There is no longer room for faith in the EVN realm for me. One’s word (and word count) means nothing. Only results. I can now only bring myself to follow a few trusted and appreciated author, and the only thing I’m interested in from them is their work. The VNs themselves are the only things that are worth looking at, can be looked at, and can be judged. They are the only things with substance in this hobby.
Opinions are Monopoly money, only of imaginary value with no vn reserves backing it. Yet, everyone is in a hurry to defend their play money if it comes under attack, turning what could have been an interesting thread into a feud between two posters lurking over their keyboard with hunched back and squinted eyes. Ideas are pitched not to be implemented but to sate the ego’s need for brief attention. Word counts are blasted through megaphones like they actually mean something, except as a gauge weighing how much of an epic *bore* the project is growing…
The social element has overtaken the developmental element. There is no longer creativity, there is no longer innovation, there is no longer quality… There’s only noise, lots and lots of noise… So now I have to tune it all out and wait till someone actually finds a note worth playing. I’ll give a listen then and only then. Till then, keep searching, but keep quiet.
I’m told to be careful what you wish for, or it might just come true. I don’t know where caution plays in, but there’s always the chance with enough wishing for your wants to come true. How could there ever be a downside? Example :
Maybe a little shy of three years ago, I encountered my first John Dickson Carr book. This was not long after Umineko was first released. And I started getting into Phoenix Wright. This left me hungry for more and more mysteries, especially entries in the EVN field. I wasn’t so lucky at the time, though, as what offers there were didn’t impress me much. But things have turned around quite a bit since then.
The first big notable mystery EVN entry is Each Uisge by Jake, which was a brilliant and fun Higurashi-esque psycho-thriller with a good dash of mystery. I loved every second of it. Some time after, The Stolen Diamond Ring by Nekomura Games was released. It was polished, it was pretty, and for a simple premise, it was well executed. Oh, and inexpensive too, which always helps. I quite enjoyed every second of it. April of this very year, I and my Team BG released our own mystery vn, Fuyu no Tabi, which was quite the ride to create. We all had a blast making every second of it.
But the most recent entry to this vn genre, sakevisual’s Jisei, gives me a lot of hope for the present and the future. It has all the polish of the other commercial mystery contender, Diamond Ring, and then some. It throws you right into the murder maze from the start, and forces you down a curvy path with no end in sight. Up until the very last second, no one jumped out at me as the suspect, despite the uncoverable secrets each of them guard. We catch whispered glimpses of our hero’s past and story, but his whole hand remains unrevealed… and at the end, there are still questions enough to carry interest over into the next installment of what hopes to be a series worthy of this intriguing start and mysterious series detective.
It was a fun experience that everyone should get a chance to play through. So go out there and buy it already. Play, observe, learn. And then go create your own mystery. I can’t ever possibly get enough cases to crack wide open.
Get to it ——— http://sakevisual.com/jisei/
First off, it’s hard to breathe out there in outer space. Second, it’s absolutely freezing. And when you finally reach it, there isn’t anything to see out there. Oh, the Earth? Yeah, I’ve been there. It’s a lot better when it isn’t at a distance.
*Ahem*… You’ve all heard the quote. “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars,” which is attributed to one Brian Littrell. That alone is enough grounds to pay it as little mind as possible. For the English Visual Novelist, even more so. This is terrible advice.
There is nothing wrong with ambition, as long as it is coupled with ability. This doesn’t mean talent. You don’t have to be good at what you are doing. You just have to be able. A lot of people now are diving into projects way above their ability, hoping that hole will be filled in by someone else with the proper skills perhaps. That’s not a way to get things done. Instead of wanting to make a project, more and more people are coming off as if they just want to manage a project. Get all the credit with none of the work, directing people to do what they need them to do. You won’t be able to take off like that.
I’ve been kinda quiet here lately for good reason. Most of February was spent working on a longer term project with the guys at Team BG which we’re all pretty excited about. Progress is steady, which is a pretty significant surprise coming from my end, and we hope to pick it back up right where we left off once April starts.
But the current development was our attempting that wily ol’ challenge, Nanoreno, for this year. There was a bit of talking and planning in that last week of February when suddenly Enerccio hit upon a really exciting idea that we all thought was worth pursuing. And now that things are beginning to wrap up, I can look back and say it definitely was. The writing for this project was quite a ride and it’s been really fun. There’s this pretty long span in the middle that I had to write that I couldn’t stop thinking on, getting more and more excited. “Oh, maybe I can include this…” “I definitely have to touch on that…” “If it were me, I’d bring up this…” “Damn, man, this is too much fun.” For what’s usually a high pressure time for most of the EVN scene, I sure had a blast. ‘Course, having a co-writer takes off a bit of the pressure.
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