Decline Visual Novel Recomendation Thread

[felipepepe]

Ok, decided to go with Kara no Shoujo, the artwork seems too glorious to pass by. :graphicswhore:

 

[Sul]

I gonna do a public favor and post this:

From this list I only played Fate/Stay Night, Saya no Uta, Sengoku Rance and Yume Miru Kusuri. I recommend the 4 of them.
I also plan to play Tsukihime since it's set in the same universe of Fate/Stay Night and Shikkoku no Sharnot just because of the intro and setting.

 

[felipepepe]

Wow, thanks Sul!

Possibly a dumb question, but why a visual novel would be considered "not for newcommers"? Easy to get stuck, insta-deaths like KingQuest, being extremely long or stuff like that?

 

[Sul]

Wow, thanks Sul!

Possibly a dumb question, but why a visual novel would be considered "not for newcommers"? Easy to get stuck, insta-deaths like KingQuest, being extremely long or stuff like that?

Sorry, I'm not big into NV.

From the few that I have played Fate/Stay Night is the longer, it has 3 different routes, but you need to complete them in order to unlock the next. It also has a lot of C&C (some choices can kill you even if not immediatly after you chose them) and a few couple of different endings for each route (true ending, bad ending, that kind of stuff).

 

[Hirato]

I had forgotten that the Steins;Gate anime was based on a VN, bloody brilliant show., would recommend.

It's probably worthwhile checking out the Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate, and Robotics;Notes VNs.
And do a Let's Play Read while you're at it

 

[treave]

Looks like they divided it on the basis of plot / themes / length / whether there's any actual gameplay.

Note: Fate/Stay Night has a voice acting patch, I recommend getting it. Higurashi has a sprite/voice acting patch which will make things more palatable, while Umineko has it only for the first part of the game - the second is still in production. Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai is not fully translated yet, they haven't done one last heroine and the final arc you get after clearing all routes.

 

[RK47]

It's a CYOA book in digital format.

 

[Cool name]

Umineko no naku koro ni and Umineko no naku koro ni chiru. A single choice at the end. Very good characters and interesting character development. Spans eight chapters each as long as a medium lenght visual novel, divided in two arcs. Very good music. Bizarre setting. It begins as a mystery novel with fantastic elements that may or may not exist and becomes something entirely different along the way. Has charmingly awful art on the PC version but there's a mod project to import the art, voices, and movies from the PS3 version to it. An awful anime was made of it.

Saya no uta. Short. Two choices. Many and pointless H-Scenes. Very nice story. Great main couple.

Kikokugai. Cyberpunk revenge story. No choices. Good story. Great action scenes. Cruel twists. Some H-Scenes. Great atmosphere.

ChäoS;HEAd. Has very few choices but adds a bizarre method to change the way in which the scenes play. No H-Scenes. Strange storyline. Good to mediocre characters, many of which are left hanging in the PC version. Despicable main character. Everyone with a name is dangerously insane. Nice art. An awful anime was made of it.

Hanachirasu. A story of revenge and swordfighting in alternate history Japan. Great action scenes and art. Nice atmosphere. A not so nice main character. Beautiful japanese traditional music. Some H-Scenes that do not even try.

Kara no shoujo. Detective story with adventure game elements. Good art. Nice atmosphere. Some good characters. Many disturbing scenes. It is hard to get an actual ending.

Shikkoku no sharnoth. Magical realism story in alternate history England. Good characters. Unique art and setting. No choices. An odd maze minigame. Very good story.



If I may I would like to post another set once I have the time.

Yeah, I think the greatest problem with visual novels is the cast consisting almost always exclusively of girls. That way it is a lot easier to make sex fit in the story. Or to make the story fit in the sex.

I am affraid this is less of a problem with Visual Novels than it is a problem with the genre usually picked for translation. It is just as easy to find visual novels where the cast consists almost exclusively of heterosexual boys or almost exclusively of homosexual boys. There are also visual novels that schew romance and sex in order to tell a good story without being forced to turn the cast into a harem.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

Try YU-NO - The Girl that Chants Love at the Edge of the World.

Just wanted to quote myself on this one.

YU-NO is a 10/10. They don't make them like this any more.

Time to put on my wapanese hat and start downloading. Ye-ha!

Ok, what the fuck?

