Decline Visual Novel Recomendation Thread

[Cowboy Moment]

It's really a pity that you need so slog through so much mundane shit to reach the payoff.

Exactly. I daresay 50% of the content could have been cut and the narrative would've been the better for it. It really is a flawed masterpiece. Narratively far better than Telltale's "critically acclaimed" crap and most contemporary adventure titles.

It also makes much better use of the medium, as opposed to Telltale games which are basically movies with limited interactive segments. It would be impossible to reproduce Ever17's story in movie form, and extremely difficult as a traditional novel. The narrative makes great use of the way VNs operate and present themselves to the player.

Spoiler

Most obvious example being the identity of the protagonist in the future branch. Neither branch ever shows the protagonist, which isn't particularly unusual for VNs, so the player never notices it, and just assumes that Kid and Takeshi from different branches are the same people.

Makes me wish someone did a proper adventure game by drawing inspiration from these VNs and The Last Express, where events would proceed in real-time regardless of what the player is doing, certain outcomes would be exclusive so you'd need multiple playthroughs to get the full picture, and it would all build up to a reveal encompassing all of them as legitimate parts of the narrative.

A man can dream.

YU-NO did this in 1992. It even has a couple of insane puzzles.

Yu-no works in real-time? As in, if you don't do anything or just walk around in circles, shit's going to happen on its own?

 

[StaticSpine]

I see a lot people mentioning 999, but not Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward.

Why is that? I've beaten PSN Platinum from it, I was caught by the story so much! I wanted to unveil ALL. The story, the characters, the voice acting, gameplay mechanics - everything is top notch.

Actually after that I'm trying 999 right now. It's nice, but after the Sequel it feels a lot less polished.

 

[Whisky]

So on the recommendations of Aurelius Whisky Jasede groke Agassi in this thread, I blazed through Ghost Trick over the weekend and damn, it was genius. Bloody legend. My initial impression was that it was a kids game. I was so, so wrong. Very clever and well crafted, consistently engaging throughout, and full of colorful characters. I had my suspicions about the big twist reveals but didn't see them coming.

I liked Ghost Trick better than 999, mainly because the puzzle mechanics in Ghost Trick always felt fresh (with new powers, new challenges) and they were part of the storyline, unlike the escape room puzzles in 999 which were somewhat orthogonal to the narrative. I don't think it necessarily had to be a DS game the way 999 did, though.

My only peeve with Ghost Trick is that for a story that is all about time travel, it never took time travel grandfather paradoxes seriously, and every time I saved someone I would keep scratching my head trying to figure out how the timeline could make sense. Eventually I just rolled with it.

Always good to see someone new play Ghost Trick. It really is fucking brilliant, especially considering the twist, if described, sounds completely insane, but in the actual context it actually works and is hinted at all the time.

Spoiler

After all, why wouldn't a ghost be able to read?

I can't praise the game enough.

I see a lot people mentioning 999, but not Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward.

Why is that? I've beaten PSN Platinum from it, I was caught by the story so much! I wanted to unveil ALL. The story, the characters, the voice acting, gameplay mechanics - everything is top notch.

Actually after that I'm trying 999 right now. It's nice, but after the Sequel it feels a lot less polished.

VLC is fantastic too, though I would say I prefer 999. VLC does end on a cliffhanger and that kind of pisses me off. It is better in many ways though, namely the ability to visit checkpoints in the game's story.

Spoiler

And integrating the checkpoints into the plot perfectly

The main reason most don't recommend it for new people is because it's a direct sequel to 999. You really should have played 999 first for the full effect, though I'm sure you'll still enjoy it.

Some also prefer 999 and feel that VLC toned down the violence and dark themes, (Compare what happens when you lose the Nonary Game in 999 compared to VLC.) which the series creator admits he was pressured to do by executives, who found out that the reason it sold better in the USA was because Japanese focus groups said the game seemed too scary. Personally, I felt the compromise that was VLC was done well enough, but it does lose a bit of its tension.

 

[commie]

Yeah, pretty much. Although Ever17, I feel, is more subtle and elegant in its construction, it's not immediately obvious that weird shit is going on, and it does a good job of misleading the player in various small-but-significant ways. It's really a pity that you need so slog through so much mundane shit to reach the payoff.

