Echo's Estate

when i played, it still took about 20 min to get into the dungeons as a DPS.
As tank you can get quicker.

I would don't buy the boosters,
just sub for a month.

FF14 is still very popular.

And I don't currently play, though I will likely go back in the future. My main is a lvl 63 Scholar.

Ummmmm.....
Hatsun was trying to see crafting guides and this ended up in recommendations today?.....

thats pretty fascinating actually

More people need to play visual novels. If you want to get into them let me know. I might even write something like "A starters guide to visual novels" actually... that sounds awesome *starts writing*

You have some greats sometimes.

I do? Great what?

I've seen the ERP in guild houses. Kind of awkward really? Especially people who publicly act cutesy and flirtatious as advertisement.

Ideas.

Oh? You like my idea? I'll be sure you get a copy of the guide then

I smiled at this so much.

Already on Estival? Too bad you don't see when they first met in Shinovi like you SHOULD *glares*

No I found that by accident while looking for regular pics.
Stop looking at me like that... >.

A Starter's Guide To Visual Novels

First and formost I would like to gratefully welcome you to this guide and to the wonderful world of visual novels. I have long thought of this medium as the ultimate form of story telling. I do hope you will all come to agree with me as we journey through this process together.

Visual Novel Terminology

As I hope you are aware no one visual novel is the same as another. They vary greatly and that includes with how they are classified. The first word to learn is "eroge" now a lot of people use the terms visual novel and eroge interchangebly. I don't really approve of that. A visual novel is just any program that is run in the specific way that visual novels are run. Art in the background, music, character voices, and text that you read. Eroge I think litterally means "erotic game" This is a visual novel that has sexual content. I think the two terms get used interchangeably so often beacuse most visual novels do actually have sexual content. Honestly, if this bothers you then visual novels aren't for you. You are better off watching Netflix or something.

Personally I like to use the term visual novel to refer to the ones that are really focused on telling their story. Heavily plot driven games thick with character development. Before you ask, "There are ones that aren't about telling thier story?" The answer is yes. Nukige, this is a word to watch out for, especially if you are or are not searching for fap material. Nukige is "erotic game" to the extreme level. Most of these don't really care about story and just focus on the characters having as much sex as possible in the most arousing ways possible. Purely made as masturbation material.

I would like to clarify that while all nukige have a ton of sex scenes not all visual novels with a ton of sex scenes are nukige. Euphoria is a perfect example of this. Euphoria probably has like 50 sex scenes, which is a lot. Though euphoria is not a nukige. Everything, includeing all the sex, is tied to a very deep and intriguing story. The game is about telling the story, and that story just happens to have a ton of sex. A nukige would be if the game is about having a ton of sex and it just happens to have a story. See the difference?

Most of you I bet are anime fans already so I wont explain typical anime terms like yuri, yaoi, loli and futa. Feel free to message me if you don't know these terms. There are a few other visual novel specific terms though that I would like to go over. While some may resent this fact it doesn't change that it is a fact. Most people that orignally started playing visual novels are men. The general audience was expected to be men and so games were made with a male audience in mind. This is why when there is a game that isn't meant to be played by a male audience there is a specific term for them. A"Otome" game is a game made for girls and women. It will usually have a female protaganist and feature all manner of female things that females like. I wouldn't know details seeing how Im not a female and don't play Otome games. If you are a lady and are intersted in visual novels you should check them out if you are tired of the typical male protag and woman love interest thing.

Next I would like to say what a Kinetic Novel is. This is just a visual novel without any choices. There are no branching paths or different routes that is common in the medium. A kinetic novel only has one route, one ending for one story. Now take great care not to confuse Nukige with Nakige. A nakige is a different type of game. This kind of game is one that is made to try and really make you cry. A nakige is going to be full of tragic heroes and tragic heroines and thier equally tragic tales as they attempt to jerk the tears out of you. Though as it is with nukige, not all games that are sad are labled as nakige. Its just a term to look out for if you would rather find a comedy.

Make VNDB Your New God

I'm kidding of course, but the importance of the website Visual Novel DataBase aka VNDB can not be understated. This place has litterally everything you could ever want to know about whatever visual novel you want to know things about. Like if you want to know if it's in english, how long it is, how popular it is, what ratings it gets. Is it a kinetic novel, is it a comedy or a drama or a nukige. It will even tell you all the different sex positions each heroine does. VNDB knows it all! You can search for a single specific novel if you want or search by tags, this is useful if you are like me and want to find all the nukige with big tits lol (kyonyuu is the search term by the way).

If you click "visual novels" under the menu at the top left you can then sort the results by date of release, popularity and rating. Pretty regularly I sort stuff by release so that I can see whats going to be coming out. Sorting by popularity or rating will show you what games everyones playing and what games everyone likes the most. It doesn't matter whatever it is that you are searching for you can find it here. Vndb has all the answers, thats why vndb is your new god. Go to vndb.org today to lose yourself in the sea of wonders that is visual novels.

Where To Get Visual Novels

DO NOT GET VISUAL NOVELS FROM STEAM

I know this is probably my own personal bias but there are reasons behind this. The first reason is that Steam censors all of its it content. You will never find any sex scenes on that platform. Games that orginally had sex scenes have those scenes removed. For some games that really can fuck up the story or character devlopment. For example, Muv Luv Alternative is on Steam. There are a couple of sex scenes in that game that are actually really important to understand what happened to a certain character and to show her character growth. I don't know what the fuck they plan to do to explain that stuff without the sex scenes. I swear to all that is holy if I ever see someone try to release euphoria on Steam I'm going to murder them.

The second reason is that Steam has given rise to a bunch of trash tier knock offs. Like if you ever see the Sakura Whatever series of visual novels on Steam. Absolute and complete garbage. What they made is litterally a nukige without any sex. It boggles the mind. The whole game is set up like a nukige and you expect to see the busty heroines get rammed but nope, this is Steam so thats not happening.

