What was the first visual novel you played?

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Reikun
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What was the first visual novel you played?

#1 Post by Reikun »

Hi! I've only played four visual novels before (3 being made with Ren'Py) so I'm pretty new to the whole scene?

I was wondering what people's first VNs were and how they got into making VNs themselves *U*

My first VN was Hatoful Boyfriend xD
I wanted to make visual novels after I played it since I'm pretty useless at comics and animation, so I thought that VNs would be a good middle media for telling stories with art.

I'm interested to hear about others' first experiences with visual novels ^^
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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#2 Post by teacup »

My first was Narcissu about 5 years ago.
I didn't even know what a VN was at the time and the whole time I played it, I was thinking "I don't know what this is... but I like it!" XD
The first VN I played while knowing what a VN was was Hourglass of Summer, because a local anime store was selling physical copies of it.
Even though the VN isn't that good looking back on it now, it was one of the games that inspired me to make my own. ^^
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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#3 Post by SusanTheCat »

I think technically it was the "Pick up Artist" section of Bar Games. It would have been about 20 years ago.

http://www.myabandonware.com/game/bar-games-ll

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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#4 Post by papillon »

... I played that. I was never any good at it. The finger moves too fast!

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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#5 Post by Mink »

Lux-Pain, unfortunately; the localization is almost HILARIOUSLY incompetent. Voice-acting is pretty good, though, and the concept itself was interesting.
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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#6 Post by DaFool »

X-Change. Thank goodness I later played Kana Imouto since I also tried Jewel Knights Crusaders (ugh). But what prompted me to want to make my own are the al|together games immediately following Narcissu, combined with the Blade Engine release announcement.

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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#7 Post by Reikun »

Mink wrote:Lux-Pain, unfortunately; the localization is almost HILARIOUSLY incompetent. Voice-acting is pretty good, though, and the concept itself was interesting.
Oh! I've heard of Lux-Pain :-D I don't know anything about it though except that the art looks really nice! I didn't even realize it was a visual novel >___<;;
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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#8 Post by teacup »

Reikun wrote:
Mink wrote:Lux-Pain, unfortunately; the localization is almost HILARIOUSLY incompetent. Voice-acting is pretty good, though, and the concept itself was interesting.
Oh! I've heard of Lux-Pain :-D I don't know anything about it though except that the art looks really nice! I didn't even realize it was a visual novel >___<;;
I played that about a year or two ago!
The translation is really bad, yeah, and I actually had the voices turned off because what they said was different from the text and it was confusing. XD;
Parts of the story also makes little to no sense but I still found it intriguing and enthralling enough to finish, despite being unreadable at times. XD
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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#9 Post by LVUER »

This kind of question have been asked a lot, there are already multiple thread about this. But I'll answer again anyway. My very first VN would be "Season of Sakura", an MS-DOS VN. Nothing great about it and the characters are taken from other popular anime at that time (Magic Knight Rayearth, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Saint Tail, etc). But it's my first VN and I don't even know what's VN at that time.
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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#10 Post by Mink »

teacup wrote:
Reikun wrote:
Mink wrote:Lux-Pain, unfortunately; the localization is almost HILARIOUSLY incompetent. Voice-acting is pretty good, though, and the concept itself was interesting.
Oh! I've heard of Lux-Pain :-D I don't know anything about it though except that the art looks really nice! I didn't even realize it was a visual novel >___<;;
I played that about a year or two ago!
The translation is really bad, yeah, and I actually had the voices turned off because what they said was different from the text and it was confusing. XD;
Parts of the story also makes little to no sense but I still found it intriguing and enthralling enough to finish, despite being unreadable at times. XD

I think one of the things that's so confusing is whether or not it's set in Japan. Unless it's MEANT to come off like it's both in Japan and NOT in Japan. So...yeah. Reviews I've read tend to say the same thing: it's not a bad game by itself, but the localization pretty much kills it.

A much less "WTF IS THIS EVEN" inducing game is Hotel Dusk. It totally counts as a VN. 8|
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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#11 Post by Camille »

Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side. It was not a pleasant experience. :| It's pretty much turned me off from most stat-raising games and I could rant for hours about all the things I hated about it… I went on to play Yo-Jin-Bo—which I loved—a few years later, but I didn't really get into the VN genre until playing Starry Sky. After that I played quite a few Japanese otome games (most of which I like a lot better than Starry Sky) and a handful of BL games. The first OELVN I ever played was Spirited Heart, but I didn't get the idea to make my own VN for another 4 years after that… I don't remember what specifically drew me to the Ren'Py engine anymore. D: But yeah, that's my VN history. xD

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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#12 Post by eternalwishess »

Mine was D.Nd: Poisoned from Akane ~~ Never got to finishing it though. I thought it was just a fan game of Death note, but I didn't realize it had yaoi. 0_0
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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#13 Post by redeyesblackpanda »

Hm... I think it was Phoenix Wright (that counts, right?). At that time, I didn't even know about visual novels... I really got into them when I tried the demo for Katawa Shoujo, I think... So excited for January 4th!!!
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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#14 Post by xSamChan »

My first Visual Novel would be "Festival Days" by pacthesis -u-.
I was and still am more into otome games ~~

My first game with Ren'py was RE: Alistair++
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Re: What was the first visual novel you played?

#15 Post by gekiganwing »

Three Sisters Story. I had been an anime-manga fan for a couple years at the time, and I was starting to give adult series a chance. And I finally had a half-decent computer. So I bought it through Animenation. I didn't enjoy the game all that much. Not a fan of the overall revenge theme. I found that using LOOK and TALK commands was wearying. And I was frustrated when I realized that it was necessary to go through a pseudo-justified torture scene in order to get a positive ending. It's been about ten years since my initial playthroughs, and I have revisited the game maybe once since then.

Not too long after that, I bought Season of the Sakura as well as Kana Little Sister. Those two VNs made me a fan.

It was 2005 when I got into my first general-audience VNs. Right when I was starting to worry that there would be no more G-Collections games, I found the first few "Altogether" translated visual novels (from the now-silent insani.org). About the same time, I stumbled across Tales of Lemma and Black Pencil. Ever since then, I've been a fan and an advocate of western visual novels.

My first GxB game experience was Yo-Jin-Bo. Yeah, I was one of the few people who actually bought some Hirameki games when they were still current.

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