Visual Novels

Alternate links: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2183430/My_LoveyDovey_Demon/

Taiki is your average guy. He’s nineteen years old, in his first year of university, and he’s just starting to learn what it means to be an adult.

During the summer vacation, Taiki goes to the countryside to stay with his grandparents alongside his siblings: the haughty, fashionable Chiharu; the tomboyish troublemaker Nene; and the sweet, shy Reza.

Taiki wants to have a relaxing summer, but his hopes are dashed when Nene breaks into their grandfather’s study, which is strictly out of bounds. Inside his study, Nene finds a treasure trove of dusty old books, including a tome full of instructions on how to summon demons.

Nene sets about this demonic summoning ritual at once, and calls upon a fearsome figure from the deepest, darkest depths of Hell…

Who just so happens to be a cute girl with pink hair and an impressive bust?!

Now Taiki’s in a real pinch. Not only does he have to look after his siblings, but he also has his demonic guest, Elisabeth, to worry about – and she’s completely besotted with him! What in the world is Taiki going to do now?!

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/Otomegames/t/751085

Coming digitally and physically in 2024 courtesy of Eastasiasoft Limited and Idea Factory

Subarashiki Hibi (Wonderful Everyday in English) was released by Frontwing in 2017 following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It was released on Steam and JAST.

With one catch: the Steam release only includes the first chapter of seven.

In my experience, it takes about 6 hours to play the first chapter, and the other 6 chapters take another 54 hours to complete. Essentially, 90% of the game is missing. The reason the game was released on Steam in this incomplete state is due to the adult content present in the other chapters. Certain adult content is not allowed on Steam. Not that chapter 1 is free of adult content anyway...

So, Frontwing offers the other 90% of the game as a patch you need to manually apply to the Steam game. You need to find out about this patch's existence from this vague Steam announcement (the store page doesn't mention this at all). If you play through all the routes in chapter 1, there's nothing to suggest you haven't just played the entire game. You get a pretty end credits scene and you're kicked back to the title screen. Because every chapter has its own ending theme.

This announcement links to their Kickstarter Updates page. Because there are 58 updates on the page, you need to click "Load More" 3 times to find this page. It tells you that you then need to go to this special page to download the patch from JAST. If you clicked the link, you'll notice that it doesn't work anymore.

That's because the link was changed a year or so ago and doesn't redirect. The patch is now offered on this page. I did not discover this from any of Frontwing's announcements. I found this out from the comments section of a community guide on the Steam forums.

The instructions on the JAST page are wrong, too. It tells you to "Extract the patch files from the archive and run ".exe" file to install the patch." What you actually need to do is go to the game's Steam folder and replace all the .arc files with the ones from the patch folder.

I wouldn't say this is easy to find. Some people can't find it. It's scary to imagine how many people don't know this patch exists at all...

If you want to play Subahibi (it's a great game, seriously, play it), it makes sense to just buy it from JAST instead. They give you the entire game and it just works, no patching required. Though, fair warning that these releases are only in English (no Japanese option), and there's a lot of disturbing sexual content. The second chapter in particular has various kinds of disturbing sexual content. So much that I can't enumerate it all... The game is also very dark. But hey, it's a kamige, and I thought it was a good read...mostly in spite of that stuff.

This is easily the worst experience I've ever had on Steam. Are there other strange Steam releases like this where you need to scour the web for the rest of the game? I want to know! Or, conversely, has a Steam release actually been better than a GOG/JAST/MangaGamer store release?

This feature proposal from the VNDB beta has made it into the live site! We can now start tagging VNs known to have DRM:

Alrighty, still not really polished or finished yet, but it doesn't look like the main data model or guidelines will change much so I've pushed it live now.

If you want to filter for DRM-free visual novel releases, you can do that now.

I consider this mission accomplished. \o/

The wording "Digital Restrictions Management" was almost snuck into the guidelines proposal, and unfortunately I can't claim to have had anything to do with that :)

The official guidelines are available here. Interestingly, the final wording is:

Some releases have DRM (Digital Rights Management or, more accurately, Restrictions Management)

Now for the fun part: documenting which releases are encumbered with DRM. If you know one of the VNs you've purchased has DRM or is DRM-free, please help by editing the VNDB releases entry to reflect this!

Hopefully, we'll all be able to make more informed purchasing decisions now.

Yorhel added preliminary DRM support to the VNDB beta site on September 12th, 2023.

The goal of this beta - aside from some testing - is to pre-seed the list of DRM types. So go ahead and add and edit DRM types and figure out how to best name and document them. While I can easily transfer the list of DRM types to the main site when it goes live, I'll probably not transfer the DRM info added to releases, so don't go overboard with that yet.

List of all known DRM types: https://beta.vndb.org/r/drm

If you've encountered a type of DRM that isn't listed here, please add it! However, don't bother with documenting which releases are encumbered with DRM just yet, as this data won't make it over to the real site.

This feature has been in Beta for three weeks and it seems pretty close to releasing. Outstanding issues:

• It's possible to search releases by DRM type, but not yet by DRM property
• Guidelines & documentation (some progress has been made, but it's not done yet).