Makes me wish someone did a proper adventure game by drawing inspiration from these VNs and The Last Express, where events would proceed in real-time regardless of what the player is doing, certain outcomes would be exclusive so you'd need multiple playthroughs to get the full picture, and it would all build up to a reveal encompassing all of them as legitimate parts of the narrative.

A man can dream.

Sometimes I prefer gameplay other than OPTION A or OPTION B.
Decisions are nice, but it doesn't seem that engaging to me if most VNs just unfold in a traditional manner.
I'm not sure if it will mesh well since it's supposed to be like a digital copy of a CYOA book-genre but I'd really love to see something new than the feeling of 'reading another book'

Try Age of Decadence. I hear its got a bit of rudimentary gameplay in between the CYOA bits.

 

[StaticSpine]

VLC is fantastic too, though I would say I prefer 999. VLC does end on a cliffhanger and that kind of pisses me off. It is better in many ways though, namely the ability to visit checkpoints in the game's story.

Spoiler

And integrating the checkpoints into the plot perfectly

The main reason most don't recommend it for new people is because it's a direct sequel to 999. You really should have played 999 first for the full effect, though I'm sure you'll still enjoy it.

Some also prefer 999 and feel that VLC toned down the violence and dark themes, (Compare what happens when you lose the Nonary Game in 999 compared to VLC.) which the series creator admits he was pressured to do by executives, who found out that the reason it sold better in the USA was because Japanese focus groups said the game seemed too scary. Personally, I felt the compromise that was VLC was done well enough, but it does lose a bit of its tension.

Well, yeah, there is a cliffhanger and it hooked me up to look forward for the next part, but still the whole story of the game looks complete.

The way it worked for me - I bought Vita and played ZE and found out about 999 on Nintendo DS (which I never had), so now I'm checking it out and I'm sure I'll get some emotions and fun from the game.

About the gory/bloody content: it doesn't work for me as "more bloody=better", the level of violence in ZE was just okay for me, keeping the tension, but not going into bloody trash. As for the compromise being made: I'd look at it positively - more copies sold=> more money for the creator for the next game.

 

[StaticSpine]

I see a lot people mentioning 999, but not Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward.

I would love to play that but I don't have a Vita, and it's $200 or play the ebay lottery, and there's no video-out bleah. I might consider a Vita TV ($100?) if/when it launches ex-jpn or wait years for emulation to catch up.

It's also came out on Nintendo 3DS, if you have one.

 

[Whisky]

VLC is fantastic too, though I would say I prefer 999. VLC does end on a cliffhanger and that kind of pisses me off. It is better in many ways though, namely the ability to visit checkpoints in the game's story.

Spoiler

And integrating the checkpoints into the plot perfectly

The main reason most don't recommend it for new people is because it's a direct sequel to 999. You really should have played 999 first for the full effect, though I'm sure you'll still enjoy it.

Some also prefer 999 and feel that VLC toned down the violence and dark themes, (Compare what happens when you lose the Nonary Game in 999 compared to VLC.) which the series creator admits he was pressured to do by executives, who found out that the reason it sold better in the USA was because Japanese focus groups said the game seemed too scary. Personally, I felt the compromise that was VLC was done well enough, but it does lose a bit of its tension.

Well, yeah, there is a cliffhanger and it hooked me up to look forward for the next part, but still the whole story of the game looks complete.

The way it worked for me - I bought Vita and played ZE and found out about 999 on Nintendo DS (which I never had), so now I'm checking it out and I'm sure I'll get some emotions and fun from the game.

About the gory/bloody content: it doesn't work for me as "more bloody=better", the level of violence in ZE was just okay for me, keeping the tension, but not going into bloody trash. As for the compromise being made: I'd look at it positively - more copies sold=> more money for the creator for the next game.

Fair enough, I don't feel 999 went into bloody trash either, but then again, I'm a lot more tolerant of grimdark than most. And I felt that VLC was a good compromise, I don't think it resulted in much creative conflicts. I'm still going to get the next Zero Escape and I'm very excited for it.

 

[Jasede]

Depends on your tastes, chances are it will have more RPGs later on.
A good game you did not list is Gates of Infinity (the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game, which I love); then there's the spiritual successor to 4 Heroes of Light (a very difficult throwback to older FF games): Bravely Default.


