Best products from r/visualnovels

We found 24 comments on r/visualnovels discussing the most recommended products. We ran sentiment analysis on each of these comments to determine how redditors feel about different products. We found 67 products and ranked them based on the amount of positive reactions they received. Here are the top 20.

Top comments mentioning products on r/visualnovels:

u/WoodElemental · 3 pointsr/visualnovels

There was a similar question here a year ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/78tr3b/jops_of_rvisualnovels_tell_us_your_stories_of/), and I should probably re-post my reply from there, considering it apparently was well-regarded.

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I was introduced to anime at around late 2007, and by the first half of 2008 I noticed that I started to understand some simple words and phrases. That seemed like a chance to learn a language with minimal effort, so I gave it a try. The other factor was that kanji were always mysterious (and therefore attractive) to me, and I was really curious how a writing system like this works.

So I went to a nearby bookstore and bought a few Japanese language textbooks. Immediately I fell in love with the grammar, which was much more logical and structurally-beautiful than anything I have ever seen before that. Unfortunately though, all the textbooks that I bought had the same big flaw: they required you to learn a lot of words and kanji by heart to be able to read the example texts even in the early chapters.

Since my visual memory and lexical memory are really weak, that was like hitting a wall. I wanted to learn more grammar, but couldn't move forward because of arbitrary lexicon requirenments. So, at around 2009 I gave up on the textbooks I had and started googling for alternatives, and quickly stumbled on what I to this day consider the best language textbook ever: "Japanese in Mangaland".

https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Mangaland-Learning-Marc-Bernabe/dp/4889961151 https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-MangaLand-Basic-Intermediate-Level/dp/4889961860 https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-MangaLand-Intermediate-Level/dp/4889961879

It is brilliantly well-structured, gives all the "conversational grammar" that is completely ignored in "textbooks for serious people", but is dominating the Japanese found in anime and manga. It also gives a lot of examples, which look like taken from anime/manga situations, which makes it even more fun. And, most importantly for me, it does not ask you to learn 50-70 arbitrary words every chapter just to understand the grammar examples.

If you are anime/manga/VN fan, and still below N3 level, you should absolutely check Japanese in Mangaland out.

At around the same time I also stumbled upon a very efficient method of learning kanji: mnemonics. Instead of trying to remember each of the characters visually of mechanically (by writing it many times), you can look at its components (called 'radicals') and derive (or at least associate) the character's meaning from them. It does not work for all the kanji, but for those it does, it is so efficient, that you can easily learn 400-500 basic kanji within 2-3 weeks.

Unfortunately, the book that I was using for that is not available in English, but I've heard that "Kanji in Mangaland" and "Remembering the Kanji" are somewhat similar to what I've been using, so you should check it out also. Even if you know more than 500 kanji, you should try the mnemonics just to understand the method and be alble to apply it yourself.

After that I became very confident in my language skills. To the point that I ordered Suzumiya Haruhi light novels from Japanese Amazon. That was a mistake. I spent like two days deciphering the prologue (4 pages), and had to give up for some time. The problem was, despite knowing most of N3 grammar, and around 500 kanji, it was not nearly enough to read unadapted text by Tanigawa Nagaru. There were too many unfamiliar words and kanji. And the fact that the senteces were insanely long didn't help at all.

Thus I needed a way, to learn more words and kanji. And I found it in writing song lyrics by memory. The technique is like this: you take your favorite anime/VN song. Since it is your favorite, you should remember it somewhat well. You find the lyrics online and go through it, looking up all the unfamiliar words and kanji. And then, when you have free time, paper, and a pen (boring university lectures are especially good for that) you try to write the song's lyrics by memory. After repeating this several times, you should know all the song's lexicon and kanji quite well, and can move to the second favorite one. After doing for 5-6 songs, your vocabulary should become much bigger and your kanji count would probably be around 800-900.

For me that was the point when I tried to read some manga (for me it was "Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai"), and by the end of the 3rd volume I suddenly realized that I AM ACTUALLY READING IT UNTRANSLATED. Reading as in "reading without looking into dictionary every few minutes". That was one of the happiest moments in my life.

Unfortunately, it was still not nearly enough to read Suzumiya. Nevertheless, it was enough to start reading simpler LN: "Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai". That made me feel that I AM ACTUALLY READING IT feeling again.

It was around 2012, and at around the same time I discovered the VN medium, starting with F/sn. I did not dare to try it untranslated yet (remembering the Haruhi fiasco that happened twice), but in about a year of reading simple manga and LNs I decided to try some simple VN as an experiment. So I went to VNDB in search of well-rated untranslated simple VN (for the metric of "simplicity" I chose it being a SoL nukige), and found Kanojo x Kanojo x Kanojo. It was even easier to read than I expected.

So after imprinting a lot of anatomic vocabulary into my brain, I finally tried a much more challenging task: F/ha, which was yet untranslated at that time. And... I actually managed it. I cannot say it was easy, but I was still understanding what was written.