Although they may not be DRM-free 😉 , Steam is offering Sekai Project games at a discounted price.

TYPE-MOON's Mahōtsukai no Yoru (Witch on the Holy Night) visual novel is getting a release on Steam on December 14. The release will support Japanese, English, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese text.

I've created a Visual Novel series and I'm trying to reach more people and get feedback. 🍻

Let's dive into free visual novels on itch.io and try to keep our sanity.

There are over 1,000 games tagged "Visual Novel" for sale on Steam until August 14th.

Here are some notable dual-language titles:

• Muv-Luv & Muv-Luv Alternative are more than 50% off. Both games are dual-language.
• Steins;Gate and Steins;Gate 0 are 60% off.
• Aokana is 50% off.
• The House in Fata Morgana is 35% off.

Localization-only releases (i.e. they don't include the original Japanese script):

• Wonderful Everyday (AKA Subahibi) is 40% off. Remember to get the patch for the other 90% of the game afterward though, as the publisher provides it separately to the Steam purchase.
• Baldr Sky is 60% off.
• CLANNAD is 70% off.

There are plenty of other great games here, too. It's a huge sale. I recommend Muv-Luv.

Welcome to the first of hopefully many Monthly Discussion Threads. Questions, Recommendations, and more are all welcome here! Anything that you don't think deserves it's own thread can also go here!

created with icebergcharts.com, background by Polareath

We've been working on a guide to help players on all major GNU/Linux distributions play visual novels for the past few weeks. This guide is designed to be used by both beginners and experts, with minimal need to touch the command line.

openSUSE wins the award for "never had to touch the terminal" and "simplest setup instructions", but Fedora is a close second.

While there are a few existing visual novel guides for GNU/Linux around, we've tried to fill in the gaps we noticed. We've put a lot of research into this guide and ensured it is accurate while remaining simple and approachable.

If you're interested, start here!

We have an extensive Troubleshooting section on our Problems page if you're having trouble getting visual novels to work, too.

I wrote this guide with a lot of help from two other people, including /u/neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space. It’s available on our community wiki, https://wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, meaning you’re free to share, remix, and build on the content as long as you credit us.

We also have some other pages you may find useful:

• If you're looking for something to play, check out our Recommendations page.
• If you want to know where and how to buy a visual novel you want to play, our comprehensive Buying page will help you out.
• And if you want to read a visual novel in Japanese, our Reading in Japanese page offers a lot of advice and points you to some useful software to make the process easier.

This one is in a slightly different format than the others but the symbols should actually be consistent somewhat.

All are welcome to join. I look forward to seeing you guys there~!

Mine:

Mayuri's ending in Steins;Gate My Darling's Embrace: As one of the rare Okabe/Mayuri shippers, finishing my S;G experience with this is one of the best story payoffs I experienced.

Tomoyo After true ending: Very heartbreaking and IMO much better than the canon Clannad After Story ending. If I have infinite money, I'll have an anime produced out of it.

Not actually 100% sure when this is from. pls gib sauce

2012 edition. It's quite interesting to see what visual novels were popular 10 years ago.

I also had the 2017 edition floating around, so I figured I'd upload it, too. There are 'some' differences between the 2015 and 2017 versions, after all.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/554575

Made a List for Physical collectors for the NS

I have been reading a few VNs since the last years but I have not found any recommendation about a Visual Novel about vampires. If you know a good VN about vampires please recommend me one (I like stories about vampires)

MangaGamer announced several new titles at Anime Expo.

JAST made several new announcements and updated us on some existing projects at their panel.

Other news

Today I learned that Saiya-Saiga has a ディスクレス field for all the visual novels listed on the site. The field essentially labels whether the release is encumbered by DRM or not; whether it performs a check to ensure the disk is in the drive on first startup.

If the developer has provided a DRM-removal patch, as in the case of August with Aiyoku no Eustia, that is also listed with a link to download it.

This should be very useful for players looking for DRM-Free releases.

Anime has slowly grown into a global phenomenon, but visual novels are far more niche. Many visual novels remain untouched by localization companies, and sometimes the localizations we do get are…lackluster.

Often, the best way to experience a visual novel is in the original language—Japanese. Whether you’re already interested in learning Japanese, or want to learn Japanese purely to play visual novels in their original language, both motivations are perfectly valid. Visual novels are a great way to learn Japanese, because you get exposure to both the written and spoken language.

I've written a guide on how you can learn Japanese by playing visual novels with the help of a friend who made some suggestions to improve it, and it's available on our wiki, wiki.comfysnug.space. As with all pages on our wiki, it's licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0, meaning you're free to share and re-post the content.

If you're interested in learning Japanese or have already begun, I hope you find this guide useful. It isn't meant to be a dedicated guide on learning Japanese, but there are some tools you might not know about that will make your life easier.

If you have any additions or corrections to offer for this guide, or are interested in working on our other pages, you can sign up for the wiki here.