Clephas' VN Home

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 ...