The game is constructed from three parts:
- prolog
- main (the part you actually can call a game)
- ???epilogue???

The first part was quite long with the with the "click option to move, click option to look etc" kind of gameplay. It was long and quite boring but I endured through. Then we entered the main game, which is a lot better, the gameplay changes to "click mouse on stuff and to move etc" and shit starts to hit the fan. A lot of strange shit.

But anyway, the third part. Holy shit! Seriously, instead of explaining ANYTHING the game shifts back the previous gameplay mechanics and we enter a story that is almost unrelated to the stuff happening previously. But fuck that, did I mention how incredibly pretentious it becomes... and it's looong. It was so bad I just said "fuck it" and deleted it altogether. It's like the devs decided to take a dump on the keyboard after doing a quite decent job.



Saying that, the "sudoku in base 12" riddle in the end of Mio path was top-notch, lost 3 hours on that fucker

Got 98% cleared.

 

[Haba]

Best visual novels almost exclusively have sex in them, but coincidentally they also don't make such a large issue out of it. Sometimes the sex scenes are even funny to read.

I think all of my recommendations have already been mentioned. I'd say pretty much everything goes for anyone, with the minor exception of some titles having rather fourth wall breaking, insider jokes that you won't get.

The following have less focus on the sexin' and more on the writin'


DESIRE
While the story may not be that unique (if you've been around), it is a good entry title. Sci-fi stuffies and thingies.

Eve: Burst Error (+Adam: Double Factor)
English release was stripped of the sexytimes, which frankly makes no sense. But the game is very good. Detective stuffies with a sprinkle of sci-fi. Sequel translation retains the sexytime. Final game(s) never got translated, so it ends with a cliffhanger.

Divi-dead
Like the name implies, it is happy love-comedy that is especially good for depressed people.

Saya no Uta
Dark, but beautiful. One of the best modern imaginations of unimaginable Lovecraftian horror.

Kara no Shoujo
Gorgeous art and voice acting. Don't expect a happy ending.

Devil on the G-String
Smart, snarky and well contained. One of the rare cases where a game manages to truly slip in a plot twist that you didn't see coming.

Fate/Stay Night
A modern fantasy epic with respectable length. Some weak parts in the writing, but a masterful demonstration of how one can tell the same story from several different angles. Prepare to read a lot.

My Little Sister Kana
Well. It is a tear jerker with incest. But I liked the writing and the other theme it deals with.


Games that give more if you've played some VNs and know the tropes and clichés:

Cross Channel
A mindfuck, in several different ways.

Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo
Like Devil on the G-String in many ways. Worth playing just for that one mindfuck the story plays out, for it is simply masterful.

Spoiler

The player character self narrates, like all h-game protagonists do. In a very obnoxious way. But it turns out that he actually was talking to a person who everyone is forced to ignore.

Forest


Muv-luv Alternative
You kind of have to read one shitty and one mediocre VN before playing the best part makes any sense.

 

[ghostdog]

It's my understanding that some of the VNs have some sex in them just because their target group in Japan expects them to have sex. It's basically a trick to sell more copies, or even a feature forced by the medium. Another problematic aspect with VNs is that they're sort of required --by their target audience again-- to provide a dating-sim like environment, so even if they're just trying to tell a good story, you're likely to have that crap thrown in your face.

I've only fully "played" Fate:Stay Night and Phantom of Inferno.

Fate:Stay/Night has a good fantasy story and well structured multiple paths, if you can stomach the moronic thought procession of the protagonist at the beginning, some Jap character cliches and the fact that you have to finish one path to unlock the other.

Phantom of Inferno has an interesting crime / hired assassins story, but for the love of god don't get the dvd version even if it has VO, it's so slow it's unbearable. Find the old version.

 

[Mrowak]

I can only really recommend Kara no Shoujo. Myself, I am pretty intolerant of H stuff (that's why I like Sengoku Rance so much, after all ), and Kara no Shoujo is relatively low on that, plus you can easily skip H content (at least most of the time). But above all it tells a quite intriguing detective story from late 50s... set in Japan... about gore murders... and that's frigging awesome!! I have my gripes with it, but I can tell for sure it's English version is the best written novel from any given here.

 

[lightbane]

+1 to Forest, I've only started it a few months ago but... Well, it's really something unique.

Another recommendation: Dengeki Striker (a superhero visual novel with almost no sex scenes).

