@Peter Payne
Sorry for the double post, I thought I got banned for my remark...
I'm sorry if I came off as ''rude'', that wasn't my intention.
My point was that people will most likely pirate games, if they are offered the chance to get what they like for free, instead of having to pay 40 bucks for a nice game.
I for one did that stuff too in the past, back when I was newly introduced to the genre, around 2009/2010.
The games I highly enjoyed playing are by now in my shelves.
To me, there is no such a thing as to having to ''proof'' me anything. Well, atleast not to myself.
I enjoy Visual Novels; while I admittedly rarely play them by now due to real-life stuff and lack of motivation to start with a bigger title, I occasionally still play games with an emphasis on gameplay and being light on the story.
I finished Demon Master Chris yesterday, for example - a title I could easily have picked up else, but which I ordered from Jlist. :P
Like I said - I pay for what I buy, but I can see that the big majority of fans won't do that.
The fun thing is, I consider pirating VN's, in a twisted way, a good thing to raise popularity of these titles, since they are still somewhat unheard of in the west.
But lately, seeing you and Mangagamer releasing more and more stuff on Steam, it seems like general interest seems to prosper.
Of course, pirating stuff in general is a bad thing, and I agree that people should rather show their support instead of being selfish and enjoying the game for their own without giving something back.
But, how would one go to make Visual Novels appeal to the west... I tried it myself with friends and as far as I know, nobody except one person started playing these games, and the game she started with was the first installment of the Monster Girl Quest franchise.
Well, I hope people will refrain from downloading these games for free in the future. :/
I for one enjoy you guys being willed to even make limited editions of these games - it's something that really animates me to purchase it, once I have the money (which is always a bit troublesome for me ^-^'').
I still want to pick up Imouto paradise and the limited edition of Da Capo I at a point. I heard you are running low on the latter, hopefully I can still snatch a copy in time. >.<
A shame about the older artwork for Kana Okaeri.
To be honest, I prefer the older one. It shouldn't stop me from playing it though.
I guess these bundles are a bit experimental then.
They seem to contain titles differing in the genre, but like mentioned before, this shouldn't be a thing, really.
After all, you get more for around the same price, I see no problem in that choice.
But, judging from your comment, if you would bundle, say, two titles from different developers/publishers, would you have to pay a fee for that?
It seems a little odd that things like this cost money, too, I'm surprised. :/
"But, how would one go to make Visual Novels appeal to the west... I tried it myself with friends and as far as I know, nobody except one person started playing these games, and the game she started with was the first installment of the Monster Girl Quest franchise."
Maybe I'm just really persuasive, but I've gotten a number of my friends interested in VNs. One went on to become one of the most prolific players of Japanese VNs the English Internet has ever seen. I turned a girl into a lolicon. My brother hates reading, but I got him hooked on subbed anime and he liked School Days because it was animated and had lots of choices. The trick is identifying someone's latent interest and continually reminding them of it in a non-pushy way.
I think it's rather easy getting people interested in VNs. Getting them to pay for them is what's hard.
''I turned a girl into a lolicon.''
I have no idea how you made it, but you sir deserve a cookie, for real.
And I thought being a lolicon would be more of a male thing... well, I still think it is, but there are obviously exceptions.
I told some of the people I have on Skype about some of the titles I liked, and even wrote a short review about them (in German, mind you) in a German VN forum.
One guy just came up, recited me, and when I brought up games like Fukai ni Nemuru Oujo no Abaddon, he just answered with ''Gay!'', rendering my opinion useless.
I don't know, I've sent this link also to my friends, seeing as some douche comes there, acting all haughty, the self-proclaimed critique he is, I wouldn't be surprised if some people would have refused to give these games a try after that.
This forum is somewhat small and very inactive; one, two people disagreeing with you there could already be enough to scare away potential customers of these games.
Maybe, it was because of that...?
I don't know, I wrote a load of text (to the games I've actually played by now and/or read about more than the VNDB entries), I really wonder why nobody, liking these games or not, atleast told me more direct about this nichÈ genre or rather, what they think about it.
It comes of as sort of disingenious.
Oh well, nothing I can do about it. It just seems like I'm the only one in my syrcle of friends who likes these kinds of games. There are in total just three people that I know of having played a VN before or are in the process of doing so, so there is that.
I've talked openly about my interest in eroge even in relatively mainstream forums like NISA. Subsequently I was contacted by people who were willing to discuss privately, but who were too fearful of being branded a pervert to talk about them in the open. Some of these people went on to openly proclaim their interest. There's a lot of latent interest in eroge; people just need a supportive, nonjudgmental environment to cultivate that interest.
Reading this, humanity is a bunch of hypocrites.
They point with their fingers at you, ridiculing you, but are too afraid to admit their own ''flaws'' in public.
While I obviously don't consider interest in porn games a flaw, I never cared about what others thought about me. In fact, I often tend to talk about VN's and Eroge with others. Right now, it even seems like a person is taking their distance from me because of that, and I feel like she's simply not telling me about feeling uneasy about this sort of stuff. I really don't care about this, as sex in general seems like a perfectly normal thing to me. And if it's of fictional origin, who cares?
