Recommend a VN

[Amigo]

I'm surprised to see nobody has mentioned Sengoku Rance yet!

Sengoku Rance takes place in Feudal Japan in the Sengoku Era. You play as Rance with his sidekick(slave) Sill who visits Japan for vacation. But instead they meet up with the Oda family which was once the ruling clan of Japan. You assume full command of Oda and set yourself a new task:

To bone all of the girls of Japan and conquer it as you go!

While the main goal of Rance doesn't seem to be the deepest, the game has a deep and nice turn based strategy game element to it with RPG elements to it! (leveling, items, abilities). You have X numbers of Fans which works as action points which you spent on the world map(over japan). Declaring war costs 1 action point for example and talking with one of your commanders costs another fan. Once you've used up your fans you end your turn and all the other clans of Japan do their things until it's your turn again. There are several thousand events in the game and there are multiple routes(you'll maybe unlock a few hundred events on your first playthrough of the True Story route. There are 3 other routes unlocked after your first playthrough. Also you unlock FFA). Sengoku Rance has a very big cast of lovely and interesting characters with plenty of H-Scenes to boot!

When entering battle you pick up to a total of 6 commanders to fight the battle. Commanders have different types of units. A commander may be a tactician and serve as a buffer. Another commander may be a miko squad which heals and uses ranged attacks. There are several types of commanders, each with their own type of soldiers and abilites. Battles have X number of turns so battles don't last forever. There's a bar ontop which shows the win ratio. If you take heavy losses your ratio will fall. And even if your army is alive, when the turns have run out. you will loose. It's not always a battle to the death! When defending a territory(village, town or castle) with castle providing the defending player a very big boost to his win/lose ratio.

Play for the hentai, stay for the AWESOME Story and Turn Based Strategy! With very nice replay value! (There's even a record screen which shows which characters you've cleared, what events you've done and what endings you've finished). Also, there is a FFA mode where you can play as any clan of Japan. You don't know how hard this game is until you've tried to conquer japan as Imagawa(Hanny)

The only negative i can think of(for some people, i don't really mind it at all) is the lack of voice acting. The game has rocking music to boot! Probably the best soundtrack i've heard in a VN ever! Loads of good humor and the game even brought me to tears a few times because you grow attachment to the characters.

I've only played a few VN's: Ever17, Swan Song, Saya no Uta. But i say that Sengoku Rance has turned out to be the best! With Saya no Uta being a close second!

Here's a nice video for those interested. Shows some gameplay and characters:


Yes, the game is fully translated and can be easily found on the internet. The patcher provided by the translation groups installs your japanese .iso of Sengoku Rance and patches it up to the latest official patch and translates the game! Pure genious if you ask me! No applocale or other programs needed!

Oh dude! I was gonna mention Rance in this thread. It's one of the best VN's out there. Pretty much like, Fire Emblem mixed with Hentai. And a little bit of rape.

[UrbanBas]

Man now I want to play it. Ugh curse my empty pockets.

[Dollywitch]

Also if nobody's mentioned it, while not a traditional VN, Digital: A Love Story.

That's a pretty good one. A bit hard once you get to a certain point but you can just go around it by saving then loading. Made by the same person who did "don't take it personally babe, it's just not your story" if I remember right. Though Digital is older.

Yes, only a year older though. Christine Love is amazing, I want to send her emails of love and offers to do music for her future games since she used a bunch of 8bc for Digital.

[Amigo]

I'm actually more surprised you guys didn't mention the grandfather of VN's- Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.

[Nightdragon]

I'm actually more surprised you guys didn't mention the grandfather of VN's- Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.

Oh god, I didn't even know 3DO even made a game like that. As far as I knew they only made the Army Men games, Battletanks, etc. Man, I love haven grown up in the 90's. Anyways, to keep this on topic, there were some threads on 4chan about a week ago or so about a preview of a pretty recent VN being released. The VN is called "Cradle Song", and can be found here: http://cradle-song.com/. It has a very interesting art style, and from the preview, some very good music too (seeing as the VN is at least partly music based). Another interesting fact is that Doomfest (a former KS dev, if memory serves) and pimmy (who is currently with 4LS) have or still are working on this VN. I personally enjoyed the preview, and will download it whenever they finish it.

[Mirage_GSM]

Oh god, I didn't even know 3DO even made a game like that. As far as I knew they only made the Army Men games, Battletanks, etc.

