hes just very cute. Hes really obsessive and a little bit ridiculous.Agreed. He's pretty memorable because of that I would add.
That and his insane luck No.24484
>>24213I did as you asked and am playing dr: another episode and it's… a lot like dead space in gameplay terms. Or RE4. My dead space instincts are serving me really well. It's pretty fun but i dont think i can set it to subbed. It's a good dub but still.
No.24490
>>24489Analogue: A Hate Story
No.24495
>>24484Yes, unfortunately Another Episode can't be set to subbed. I don't know if there is a fan-made patch that allows you to play the game subbed.
No.24496
>>24490Oh hey, thats by the same woman who made
don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story and
Ladykiller in a Bind. Those two were delightful, the former has some interesting twists in the plot, dealing with ideas about march technology and privacy, while the latter is the best depiction of BDSM I experienced in any medium.
No.24497
>>24494all leftists shave their pubes
No.24524
>>24520i finally finished the game after about a full 24 hours of gameplay. i'll be honest, it certainly was long enough to be worth playing, although with some caveats
my thoughts: the game is a masterpiece, but a disjointed one. the main character, komaru, is a bit of a moeblob, a stereotypical anime schoolgirl and for the first three quarters of the story, she's just… boring. it wasnt until the reveal that
her parents were shown to be murdered by the antagonist and she seriously considered blowing up all the children in towa city that she had any form of character. i was kind of hoping there'd be two endings, one which has you
succeed junko and the other which has the stereotypical happy ending. with how many times i chose the "bad ending" up until that point, it was so disappointing to not see it at least shown in more detail after the final battle, like if you just give in completely and become evil. that would've been so cool
the cutscenes are great, as usual for danganronpa. i hate to say that seeing people get extravagantly executed is one of the most fun part of the series, but it's kinda true. there's even scenes which are entirely animated like an anime and those really spice up the somewhat dated 3d graphics of everything else, although every danganronpa game ive played so far has the problem of having kinda dated graphics in normal gameplay, which obviously can be forgiven.
another point, i don't know what was lost in translation because this was the only exclusively dubbed version i've played, but they do speak awkwardly at points. talking about hope and despair, they obviously talk about it as some kind of philosophical concepts, but then there's also points where they couldve said "hopeless" instead of "despaired", or "desparate", or "optimistic" or "hopeful" instead of talking about hope itself. i think this is mostly just a result of translation, however, because it's a recurring thing in all the games.
in terms of the tone, it was hard to take the game seriously until it started getting serious and the
writers started figuring out what they were going for. i think in terms of tone, DR 1 is still the best in terms of believability. it had obvious engine limitations and was a closed setting, so it had to rely on good writing and mystery to carry itself, though this reliance was still spiced with cool executions. i think the later games had trouble with some kind of identity crisis, and this one seems to have that problem. it really felt like a dead space or RE4 clone at times, not that it's a bad thing.
No.24529
>>24524also this game has a lot of fanservice but i wont talk about it because most of it was awkward and uncomfortable
No.24557
>>24556sauce? looks like a cutie
No.24561
>>24558Btw posting gin's autism diagnosis in the game isnt a spoiler because it actually makes you more willing to take care of him in the game and also hes my baby and i will protecc him
No.24562
>>24558>>24561Not really into horror, that's a shame, enjoy it though.
No.24563
>>24494Muramasa is a masterpiece, the katana autism is enough to put it above all other VNs.
No.24578
>>24494>FOR USE OUTSIDE JAPAN ONLYkek.
No.24597
>>24578the jp version has all the h scenes censored with mosaic, but the retail english release has all the h scenes cut out entirely because of how disturbing they are
No.24598
>>24597in socialism we will smash these weirdo censorship boards
No.24684
>>24667I watched it subbed, so I'd suggest watching it subbed.
No.24689
>>24667watch it in whatever language you played the games, the voice actors are all the same afaik
No.24754
>>24752But I don't like guro/horror uwu
Play Planetarian instead for cute robit.