Anime porn has to be taken with a grain of salt anyways; the situations in these kinds of games don't even reflect serious, realistic situations (most of the time) how they would happen in real-life.
I myself am a Lolicon (I guess? Let's say, that I would prefer this over the mash of big-breasted oppai heroines), but don't necessarily have to buy Eroge with loli characters. For example, in Littlewitch Romanesque's case, while being absolutely against censorship, I would have prefered a censored version, because the H-scenes feel very forced most of the time, in my opinion. I absolutely love the artwork of Oyari-san, but not particularly in relation to pornografic aspects. It just catches ''beauty'' with ''girlish innocence'' in my opinion, I don't really want this to be in relation with naughty content.
Not that I hated it in the game, but oh well... wasn't my cup of tea.
But, I disgress yet again.
What if people would ''judge'' themselves? Maybe they would feel uneasy regardless of the magnitude of such content, what if they would feel pressured anyways, because ''society doesn't like it''?
Implying a neutral place to discuss this kind of content would be a great idea, but what about the mentality of these people? Can this really be changed into something they would approve of themselves?
Who knows how the demographic in itself is. So far, most people I've seen didn't like VN's and Eroge, especially the latter.
And also, what about the standards of Visual Novels in itself?
Interest in VN's stoked since several titles have been released on Steam, but what if exactly these titles become a standard?
I don't want to see a bunch of mainstream games released on this platform and therefore implying how a ''good'' Visual Novel has to be like from a big mass of people unfamiliar with the entire genre. :/
@Peter Payne
"(With Steam on the horizon, there's a chance that all games will go to this platform. If 90% of all licensors' money comes from Steam and there's the risk of fans pirating our adult games anyway, it may make it hard to do adult games at some theoretical point in the future. This is why Steam is really dangerous for the industry...every company is expecting a big payday, as long as they censor their games or make them all ages from the start.)"
My two cents on this, why stop releasing eroge? As someone who has been observing the industry for a while now but not actively participating in it, my perspective might be a bit skewed. But there isn't enough Japanese-produced all-ages titles of high quality to support JAST, MangaGamer, and everyone else on that alone. Which means that even if Steam becomes the primary source of revenue for everyone involved, you'll still be mainly taking and censoring 18+ eroge into all-ages releases. How much more would it cost to translate the cut h-scenes and release an 18+ version on the side? How much extra return do you think you'd see for doing so? From my perspective, I don't see how this would ever stop being a worthwhile endeavor for all companies involved. Even if Steam gets even bigger for VNs, new customers who are aware of and desire the 18+ versions will enter the market, ensuring that well never runs dry. So I think we'll continue seeing dual all-ages and 18+ releases of most titles for as long as Japan continues releasing eroge. The one thing I worry about are the titles that can't be cut down for a Steam release, like Starless and Euphoria. If all steam releases become much more successful than even the previously top-selling nukige (the Steam version of Cho Dengeki Stryker of all games outsold Imouto Paradise), then at some point you're going to ask "why bother with anything that can't be on Steam?" Why waste resources localizing Starless if you can't get dem steam bucks. Well, it's not a huge concern for me since I'm not part of the audience who buys those particular titles, but I could see a lot of people being bothered by that.
@Decay, we certainly would never willingly do this, since we love the genre and and the fans. My point is, if market forces cause non-adult games to be the main source of profit in the future, it will affect things in various ways, e.g. the way If My Heart Had Wings was released, which was frustrating for fans but overall important for that company. We intend to use any profits we get from Steam to do more interesting games, both adult and non adult. But if we were on the ropes, just hanging on by our fingertips like a lot of the J-companies are, we might say "no more fapping, Steam all the way." Well, we wouldn't, but another company in our place might.
I'm always glad that J-List has such a mixed business. Our candy and import games and T-shirts all support the eroge side, and vice versa. Companies that do only games have more stress, because if the next game doesn't sell above X units, they don't get their paycheck.
If My Heart Had Wings is a great example. WILL previously partnered with J-List to release their games uncensored. But for reasons that maybe only WILL knows, they decided to branch off and release Pulltop games independently as all-ages versions. Let me propose a hypothesis: they didn't want their games associated with pornographic content, so they decided a completely new company that only did all-ages releases releasing a title that would only see a censored all-ages release was the best way to reach a mainstream audience overseas. As a result, JAST didn't get to work on the 18+ version I'm sure they would have loved to work on.
This is one concrete example where the perceived importance of the mainstream market (including Steam) led to licensing doors being closed.
^ The preceding conversation is pretty fascinating. The future is an amorphous and unpredictable critter, and predicting the future of the market (yikes!) in an industry dominated by technology (yoiks!) is an even bigger headache. But getting back to Kana…
(DARK-SHIKI:) “Doesn’t Okaeri have the original art + the new art? As in it’s toggleable?”
(PETER PAYNE:) "Kana does not have the old artwork, mainly because the guy who promised to make a patch for us bugged out and stopped replying to our emails. We can’t do an official art restoration patch (due to licensing issues), but we’d help make one at some point in the future."