After the realization that I can read untranslated Nasu, it was a matter of time untill I completely stopped bothering with any translation for any Japanese media that I watch or read.

Happy End

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It was in late 2013. After that I basically stopped "learning" Japanese and started "using" it. Everything becomes super easy when you can google Japanese words and grammar structures in Japanese. By now I have finished a lot of untranslated work including notably hard ones like Muramasa and Monobeno, passed JLPT N1 (it was my first JLPT lol) two years ago, and am researching ways of relocating to Japan.

u/nogaku · 1 pointr/visualnovels

You can play almost all VNs without trouble if the computer is Windows-based. The problems that arise saliently tend to involve software incompatibility issues (i.e. older games not updated/tested to run on Win10 machines) and rarely if ever have to do with the hardware of the computer. As long as your laptop has Windows as its OS (it seems to be so based on the specifications list) you can be assured that it will run the gamut of VNs without much trouble (graphics are never really an issue as VNs don't make much use of them to begin with--tho beware of VNs equivalent to triple-A type games like Muv-Luv Alternative cause of the frequent and rapid character movements it utilizes).

That said, not to be discouraging but why not consider shelling out a couple more bucks for a slightly higher-end model from a better known manufacturer (even with the specs like its storage type and ram size the display should be a huge devaluing factor)? I can tell you this as I had a tablet PC handed down to me by my brother that playing a VN on a unit with a screen no bigger than 12'' is actually pretty darn distracting because of how minuscule the font size becomes when the entire screen is literally the size of a paperback book--and reading a VN, I believe, is nothing like reading a book as audio quality as well as adequate amount of space for admiring pretty art work are major factors for enjoying a good VN.

My 'humble' recommendation

Search around a bit more for a better deal because you'll find a lot of alternative higher-end models with more faithful form factors that have gone down in price and--just my two cents--prioritize screen size and storage type/size because processors and memories installed in budget laptops are categorically indistinguishable performance-wise (although M series are of a different variety compared to i3, i5, i7 series).

u/funwithgravity · 4 pointsr/visualnovels

This is a strange question but I'll ask anyways.

I recently watched sasami-san@ganbaranai and I noticed that Yagami Tsurugi's headphone was drawn with great detail. I wondered if it was an actual model and sure enough it was. In the anime, she uses this $900 headphones to play eroge in front of other teachers at the school and tells the other teachers to get lost if they say anything about her hobby.

So the question is, would there be any benefit to using such a ridiculously high price/quality headphones for playing VNs? I would personally never even spend a fifth of that on headphones, but I's just curious as to if there is an actual tangible benefit to using such headphones or if this is just a joke/product placement.

u/EnmityTrigger · 3 pointsr/visualnovels

You may want to consider a laptop instead of a desktop if you do not intend to play graphically intensive games. Even cheap laptops can run any visual novel.

Tbh I'd go for a laptop if you want to spend less than 500 usd. Desktops are expensive because you also need a monitor, mouse, keyboard etc.

Depending on your needs I'd go with a 15.6 inch laptop.

Try to find a laptop with a 8th Gen Intel i3 processor, with 256 GB of storage and 8 GB ram. This should be good for internet and office work while also playing Visual novels.

Something like this is cheap but and with decent performance https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Display-Graphics-Keyboard-A515-43-R19L/dp/B07RF1XD36/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=laptop&qid=1571258070&rnid=2941120011&s=pc&sr=1-3
But if you can spend 500 usd, then something like this will last you longer: https://www.amazon.com/Acer-i5-8265U-Keyboard-Fingerprint-A515-54-51DJ/dp/B07RF2123Z/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=laptop&qid=1571258070&rnid=2941120011&s=pc&sr=1-4


But look around for good deals. Sometimes you can find good laptops for little money.

u/Egikun · 2 pointsr/visualnovels

Think about it this way: Reading primary sources that require previous knowledge to understand before you have that knowledge removes an entire level of appreciation you could be having for the work. Almost to the point to where reading it now would likely be just as valuable as not reading it at all. You're effectively paying your respect to their work by learning it properly.

I think it's important to distinguish your reasons on why you want to learn philosophy. If your main goal is to learn as quickly as possible, then contemporary books are the best. In anime/VNs/storytelling, it sounds cool to say "I've read the entire works of Plato, Descartes, and Kant," but in real life it's usually the single worst way to learn philosophy, and definitely won't do their knowledge justice.

Aristotle's teachings are over 2300 years old. We've had a lot of time to think about what he's said (much of it incorrect). On top of this, different philosophers have studied different fields. Just jumping from philosopher to philosopher won't do you any good, since each are likely going to be talking about very different topics. For the record, it takes about 4-8 years of university study to really digest everything that's happening in a single field, and there are over a dozen of them.