No.24755
>>24754might as well play Phoenix Wright or Clannad baka
No.24756
>>24755>horror fan being up his own assquelle surprise
No.24761
>>24755Thank you for reminding me clannad exists. I wonder why everybody loved it years ago. Ill play it and find out soon
No.24762
>>24756this is a thread for visual novels not "kinetic novels"
No.25731
Danganronpa v3's extremely controversial ending was actually extremely high iq and it takes a high iq to really appreciate it. The themes of the game is nihilism and absurdism and the third game just continues the absurdism to an extensive degree, obfuscating the truth of the entire world and depicting media spectacle in an incredibly high iq manner. In the end the characters reject spectacle in favor of absurdist and situationist philosophy thereby revolting against the cruel nature of the entire system.
No spoilers but damn i was actually impressed by the twist here
No.25748
should i play steins;gate or phoenix wright first bros? i have both
No.25749
>>25748Wrights goofy play it first
No.25757
>>25731I loved that ending. I'm glad you seem to have enjoyed the series!
>>25748I'll second
>>25749.
No.25762
>>25749>>25757Playing it now. This is rough.
No.26585
A few recommendations that I haven't seen yet
>G-Senjou no Maou
This one is hard not to spoil, the main character is the son of a Yakuza boss going to school as an eccentric renaissance man to cover up what his actual job is. An exchange student arrives and is tracking down an international criminal called "Maou" (another word for the devil in Japanese). A lot of interesting social commentary built into the story along with a branching storyline. I strongly recommend doing these stories in order no matter how rough some of the choices are for the ending to hit as hard as it does.
>Zero Escape trilogy
Similar to Danganronpa in terms of gameplay, the first game starts with the main cast being kidnapped and thrown onto a sinking ship with wristbands containing a number 1-9 on their wrist that activate doors to escape rooms. If you like escape rooms, metaphysics, pseudoscience, and esoteric concepts in general, this is 100% the series for you.
>AI The Somnium Files
Same writing team as the Zero Escape trilogy. You play as a detective that traverses dreams to find answers. The game begins with a copycat killing surfacing and killing the ex-wife of the MC's high school friend. The more you explore dreams the more things become complicated as the story branches along multiple paths. It's more lighthearted than Zero Escape with not quite as strong of a cast, but still hits hard when it wants to and has a lot of references to other anime/games/pop culture and a couple great game-over gags.
>Kana: Little Sister
Implied incest warning on this one, but as a spoiler, they're not actually related. The main character's younger sister has been in and out of the hospital her whole life due to a kidney condition, and the game begins when it reaches the point where she's reached kidney failure. There isn't much more that I can say about this game other than it being a total gutpunch from start to finish, and the good ending can only be achieved after getting the other endings.
>Yume Miru Kusuri
Main character is an "empty inside" high school student with high grades and no social life. At the beginning of the story he meets 3 girls that change his outlook and depending on which route you take, you experience the despair in all of their lives and take it on yourself. The story is fantastic and it's a great beginning spot for anyone somewhat new to visual novels, however as a warning I should mention that bullying, drugs, sexual assault, suicide, and attempted rape are all parts of the game.
No.26801
my female bpd friend recommended i play hadaka shitsuji because she thought it was hilarious so im gonna do it soon and ill let you guys know what i think later
No.26834
>>24213based baito senshi fan
i recall s;g 0 being good as well, but it's been so long
No.26835
I can't in good conscience actually recommend it, but if you desperately need a way to waste about 100 hours you might be interested in checking Muv:Luv out. I recall Alternative being quite interesting, but you have to go through the slog of reading the two previous ones which suck ass (Extra and Unlimited, iirc). Got some choice moments, though frankly I'm of the opinion that VNs with sexual content in general are kinda worse because they just have to shoehorn porn when the story doesn't really ask for it. Though it seems like it has all-ages versions, so maybe thouse might be better.
Yu-no is a true classic (also extremely long), but worth playing if for no other reason than the fact that Ryu Umemoto's music is just amazing.
Most works by Key are fine, Clannad is a bit too sappy, Little Busters is fun but I think (of what I've read) Rewrite is the best. It just doesn't take itself seriously at all, which makes it very enjoyable.
If you find you like a particular genre, you might want to check out VNDB if you haven't already. /jp/ sorta folks are extremely meticulous when it comes to tagging, and they seem to just be always willing to write long essays about why you should or should not play any given VN .
No.26848
all this thread can recommend is shit youll find if you search for "top 20 vns" lmao
No.26849
>>26834Ah, greetings, fellow Part-Time Warrior enjoyer!
