SBESTER'S PROFILE

I've been on a visual novels kick for a couple years now, love them! It's hard to beat the legit Japanese ones, like Higurashi When they Cry, Umineko When They Cry, Fate/Stay Night, Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate, Sakura Taisen series, Never7, Ever17, Remember11.

There are some slight differences between styles of VNs that you may need to know though, if you're serious about getting into them.

Straight-forward visual novels usually have choices involved, with alternating routes leading to different endings. Sometimes this means having good ends, bad ends, and true ends, while other times they'll just be *different* ends.

Kinetic Novels are VNs with no choices involved and no altering paths involved. It's pretty much just a novel with the pretty pictures to help the story along. The most famous of which are the When They Cry series (includes Higurashi, Higurashi Kai, Umineko, and Umineko Chiru). They're actually my favorites, though they take a long time to get from the cheerful and boring day in the life scenarios to the chilling and gore-filled climaxes. I actually prefer kinetic VNs because very few VN writers are able to pull choices off well imo. My MAFIOSI novels are kinetic novels because of this (also available on this site).

Eroge, you will probably want to stay away from. They're just pure hentai VNs, with very little in the way of story. My advice is to avoid at all costs. Some popular VNs unfortunately do have some hentai in them though, like Fate/Stay Night and the Muv Luv series, so you have to be careful and do your research before trying one. Imo, sex scenes can really drag down what was really a pretty good story (an example being Fate/Stay Night), not just because they aren't normally handled very well, but they interrupt the flow of the story and really feel out of place (at least, in every case I've come across).

OELVN stands for Original English Language Visual Novel. These are mostly indie made VNs that were created by Ren'Py, a VN making program. There are a few of these on this site, as mentioned above.

There are also some great VN/RPG hybrids, which simply contain elements of visual novels in them. Sakura Taisen is a popular one, although only the 5th one has been translated to English (I played the rest using an English guide). Record of Agarest War is another example, though it's hard as hell and I don't really recommend it.

I prefer the animatronic turtles of yesterday. I actually thought they were gonna go in that direction again, but nope. The CGI for their faces looks like something out of Shrek.

The worst thing to me is Shredder though. Instead of a Japanese ninja fighter, he's some white dude who controls a black ops team or whatever. Is this costume magically gonna give him ninja fighting powers to be able to take on all 4 of these 8-feet tall (assumed 400+ pound) turtles? No? No.

EDIT: Mikey looks like Sid from Ice Age. Look at him in the final frame.

So friggin' many, I still have about 10 PS2 JRPGs that I own but haven't played yet. There's just so much gold from the PS2 era across all genres. In fact, the only games I've really liked from the current generation of consoles are Yakuza 3+4, Dead Space 1+2, Xenoblade Chronicles, Mas Effect trilogy... that's probably it. I'll give the new Tales of games a chance eventually as well.

author=GreatRedSpirit

author=sbester
I just want Sega to localize Yakuza 5.

They probably won't though, because in their words: the fans haven't done a good enough job promoting the series in the West. 'Cause apparently that's our job.

Add the Yakuza 1+2 HD to that list for me.

(C'mon Sega you don't even have to dub it or anything. Just translate the text and add subtitles and you're done! One guy did a LP of Kenzan! and just threw in his own subs and whatnot for all the text, both over voices and text. Why can't you? Release it over PSN to reduce cost or whatever, just give us Kiryu HEAT ACTION Taxi Driving!)

I'll second that vote for Y1+2HD, but it's so very doubtful.

Last I heard about Y5 from Sega was that "it's just too big and therefore it would be very difficult to localize". If they don't announce it in the next couple days I'm gonna import it.

I heard Seth Green wants in on this too.