Have you ever watched or read a piece of media and was completely enraptured by a storyline or character that the author clearly wasn’t? I know the question seems odd on its face. After all, why would an author include a character or storyline they didn’t care about? Yet, it tends to happen more than […]
You know what’s rare in English Visual Novels? Stories about childhood. Not adolescence: childhood. There are various reasons behind this, but it comes back to the reliance on familiar tropes to sell a story and most of those tropes are reliant on a cast older or around the legal age of consent…make of that what you will. […]
I first heard about Fatal Twelve last year at AnimeFest in Dallas. It was a part of a rather impromptu presentation by Sekai Project that I enjoyed, but mostly because I was roasting most of it on Twitter. A few titles stuck out to me though as having strong potential and this was one of […]
The Gold Standard here is written in blood. That hasn’t stopped being true for VNs Now from the moment I first uttered it. However, even my long-time readers forget the corollary to it. Exploring the more dramatic and even the more traumatic side of fiction gives your work a better chance at being good, this […]
The concept of a civilization has various appearances in the pages of history, but usually follows a few noticeable guidelines. Those guidelines are how to keep its people fed, how to ensure some sense of order and on how to care for those people who, for whatever reason, cannot function in established society. That last […]
And so, a new chapter opens. Yes, I am still done with the Sakura series. My hands are washed of it and I am not looking back. However, I’m not necessarily free from the sub-genre that spawned it. Interestingly enough, despite the success of Sakura Spirit a few years ago (siiiiigh), only a handful of […]