Yeah Steins;Gate 0 was really good too, much less linear than the original as far as VNs go. I liked Linear Bounded Phenogram as well, and My Darling's Embrace was… something I'm not used to, but pretty fun nonetheless.
Another thing I loved and forgot to mention about the franchise is the soundtrack. I don't have any particular favorites, but I feel like giving Messenger (S;G0) and GATE OF PHENOGRAM (S;G:LBP) some honorable mentions today.
Oh, one last thing I forgot to bring to Shay's attention regarding it: make sure to install the fan-made patch for it, it brings a bunch of small improvements to the Steam version, such as subtitles for the opening song. It can be found here:
https://sonome.dareno.me/projects/sghd.html No.26851
>>26848I will do nothing while complaining
*pushes up glasses*
No.26858
>>26848is that a bad thing? for someone new to the genre what they might benefit from reading the "top 20 vns". Also what's the point in recommending bad VNs? They can be fun, sure, but hell might as well just read something actually worthwhile.
No.26862
>>26858im saying youd be better off just googling "top 20 vns" than reading this thread
>recommending bad VNstheres only popular vns, and bad vns, obviously
No.26865
>>26862Are you going to recommend some VNs that aren't popular or you just going to jerk yourself raw over noticing that water is wet?
No.26867
>>26862A few of the ones I recommended (G-Senjou no Maou and Yume Miru Kusuri) are among top 20 lists, but I still included them. I think a good reason to do that is adding a personal touch to the recommendation. I might even recommend a few more in the future if I want do do another list of 4 or 5 VNs.
No.26930
>>26585>Zero Escape trilogyI just finished the first game, it kinda felt like a mindfuck to me at times, especially
during the true ending, but I liked it!
I found a good amount of the puzzles pretty easy to figure out (plus the game gives you plenty of hints), which is a good thing because I'm kinda dumb lol. Soundtrack was cool, characters were charming, and I'll make sure to check out Virtue's Last Reward next.
No.26957
if you liked danganronpa i recommend seeing battle royale in some form, whether as a film, manga, or the original novel. especially since the ""political commentary"" is quite a bit more explicit than in DR
it's also widely considered the catalyst of the "death game" fad in modern japanese media
also seconding
>>24390 since while i wouldn't really call higurashi "leftist" it's an interest read solely for the fact that it's a popular modern-ish japanese otaku work that dares to (obliquely) reference the '60s japanese left & stuff like the sanrizuka struggle
>>26848recommendations are ostensibly limited by what's translated into english and what english-speaking VN readers are aware of… meaning the perennial "top 20" titles
>>25731based take
No.26958
also props on identifying the absurdist bent to the series; a lot of early english-language discussion about danganronpa (~2013) misread the games as being "subversive" or about "anime tropes"
certainly some part of e.g. DR1 ridicules the kinds of people who play games like DR1 (fat repulsive otaku hifumi) yet at the same time it includes near-unmissable bath scene fanservice and free-time events with galge mechanics
>>26957>>26848like i could tell you to read stuff like true remembrance and symphonic rain but i don't really give a shit about them either
No.26969
>>26930Virtue's Last Reward is my personal favorite although many say the first game is their favorite. It's all down to personal taste, but I think you'll really enjoy it since you liked the mindfuck aspects.
No.28701
I've been reading Never 7 and I'm really enjoying it. Uchikoshi has certainly grown as a writer since then, but it's cool checking out his first VN and comparing it to where he is now with stuff like Zero Escape and AI The Somnium Files.
No.28714
>>24212>hope's peak academy created a method of artificially forcing someone to become extremely talented, which dialectically had the potential to equalize mankind and develop the talents of anyoneYeah, and in the end they'll simply increase the division of labor further and make the workforce more efficient. Just like the porkies want.
All this obsession over "le perfect worker" is just another bougie attempt at cutting costs since talented workers are a rare resource for obvious reasons.
Now that I'm writing this Elon Musk might already be thinking about how to replicate Hope's Peak Academy.
No.28717
>>26960would you recommend it to someone who liked kara no kyoukai?