Also, as far as I know, the 3DS version of Virtue's Last Reward has game-breaking bugs and crashes, so until I hear otherwise...

 

[Whisky]

Both versions have a chance of save corrupting if you save in a puzzle room. I avoided it on the 3DS, but you should avoid saving during those times.

 

[Comrade Goby]

Are there any good VN's that are like Western?

Not animu style graphics

 

[StaticSpine]

I see a lot people mentioning 999, but not Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward.

I would love to play that but I don't have a Vita, and it's $200 or play the ebay lottery, and there's no video-out bleah. I might consider a Vita TV ($100?) if/when it launches ex-jpn or wait years for emulation to catch up.

It's also came out on Nintendo 3DS, if you have one.

Are there good reasons to get a 3DS over a Vita? Offhand I can only think of Etrian Odyssey 4, Fire Emblem Awakening, and maybe Ace Attorney 5.

I must be honest, I didn't considered buying a Nintedo handheld, everything I know that Vita has a more powerful hardware and has better graphics.

 

[subotaiy]

Are there any good VN's that are like Western?

Not animu style graphics

Yes, please someone answer him.

 

[Gragt]

http://thelostwood.com

 

[oscar]

http://thelostwood.com

Love this game, can't wait for the rest of the episodes to be translated.

 

[Whisky]

So while bored over the holidays I decided that I would clear out some of my Steam backlog and installed Analogue a hate story. I don't even remember buying this game, it must've come in a bundle or something. Well verdict is that the title is very appropriate, because I actually started hating this VN about 15 minutes into the game.

VNs, not being much in the way of gameplay, rely heavily on the quality of their writing, and Love's is what I would describe as sophomoric. And not even a college sophomore mind you, a high school sophomore. Now I don't think that an author should necessarily have to be XYZ ethnicity in order to write about XYZ culture in an authentic/respectful/insightful way, but Love's work just doesn't actually feel authentic, respectful, or insightful of Korean culture and history. Her dialogue is on the fan fiction level and the plot generally feels like one large authorial surrogate fantasy. I would not have minded the heavy-handed hamfisted SJW feminism if it had been better written (Love is no Margaret Atwood), as I suspect it will in TToN. The game is simply undeserving of the praise it received from the "gaming journalist" crowd.

In any case, since I am highly unlikely to buy or play the sequel, and the most interesting part of Love's plot (the events leading up to year 0, the restoration of Joseon Confucianism and the decline of advanced industrial society, on an interstellar generation ship) is conveniently left to Hate Plus, I have determined my own version of those events to be something like Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, where the combined excesses of fourth wave feminism, princess syndrome and kpop twerking lead to social destabilization in Near-Future Korea, and a reactionary backlash by (non-Christian*) conservatives who launch a generation ship to escape the implosion of their civilization. I cannot, however, account for Love's decline of advanced industrial society plot development in a logically satisfying way. I can only surmise that she drew some kind of inference from the "Why did the West industrialize before Asia" debate that has her imagined Joseon restoration cause the rejection of Western ideas and/or some sort of state enforced tech limitation a la Wingrove's terrible scifi series. But this is somewhat implausible even for science fiction. Those of you who have played the sequel, feel free to let me know if this summary treatment is better or worse than what she actually came up with.

I played something else by the same person, "Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story," and it was offensively bad, one of the worst things I've ever read. Few things piss me off when I finish it, but this one did.

Severely unconvincing teenager dialogue and a completely insane (and possibly offensive to anyone with the notion of privacy, like teenagers) twist ending makes it one of my most hated things ever.

 

[TigerKnee]

I remember liking the creator's original game, Digital: A Love Story, but thinking back on it, I probably liked the UI/concept that you were interacting with the game as if you were really using an old-school BBS board, and probably not the writing/plot itself.

Her later VNs are just way too ANIME though. And normally I don't have a problem with that, but this is someone who's clearly not Japanese trying to use Anime tropes as a marketing/sales gimmick, which is just awkward.

 

[Cool name]

Are there any good VN's that are like Western?

Not animu style graphics

Yes, please someone answer him.

Spoiler

kpop twerking

 

[RyviusRan]

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.

YU-NO is one of those games that requires a lot of time and the want to immerse yourself into the game.
The prologue is not that long when you compare it to the rest of the game.
It may seem boring to some but a lot of the prologue does contain hints for later parts of the game and it takes time to introduce the characters.

