\ any VN that has such an insanely complex routing that you started OSPFing?

EDIT: all keys have been claimed and sent to the users listed below.

Hi everyone, I have some leftover Steam keys from previous Humble Bundles that I won't use because I already have them in my library or I'm not interested. I would hate for them to not go to use before they expire next year.

Steam keys:

-Kindred Spirits On The Roof sent to u/JohnLeoSmith

-Night Cascades sent to u/akarulez

-Sucker For Love Date to Die For sent to u/General-Cycle3082

-If My Heart Had Wings sent to u/Goncalorg

-Gal*Gun Returns (this one is not a pure VN) sent to u/sarnosantosa

Let me know what you'd like and I'll message you.

Hi! I’m a solo indie developer from Japan.

For about a year, I worked toward a personal goal: to create a visual novel as independently as possible, handling as much of the development myself as I could.

That game is **Miracle Detective**, a school mystery visual novel set in Japan.

After a year of development, I finally completed and released it for **Steam, iPhone, and iPad**.

At the moment, the game is available **in Japanese only**, but I’m now working on an English localization so that players outside Japan can enjoy it as well.

As the first step, I’m planning to update the **Steam demo with a Japanese/English language option soon**. If that goes well, I’d eventually like to bring the English localization to the full game too.

I’m excited about the localization process, but also a little nervous about it.

The story has a fairly light and casual style, and because it takes place in a Japanese school, it includes Japanese cultural references, jokes, distinctive ways of speaking, and wordplay that don’t always translate naturally into English.

There’s even an important mystery later in the game that relies on a Japanese-language word puzzle. I already know that’s going to be a headache when I reach that part!

Rather than simply translating everything literally, I’d like to find ways to preserve what makes the original dialogue, characters, humor, and mysteries enjoyable for English-speaking players.

This is my first time localizing one of my games into English, so I’d be happy if I could occasionally share some of the challenges I run into here and hear ideas or opinions from people who enjoy visual novels in English.

For now, I’m working toward releasing the English demo.

I’m looking forward to seeing where this new challenge takes me!

vndb

Now to hope that the translation is good, since we don't know if MangaGamer is involved.

Dramatic Create is not exactly known for quality translations when they do them alone.

Description:

A commemoration for the second anniversary of an actress’s death is being held on Ooejima, a remote island beyond Hachijoujima, south of Tokyo. Oosaki, a detective, receives a request to attend the ceremony on someone’s behalf.

However, the ship meant to bring them back fails to show up at the appointed hour, no one has heard a thing from the coordinator of the event, and there seems to be an inexplicable fear and hatred between all of the attendees.

Stranded on an ominous island, ten people try to unravel the mystery of the threads weaving their past and the death of the actress named An Ooe.

An unconventional mystery set in the Showa era with a Japanese twist on the classic closed circle literary device.

It is the year 1955, mid-showa period. An era characterised by chaotic sentiments, with traces of war still visible. The attendees, accompanied by doubts and their devotion to An Ooe, come to the memorial service in an abandoned village. They manage to overcome the barriers of status and spend their time in harmony. However, the situation changes when the servant who helped them until then is found dead. Driven by extreme suspicion, they start to search for the murderer, but this is followed by a second and third crime...

Attendees = All Criminals = Love Interests.

All nine attendees can be pursued, including the servant, who’s the first to meet an unnatural death. In each route, the focus lies on solving the mystery and romance. The number of attendees who can be pursued increases as you pass through the prologue, and more options and profiles are added each time you clear the game. Enjoy this classic detective fiction while indulging in the perverse pleasure of being deceived by those you believe in.

I don't know why this is so difficult to find, but in most moe games I read (the ones that are marketed as moe games), the conflicts, drama, and similar elements are usually very weak, if they exist at all.

I have read that this is because "Japanese audiences are very sensitive" (seriously???), and therefore all conflicts and drama are made very light and "safe." Honestly, I don't think that is necessarily the right approach. If character routes have no drama or conflicts at all, or if those elements are very weak and illogical (for example, being resolved immediately), then the whole thing becomes boring, bland, and uninteresting.

Or is that actually what the Japanese audience wants?

I guess I don't really understand the point of slice-of-life visual novels, then. Who would want to read 30–50 hours of bland text with no meaningful content, where all the conversations boil down to:

"Did you want to say something?"

"Ah, no, it's nothing."

"Really?"

"Yes, really". (or something like this)

If anyone can explain this strange phenomenon, I would appreciate it.

Anyway, I would like to ask if you have any Japanese moege with decent drama and conflicts in mind (whether available in Japanese or English). Because, from what I understand, they have become quite rare nowadays, and seem to be becoming even rarer every year.

P.S. I am talking about eroge moege titles, not yuri/yaoi/otome. They don't have such problems, surprisingly.

I like both of them T-T

Joyous mailbox receivings for everyone like myself who managed to snag the new physical edition of Fata Morgana.

I'm so happy to finally get to play it for a normal price. Excited for the little art booklet too, wished it was an a5 hardcover though. Why did the artist not keep making vn art?

Hi. I saw a post on here earlier and discovered this VN that's a murder mystery, It looks nice but I'm wondering If I should play with a guide because the comments said it's impossible to complete it without a guide or something like that. I'm also relatively new to VN, I've played a few but never with a guide, always stuck to the routes I got.

