I’ve been sorta bouncing between using guides and not using guides. My first was tsukihime, and I used a guide for every route except for arcs, and then for clannad I did the same for doing nagisa’s and then guided the rest. But after that I stopped using guides except for games which have terrible structure for choices(such as tokimeki check in).
My friend who I talk these games with, uses guides for everything. And I just wanted to see what other people who play these do.
Yes, all the time, if there is one available. Hell, the first thing I do when I start most games is google for ‘{game title} ??’ or ‘{game title} site:foolmaker.net’.
I don’t know in advance if a game is going to be convoluted and horrible, with a crazy annoying branching structure, or is going to have ‘perfect’ branching like in Haru no Ashioto (with pretty much the minimum number of options) or even more of an extreme like in Colourful Box where you pick your route in advance.
However, if I do have to spend time replaying to try and get on a route, that’s time I’m not actually playing the game. If I’m reloading and skipping, trying different sets of choices to see if they get me past a particularly annoying bad end (e.g. Soul Link or Extravaganza) I’m not getting anything extra out of the game - just wasting time. When the average eroge takes 20+ hours to complete, with some taking much more, you don’t really have time to waste when playing these games!
So, yes, rather than even run the RISK of wasting time, I jump straight to the walkthrough.
Hell, and for the couple which don’t have walkthroughs available, I often find another way to do it - G-Senjou no Maou I got pretty much immediately before any walkthroughs went up. I pulled out the script and grepped it for branch points to determine what I had to do.
For me I don’t really feel like I’m wasting time, because there simply are so few good VN in english that if something is enjoyable I shouldn’t try to finish it too fast. Admittedly I already did most of the best ones… So i’m already scraping through the bottom of the barrel.
Every time, no matter what I’m playing. There are two main reasons - certain games are unreasonably difficult, and having to continually reload and try out different combinations of decision points doesn’t really count as gameplay and hurts my enjoyment of the story. The other advantage of the walkthrough is being able to read the story in the order you want, which for me is usually bad endings before good endings, and favourite characters/best routes last.
With bishoujo games, always (yet I never use them for any other genre unless I’m completely bashing-my-head-against-the-wall stuck. Odd. :? )
I don’t know why I prefer using guides, probably sheer laziness. Then there are those games that REQUIRE a guide (Kagetsu Tohya. :twisted: )
I’ll generally play through once without a guide and see what happens. Then I take a guide and go explore the other endings.
I try to play without a guide for starters, but some games are unreasonably difficult. For some U don’t need a guide at all.
I generally do the same thing as papillon and go through a game once without a guide, then after that use a guide to get all the paths. There are exceptions to this though. For instance, when I borrowed Tsukihime from my friend, I immediately used a guide. Another example is Casual Romance Club. The first time I played it, I didn’t use a guide. The second time, I did, but I didn’t enjoy the game as much. The third time through, I played mostly without a guide, but did look at it occasionally (especially since I was so close to finishing the path I was on and didn’t want to foul it up at the end).
The only genre of games I ever use a walkthrough for are RPGs. (not that I’m bashing walkthroughs or anything, Persona 4 I’m looking at you)
I’ve just gotten way too in the habit of quick saving at every decision branch in any VN I play. Even with Da Capo, (which truly tested my patience) I was QS every time I had lunch, after school activities or free time. Of course, I didn’t complete 100% of the events in any route outside the 2 bonus ones, cause I’m not so anal as to care about the dialog change for every decision I make, but for the most part I feel like I’ve gotten some pretty decent mileage out of my eroge. Of course, some games (Princess Waltz/Chain come to mind off the top of my head) require nothing more than just clicking the mouse to advance, so no guide needed for those at all.
But really the most important thing to keep in mind is that it shouldn’t matter whether or not one uses a guide or not, its the hope that you have fun playing the game itself, no matter how you get through it.
Always. A lot of games and very little time, so by using a guide I can ensure speed and general completion in what time I do have. I mostly play games for the story elements anyhow, so I never get anything out of seeing how things play out with my choices and so forth.
I always try to play through the game without using a guide because this obviously is the way the “game” is meant to be played. But I don’t have the patience to keep playing that way because I hate to see the same scenes again and again. In some of the games you can skip scenes you have seen but not always without missing something new. And the game suffers when you play the scenes out of order.
I also agree that many of the games are way too difficult to be played as they are meant to be played. In such games you nearly always miss the H-scenes or get only bad endings which usually aren’t very good. I just don’t understand why the Japanese love all those bad endings, and the Japanese seem to have much more patience than we have.
Another thing which is irritating for me is the way most light games work: If you miss an opportunity to talk to the girl you want, then you know that you will get a bad ending. And you also get a bad ending if you unnecessarily talk to another girl during the game. This makes it very uninteresting to play through the game, because you can’t change your mind about the girl you want without restarting the game from the beginning. Fortunately you don’t miss all other girls for the rest of your life when you date a girl in real life. Not many people in real life end up being married to their very first date for the rest of their life. So I don’t understand why it has to be this way in the games. In my opinion the purpose of games should be to have an opportunity to try the things we can’t try in our own lives. Not to have more unnecessary restrictions.
