I liked it
I’m not a fan of huge breasted women in these games, so Cherry didn’t do much for me.
I personally didn’t find the ero scenes for Princess Waltz to be that bad
The ero content in Princess Waltz really takes a back seat to the story. There aren’t that many scenes.
X-Change Alternative - PV video
If you’ve never played a X-Change game… you probably should. As long as it doesn’t cost too much, it’s an amusing adventure with plenty of ero.
And Alternative has nice voices, art, and music. It doesn’t show any realistic life from the other side, but I can’t decide if you’d like it or not…
Better get a second opinion…
Yeah, X-Change Alternative is a good game and is really just about some of the strange situations this kid gets in by being transformed into a girl. You can choose to have relationships with male characters, but there are quite a few paths that avoid this as well. I’d probably take a look at a walkthrough before getting too far into it, just so you make sure you’re on the path you want. (for that matter, I typically advocate using walkthroughs unless you’re really into playing a game multiple times)
I hated X-Change Alternative. The first few moments of the game sort of served to mislead me into thinking it might have some substance. Boy was I wrong. The protagonist and most of the characters irritated the heck out of me and the ones that didn’t seemed to do a pretty drastic personality shift in the H scenes, which themselves were pretty terribly uninspired. Given how everyone in the game was so instantly accepting of the protagonist’s transformation, given how it caused so few of the logistical issues that you’d expect (and, fleshed out, could have been an interesting angle to explore) I don’t see why they bothered making this a gender-bender game in the first place when they could have just made the protagonist female. Although I guess it probably wouldn’t make it any better of a game. Why does the protagonist take the incredibly dubious medicine in the first place (other than the fact that it is obviously necessary to continue the plot.) Why do none of the characters have motivations that make any sense at all and seem to occasionally forget why they were written into the game in the first place? I still don’t see any reason why this was made a gender-bender title to begin with- the flashback stuff at the start hinted at something but from my experience the game forgot about it entirely after the first two hours. If I had to group everything into one problem, I’d say it’s this: lazy writing. When effort is not put into the crafting of an eroge, I don’t feel inclined to put in the effort to read it. The H scenes themselves suffer from a similar problem where the writer basically decided ‘yeah, okay, not writing this, so I’ll make this scene 10 lines long and just say blah blah blah continued for the next three hours’- great, okay. I probably wouldn’t want to read a three hour long H scene either but what the hell, why even bother including H scenes if you don’t even care to really write them. It sort of reminds me of the whole ‘and then this and that happened’ writing cliche. It’s incredibly lazy writing. Not that it’s just the H scenes that do this in XCA- plenty of other scenes are just handwaved away in the same fashion- but the H scenes are the most obvious and most prevalent.
Other issues besides the writing seem fairly minor, but the game also pretty drastically skipped on production values whenever it could. The CGs are fairly AliceSoft-y in that while there’s a decent number of them, there’s no sub-CGs/differential CGs for most of the base CGs; therefore, for most of the time the CG you’re looking at doesn’t match the text you’re reading at all. The engine the game runs on is also incredibly clunky and feels like it was made in 1998. Non-antialiased text, slow fades, unresponsive menus and a tendency to crash a lot.
This was the only X-Change game I played and I only got it because it was available on game999 for 999?, but after it I feel completely disinclined to play any of the others. Honestly, when it comes with gender-bender titles, even yumemisou’s moronic Futaba Channel series was better than this.
I’m pretty much in agreement with Lancer-X. It’s a bad eroge, but it’s generally an improvement over X-Change 3, and it’s marginally better than Futaba Channel (Futaba Channel is linear, hence none of the sillier moments are avoidable). Regardless of the route, the game quickly descends into a collection of H scenes, and while there are quite a lot of them, they feel like they are from a pre 1995 game (which is odd, as X-Change 3, released a few months earlier, included a normal number of variant CGs and had CGs that matched with the text). After a few hours, it felt like I was playing a bad eroge with a female protagonist, instead of a gender swapping game, so I couldn’t really recommend it on that front either. Scenario-wise, X-Change Alternative didn’t work for me, as turning into a female protagonist and eventually deciding whether or not to change back is 90% of the overall story, when it should really be more of a device to support the scenario on each route. If the game had good writing, it would be able to get away with the plot but…
Fortunately, there’s a rather amusing NG voice compilation from X-Change Alternative, so that’s an easy recommendation over the game. 
Well,from what I’ve seen of the series, none of the people around the character really make a big deal about the sex change, ever, so I was not surprised when it was just accepted this time around. (though I have always thought a better story could be told in this series if people didn’t know it was the same person just transformed)
I didn’t have a problem with most of the other stuff, as I didn’t go in expecting it to be anything more than it was. I actually liked most of the central characters, though the student body characters didn’t do a thing for me. I didn’t care for the fact that you are pretty much forced into a couple ero scenes, mostly on the student council line again, with no chance to avoid them without a walkthrough. (once you start moving down a certain path you get stuck for awhile)
The art not matching the scene itself - well I’ve seen this so often in the games released in America that I pretty much expect it, and the very few times I’ve seen otherwise it has been a happy surprise.
