Clephas' VN Home

First, I should explain Alcot's varying styles to those who aren't accustomed to me discussing this company. Alcot has three types of VNs it makes. One is the classic charage type, like Clover Days. The characters and story are funny but tend to be shallow, with little overall depth. Nonetheless, because the stories are funny, you still like them anyway. The second type are the more serious works, like Kurenai no Tsuki, which have more adult (not in the sexual meaning of the word) themes and an actual central plot. This type can range from mysteries to high fantasy, and of the three types it has the most varying quality between works. The third type is their fantasy/sci-fi comedy games. Starting with Osadai (Girlfriend is President) and including Naka no Hito, this type tends to keep the humor of the charage types (sometimes including silly story elements such as giant pandas with pretty human daughters) and include a much deeper type of character development (mixed with the h...

Well, you'll be disappointed to know that I am disappointed with this VN, even though I didn't have high hopes for it. First, I should explain the theory/template for a good trap protagonist VN. 1. Protagonist is voiced (voicing the protagonist in these VNs with a sex-neutral-sounding VA generally gives you what you want) 2. Protagonist is something of a submissive personality, when it comes to minor issues, but when it comes to anything major is proactive. 3. Protagonist at some point stops being bothered by the fact that they are dressing up as a girl. (along with occasional sighs when they realize they are thinking completely like a woman) 4. Protagonist is generally capable, earning the positive emotions he gets from the girls honestly. 5. The discovery of the protagonist's sex by the heroine is in a suitably dramatic manner, thus generally overwriting the shock of the discovery of his lie (most of the time). 6. The actual issue of his tru...

I get people asking me all the time why I like this VN so much, and indeed, there is a lot about this VN that makes it a somewhat eclectic choice. The only thing that is even remotely moe is the basic visuals, and the arcs of the story range from the shocking to the creepy. First, the biggest reason is quite simple... Kamio Ami. It is really rare for a heroine to so completely shatter pre-existing standards of what a VN/anime/manga heroine should be. Ami is the single most pragmatic, cold-blooded, and manipulative heroine I've ever come across. She also mixes that with a hedonistic side that makes her even harder to read. The second reason is a bit more complex. This VN basically crucifies modern Japanese culture from beginning to end. It pokes holes in common Japanese preconceptions of what should be, and it outright sneers at the assumption many make that the law is there to protect people. I don't think I've ever come across a VN that so completely finds the...

First, I want to say thank you to those who patiently listened as I whined and complained about this VN as I played it. I should also explain what I was complaining about first, so that people don't get the impression that this is an awful VN, just because I have complaints about it. I'll place this in spoilers for people who don't care about my whining. Basically, I have a pet peeve when it comes to people who use 'alternate history' settings. It isn't the fact that it is an alternate history... it is when they fail to account for impossibilities that are outside of the central historical difference. In this case, I refer to the situation of the Chinese in this game... to be blunt, China didn't have the ability to project power across the Sea of Japan in the era just after WWII (they were still busy with their civil war, then the disasters of Mao's early rule). The US was able to because they had the ships, planes, and trained troops necessary to mai...

A Universal Issue Tentacle sex and rape are the two big downers to this series. For a series with such good writing, it is amazing how quickly it becomes repetitive once h-scenes get into the picture. On the bright side, corrupting the heroines in Empire, Frontier, and Hypno almost always has immensely hilarious results after the mindbreak. It is kind of irritating that you pretty much have to mindbreak them to get the really good strategic skills, though. Abyss To be honest, this is the game in the series I liked the least. First, it is the first one that introduces the tentacle impregnation=new troops system that was the recruitment system for this and Gaia. Second, it has the weakest set of heroines and protagonist in the entire series. Third - and last - it uses a dungeon-defense gameplay model, which I despise. To be honest, the Law route of this game is incredibly boring, story-wise, with a huge amount of cliched jrpg knock-off plot twists. While this...

Yes, I went and played a game in this series, mostly because Sanahtlig is an old friend and I didn't want to keep brushing him off. In fact, I'm marathonning this series starting with this game. First, an initial umbrella statement... this would have been a first-class story (though flawed) if it weren't for the massive amounts of tentacle rape and choukyou. Am I serious? Yeah. Despite everything, the base story is actually really good. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the gameplay. It takes the form of a conquest-strategy VN where you use six-soldier units to attack cities that are defended by up to six soldiers. Unfortunately, there is nothing resembling actual strategy to the entire thing. Oh sure, you have to manage your resources and keep your soldiers healthy... but that's the closest you get to it (there are some strategic elements to the management of the power gauge and the use of skills, but those are minor). Basically, it is a 'm...

This is the newest title from Lump of Sugar, and as is typical of their recent productions, it has a needlessly complicated system for story progression that would have driven me insane inside ten minutes if I hadn't dled the patch that removes the gimmicks from their site. From what I've heard, LoS finally heard the screaming of their fans, that they didn't want anything to do with the pointless gimmicks that plagued Unmei Senjou no Phi and Magical Charming. Kind of sad that it took them a few years to figure it out though. That said, this VN... is not something worth writing home about. Oh, it is as pretty as any other LoS game, and it does have a decent setting and characters... but - when the gimmicks are stripped away - it is a bare bones second-rate moege. The only route I played that I can say was completely worth the time I spent on it was Ichika's, which is probably why she was the main heroine. The biggest downers of this VN are: 1. Th...

Before I start this, I should probably explain the company known as AXL to the newbies. AXL, which is known for Shugotate, as well as a number of other high-quality VNs, is an 'old-hand' company that was started pretty soon after the turn of the century. They developed an extremely beautiful art style, as well as a penchant for high-quality fantasy and romance stories. The thing most people will notice upon playing any two AXL games is that the art-style is exactly the same... it still possesses somewhat thicker lines than is the norm for VNs nowadays, and the actual character faces and poses tend to be reused heavily between games. The saving grace of this is that the actual quality of the original art is so high that it still looks pretty today, so you find that you don't really mind, for the most part. Common The common route of this game is a lot closer to what you would have seen in their best games, in that it is heavy on the story and the character devel...

