Update: Requests closed. Not taking anymore suggestions. =)
Not sure if this is some sort of repeat thread but could someone recommend me a few(3 to 4) really short games?
Short as in: 3 to 4 hours max? As in… won’t take more than 1 day to finish.
This is because I really want to get back into playing visual novels. I’ve got like a massive pile I bought a few years ago: and I didn’t even get around to playing most of them except for Animamundi and Ever17. =/ However, it’s kinda daunting 'cos of all the reading. @_@ So, I want a few… to like get back into the mode.
Criteria: must have some good atmosphere and decent writing. And hopefully, the route won’t be too confusing… Also, must be in English. I can’t understand Japanese… And I don’t mind violence, gore and sexual scenes.
Try the first Sono Hanabira. It’s not free, but you can buy it from a DL sales site and it’s definitely short. I can’t promise that the writing is decent but try it anyway.
Note that ‘1 day to finish’ is a really vague amount of time, because it assumes we know both how long your day is and how fast you like to read these things. For example, I recall finishing Cross Channel in a day* but I probably wouldn’t recommend it under that category!
*where day = contiguous period of 24 hours. I didn’t finish it in one go, I slept between.
@SidVanHalen: mmmm… going by reviews, it seems that the tls of Edelweiss aren’t really good. Hmmm… thanks anyways.
@Lancer-X : whoa… so there are yuri games too, eh? turns completely bright-red at the other titles on that site (Sorry, ignore me… I’m just in 1 of my more innocent modes.) Hmmm that one seems kinda lengthy… but I’ll put that on my list of “To play”.
And really, I mean something that won’t take more than… okay, like 12 hours max to finish. 'Cos i tend to “chicken out” at reading too much… :lol: After playing Ever17 and Animdamundi(99.99% of all routes completed, I felt really satisfied with the story but also felt like I’d been crushed into bits and for weeks to months, felt completely unmotivated to look at anything with words.)
Strangely, I can read chunks of non-fiction stuff but that’s another matter.
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And now, a much more silly question: when playing visual novels, how do all of you figure out all the “flags” and routes? Do you like make a chart or something? <— a person who used either a walkthrough or trial and error to figure things out. I’m playing Air Pressure and the flags already are starting to confuse me… soo many choices. @_@
Air Pressure’s a rather unusual case, as there are only three endings but a large number of ways of reaching all of them. It’s probably not necessary to try and read all of the scenario in order to enjoy the game.
I always use a kouryaku (walkthrough) [if there’s one available], mostly so I can get the endings in order I prefer/the recommended order whilst minimising the amount of backtracking but also because certain games are almost impossible without one.
Oh, so there are only 3 endings to Air Pressure. I think I already got all of them but I was still confused over whether there was more.
It was quite interesting… using a “relationship” as some sort of metaphor to represent dependency and his “inner thoughts” to represent his struggles about what to do with Leah. It was utterly vague and you really had to kinda think things through. And suddenly, everything started to get creepier and creepier.
Reminds me of Animamundi… the story was quite good, finding the pattern for the “required flags” to activate possible routes was utterly confusing. It’s a clear case over how story wins over… game logic. =P
Wow… Saya no Uta and Kikokugai look awesome. @_@ I’ll put them on my “to buy” list. Hopefully, Jast will release them 'cos it seems like a pain to buy the Japanese versions since it doesn’t seem like there’re any direct DL copies being sold. I seriously am not interested in importing games 'cos of customs: anything with sexual content deemed undesirable will probably be destroyed.
Damn… =/ There are soo many VNs out there. @_@ If only I could read Japanese , then I could play Muv-Luv someday. I kinda wanna see what the fuss is all about. Same with Ever17: Cross Over Impression.
Then, there’s Kanon, Kanna… some game called “ef” and a load, load, load… of other titles, to add to my “considering to play” list.
makes hopeful eyes You could play Fatal Hearts… The ENTIRE game is longer than three hours but you can reach an ending in that timeframe if you’re not a slow reader…
Also, while I love to read, I find that I get antsy sitting through long stretches of VNs, so my games tend to have little minigame breaks in them.
Most VNs have simple flag systems, but like Ignosco I walkthrough pretty much anything - the only exceptions are new games that don’t have walkthroughs yet.
Oh yes… Fatal Hearts. The demo seemed kinda interesting and the writing seemed to hold a certain amount of potential but the mini-games were really difficult which kinda put me off. I’m getting old and my hands aren’t the same anymore. x_x I’d have preferred being able to skip through them or if not, opting for an easier level/some penalty if I couldn’t solve them.
Or if not, it’d have been nice to see some mini-games that tied into the storyline(reflecting part of the gameworld or the characters’ personalities) instead of “being games within games”, which I’ll bear with but don’t really always like 'cos they often don’t really interest or motivate me.
Oh, so they’re sold online then… hmmm. I didn’t realize that certain products were sold only in the Japanese version of that site. I wonder why 'cos you can buy “Japanese text-only” works in the English site?
Oh well, thanks for the link. And what did you mean by “50% right?” I’m like totally off, aren’t I?
Ahhh… and do you like go through all the flags to read all the various bits of convos? Or do you just simply go through many/most of them?
No idea, but I ignore the English site myself - nothing is any cheaper and the only things exclusive to the English side are games I would never, ever want to play. Ignosco says that products on pro/pro2 (in other words, commercial, not doujin) do not go onto eng.dlsite and most of the stuff on home and hana doesn’t either.
You said that Saya no Uta and Kikokugai weren’t available for download. Saya no Uta is. Kikokugai isn’t (and probably never will be sadly). Therefore, 50% right.
Typically I go through whatever the walkthrough tells me to, which usually grabs everything important - not too interested in getting every last slice of text unless there’s something important there. As long as I basically see every event in the game, that’s good enough for me - although I wonder at times if I do miss stuff. It’s hard to tell because most games don’t track how much text you’ve seen - they track the CGs and H scenes you’ve seen but not text, so if you’ve cleared the former but are missing some of the latter there’s no way to determine this.
I don’t usually use walkthrough, though if I got stuck somewhere I don’t really hesitate to use one, and probably use it for the rest of the game (better safe than sorry). I do usually try to get everything, at least if I got somewhat interested in the game< for some, like Tsukihime or Fate, I made sure to get every possible scene. And I like to have 100% completion: I didn’t do that with Clannad, but did with Suika and Da Capo which recorded seen scenes.
As for recommendations: try the different al|together titles. The 2005 ones are the best in my opinion, though OMGWTFOTL, from the 2006 one, is a must play.
One of the reasons I use walkthroughs is that they actually help me work out where I am in a game - because I play anywhere from five to twenty eroges at a time and leave some for months before coming back to them, it can get awfully hard to keep track even of which route I’m under. So I just pull the walkthrough up, look through my saves and I generally figure it out pretty quickly.
Fair enough. They are skippable by cheat codes findable in walkthroughs, but not by default. The little minigame bits in my soon-to-be-released game are rather easier, although much less tied into the storyline. Most of the fatal hearts ones do have a relationship to the story, although some are just random adventure-game puzzles (dreams usually). The puzzlebase for Date Warp is completely abstract and bears no relationship to the story, although in a meta-sense it is connected to what a player does while playing such a game.
Or do you mean minigames that, rather than being an obstacle which must be passed in order to continue, lead to different bits of story depending on how well you did in them? There are one or two of those but most of them aren’t… It’s a possible idea if I ever do something like that again (but I’m not currently eager to pump out piles of different puzzles again!)
I bought and played Fatal Hearts a while back - dunno if I ever gave my impression of it here or not (I meant to!) but I hated the puzzles, to be honest! The kind of thing that works better for me is some sort of consistent gameplay mechanic, like a battle system - the puzzles in Fatal Hearts sort of broke the flow for me. Some were alright, but the quantity of them vs the length of the story was way too high.
Just to comment on this - there are only a handful of eroges that have nothing but yuri (quite a few non-ero ones though), and although none of the Sono Hanabira games aren’t particularly good and/or long, they’re still probably the best option. There are a couple of good to outstanding eroges that contain yuri, but it’s mostly a relatively insignificant portion of the game.
Also certain maniax products with a significant gameplay component don’t appear on eng, such as Seal’s Nakadashi Oni don’t appear, and iirc neither do eroges featuring guro (indicated by a skull marking on maniax). I think the creators are able to indicate if they want their product to be sold on eng as well, so that might be why certain purely text based works would show up their, even though almost no-one would buy them. (Oh, and incidentally, although I assume Papillon already know this, I noticed a while ago that Hanako Games is now selling two games on home. Amazingly, both games have sold more copies on the Japanese side than on the English side, which gives an idea of what the eng.dlsite demographic is like. :P)
Generally I have the same approach as Lancer-X. For games that are nice enough to give you a flowchart, I’ll probably try and read 100% of the text, but otherwise it can take too much effort to find it all. In many eroges, a lot of the choices are also somewhat redundant, as they’ll lead to a slightly different 30 second conversation but are otherwise irrelevant for the routes/endings.
I had a similar problem in a few places, and a couple of the other puzzles felt a bit redundant (that aside though, I quite enjoyed it). If your room isn’t completely clean before Lucy comes over, in practical terms, it’s not going to have any impact on the game. Then again, I think I recall you saying that other people thought Fatal Hearts would have been better with more puzzles?
I guess it’s somewhat similar to the placement of H scenes in some eroges around critical moments in the story and/or right before the end of the route. Yumemishi was particularly problematic in that regard, although I don’t think there was any other way of working around it. I finished Asukimi yesterday, and that had similar issues on some routes (as well as with H scene placement in general), so I skipped through those scenes so that they wouldn’t interrupt the story.
Also, must be in English. I can’t understand Japanese… And I don’t mind violence, gore and sexual scenes.