 

[Crooked Bee]

I think Ever17 is the only one I've played, or rather watched a Let's Play of, to the end, and it's pretty good. Definitely recommended.

 

[felipepepe]

Hey guyz, this Kara no Shoujo is very good, I'm having a blast and-

Oh fuck. And I had only one save...

 

[felipepepe]

WHY I DIE SO MUCH! FFS, I've been backtracking almost 5 days of the story and I still can't get any outcome besides getting kidnapped & killed with Orihime t the infirmary!

 

[Mrowak]

WHY I DIE SO MUCH! FFS, I've been backtracking almost 5 days of the story and I still can't get any outcome besides getting kidnapped & killed with Orihime t the infirmary!

The beauty of the beast

Seriously, this game has no qualms about murdering you and all you love just because you did stupid shit (and even when you hadn't done one - it's every bit as unfair as AoD ) even 20 days after you make a tactical error.

And yes, I call it a game, because barring the absence of combat it has as much gameplay as AoD (and more gameplay than e.g. Inquisitor).

 

[Cool name]

@ felipepepe: Mrowak and Abnaxus did beat me to it but I nonetheless want to welcome you to the Kara No Shoujo experience. Do not fret, for everyone is abducted with Orihime the first many tries.

 

[SCO]

this would be a banable offence thread just 5 years ago

that is all

 

[Jasede]

Many VN feature sex, the trick is that some use it as the main attraction and others treat it as something that naturally occurs in the story, and sometimes it feels that it has to feature sex just because it's in the list of specifications. I assume you're not interested in the first category, so in the second I'd suggest stuff like YU-NO (probably the best of the genre; the scope is simply amazing), Kara no Shoujo, Kana Little Sister, Crescendo, Season of Sakura or Divi-Dead. The quality and amount of sex vary greatly, some try to be about slices of life with lots of humour, some are about horror, and others plunge deep into existence.

I know you aren't the right person to ask but these kind of games would be a lot more interesting to me if you knew any that were about...

Spoiler

guys and furry boys

And no, I don't mean porn. I'd love to read a nice story. But I'd love it much better if the romance part (if any) was about guys & furries. It's only natural we look for content we can relate to.

 

[Gragt]

I haven't tried any but I saw a few floating on BitGamer about, well, let's say guys attracted to other guys. No idea at all of the quality and if the focus is on sex or otherwise. As for furry, well, apart from the occasional cat or fox girl, there isn't much. Well, Monster Girl Quest! is a pit of depravation with furry, scallie, plants, vore and what have you, but it's blatantly about pr0n and all the monsters are girls.

 

[Cool name]

Forgive me for intruding into an exchange I was not invited to but I think I may be able to help. I know of three visual novels with male homosexual romance elements that have been translated to english, those being Enzai, Absolute obedience, and Togainu no chi. About furry ones with the same characteristics I only remember there was a project to translate Lamento a while back but it seems nothing much ever came from it.

If I do manage to find any more I will post it here for you to find.

 

[felipepepe]

I finally managed to get past that bloody infirmary! Sure, Orihime died anyway, but it's 1 corpse instead of 2, my wonderfull investigative work reduced deaths in 50%!

I'm enjoying the game, but the outcomes seem a bit too random... I mean, I don't even understand what I did so differently to get past that kidnapping...

EDIT: Hurray, I beated the game and even saved ma sister! I also got insane, but that's a minor setback.

 

[Gragt]

Oh yeah, forgot to share another VN: Quartett! The interesting part about that one is that it's actually more of a comic book than a novel. The art is lovely and the various stories are touching. It's very light on sex and the little there is just seem to fit. The story is rather simple: Phil, the main character, enters a school for young musicians in Germany. Each year an important event takes place where 96 of them get organised as quartets and compete against each other for the chance to enter a music competition which acts as springboard for their future careers in music. The nice thing is that it unfolds very naturally, there's also a lot of camaraderie between the various students — their rivarly is mostly based on respect of each other's abilities and no stupid and childish enmity. The comic book style with the moving images and phylacteries also gives it a very pleasant and distinct style. If you want something fun and touching that flows very easily and without any silly histrionics, you should give it a try. The soundtrack is also very good.

 

[Excidium]

VN has to be the shittiest genre ever. It's all melodramatic or moe shit.