No.28718
>>24212Can VNs even be considered games? Some of them don't even have any gameplay at all. At least Phoenix Wright and Danganronpa are primarily adventure games with puzzle mini-games. Probably the most gameplay-heavy "VNs" out there.
Just like Sonic Battle. No.28721
>>28719No idea whom you're referring to. I was just asking. Nevermind.
No.28727
>>28717Same author, so yeah absolutely. I'm a sucker for anything written by Nasu, but Mahoyo in particular has a very high production value and isn't quite as long as his other visual novels.
No.28731
Youtuber playing eroge to an audience of children: Wow this is just like Doki Doki Literature club!
No.28757
>>28721 (cont.)
I was just asking because VNs can be both interactive fiction and a kind of motion comics. Interactive fiction is a type of games in my book. Not so sure about motion comics. The name's kinda confusing because it means both. Which is the only video game genre to have this unique quality.
Nobody plays Western interactive fiction anymore…
No.28774
>>28757When I read interviews with visual novel developers, they often talk about taking advantage of the medium and how it allows them to do things they can't in other genres. Maybe it would be better to call it its own thing.
When you say Western interactive fiction, do you mean like text adventures or what?
No.28786
The English translation of the Tsukihime remake is finished!
https://twitter.com/tsukihimates/status/1670114087374815232I had the pleasure of working on this alongside a lot of other much more skilled people. Give it a go!
No.28787
>>28786This terrifies the Fate fan
No.28788
>>28787They've had it too good for too long
No.29033
>>28774>When you say Western interactive fiction, do you mean like text adventures or what?Yes.
No.29052
>>28786thanks, i'm finally gonna get to play tsukihime
No.29074
>>29052>i'm finally gonna get to play [porn]Man of culture.
No.29114
>>29033Fallen London is a little niche but still cool, got a big update recently too. The F2P model is a little stifling but it works in its own way.
No.29126
>>29074idk senpai i really enjoy other nasuverse stuff and i'm excited to get into this
No.29127
>>29115>Visual novelI mean it literally does have little icons but it's mostly just text. The game is relatively popular and has spawned a few spinoffs (Sunless Seas, Sunless Skies).
The engine they use, StoryNexus, has quite a bit of other interactive fiction too.
No.29154
>>29115nta but Katawa Shoujo and Everlasting Summer are both great F2P visual novels
No.31960
>>29154Well I was using F2P as a euphemism for microtransactions.
Anyways, I wanna read some VNs, but not ones that are just cliche-ridden shit. I just played like 30 mins of eden* and it made me want to fall asleep. It's crazy the absolute dreck that has 'overwhelmingly positive' on Steam.
No.31961
>>31960>cliche-ridden shitmy man youre reading old stuff that defined those cliches lmfao
No.31962
>>31961Well okay, help me out and recommend something good then.
No.31963
>>31962any vn with scenarios written by romeo tanaka
No.31964
>>31963Okay, CrossChannel sounds like a decent premise, I'll give it a try.
No.31967
>>31963>>31964Well I googled and most of the stuff on Reddit is like 'there's no good English translation, just learn Japanese bro'.
Ok.
No.31968
>>31967if you want to read good vns thats how it is
No.31969
>>31968Well that's fucking annoying. I can't even figure out how to get an English patch to work anyway so fuck me I guess.
No.31970
>>31964>>31967Oof, that's both a great and terrible choice. CrossChannel has amazing prose and Tanaka is one of the GOATs but that also means it's incredibly difficult to translate well. You can get a taste of his stuff by watching the anime adaptation of Jintai.
Maybe try playing some Alicesoft or old Nitroplus stuff?
No.31971
>>31970But how do I know what's good? There's so many of these fucking things.
No.31972
This is my misery of the digital age. There's so many things out there that I would probably enjoy but it's so impossible to find them with the overwhelming amount of FUCKING GARBAGE clogging the internet. I wish there was an AI that could just analyse my media consumption and know what thing I probably want to play/watch/read/listen to next.
No.31973
>>31971Look at their tags on vndb to get an idea of what you can expect. It hides spoilery tags by default.
No.32307
>>31967I'm pretty sure I read through the amaterasu translation and I thought that the novel was absolutely amazing. Unless you're actually planning on learning japanese I'd fully reccomend it… Apparently it misses/doesn't translate a bunch of puns but w/e.
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