Ah, well. On the brighter side, I guess at least that means my purchase of old Kana wasn’t a waste of money. On a related note, is a physical edition double-pack of the original Kana and Family Project still in the works at some point down the line? It has been featured in JAST’s promotional catalogs I sometimes get with my packages for a while now. (Much better combination, btw.) Are you waiting on the last physical editions of Family Project to empty out first, maybe?RE: Bundling Kana with Sensei
In addition to what Peter said about them both being G-Collections releases, my understanding is that the same artist worked on both the original Kana and Sensei 2. Now, if the same guy worked on Okaeri, I don’t know…
Grabbed this tonight when I saw they were having a sale. Quick question, as I’m unable to find it on my own, can anybody tell me where the save data is located? I downloaded it and started reading on my PC, then copied the game to my microSD so I could continue on my Surface. Doesn’t look like it copied over.I’ve checked in Documents, Saved Games, AppData, LocalLow, etc., but can’t seem to locate it.
The save game file should be in the same directory as the game itself. Unless there was a chance you didn't save progress?
Hmmm… maybe saying Save Data wasn’t necessarily the best way to describe it (although now that you mention it, I didn’t). Basically, I open the game on my PC, and there are a number of images unlocked under CG Recollections already, but when I copy the game over to my Surface (just tried deleting and copying again), all the images are locked away. I’m sure there’s some random folder hiding on my PC somewhere that’s keeping track of the images unlocked.
It took quite a while, I could have saved a lot of time by simply re-reading what I had already read (which I have to do anyway)… but I’m stubborn sometimes. Folder with the data I needed was located in AppData \ Local \ Virtual Store \ Programs (x86) \ Kana Okaeri. Placed it in the same place on my Surface, nothing. Replaced the Save Files in the game folder, BAM!! CG Recollections appear on Surface. Good to know all this, as I switch between my PC / Surface, and like to keep everything more or less even across them. Now then, I’m gonna go read now. 
I just came across the first animated sex scene in Okaeri and I must say that is one enhancement this fine game don’t need. Seeing five or ten minutes of Taka’s bare ass and nothing else twitching on screen was a little too gay for me.
More news from the Okaeri front:
The voiced Yumi has the most annoying voice i’ve ever heard. I understand why Taka had trouble being around her.
Trust Jlist to provide us with many amusing typos and strange translations:
“Kana licked my wound with her tonuge” What is ‘tonuge?’ Sounds Japanese. Is it some kind of RP I’ve never heard of?
“The day plaintively came to a close.” I don’t understand what that means.
p.s. I’m not complaining. I find these things part of the fun.
I love your Breaking Eroge News Updates, Bamboo. :)
My theory is that the "tonuge" is the hentai version of a tanuki... a cute little racoon with tentacles, obviously! For "plaintive," I always think of it used to describe sorrowful sounds like moaning, whining, or sobbing -- apparently a noisy tearjerker of a day! (Which... now that I think of it... maybe it could work?)
Jack Sprat sez: My theory is that the "tonuge" is the hentai version of a tanuki... a cute little raccoon with tentacles, obviously!
and big balls.
Okaeri update:
Have you noticed how much smaller the couch in the Todafamily's living room is in the new game? In the old game, both Taka and Kanaspend some time stretched out on the sofa, but this new one hardly seems bigenough for that. Also, there used to be a big picture window with a nice view intheir house, but that's been replaced by a much smaller window with a cheap-lookingcurtain drawn across it. In fact, this new room seems altogether much smaller andcrappier than the old one. Could it be they are living in a different housenow? Perhaps their living under reduced circumstances due to Kana's constanthospital bills. I can imagine that must be quite a strain for them, and I've alwayswondered how they could afford it. And now with Taka entering college, it's no wonderif they had to move into a smaller place. Maybe one of those high risebuildings you see in anime. Probably the curtain on the window is to hide theview of some ugly factory building or junkyard across the highway from the room.
Interesting quote: Taka says, "Sometimes I feel like I'mcaught between the real world and the overworld." Overworld? Sounds like aMurakami story.
That should more properly be 'overworldly." Makes a difference in the meaning–if any. How do you edit these posts, anyway?
Last Okaeri update.
Well, I just finished my first run-through, and I'm a littlemisty-eyed as usual. Poor Kana; her deaths always strike my heart. On the otherhand, I was annoyed by the animated love scene between Toda and Kana. Hereagain, I'm not happy about these animations. They're annoying and distractingfrom the story. Plus, weird things can happen with these scenes. When I played RaidyII, she got caught up in a masturbating scene that I couldn't figure how to gether out of and she was trapped in an endless loop of diddling. I saved the gameat that point, so she's probably still at it, poor girl. My biggest problem with Okaeri is the voices.Not the voices themselves (except for Yumi's), but by the fact that there wereany voices at all. After six year of playing old-style Kana, I'm so used tohearing her speak to me in my head that hearing her speak to my ears doesn'tseem right at all; it's less intimate.