That being said, "The Problems of Philosophy" is a good general introduction to the concept of philosophy. A Little History of Philosophy is a personal choice of mine. Just remember, there are no shortcuts.

u/end-it · 2 pointsr/visualnovels

i bought this one a while back and it works fine for VNs, aside from it overheating a ton if you try to run a VN inside of a winXP VM! (which still works okay i guess)

the price does seem a little inflated from what i bought it at about a year ago but should still be low-ish. mostly thirdparty sales though. I'm sure there's other decent ones on amazon that are also in that resolution range worth buying...

they're definitely becoming rarer though yes

u/8cccc9 · 2 pointsr/visualnovels

You can only get a physical soundtrack of the remake version (the original doujin version used free to use music AFAIK), but if that's what you mean then the soundtrack is available at the usual places like
Amazon,
CDJapan,
Play-Asia,
Otaku.com,
Otaku.co.uk,
or Solaris Japan.

Edit: There seem to be physical soundtracks of the doujin version (album 1, album 2), but they should be nearly impossible to find. If you're just after the music, you can probably easily find the music online as it's all royalty free.

u/Kowzz · 2 pointsr/visualnovels

Not stuff that necessarily came out in 2015, but things I read/saw/discovered in the last year:

u/TuttyTheFruity · 1 pointr/visualnovels

Are you looking to incorporate VNs with gameplay or no in your presentation? This will affect the type of VNs you look for.

I find research on communications history will aid your presentation. For reasons stated by others at length here, VNs represent a medium of communication that marries the high-fidelity audio-visual content of television and movies (with particular emphasis on communicating facial expressions) with the information-dense communication abilities of the written word (i.e. books and transcripts). As a result, it combines the best aspects of various communication mediums.

This is a pretty good resource for inspiration if you can find it.

For a school presentation I would avoid 18+ material. You don't want to bring surprises to the presentation that would distract the audience from your points.

u/silverforest · 3 pointsr/visualnovels

Text extraction is easy. You can find programs that read the in-game text as you play the game.

As for text replacement: Grab a hold of someone who is either familiar with VN engines or a reverse engineer.

As for translation at your level: Knowledge of Japanese grammar is more important that Kanji recognition since you can look things up. If you want to learn more grammar, I would recommend picking up these three grammar dictionaries ([1], [2], [3]) and reading through them.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789004546

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Intermediate-Japanese-Grammar-Seiichi/dp/4789007758

[3]: http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Advanced-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789012956

u/NaiDriftlin · 4 pointsr/visualnovels

I've read a few books on the matter and sat through a few GDC workshops. The odd thing is, outside of this, I've only ever heard /u/Arcanus44 refer to the concept as 'Juice'.

My personal oddities aside. 'Game Feel' is one of the reasons I opted to use Unity over RenPy for my VN development. There's a lot more to an experience beyond the words we use and the plot points we show.

I don't read a lot of VNs on mobile devices, but I would expect that(especially for 3DS/DS/PSP/Vita titles) to be more common than on PC releases.

Though, I think if you would like a great example of game feel in high-text environment on the PC, Undertale would probably be one of the best examples I have. Take a look at the sprite work during combat. And then how the text animates on. How the text read s l o w s d o w n and the blips deepen during dramatic moments, and is fast and big during more light-hearted moments. Sometimes, even after the text has been written the screen, it gets animated. The way the sprites animate throughout the combat (and non-combat, yet combat like) scenes screams high game-feel.


Edit:

Higurashi has a few good moments with color-shifting the screen, adjusting the text read speed, and sounding that creepy-ass music right when things start getting crazy.

Editx2: And for any devs interested in my reading material, check out Steve Swink's book 'Game Feel'

u/ieya404 · 1 pointr/visualnovels

In my experience, the difference between comics and graphic novels can be pretty blurred, and is often more about the presentation (in terms of paper quality and cover thickness) and quantity (the contents of several comics may be printed in a single volume to create a graphic novel) - for example "Preludes and Nocturnes" can easily be considered as a graphic novel, however its contents were originally published as eight comic issues.

u/RadRobert · 2 pointsr/visualnovels

No problem, I hope you enjoy it! And if you like the opening song (which I absolutely love), you can get it on Amazon here. I realized this the other day, after struggling to find the vocal tracks online months ago... XD

u/Slovakin · 2 pointsr/visualnovels

its just the standard english release of the game (non special edition). Idk why they decided to call it the "best edition." (at least that's what I've gathered)

Here is the link to the game from amazon.

u/Mario3573Z · 5 pointsr/visualnovels

It's definitely better received in the West than Japan, just check out jp amazon reviews or EGS

u/ctom42 · 2 pointsr/visualnovels

I recently found physical copies of both parts on Amazon for around $30 each with free shipping.

A quick searched turned up the same seller charging $40 each now, which is still not bad

http://www.amazon.com/Umineko-Chiru-Twilight-golden-episode/dp/B004FQH5E4/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1457022175&sr=8-9&keywords=umineko+no+naku+koro+ni

u/d909 · 3 pointsr/visualnovels

I recently encountered the same problem. I ended up ordering a physical copy.

Umineko

Umineko Chiru

Those should work with the translation patch.