I felt a little warm and fuzzy reading that post even if it wasn’t directed at me.
I at least actually enjoy getting a chance to write up recommendations for a newbie. Given the realities of how small the market is, I get to influence the growth of the market ever so slightly if I can convince even a few people to lean towards games I liked. Such a small market means that every new customer is valuable.
And it always sucks buying games that you end up not liking. I’ve been there. Like XChange 1 … ugh. If that had been the first game I’d bought and played, I might have never played another one again. Fortunately, it was the second, and the first was good enough at the time to make me a fan. (I doubt I’d appreciate it much if I tried to replay it; it’s got issues.)
Yeah, after XCA I’m pretty much definitely not touching the original series XChange games, which seem to be even worse. XCA2 has an 80% EGS average so I might consider it if it appears on game999 or something. (DLsite has it but it’s still 5,800?)
Really, it’s my pleasure, PsychoG13; I welcome anyone who is genuinely interested in sharing in one of my favorite pastimes.
I consider myself fairly well-read when it comes to visual novels - I’ve played through many titles I thought I would hate and ended up being pleasantly surprised - so I’d like to think I’m a useful resource. I haven’t played through every English-translated visual novel under the sun just yet, but I’m slowly making that a reality. Odds are, if I haven’t personally finished a title, I know at least a bit about it. And, if I don’t, regulars here like LexarV, fujifruit, Dark_Shiki, olf_le_fol, Lancer-X, Nargrakhan and Nandemonai can easily help you out where I might prove to be useless. Narg and Nandemonai especially - they’re true veterans around here.
There are a lot of people out there who, for some reason or other, have this strange Boys’ Club mentality about our shared hobbies, insisting that anime, manga, and/or visual novels be tailored to their exclusionary preferences and turn away people wanting to check out the media for the first time. I’ve personally run into people who refuse to touch anime or the like, not because they’re not interested, but because they’re understandably put off by the elitist attitudes and policies of these so-called “fans”. I have no respect for those who show this kind of hostility toward newcomers, especially on an English publisher’s website, so please excuse me if you see me or anyone else butting heads with this kind of unjustified stubbornness. It’s happened before on these forums, and I’m sure it’ll happen again…
Okay, that’s enough ranting and ego-stroking out of me. If you have anything you’d like to know, no matter how strange you think it might sound, ask away and we’ll do our best to help you out.
That said, Being stubborn head butters is fine when it encourages heated, but friendly, debates between community members … it’s just not the way we want to welcome new people to the hobby.
Personally, I like seeing new people finding the hobby for the first time - it makes me feel good to know that the word is getting around. You’ll find these forums to be some of the friendliest HGame forums on the net; the people here are almost always happy to help and are encouraging of new thought. Always feel free to ask questions here, unlike some of those elitism forums TDO mentions above, we’re typically a pretty friendly and inviting group.
Unless, of course, you mention the secret - forbidden - subject, then all bets are off! 
It’s also funner getting into the games now. There’s a wider selection and many higher quality games released than when I first started playing back in 2003. Very small selection back then, and a good portion of the games were sexfests that didn’t offer much for story or choices. Peter’s really been making strides in getting some bigger and better titles out in english.
Yeah. In 2003, I considered Snow Drop and Tokimeki Checkin! to be quality titles. At the time, there had never been games with graphics as good as those two released, nor (I think) had there been many with voice acting (other than one or two that I think had really atrocious English dubbing?).
I don’t think Snow Drop would rate all that highly were I to try it again now. I think TCI would fare better, just because I remember it actually being funny, but I really can’t remember.
I haven’t played many of the Himeya-soft titles; many of them are supposed to be really good. Other than them, of the early titles (essentially, before G-Collections launched) there weren’t terribly many good games. Nocturnal Illusion, Brave Soul, Critical Point, aforementioned Himeya titles … I really don’t know about any others that I’d say were actually good. (And I still need to get more than a few hours into Brave Soul at that. Lost my install, never got around to starting over.)
Of the actual Jast USA lineup … I really couldn’t say how any of them would hold up; I suspect not well. Likewise for the various other companies that published a few games, and disappeared. (Except for Nocturnal Illusion.)
That’s a handful of games in like ten years. In contrast, the post-GC-launch years have seen a steady stream of really good releases from Jast, Mangagamer, and GC itself (before it imploded).
Yeah. A small group of us (myself included) got into an argument not that long ago with a newcomer who was furious about the lack of honorifics in Deus Machina Demonbane despite the title being set in a fictional American city (ie: not Japan) and being a clear, deliberate homage to H. P. Lovecraft (Call of Cthulhu). He failed to back up his points (he kept repeating that Japanese terms were “so appropriate and wonderful” instead of providing defensible rationale), willfully twisted around the words of others (he insisted that I hate honorifics when I specifically said that the setting and context determine whether they’re appropriate or not), used hostile language throughout his posts, and even resorted to “wish[ing] horrible evils” upon his opponents and making death threats.
