Maybe… I know it’s set in Japan somewhere and it COULD be a horror game. Not too sure but I just remember the graphics were in line with the old GameBoy possibly with some faded red as some kind of motif?
I’m pretty confident this isn’t what you’re looking for, but this is what I was thinking of
1 Like
I’m reading through Higurashi right now and I was way into its sequel Umineko back in the days so I can offer some insight.
First, the entry tax. I’m gonna talk about something that looks like this:
Take a moment to parse the style of this startup screen, the mitten hands, the outfit, where all the bits are. We’re beyond mere moemoe here. I won’t blame you if you stop here.
I must also mention that I’m using the french localization of Higurashi, which is notably high quality, a labor of love but by an experienced professional translator. Compared to Umineko for which I had a fan translation it’s a completely different level, and that brings a lot to my appreciation of the work. I can’t speak for Mangagamer’s US translation, but that they titled it Higurashi When They Cry while the french version is Le Sanglot des Cigales (The Cicadas’ Cry) speaks of different approaches to localization.
Still there? Buckle up.
For starters, it’s almost impossible to separate from its format as it’s a huge factor in why it caught on. It’s not just a VN, it’s a doujin (ie not just indie, but amateur, non-commercial) VN with super, super low production values. Backgrounds are photographs with a couple photoshop filters slapped on them, and you get half a dozen blobby pillow shaded sprites of anime girls bouncing on them. If you can get past the initial contact it actually works in its favor because it leaves tons of room for imagination. Like holy heck look at this it’s just a red paint splash on a black background with some canned creepy sound and I’m infinitely more terrified by it than any lovingly pixel shaded axe murder you can put in an AAA release (and I an be terrified by it without having to actually look at gore, a definite plus). But it’s not just the imagination thing, it’s also super endearing in a way, the same way z movies are. That you can be able to build such a story when those are your tools, that you can evoke a dismembered body with a photograph of a junkyard and suchlike. The author cited the Blair Witch project as an inspiration on how to do more with less and I can believe it. And yeah, I’m actually arguing that something is lost in the remasters/remake where sprites have been redrawn by professionals who actually draw fingers on hands and all.
Music’s a step above. I’m still relatively early in Higurashi so I don’t know if it’s gonna be as excellent as Umineko’s soundtrack, which becomes absolutely bonkers as it progresses, but it’s good. The original plan was to use free music from the net but the composer offered their help and it’s great help.
The final consequence of its no-budget doujin background is the release format. The VNs it takes its inspiration from had a route-based format, if you’ve gone through, say, 999 or Hatoful Boyfriend or a number of others you know the type: some key choices direct you to one of several routes, and you’ve gotta go through some or all of the normal routes (which in an horror or mystery VN are usually going to lead to bad ends) to unlock a final route that leads to the true end. But here they just didnt have the resources for that so they removed all choice, and released eight linear routes sequentially, one per comiket, with the final one being the true end and the first one eventually becoming shareware (which further helped it spread). They’re linear but there’s still a game in the solving! And with half a year between each route it had time for the mystery to simmer and gather followers (and, eventually, blow up).
The first four routes are the “questions arc” and set up a number of mysteries, and the promise is those four should contain all the key information for an astute armchair detective to understand how everything went (whether they actually manage that may be subject to debate). Not just the mysteries and impossible murders but also how the apparently contradictory routes fit together. The next four routes, the “answers arc”, provide solutions.
This is probably the hardest bit to reproduce after the fact, the insane corkboards that you as part of the fandom would weave to try and explain it all over four years of releases.
Also, this is the reason for its length: it’s not one VN but two sets of four routes each, first route took me 10 hours and I’m a fast reader so you can probably count a solid 80 hours for it all. My advice is to pace yourself and maybe try one route per week.
What of the story itself? It’s 1983, in a remote rural village, you’re the new kid fresh from the city, you don’t really know the locals yet apart from the four girls of the tabletop gaming club at school, two teens like you and two younger kids, somewhat quirky, it’s all very fun although the punishment games for losing seem like they may go overboard at times. Life is good, summer is clear, the girls are cute, the local shinto festival’s approaching and this could easily become the moe romance VN it looks like. Until you learn of the murders, that is. One death and one disappearance each festival, people considered not quite part of the village and all somewhat related to the gaming club girls. Locals don’t talk about it. The person who told you is found dead the next day, their throat clawed out by human hands. The rumor has it, the village’s guardian divinity Oyashiro-sama did it. A policeman familiar with previous cases seems to think the whole village’s in on it and you’re the next target. Did I mention your main squeeze has been running around with a hatchet lately?