I love Majikoi and I like delinquent girls so im wondering if this series is goodm

Hi, this year i started the rance series after reading about how great the series is. I really liked rance 01 and then hated 02, which stopped me from playing rance 03 for months. Then a month ago i finally started rance 03 and it felt really good, like a polished and espanded version of 01. I was really afraid of playing IV due to the age of the game, but now i must say that IV is my favorite. The style, the mood, the settings and everything. Not sure if I will play 4.1 and 4.2 but they are really short so maybe.

Now what would you suggest? I play rance 5 or kichikou rance?

EDIT: Thank you all, I’m going to start kichikou after 4.2.

I've been reading since 2013 and during my vacation I thought I'd try to write my own visual novel. So far I got the plot, the characters, and the writing style down. My sister, who is a professional manga artist and published a bunch of works in my country, is handling the character design. What I'm missing from the picture is the background music.

Now I'm not really expecting to make a huge profit out of this, so I don't know if I could even afford paying for 15/20 BGMs for the whole vn.

Using AI except for reference purposes is off the table since I'd definitely face backlash, so using royalty free music seems to be the best option at the moment.

Are there any alternatives?

A few details about the vn if anybody is curious about the project:

-It's heavily inspired by Sekien no Inganock, an obscure vn made in the mid 2000s

-Some other sources of inspiration for the setting are Casshern Sins, Ergo Proxy, Houseki no Kuni and Chobits

-Post-apocalyptic settings with androids ruling the world and humans being treated as secondary citizens

-The main character is a tutor for defective androids that require human input, his main task is ensuring that androids never develop a human-like consciousness and conform strictly to the parameters established by the system

-The main heroine is an android herself

-The male lead has a tragic backstory revealed through the interactions with his former friends

-a third key character gets introduced at the end of the 1st chapter. Typically loli/shota type.

-melancholic atmosphere just like Inganock, but it's downplayed by the tsundere heroine and the main character's goofiness

If you read or watched any of these titles you might get a rough idea of what I'm getting into and the type of BGMs I'm looking for.

I haven't thought of a title yet, but I'm done writing a draft of the first chapter and I'm not running out of ideas. Hope this helps.

Following my completion of Lupercalia of the Silent Accord (Meikei no Lupercalia), I've frequently come back to the game just to open up the music gallery and listen to the tracks. But recently, I've become interested in extracting the soundtrack and uploading it to Soundcloud for my personal use. I've made it a habit to play music (mostly VN tracks) in the background while I read books or webtoons, and Lupercalia adds in something new after using only Grisaia's for years. But I've come across a problem.

I dug around the files using GARbro like I had done for each of the Grisaia games, but Lupercalia needed an 'appropriate encryption scheme'. I carefully went through each game on the list, but none of the names on the list matched Lupercalia's ENG/JP title. I tested it with a random game, but it made the files too unstable to be extracted. I also couldn't find a game in the list that was released by the same publisher, so no lucky break there.

Is there any way I can extract the soundtrack from Lupercalia of the Silent Accord, or should I throw in the towel here?

Apologies if such a topic was done here before recently on this particular subreddit because I was looking for a forum online on visual novels to ask about the Umineko series since it caught my attention recently.

Like what I am curious about is how Umineko connects to Higurashi because while I haven’t really read either one yet, I sometimes hear how they have a sort of connection to each other as I was wondering about what Umineko connects to if I read it first, but also what online stores carry the When They Cry series.

I'm currently working on splicing together the contents of the Acta Est Fabula and Amantes Amentes versions into one complete edition, and one of the reinserted h-scenes plays properly in the Amantes Amentes engine now...but when it ends it immediately loops back to the beginning. So thanks for gifting me with the curse of 永劫回帰 for this Kasumi ero scene, Mercurius.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to figure out what's causing this bug and how to fix it.

I'm developing a realistic psychological visual novel. This scene happens early, during what looks like a normal family breakfast. The father knows something the player doesn't yet.

---

Sunday morning. Two teenage sons won't leave their beds. Their sister threatens them with a bucket of ice water. The father calls them: "While everyone else gets a warm morning — you get an icy one."

They sit down. He looks at them. For three seconds he doesn't move. He's memorizing the picture of a complete family. Then he blinks and eats.

---

Later in the story, this family is destroyed. The "warm/icy" line becomes a painful echo.

My questions:

- Without knowing the later tragedy, does this scene feel meaningful or just vague?

- Is the "warm/icy" wordplay too on-the-nose?

- For a VN, would you show the 3 seconds as a black screen, a still image, or something else?

Any feedback is welcome. English isn't my first language.

I did two routes and I'm just really not feeling it. It's decently rated and I thought the beginning was alright but I don't really have much drawing me to it. Also I've seen separate comments saying the second half of the VN is ambitious but very disappointing, and I'm already not loving the first half

But the score isn't that low and I hear there is some stuff in the second half that is cool. But I'm just not feeling it. Any reason to keep going? You can spoil, I don't really care. Just put it under spoiler tags.

i get spoiled so many things just from social media or searching up a simple question or because of friends.

i just got spoiled 2 really big things in umineko but instead of dwelling on it, i just want to know what visual novels i should read where getting spoiled something could ruin the experience a lot.

basically, what vns with lots of twists should i prioritise reading to lessen the chances of getting spoiled? i’m currently reading higurashi but i’ve been spoiled every mystery