I'm not going to argue about what defines a VN here. To be blunt, the fights over that issue - which were fairly pointless - were bad enough in the forums. That said, I am going to explain why VN terms tend to be so fuzzy and hard/impossible to pin down. 1. We are basically defining a medium that is new to us (new being a relative term, lol). 2. Pseudo-Japanisms like charage, moege, nakige, etc. are generalized terms that represent a certain type of structure and purpose to individual VNs. For people who like to nitpick, these terms really aren't fitting, because they are basically umbrella terms that contain a lot more than you'd think. 3. The Japanese otaku-media tendency to turn everything into an archetype creates an illusion of a 'universal unity of ideas'. Of course, there are a lot of different reasons besides these, but these are some of the more obvious ones. However, perhaps the one that bothers people the most are the ps...

Ok... there really isn't much to say on this VN, because it is ridiculously low-budget/low-quality. That isn't to say that it doesn't show moments of brilliance... it is just that the pacing is so terrible it is like the story got tossed into a high-speed blender before being pulled out and taped back together... with a lot of missing pieces. I'm not fond of pointless ichaicha, but when all the heroine routes but one feel so truncated you feel like they might as well not even exist... well, you just can't have good feelings about it, now can you? It's like they surgically removed anything that might have developed the cast more either before or after the path split. Moreover, the actual heroine stories are basically template patterns of their various character type, with a few minor setting-based twists. Heck, even Mia's ending (she being the true heroine) is ridiculously true to her character type's patterns, with all the details sort of white-wa...

Wow. This is definitely a case of not being able to judge a book by its cover... or by its summary, either. I don't think I've encountered a VN with as much emotional impact as this one since Houkago no Futekikakusha, last summer. Sumire is by Nekoneko Soft, one of the oldest existing VN brands... They are one of the 'founding names' of the moege umbrella genre, while also producing more serious works through their subsidiaries, such as Cotton Soft (of Reconquista and Owaru Sekai to Birthday fame). Sumire is rather unique, by the standards of current VNs. The protagonist, rather than being a student, is a salaryman in in his mid-twenties, a socially inept man who was an otaku but has lost most of his passion. He goes to a virtual chat room/online game that imitates a school, where people use characters from Nekoneko Soft games as avatars. There, he is part a sub-community of four people (including him) of people that are similarly awkward. This story is...

Love, Vampire Flowers was one of the VNs I have been looking forward to, if only because Lovesick Puppies (by the same company) was such a hidden gem at the time. I won't say this approaches Lovesick Puppies for impact, because it doesn't. In comparison, it begins much more slowly and the problems tend to be more of the 'classic charage' type (well, the heroines' ones anyway). The big draw of this is that the protagonist is about as psychologically mature as you could hope for from a 'good guy' vampire, lol. Unfortunately, that very maturity is the cause of most of the boring parts of the early part of this VN. Not only that, but the makers of this VN indulged in a rather heroic effort to avoid getting to the point when it came to the common route, lol. So far, I've played two heroine paths, Chris's and Rie's. About two thirds of the VN is repeated text (since the actual choice to cause a split-off is in the prologue, I'm unsure if it ...

I picked this one as my second game for VN of the Month May 2015 for a very simple reason... this company's previous works(1/2 Summer and Timepiece Ensemble) were overall enjoyable/emotionally powerful and I was hoping for a repeat of the experience. I'll be honest and say outright that it is nowhere near either of those two for sheer emotional impact, but I did find it more interesting in some ways, intellectually. First, the basic setting is pretty interesting. The VN takes place in a school with an absolute caste system, where most of the students are 'failures' brought in from around the country and forcibly enrolled in order to reform them and a few dozen high-level students rule over them with an iron fist. This is achieved through the use of bracelets and anklets that stick together when activated at a special student's console and a collar that can unleash electric shocks as punishment. The protagonist basically comes into the school with the purp...

I'm going to be blunt, I wasn't really up for playing this in the first place, and as a result, my opinion of this VN is probably quite a bit lower than it actually deserves... but at the same time, it is probably a bit more realistic than those who are tricked by the pretty pictures. I mostly picked this one up to satisfy those who are curious and because it is technically a May release. From a writing standpoint, this VN is about average, as moege go. There is nothing really special about the narration and the dialogue is actually weaker than I'm accustomed to from non-doujin titles. As such, there really isn't anything to praise linguistically. There are a lot of attempts at humor in this VN, but they are just that... attempts. Not only that, but the patchy way they voiced the game - about half is voiced, half is not - makes it hard to absorb oneself in reading this. It would have been better if they either forewent voices entirely if they didn't have the ...

Bullet Butlers: An Introduction Bullet Butlers has one of the more interesting fantasy settings that I've seen in a VN. Think film noir combined with elves, lizardmen, orcs, and magic and you won't be far off. The guy you see above is Rick Arrowsmith, the protagonist of the story and butler to one of the potential heirs of the draconic Mystic One (spiritual - not necessarily physical - descendants of the heroes who defeated the Undead King who serve as symbols of God's favor). Now, Bullet Butlers was made by Propeller, the same company that made Ayakashibito and my long-lasting favorite VN - Evolimit. If there is one thing that some people might have noticed about Ayakashibito, it is that, to an extent, the heroines were less than satisfactory (from a moe-addict's point of view) and yet they still liked it... now why was that? It is a simple fact that the story in each heroine's path far surpasses the attraction of the heroine herself, that's why. lol...