And you know what? It’s riveting! I do already know the essentials twist-wise, and it still is! Up to after the end, because you’re provided with supplemental materials after each chapter, including the police case file regarding the unfortunate ending of that first chapter, which of course don’t quite match what you’ve know and done, indicating some mysterious tamperer at work. I don’t know if it’ll quite stick the landing, but it certainly looks like its reputation as great psychological horror combined with an intricate puzzle box is well earned.
Who did it? Why? Is there an actual culprit? Single or a group? What’s their motive? Is it really a supernatural demon? What’s their motive? Who tampered with the evidence when the only person with the opportunity was the one who needed it to go public? Who can murder people unseen, unheard? Is it just that people don’t want to see? Who is it that you feel is always walking right behind you?
It also started a whole trend of “dark” VNs with murderous anime girls. In somewhat recent times things like Doki Doki Literature Club owe a lot to it, as does Danganronpa. Well, Danganronpa probably owes a lot more to Umineko but I’ll leave that to another post.
EDIT: continuing through it I realize one important warning I didn’t really mention and should probably put emphasis on, if you’re tempted by the pitch above, is that it’s still a gruesome horror VN originally made for an otaku audience. It features graphic (although not visual) depictions of murder, torture, mental illness, physical and psychological abuse, often of young girls. It’s not for the faint of heart. On top of that, even several characters depicted as positive make off-color jokes about women and minors. It goes further in all of this than something like Danganronpa because the text format allows for it and also because it was never written for a commercial release. I don’t know how much of it was toned down for the US localization.
Speaking of the commercial aspect though, I mentioned it blew up and to give you an idea the first route’s release was 100 burned CDs from a completely unknown circle at the time, that they didn’t all sell, but by the time Umineko started they’d sold over 500’000 copies of Higurashi and it had become the first doujin game to receive a commercial port. Also, although there are eight episode, each release in an arc includes the previous routes (which helps a lot for latecomers) so the numbers have less redundancy than you might expect from a series with 8 releases.
8 Likes
after spending quite a few years drowning in this genre and wasting a lot of fucking time, i guess i’ll actually talk ab video games and leave my two cents here.
i read the first two parts of higurashi and hated them. extremely slow paced. the ’ horror ’ bits were absolutely absurd and made me roll my eyes more than once. not scary on any level. i was very happy with what happens to the obvious creep of a protagonist. the real draw of this series, from what i’ve heard, is the anime.
i have never seen this one, but it might be a lot like stein’s;gate in this regard, which i had the uh? displeasure? of seeing right after a few days of recovering from madoka.
as for reading the vn itself, the experience. . .was excruciating. i don’t really see the point in reading a vn if you’ve already watched the anime for it. there are hardly any changes and you mostly just wind up getting spoiled on the plot. anyway, i wound up with one of the bad ends because i didn’t fully understand the cell phone mechanics. after 40hrs already invested, and not enough saves to do the other routes, i decided to never play it again.
fuck steins;gate
the one thing i will mention is that the anime actually bothers to make okabe into a decent person, unlike the vn, which people who have read it never actually prepare you for.
fuck steins;gate
i’m sort of a more hardened type now and don’t think i can put up with much anime bullshit at this point. i am so fucking tired of pinkhaired high pitched teenagers ( who of course look much younger than this ) being like. . .the posterchild for what anime is now. pple complained in the early 2000s and i’m complaining now: moe sells but it is stomach turning to wade through the vn and jrpg tags on steam because of this sort of thing.
just forget ab what most pple say.
those pple have terrible taste.
the time you spend reading a vn that is 200+ hours is time that you could spend watching the show that it’s based on or reading a manga ( prob of better quality )
unimeko sucks
higurashi sucks
( fuck steins;gate )
they’re badly written, are unplayable without mods, but even then, you’re in hell with circular writing, uninteresting twists, and vaguely interesting characters who are overshadowed by plot points that take way too long to resolve themselves.
i only started umineko because it gets compared to fata morgana a lot.
perhaps in. . .tone? atmosphere? maybe. . .a little.
hanada was probably influenced by umineko when he wrote fata, but if you’re going to read any jp visual novel and are still on the fence. . .i am begging you to read fata.
