Getsuya posted:

Mother Goose no Himitsu no Yakata Blue Label/Mother Goose`s Secret Mansion Blue Label is a VN where you are drawn into your own bookshelf. Girls representing (indirectly) the old nursery stories you used to love so much are waiting for you in a mysterious mansion. Turns out you can`t go back to the real world until you have re-awakened in your heart the love for rhymes you used to have. How do you do this? Why, by taking quizzes on rhymes of course!

Getsuya posted:

All I know is that they kind of botched the Higurashi release but are trying to make up for it now. Beyond that I'm in the dark. And while it's okay to talk about localization companies let's avoid talking about that particular game because it is 18+ and this is a thread for non-porn visual novels. Thanks.

Nate RFB posted:

loving laffo. They are never, ever going to finish.

dmboogie posted:

Urgh. I've been playing through Amnesia: Memories after getting it for a buck back in the Steam Thanksgiving sale. It certainly wasn't my favorite VN ever or anything, but I was enjoying it. Ikki's route had a pretty decently sized helping of standard otome creepy poo poo in it, but it was never too terrible and was neat overall. Kent's route was legitimately pretty great. Then there's loving Toma.

Jesus loving christ I hate yandare characters, especially when you can get "good" endings with them that aren't knocking them the gently caress out and calling the cops. The same poo poo popped up in Sweet Fuse, too, but at least there it was easily ignorable; and the rest of the game was fantastic enough to make up for the slight blemish.

Are there any VN's that feature abusive characters like that where the true ending is "this poo poo is dangerous and hosed up, get the hell out of dodge right now"? The only thing I can really think of is Magical Diary with Damien's route, and that's a Western made game.

FractalSandwich posted:

I was going to make a joke about Dorothy getting involved in organised crime, but apparently that's actually what it's about. Go figure.

Alder posted:

Listed of recc'd VNs I've played before:

Nameless ~The one thing you must recall~
WORLD END ECONOMiCA
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Dandelion - Wishes brought to you -

It's not a huge discount but all of them are min 30-40 hrs and I got tired after page 5.

dmboogie posted:

Alternatively, VA-11 Hall-A is really great, and I recommend it. Even with the setting, the characters and dialogue are pretty human and believable, the art"s pretty, and the music's cool.

Irony Be My Shield posted:

It can be good if the game realizes the character is a jerk and takes steps to humanize or develop them. I felt like Fata Morgana did it pretty well. It's different if it's not acknowledged by the game and you're just expected to treat their actions as cool and good though.

CottonWolf posted:

Has Famitsu ever not been a joke magazine?

MegaZeroX posted:

They is used more and more to refer to someone in the third person.

Meallan posted:

Whoa after that reveal about YU NO I just don't understand how that's getting localized

Irony Be My Shield posted:

I think it got less funny when they found themselves completely unable to translate a game due to all the changes they had previously made.

Meallan posted:

Yeah I also consider it one of the best. The Ace Attorney series is ripe full of puns, popular references and relies immensely on localisms etc. The localizers manages to make the work AS funny in English without the audience needing to know a lick of Japanese. It is one of the most impressive works I have seen.

You do need to suspend disbelief to accept that California was overtaken by Japanese immigrants. But this series was never supposed to be a serious representation of society, so I have never understood why one would be bothered to the point of enjoying it less.

Sakurazuka posted:

I imagine there's a least a small group of people who are annoyed just because they changed everyone's name and the setting and tried to reduce the 'Japanese-ness' of the original game in a way that you probably never see in a localisation nowadays.

No Wave posted:

I bet they wouldn't localise it now.

thark posted:

Random thought.

Why is it that so so many otherwise excellent VNs don't have an option for instant text display? (Phoenix Wright was the example that triggered the thought this time, but it's quite common even or especially in big-name titles.)

Like, with eroge it's pretty much a 99% guarantee that setting will exist. (OR SO I'VE HEARD.)

MegaZeroX posted:

All I know is that the general consensus I heard, both in this thread and outside of it, was that the Higurashi anime was mediocre at best (and bad at worst) and that the Umineko one was terrible. As such, I just made post indicating that there might be a good one coming. Obviously I don't know that it will be good, just that I imagine that a second attempt at an anime will avoid at least some of the pitfalls of the first.

Hwurmp posted:

Dark Souls is a visual novel

The Colonel posted:

this is a ridiculous outlook to have about any medium and built on a weirdly exclusive view of storytelling, but saying it about one where you likely won't have experienced a large body of work due to language and popularity barriers resulting in a large amount of independent work that will never receive the same attention and popularity and maybe never even get translated, especially when mentioning a writer who famously managed to hit that amount of success and still only carries a portion of their work over those barriers, might be the most insane thing

AFancyQuestionMark posted:

To be honest, they aren't wrong. The majority of all genre works in any medium are never going to "rise above the level of pulp entertainment" because they aren't trying to. Being well constructed, compelling and enjoyable is the target they strive for and what we as an audience are looking for. And that's perfectly cool.

I enjoyed Raging Loop a lot, for example, I thinks its the best mystery VNs of the last couple years, but I didn't find it to be especially meaningful or remarkable in the grander picture of stuff I consume. It's a solid piece of entertainment, it has a lot of good stuff, as well as some stuff that's okay or even a bit bad. But it isn't anything beyond that. Nor did I expect or want it to be anything beyond that.


As for the whole 'tons of hidden untranslated gems' aspect, it's probably true but imo the only useful discussions we can have are about things we've personally experienced in some way.

orenronen posted:

Tangentially, I wish someone would explore the effect of extreme localization on underlying narratives and stories. The most prominent example is Ace Attorney -- do the AA games and the Gyakuten Saiban games tell the same story? Are the characters the same characters? Or does transforming an absurdist parody of Japan and its culture into a bizarro hybrid country, and taking a completely ethnically homogenous Japanese cast and giving them diverse nationalities have a significant effect on the underlying story and narrative, and who the characters themselves are? The plot is (for the most part) the same, sure - but I'm not so sure about anything but the very surface level of events the games depict.

MegaZeroX posted:

Huh, I know for many years they were working on Nar Katma, which was supposed to be "AN RPG where you are both the hero and the final boss." Did thar evolve into this, or is Novectacle just on a "both X and the enemy of X" kick right now?

Lord Bob posted: