Just wanted to hear what the community is into!
I mainly like mystery and romance VNs, and recently played episode 0 (the demo) of of the Devil (which I loved and I instantly bought episode 1) and played the demo for Urban Myth Dissolution Center (visually impressive but the story and MC didn’t catch me).
Apart from that I’m very slowly working through Mamiya, on my second playthrough of Jack Jeanne, and in the middle of my first route of Lkyt!
I forgot to keep an eye on Khemia and it seems they released the re-write of the into about a month ago, so I’m gonna be checking that out.
I’ve been slowly working my way through Kimi ga Nozomu Eien. I’ve seen the anime, and I loved Muv-Luv Alternative so it’s nice to go back and experience the original story.
Even though I remember how most of the story goes, I’m enjoying it because of the comedy, and I like the serious parts too. I like how the writers flesh out the characters’ emotions and clearly draw from some real life experiences when it comes to relationships and drama.
I’m not really sure I’ve read enough to have a specific niche (though to be fair, I do try to engage with wide variety of topics in media in general).
While I haven’t read much this year yet, here’s some things I’ve gone through:
- Majikoi, Do Love Me Seriously! (both games and good chunk of the fandiscs)
- Waga Himegimi ni Eikan o (fantasy title by Minato Soft, makers of Majikoi)
- When They Cry series (Higurashi and Umineko)
- Song of Saya
- SeaBed
- Katawa Shoujo
- If My Hear Had Wings
- LoveKami -Divinity Stage-
- A Kiss for the Petals - Remembering How We Met
- eden*
- Go! Go! Nippon!
- some other stuff I don’t remember at the moment
Huh, now that I look at this list it does seem I’m leaning towards romance adjacent titles (as far as the stuff I remember anyway). There’s still a lot of titles in my backlog so things might change in the future but this is a decent sample size I’d say.
Btw. do gacha games count? Most of them use VN presentation style for their stories and that would make my list a little bit more varied thematically.
It’s true that many gachas use VN format for storytelling, but from what I see they aren’t generally considered VNs 🤔 I’d say the critical difference is that the core gameplay consists of character collection, resource management, upgrades, and whatever battle system/interactive game mechanics the game uses, rather than story? Though I spent a considerable amount of time reading the main story and side stories in granblue fantasy myself…
That seems a bit arbitrary considering series like Rance (and others that slipped my mind at the moment) are considered VNs despite their gameplay sections.
It doesn’t really matter though, it was mostly a joke question to move my list a little further from its mostly romance focus.
I should get around to my visual novel backlog. The last few I finished were the Zero Escape series and Gnosia.
Is Gnosia good? I found out about it via the anime announcement and got curious
Anime? May have to look into that! Personally I went in with minimum expectations and loved it. It has some light RPG attribute allocation junk that I didn’t care for as it felt a little tacked on (and I don’t like RPG stat/progression systems on the best of days), but besides that I enjoyed it a ton.
It narratively integrates its whole gameplay loop, since it’s a timeloop game, which is what made it really click for me. Toss that narrative framing out (or don’t care for it) and you may not like it as much.
The more I think about it the more I think they chose the perfect type of game for a timeloop narrative, since a well-designed visual novel allows you to rapidly skip through repetitious elements. All this said, since there are several characters, some are much less developed than others and make it a drag at some points as you try to work things out, but there were still enough written and developed well that made up for that in my opinion.