i read the house in fata morgana in 2016, about two months after it had released on steam and only had 2 or 3 reviews. i went in not expecting much, but it’s 2023 and i still think ab this game. i’ve reread it once or twice. it’s ab 25-30 hrs. this sounds like a lot, but this is extremely short for a jp vn. it’s also. . .a lot cheaper than most jp vns. it goes on sale a lot, though, i’ve noticed that the discounts aren’t as deep as they used to be.
it’s not perfect by any means but, jfc if i have to see one more person talk ab how ’ great ’ umineko is, i might just lose it. i am 56 hours in so i feel like i’ve invested more than enough time into this. i just can’t believe that barely anything has been revealed ab the mystery of this story yet! i took a break for a few years because it had a slow start and i only found myself becoming more and more irritated as i read it. now? i’ve come to realize that this is just. . .garbage and i could’ve spent time reading an actual good book or something, instead of this trash.
anyway, i second the notion that western vns tend to fair a bit better.
i think ab eliza a lot.
this is the only jp vn on steam that matters
if you’ve never read any visual novels and have not gone down the path of the lonely weeb, there’s still hope for you: get out now, ( but at least read fatamoru ). the moral of the story is that weebs are hardly right ab anything.
9 Likes
Just wanted to chime in to say that there is a manga adaptation of Fata Morgana, although I don’t know if it’s good quality. If it is, it would be a better time investment because the vn is really slow. But the story and the twists are very intense. I think still about it sometimes.
An anime would be even better because in a manganthe music is lost
1 Like
i dont think i would have liked steins gate as much if my best friend hadnt died irl. and even then im ok not replaying it ever again, once i saw the anime movie which is literally fine for 90% of the runtime until kurisu’s master plan is revealed to be kissing a child misato style i lost all interest in the series
va-11 hall-a is great but i always forget how the first few days are nonstop the writer being horny i love a bunch of the characters though like dorothy rocks and the jill/dana dynamic is great
I played a little hakuoki and the plot being all these totally not gay shinsengumi guys getting their dicks hard for a girl crossdressing is hilarious.
this is actaulyl one of my fav vns, i played it all in one sitting , its just kinda cute and sweet and has like some of the best options for representng yourself if you arent cis ive seen in a game, and it doesnt push you into romance like a lot of vns though its an option. great if you were a lonely gay kid!!!
3 Likes
yeah, i def understand getting attached to things when you’re in a vulnerable state, for sure. i used to really like steins;gate in the years that followed me watching it. by the time i got to reading the vn, i was mostly just trying to comb through ’ the classics ’ that everyone had hyped up and didn’t really feel any attachment.
i added this game to my library and will try to play it at some point.
thanks for bringing this up actually
i keep forgetting that there is a manga too
the vn is prob a more heightened exp tho for the reason you said
vns are. . .def something that will not appeal to everyone
it was a niche thing for a reason
but fata is special to me so i’m always going to hype it up
1 Like
You’ve heard wrong, although it is likely the way most of the US fandom at the time originally experienced of the franchise. But the VN had already reached phenomenon status 2-3 years before the anime came out.
The big thing is the higurashi VN is “solvable” at the point the author says it is, with a lot of arguing around its fairness and actual genre by mystery fans (Umineko is ultimately a postmortem of the author’s experience about all that) while the anime just plain isn’t, arguments or not.
That’s of course because they cut tons of what they thought was cruft in favor of amping up the horror (and also simly to fit an 80 hours mystery into a TV series), and it wasn’t. They had to put in a couple new arcs just to work some of the original clues back in. To be fair yeah it would’ve been difficult adaptation work, because it’s tricky to know what’s a clue and what isn’t, and I guess their pipeline didn’t allow for asking the original author about what to keep.
It’s pretty amusing they made the exact same mistakes with the Umineko anime, only to the point where they felt it just wasn’t salvageable.
But also to some extend I think both Higurashi and Umineko are things where it can be hard to get why they’re popular now, because they laid the foundations for much of what followed, and also because the release format was essential at the time. Each of them was a four years ride of arguing with strangers on the internet.
2 Likes
this refers to the people i know that actually like higurashi
neither of them are american
they’re products of their time and came when there wasn’t much like it available but, that doesn’t make them actually good though. i stand by all i’ve said. even in my biggest weeb days i don’t think i’d be able to stomach either title. there are better writers of vns as this point.
thankfully.
