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.
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 ^^
>>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.
>>24237>>24239Gee, I wonder who's your favorite Danganronpa character :D
>>24238I can feel the hypnotic power of this guy (gal?) through this image.
>>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 >>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.
>>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.
>>24752But I don't like guro/horror uwu
Play Planetarian instead for cute robit.
>>25731I loved that ending. I'm glad you seem to have enjoyed the series!
>>25748I'll second
>>25749.
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.
>>24213based baito senshi fan
i recall s;g 0 being good as well, but it's been so long
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 .
>>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 >>26848I will do nothing while complaining
*pushes up glasses*
>>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
>>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.
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
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
>>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.
>>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…
>>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?
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!
>>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.
>>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.
>>31963>>31964Well I googled and most of the stuff on Reddit is like 'there's no good English translation, just learn Japanese bro'.
Ok.
>>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?
>>26835Thanks for recommending Re:write. i've been enjoying reading it a lot these days. (How the hell do you spoil text???? I want to talk about the routes!)
>>32521I'm not really a fan of those themes..(band, music, etc)
How is it, though? Are you liking the game?
>>32822You know that this discussion is literally
a spoiler to the plot of the game right?
>>34472Cute.
>>34467Kill yourself.
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