The Epilogue of the game actually carries a lot of connection to the earlier part of the game.
If you actually played through it you would see how all of it ties together.
Not sure where you get the pretenious part either.....I feel like people misuse that word most of the time.
I will say the epilogue deserved more padding to flesh out certain parts but it did eventually answer all the important questions I had about the game.
The author of YU-NO actually had more content planned for the Epilogue but was never able to add it in due to time constraints.
If you played through the special disc then you would see the devs even were talking about more content being released for the game.
Speaking of the special disc if you liked the puzzle at the end of the Mio path then you would of liked the Eriko challenge mini game which has three similar puzzles like it.

 

[Alonebadman]

So while bored over the holidays I decided that I would clear out some of my Steam backlog and installed Analogue a hate story. I don't even remember buying this game, it must've come in a bundle or something. Well verdict is that the title is very appropriate, because I actually started hating this VN about 15 minutes into the game.

VNs, not being much in the way of gameplay, rely heavily on the quality of their writing, and Love's is what I would describe as sophomoric. And not even a college sophomore mind you, a high school sophomore. Now I don't think that an author should necessarily have to be XYZ ethnicity in order to write about XYZ culture in an authentic/respectful/insightful way, but Love's work just doesn't actually feel authentic, respectful, or insightful of Korean culture and history. Her dialogue is on the fan fiction level and the plot generally feels like one large authorial surrogate fantasy. I would not have minded the heavy-handed hamfisted SJW feminism if it had been better written (Love is no Margaret Atwood), as I suspect it will in TToN. The game is simply undeserving of the praise it received from the "gaming journalist" crowd.

In any case, since I am highly unlikely to buy or play the sequel, and the most interesting part of Love's plot (the events leading up to year 0, the restoration of Joseon Confucianism and the decline of advanced industrial society, on an interstellar generation ship) is conveniently left to Hate Plus, I have determined my own version of those events to be something like Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, where the combined excesses of fourth wave feminism, princess syndrome and kpop twerking lead to social destabilization in Near-Future Korea, and a reactionary backlash by (non-Christian*) conservatives who launch a generation ship to escape the implosion of their civilization. I cannot, however, account for Love's decline of advanced industrial society plot development in a logically satisfying way. I can only surmise that she drew some kind of inference from the "Why did the West industrialize before Asia" debate that has her imagined Joseon restoration cause the rejection of Western ideas and/or some sort of state enforced tech limitation a la Wingrove's terrible scifi series. But this is somewhat implausible even for science fiction. Those of you who have played the sequel, feel free to let me know if this summary treatment is better or worse than what she actually came up with.

Hate Plus does a better job of showing how the society came to be. I liked it better than Hate because the story makes out the previous characters who seemed honorable and likable actually be complete assholes and horrible human beings. There's the forced feminism angle but I liked Old-Mu because's she's a bitch to everyone. Love actually makes does a decent job of explaining how the society became the Josean Restoration. They didn't remain like that for a long time despite what the first game said/explained about its society.

Still, the SJW feminism is there and is merely eye-rolling but one of the final logs made it worth showing how despite the poor treatment of women in the first game, they were just as equally cunning and horrible as their terrible male oppressors and thus giving equal treatment to knock some of the SJW angle down a notch.

 

[Alonebadman]

I'd recommend Full Metal Daemon Muramasa if you can read moonspeak. It's written in traditional vertical Japanese and there's no English patch currently. Someone was working on one a couple years back but it never got off the ground. You can find a blog by a guy name Gare who went through and summarized every chapter and dialogue he picked out. Just from his writing, I would say its probably one of the best VNs due to its characterization, subject matter and its brutal deconstruction of the ally of justice concept engrained in Japanese culture. It's set in an alternate 1947 where WWII was fought in the 30s, the Kamakura shogunate survived and the current shogunate is just horrible and oppressive.

The protagonist is probably one of the better ones I've seen in a long time. Guy's voice actor is top notch and so is the rest of the cast. The sex scenes are there but they make up a miniscule amount of the content compared to the 50+ hour sprawl. It reminds me of Fate/Stay night's ally of justice question and answer themes and rips the rug from under it. It's dark but it's not as dark as it makes itself out to be. It's more depressing and sad because of what happens to the characters and I don't agree with the games themes/moral messages at all but it's good to make you think.

