Horror is such a difficult genre for artists to work with. People think it’s easy because they have memories of more-comedy-than-scary slashers and B-grade films, bad acting and all. There’s also the perception that it’s not a particularly subtle genre, and therefore must be quite easy to work with. But…
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I guess, given the success of Azur Lane, Girls und Panzer, KanColle and whatever else, it would be inevitable that at some point someone saw warplanes and thought “yeah, you sexy thing, what if you were an anime girl?” And so we have Kamikaze Lassplanes, a visual novel/SHMUP combination by…
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Him, The Smile & Bloom is a surprisingly “innovative” otome, at least as far as the narrative goes. I use the inverted commas because that word is bandied around far too much (and is far too associated with techbros – and yes I realise the contradiction between my disdain for…
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Urban Myth Dissolution Center is an interesting game. Set in modern-day Tokyo, this ADV from developer Hakababunko and publisher Shueisha Games features a series of episodes involving the titular Urban Myth Dissolution Center, an organisation that specializes in solving peculiar cases involving such anomalies. University student Azami Fukurai had a…
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Kotaro Uchikoshi will be remembered as one of the finest writers to work in the visual novel (and VN-adjacent) space. He is of course best known for the Zero Escape series and, more recently, the two utterly exceptional AI titles. Right at the start of his career, however, he worked in…
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It’s such a tough gig to be an indie VN developer. It’s a niche genre at the best of times, and the resources that you have to dedicate to it are going to be limited. It’s a question of what you throw money into to try to make your project…
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SINce Memories: Off the Starry Sky is a spin-off of an incredibly long-running series: Memories Off, which has been running since 1999, is now close to twenty titles deep, and has, over the years, had some legends of the visual novel medium work on it, including Mr. Zero Escape himself,…
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Writing horror is a tough gig. It’s challenging for writers to create and maintain fear and tension. Horror needs to be character-driven and it needs to make the audience care about the horrible things that are happening to those characters. Meanwhile, it’s difficult for visual artists because even the slightest…
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Dance is a difficult subject to tackle, for many reasons. These challenges are, fundamentally, why it’s not a topic that video game developers typically touch (or filmmakers, or novelists, or painters, or most other art forms). The Ukrainian developer behind Light de Deux has given a ballet-themed visual novel a…
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Otomate can always be trusted to find some way to repurpose the established otome formula for a visual novel that at least feels a little different, even if functionally it’s not. 9 R.I.P. lands at the perfect time for Halloween, and even though it’s Otomate playing it safe with the…
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