So I try to play through the game without using any guide. But in the end I always use the guide anyway. Sometimes even before I have seen the first ending. But only because I get bored and want to try something else.
Well, I think it was about time I actually made an account on this forum, after about 1 year of looking from afar. The first game I ever played of this genre was Snow Sakura and within the first hour of the game, I found out that in these sorts of games you want the best possible end for your first play through. Hence I found a walkthrough and went for the “Hiyama Kozue” rute. And I’m quite glad I did since it’s still one of my favorit characters as of yet, would have hated to end up with the teacher or something similar. Probably wouldn’t happen considering the choises you make, but well… atleast it ends in a way I want it to.
For me it’s not wasting time, I just want the best expirience from the game from my first play through… Feels much better, and strangely enough when I replay a game a few months later my first choise of characters always seems to be the right one, meaning the characters I like the most throughout the entire game.
With that said, thanks alot guys. You’ve pointed me in the direction of a ton of games worth playing in the past, and some lesser good but thats besides the point. Think I started out just with a small curiousity after reading the news paper about how popular this genre had become for the youth outside of Japan and whatnot. And thought “well that can’t be true” now one and a half year later im absolutely hooked myself, I’m just glad I can’t speak or read Japanes since I probably wouldn’t have a social life is that was the case. (Sorry about going off-topic)
Thanks again 
Ehh, really? See, I don’t actually think that at all!
I want to play the game worst->best, if at all possible (although you generally can’t tell), just because it’s nice to end with the best ending (even if the best ending isn’t actually a ‘good’ ending, such as SWAN SONG’s Normal End). That way I keep myself from losing motivation to finish before the end.
Of course, sometimes it happens anyway, but oh well =P At least I’m then more likely to come back to it
EDIT: Oh, and for reference, the only routes in Yukizakura (Snow Sakura) that I liked were the cousin and teacher routes. Everything else smacked of… I dunno, but it didn’t ring well with me at all.
Can’t speak for everyone, but I have no regrets. =P
You’re right about the motivation part, let’s take “The Sagara Family” I pretty much had avoided the mother since she really didn’t do it for me, a bit too “needy” somehow. Which ment she was my last character when I played through that route, and as expected she really didn’t do it for me which made it really hard to play through.
I do however jump a bit around after the first play through though, it’s just that I pretty much what the best expirience right away so it doesn’t get “spoiled” somehow, but each to their own I guess.
There where three girls I enjoyed in Snow Sakura, Hiyama Kozue, Kisaragi Rei, Tachibana Saki. (in that order) The sisters didn’t seem to do much for me I don’t know why… but it’s probably the same as you with everyone except the cousin and teacher.
I only “immediately” use guides for RPGs because I hate missing out stuff (sub quests, hidden items, etc.) and wouldn’t like spending hundreds of hours replaying them just for such reasons. For SIMs (as rare as they get nowadays), I usually try a first time without a guide “to get a feeling of the game” before I read one to check the required parameters to open a route. For AVGs which routes are obviously determined by your choices (e.g. with the icons of the girl to whom a choice applies attached to said choice), a guide isn’t really necessary so I go without for the characters I like, enjoying the story, and may use one to browse over the characters I don’t like. For AVGs which routes aren’t obviously determined by your choices, I always try a first time making choices “as I would if I were the main protagonist” to see with which girl I’m most compatible then try to get the other routes without a guide. I’d only use them when not being able to get one, or because I don’t think the remaining girls/routes would interest me.
All in all, I don’t often use a guide because I hate most knowing in which route I actually am, making it a challenge to get a route. I guess I could use them in order to speed my playing time, but time is rarely a consideration to me (which may explain why I’d need decades in order to complete my backlog~)
At the contrary, I personally think most modern erogames are very easy to complete, with very few choices overall, and most pertinent to a route. Games of yore, where you had to talk to everyone, click everywhere, do every possible action, or where you had countless choices among which only a handful actually had an incidence on the “story”, were infinitely harder.
Oh, I should probably explain this better! It wasn’t the CHARACTERS I particularly liked. It was the routes.
I liked several of the characters, but thought their routes were rather ordinary, and/or had unsatisfying conclusions.
I hadn’t really thought about it like that, propably becouse I tend to dig myself into the relationship between protagonist and the girl. But yeah, definitely better routes if you think about it like that.
If you think of a game like Princess Waltz then I agree. But I didn’t say anything about “modern games”, because I have played a mixture of a lot of both new games and older games recently. (I haven’t been playing such games for a very long time, so I didn’t buy any of the older games when they were released.) Games like Crescendo and Tokimeki Check in! are not that easy at all. In Crescendo it is very difficult to find any of the H-scenes and in Tokimeki the best endings are also rather difficult to find unless you have nearly unlimited patience to keep on trying.
That wouldn’t matter though if only it was fun to keep playing the game that long. But on the contrary the mentioned games are rather boring to replay, after you have finished them the first time. (I like Tokimeki a lot more than Crescendo though.)
By old games, I meant games released before 1998…
Same here.