I am currently playing through Steins;Gate 0 (I’d recon I’m 75-80% through?) and to echo what I said in the S;G topic here, I think the first VN had a better story than this one but told remarkably worse. If I go through the story of the original in terms of A-to-B-to-C it seems fine and at points clever, and I do think well enough of its last third or so, but its first half-plus is borderline sabotaged by the pacing/padding to a degree that I don’t believe I could actually recommend it to people. All of the notable characters have personality… let’s say quirks that are somewhat annoying but are meant to become endearing, but the initial 60ish percent of it is so stretched out that they keep hitting on these quirks repeatedly to the degree that it basically turns one against the characters to a degree which is a problem once that back third hits. I think said back third still works in part due to how long you were stuck around all these characters beforehand, but it’d have likely worked better if one hadn’t started to resent them first.
Part of me wonders if the anime adaption (or Elite) manages to fix this, but I ain’t gonna risk that many hours checking on the off chance it does.
50% off rn
1 Like
I had the same impressions as you.
1 Like
okay, maybe ignore my unhinged posts ab umineko pls. despite it being a marathon to getting where it gets good i haven’t been able to stop thinking about the characters in this despite having it on hold for months. i’d say that the pacing needs work and maybe just some general editing to cut down on the bulk but i actually really like this game now that i’ve installed mods.
the soundtrack is also sublime, the memes are true.
umineko is good, srry
i’ve had a screenshot that i had to edit the black bars out of uploaded as artwork and displayed on my steam profile for awhile now. i really like chapter 3. this seems to be where things finally start to gel and pick up. interesting things happen before this but the whole thing with aunt eva really speaks to me a lot. i understand her pain ( if even if not quite for the same exact reasons–she’s not trans ) but god man. . .UGH, so fuckin good.
i never did post my picture of the limited run fata i snagged off ebay, along with the card that came with it ( it’s gorgeous ) but let me see if i can find the picture rq. def play the house in fata morgana i am literally begging if you like vns. visual novels are definitely worth it if you are any flavor of weeb ( and there are plenty of good ones that aren’t even japanese like eliza ) but i am def thinking of reading through fata again so that i can get back in touch with more tender emotions.
it’s such an amazing empathy simulator and even if you like the ’ bad ’ characters ( i like a guy who is notorious in the fandom ) they’re built up so well that it doesn’t really matter that much. the fata thread is relatively short but i am thinking of posting some old screenshots. i would blur spoilers. i could always do it here though.
fata is really special man i stg pls pls pls PLS read it
and then after that read requiem
and then after that play seventh lair
i am obviously biased y’all but i’m TELLING you
2 Likes
Apology accepted
That being said, Higurashi (the actual original VN) parts 3-7 are still better than it
No elaboration
2 Likes
thank you, i was def on one when i made the initial posts. i don’t hate steins;gate per se, but i prefer the anime. what i said ab okabe i’m not going to rescind. and. . .better than umineko?! 
i am craving more horror media too so i just might have to go back to it! also, i just wanna say that: TODAY IS THE SEVENTH YEAR ANNIVERSARY THAT I FIRST PLAYED THE HOUSE IN FATA MORGANA AND IT IS ONE OF THE BEST VISUAL NOVELS OF ALL TIME ( if you like goth / victorian settings and flowery prose / FEELINGS ) blessed be
here is my reminder that is you have an interest in this medium, it is within your best interest to play this masterpiece |
Steam Developer: Novect | the entire series is on sale for the steam visual novel fest!
Necroing this thread to be a space to talk about the visual novels I read since the visual novel community is gross and just simply not well-read when it comes to any sense of storytelling standards.
I’m not a romance kind of person. I like action, I like adventure, and pulp-fiction. Visual novels aren’t the breeding ground for these kind of stories but they have a unique flavor when they do attempt it.
Onto the vn:
Kitto, Sumiwataru Asairo Yori mo,
Helping a guy make a patch out of sheer respect for his effort. Now onto the game: its a particular flavor of male fantasy. This time the main character is neurotic and has an extremely low-level of self esteem. Besides that, its a very standard melodrama with shitty comedy about different girls pining over the mc. This is not at all what I’d be reading under any other circumstance.
The Shadows of Pygmalion
Only just started this but there’s actual prose in this. Doesn’t read like a normal shitty vn and more like a novel. There’s some intrigue. I’m hoping that things actually happen and the action turns out solid. The lore seems interesting so far, and the main character’s weird fixation on dolls and purity has interesting seeds to grow into something more later.
6 Likes
Have any recs for visual novels like that? I’ve been looking for the same kind of thing but haven’t found any I like yet.