Good cast, interesting themes, dark but not grim dark and a decent time sink make it worth playing if you can.

 

[Raghar]

Are there any good VN's that are like Western?

Not animu style graphics

There are, but there are a lot more with manga like GFX and if you miss them, you'd miss a lot of quality VN.

 

[Alonebadman]

Love actually makes does a decent job of explaining how the society became the Josean Restoration.

Could you summarize how?

Spoiler

The society was a semi-autocratic government overseen/ruled by a council of department heads who oversaw the ship's policies,maintenance and civil order. Mu was originally the head of the Security department and wielded the most power due to being an AI and overseeing the ship for over 1500 years. As in any declining society, there was in fighting and competition between the department heads, mostly Mu and the ship's civic head. The others had voting rights but most went along with either Mu or the head depending on their own allegience. The main story is the struggle of Mu vs the Council and how a series of politically shrewd moves(in their mindss) ends up blowing up in their face. The Emperor Ryu from the first game is originally a political puppet used by Mu's rival to and the council to quell a democratic dissident who becomes President during the game.

The President manages to create riots/create backlash against the Council and Mu and her forces are forced to take quell the riots. During this incident, Ryu and his lover, the bisexual empress, reveal they had been subverting the council's power and the various acts Ryu passed as the head's puppet successors included some slick clauses that gave him proper power. They managed to gain control of the security system on the ship, wipe out old Mu and reprogram her into the Josean Mascot she was in the first game. Ryu then deletes all records of the ship's history, creates laws and forces people into heterosexual couples and installs himself as the first Emperor of the new Josean Dynasty.

The society itself is pretty open/21st century style values. There's some criticism of gays and lesbians but most people tend not to give a shit. Most of the side characters are involved in relationships that end badly because of the forced straightness. An actress becomes a concubine to a rich dude and leaves her naive lover behind, two gay dudes have to keep their relationship on the sly due to one being a part of a powerful family/forced law. Mu's subordinate is a bisexual hard-ass who is robosexual for her but Mu turns her down and says never to speak of it again. She ends up being a patsy for the rebellion the President created. A young scientist loses her position because of Ryu's policies and wakes up glasses girl for some reason and discovers the whole ship was fucked due to radiation exposure of 1500 years and their fertility rates plummeting as a result. Ryu's dynasty was doomed from the start and everything he did was meaningless in the long run. The whole society was fucked no matter what happened. A lot of the characters changed their names and are from the first game. I don't remember all of them.

Everyone was generally terrible or turned out to be a massive dick involved in the political game. Basically, it doesn't matter if your gay, lesbian or straight, you are a terrible person because of your shitty actions. That's the moral of the story I saw. I didn't feel bad for anyone and agreed I hated everyone equally. Besides, America fuck yeah.

 

[Alonebadman]

It's a rough summary and there's some details I've missed but that was the gist of it. Digital was her only good story and I say good in the loosest sense. She should just stick to writing fanficy romances and stay away from political discourse. The social issues is her thing, the politics generally reads like a gathering of shitty super villains on "how can we fuck over the peasants? Shut your mouth filthy AI Bitch. Ok, petty bullshit aside let's vote." It was boring to be honest.

 

[TigerKnee]

"Sort of like dating sims or the Persona games' social links, but with a much more honest portrayal," Love wrote. "Really, dating sims are inherently about manipulating other people — pick the right dialogue choices based off what you think they expect, learn about their interests so you can give them perfectly tuned gifts, make decisions based off whether you'll impress them or not — but like to pass it off as being about romance.

"Well, fuck that. You can still do that inLadykiller in a Bind; we're just not going to pretend that it's anything other than manipulation. It'll have consequences."

Why do a lot of people keep trying to use that sentiment as if it were some kind of "SUPER DEEP INSIGHTFUL COMMENTARY ON THE GENRE." Do they just have extremely poor knowledge and awareness of what computers are good/bad at and the concept of games?

Might as well argue that all RPGs are Racial Genocide Simulators (TM) then.

 

[Whisky]

Sounds Codexian enough for a LP. I'm interested.

out in 2015

If it's like her other stuff, it'll be short, but boring and the brief moments of intense insanity won't make up for it. Best find a niche fetish hentai title instead.