Honorifics. Serious business. :lol:
As you can tell, I found the exchange pretty hilarious; it’s a perfect example of how not to behave in these parts. You can read the whole debacle starting from this post. You’ll catch on pretty quickly that I had my tongue firmly planted in my cheek almost the entire time. The inciting party liberally coated his posts with sarcasm and insults, then rebutted that people didn’t know what hostility looked like when we called him on it. Really, it’s an enlightening read, so, if you have a moment, I highly suggest you look it over (it’s about 6-7 forum pages long, with a couple of unrelated posts in between).
In this forum, you’re welcome to disagree with anyone on any subject. Just be civil about it (your posts thus far indicate that you’ll have no problems in that department). Otherwise, you’ll quite literally turn yourself into a laughingstock, kinda like the horribly-misguided “fan” above.
Indeed. Some of us might be accommodating if you’re looking for an off-the-market title like anything from Himeya’s English catalog (ie: Divi-Dead, Desire, Eve Burst Error, Adam -The Double Factor-). If, on the other hand, you wish to hoist the Jolly Roger to obtain a title you can easily purchase from J-List, MangaGamer, or even Amazon, you should seriously reconsider bringing up the subject. Some posters (like one of the onlookers in the above exchange) aren’t very well-liked around here because they split hairs over games they’ve proven they never intended to pay for in the first place.
Getting back on topic:
My policy is that I enjoy a touching story that makes me think. Sure, mindless sex romps are enjoyable every now and then, but those pretty much never get into my upper echelon. As Billybob and Nandemonai pointed out, the majority of releases back in the day were sex romps. With the huge difference between supply and demand of quality titles, Japanese-literate fans eventually took matters into their own hands and started translating titles into English themselves, effectively forcing the industry to evolve with the times. Thanks to that, we have a wider variety of story-centric titles available and joint productions between fans and the English visual novel industry. JAST and MangaGamer both maintain lines of shallow sex romps and sophisticated stories; I’m glad that we now have a degree of choice with what we’d like to read. Quite a few people become incensed when a fan translation team joins up with a professional publisher (citing self-serving and legitimate reasons alike); I, for one, see this as a long stride in the right direction.
Well, that’s all for now. Yukyu no Shonenshojo awaits…
It’s not even that; the games were just a lot older, and the storytelling was still evolving. Yeah, games like Paradise Heights were pure sex romp. I mean, the ‘plot’ involves a guy who likes … pizza … so much that he buys an apartment complex and lets a bunch of … female pizza chefs … stay there for free, so he can have as much … pizza … as he wants at any time - then he leaves you (his nephew) as the manager. In a shocking twist he doesn’t tell you this little detail, so you get free pizza at the drop of a hat, and have no idea why until the twist is revealed in an amazing ending!!!1
Yeah, there were plenty of games like that. (In fact, pretty much all the games were like that at the very beginning, I hear) And plenty of the ones translated were like that. But the thing was, there were translated games that tried to be more, and even those met with limited success. I wouldn’t really call 3 Sister’s Story all that great, and yet it clearly wasn’t a sex romp at all. (There was a lot of fairly gratuitous sex, but there clearly was a bigger story, you were even penalized for getting laid too much.) Likewise - Runaway City and Seasons of the Sakura also tried to have a real story to them … but it just wasn’t all that terribly compelling.
And the games that tried to go for gameplay were limited as well. True Love is still one of only two sim games ever officially translated and sold for money by a legit company … and it’s - being 100% honest - not all that great. Cobra Mission is pretty terrible, and it was the first h-game ever translated and an RPG to boot!
These games have NOT aged well. (I was going to say that Kanon had been released, so good games definitely existed in Japan; but Kanon was 1999, and 3 Sister’s Story was 1996. So at the time these games were originally released, they might have actually been fairly well representative. I wouldn’t know for sure.)
YU-NO was released in 1996 and is still considered by many either the best or one of the best eroges ever. It also does things with the medium that have since been feebly imitated but never equalled (taking the standard branching style of eroge gameplay and mixing in a good dose of quantum physics parallel worlds theory.) That said, there is no denying it was absolutely exceptional for its time (and is still exceptional today.)
YU-NO still made use of the old ‘menu-style’ LOOK->GIRL, LOOK->GIRL, LOOK->GIRL, TALK->GIRL, TALK->GIRL, TALK->GIRL, PLAY->ANOTHER EROGE style of system you got quite often back then (and, really, does ANYONE miss that?), but mercifully only used it for the first and last portions of the game (which lacked branching so you couldn’t get it wrong anyway)
Now, otherwise, 1996 was a relatively busy year for eroge (probably the first truly busy year) so there are a decent number of other respected titles. Leaf’s Kizuato is a good example (mind- it had horrible art. Compare with YU-NO which had amazing art) and AliceSoft had Kichikuou Rance (which is basically an older version of Sengoku Rance with many parallels and a greater scope) and the apparently quite good Only You which I’ve never played.
1995 had some good titles too(Eve and Desire)