They didn't. That VN wasn't made by 3DO, it was made for the 3DO.
By the way, when I think of 3DO, I don't think of Army Men, but of this.

[Dollywitch]

Particularly interested in OELVN recommendations, what should I look for? I've seen some really cool ones that just take one simple idea and run with it, wish I'd have written them down.

[UrbanBas]

I'll add more of my recommendations.

Family Project is the first. I haven't done all the routes yet but the ones I have completed so far have been interesting and compelling. You make a good amount of choices that effect small things here and there. The routes I've played were good but some were a pain to get to. Had more than my fair share of bad endings.

Clannad I've just started playing and got only two endings so far. It's a weird game to play as you have a couple different glimpses into another area. The game is hard to get down without knowing where you need to make critical choices. Sadly enough you never know when these will come up. Most critical choices happen during every play through. The girl specific ones are easy too guess at as you have a frame of reference.

Those are two more VN's I recommend if your willing to get a little frustrated with bad endings.

[someone called chiis]

there is no english patch for Clannad yet is there?
i know there is one being worked on but the word Slow going come to mind...
or am i wrong about this?

[gekiganwing]

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties was an anomaly -- I believe it was intended as a full motion game, but it didn't quite work out. Regardless, it wasn't noticed by many fans, and has been largely forgotten.

Until recently, there have been very few commercial western video games which are centered around relationships. Not many people have heard of the late 80s computer game Romantic Encounters at the Dome, or the mid 90s computer game McKenzie & Co. Only a few fans bought the early DS game Sprung, or the PSP game Brooktown High. Right around the mid-2000s, Hanako Games started releasing PC/Mac games about relationships through direct downloads, and since then, groups such as Winter Wolves, Okashi Studio, Sakevisual, and Zeiva Inc have followed suit.

Somehow, relationship elements became a part of western RPGs starting with Baldur's Gate 2. And there's been a few western porn games with a commercial release, many of which feature 3D polygon graphics.

[X_Bacon]

there is no english patch for Clannad yet is there?
i know there is one being worked on but the word Slow going come to mind...
or am i wrong about this?

There's a "beta" patch that's been around for years, translation is pretty much finished.

[Teclo]

Just about to start playing Cross Channel. You can easily google the patch and a torrent. While you're at it, the other VNs translated by the same group all seem well worth checking out. As for Cross Channel, here's a Wiki synopsis:

After a failed summer vacation with other members of the school's broadcasting club, Taichi Kurosu and some of the other club members return to the city, only to find that all living creatures within it except for the club members have completely vanished. In order to confirm the status of the outside world, Taichi decides to gather other club members to help Misato Miyasumi, the president of the broadcasting club, set up a broadcasting antenna to contact any possible survivors. However, Taichi soon discovers that the world is actually repeating the same week and thus all their actions are reset, with no loss or gain, no matter what actions are taken. Seeking himself and the restoration of broken bonds, Taichi must discover meaning to exist in this strange and lonely but, for Taichi, comforting world.

Also, and I really can't remember if I've mentioned this before in this thread, but I'd recommend checking out 999 and Time Hollow for the NDS. Both officially translated and well worth buying, with so many twists that it'd make M Night Shyamalan dizzy.

[Yonowaaru]

there is no english patch for Clannad yet is there?
i know there is one being worked on but the word Slow going come to mind...
or am i wrong about this?

There's a "beta" patch that's been around for years, translation is pretty much finished.

To be more precise, all the text has been translated but some of the ending text is still left untranslated.
It's nothing major though, so you shouldn't hold off playing it! It really is one heck of an experience!

[delta]

Just about to start playing Cross Channel.

I wouldn't recommend games before playing them, especially not terrible ones like Cross Channel.

[DMGnome]

VNs written in Flash!

Air Pressure is a short little VN, originally written in Ren'Py and has been ported to Flash. It's a little too "ooh, literary!" for me, but a lot of people like it. If you play it, you've really got to go for all three endings and take a long hard look at the subtext.

RPG Shooter: Starwish is, as you might expect, a shooter with RPG elements, and it's got a VN-styled story that ties it all together. As a shooter, it's mediocre. The music is nice but the graphics in each level are kind of terrible. By all rights, it should be an average game at best, but somehow the sum of the parts gels into something really good. Like, really good. I don't know how it works, but it does.