A general rule of thumb to follow is that games that were originally made in the United States or whatever other western speaking country are all trash. Like I'm American and I'm very willing to admit Americans don't know shit about how to make visual novels, so please stop trying. You always want to find games that were originally made in Japan and then translated later.

I do want to say that if you wish to and you probably should at some point, support visual novel developers or the people that translate them into English consider purchasing games from MangaGamer or JAST. They offer completely uncensored Japanese visual novels that have been properly translated into English. https://www.mangagamer.com/ or https://www.jastusa.com/

That said, I am painfully aware of how difficult obtaining visual novels in the west is. Thats why I have other solutions that work quite well in obtaining that which you desire. I would say that the most reliable, but certainly not the fastest, way of obtaining any and every english translated visual novel is the website www.erogedownload.com. Every upload they have is completely in english. I have downloaded many games from them and not yet found any one of their download links to be broken or not working. I will say though, that as a free user you are going to have to download games piece by piece which can take a long time depending on how big the game is. Still, you will for sure get the game eventually.

There are also some torrents floating around, but for anyone familar with torrents you likely realize that they aren't a sure thing for you to be able to download. If there is no seeders then you wont get it. If you want to try though check https://catbox.moe/official.php for english translated visual novel torrents.

The other thing I want to talk about here is where to get untranslated games. I know some of you might think that doing that is pointless. If you are planning to really focus on the story of the game then yes, its pointless. But if you are looking for some new nukige to stroke yourself to then it doesn't really matter if its translated or not. Like 90% of my nukige aren't translated. To get those I actually do torrents and get the torrents form the site http://www.anime-sharing.com the direct download links on this site are almost always broken so torrenting is the way to go here.

Important Technical Stuff

Sadly playing any and all visual novels that catch your fancy isn't as easy as doing the same with Xbox games. There is a fair bit of stuff you got to have and know about in order to ensure you wont ever run into problems playing any visual novel out there. Though, if you did properly purchase a game from one of the places I mentioned earlier you aren't going to have to deal with all this. Just something to keep in mind. For everyone else though...

First, get Winrar. This is a program that allows for the opening of .rar and .zip files. A rar or zip file is just a holder, its a way to compress and contain multiple files within one single file. You got to extract its contents in order to get the real stuff. Winrar is a program that can do that. You aren't likely to find many downloads online that aren't in a rar or zip file. This program is a must.

Next, get Daemon Tools. Scary name I know but a program almost as important as Winrar. Quite often what you will find after you extract a rar file containg a visual novel is a single file with either a ISO extention or a MDF extention. What these are, are litterally the orginal game CD/DVD entierly in digital data without the physical disc. This means you basically have a disc without technically having a disc. With that in mind that means you have to insert the disc into your computer right? Seeing how you don't have a physical disc though that isn't possible. This is where Daemon Tools comes into play. What Daemon Tools does is creates virtual disk drives on your computer that work just as your physical ones do. You can then "mount" your ISO/MDF to your Daemon Tools drive and the disc auto run program should start up.

As far as programs go there is one that you can probably get away with not having since its not commonly needed but there are occasionally times when it is needed so why not get it anyway? PowerISO. This program allows you to look at the individual files within a disk image (a image being the virtual copy of the disk). You can then extract only specific files. The reason this could be useful is occasionally some people will include a game crack indside the ISO and you have to get that file in order to run your game. It doesn't happen very often but It's good to be prepared.

Thats all for programs, finally. Unfortantely you aren't quite done with technical stuff. There is one other major you need to do. You need to change your system locale to Japan. I'm not really sure why this is a thing you got to do but It just is. I would bet its something like a game that supposed to run in Japanese won't run if you don't have a Japanese computer. Oh but don't worry, all the English on your computer won't suddenly turn to Japanese. I've had my locale set to Japan for years and everything is still displayed in English. To do this, at least on Windows, you find your Control Panel and click "Clock Language and Region" I have Windows 8 so it might be a bit different on other versions. But there should be something similar no matter which version you are on. Then under the Region section in the main display area there is something that says Change Location, click that. In the window that pops up click over to the Administrative tab. The second option at the bottom "Language for Non-Unicode Programs" Click "Change System Locale" Find Japan then apply it.

A final note in this section. When you are installing from a disk image the installer that comes up is more then likely going to be in Japanese. You are just gonna have to click buttons and see what happens. One of them is going to be the install button. Its usually the biggest one. If you can't get a game to work and it just gives you some Japanese error you can't read. Make sure the game is cracked and if it is and nothing else you try works then I reccomend giving up honestly. Some games just won't work, it even happens to me.

Conclusion and Reccomendations

Welp, here we are at the end of this very lengthy guide. Hopefully you weren't overwhelmed and actually made it to the end. In which case congrats. Visual novels are truly an amazing medium that Im sure you will enjoy. Hopefully the only remaining question you have now is "Which game should I get?" well I can't give you specific suggestions without knowing what you are looking for. You could always just message me and we can talk, I'm open to that of course. Or you could look to god (vndb) for answers. The highest rated/most popular visual novels are a good place to start. Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope to hear you have become a huge visual novel fan.

That was amazing work echo.

Thank you, hopefully you can start playing visual novels now. I would be happy to talk about what you should try first if you want

One are you didn't mention, that is they've started appearing on Playstation now. Do those come under your Steam rules?

Ah, Well, certainly for censorship they do. Any visual novel on playstation would be censored

There aren't very many, and I'm sure they're probably without sex scenes naturally.

Well I think Muv Luv Alternative actually had a PS2 release now that I recall. And you read my thoughts on that one specifically