What got you into VN?

[Air-Dragon]

This may be a lame or previous answered question but for all VN fans out there how do you come to like/love VN?
For me i started out with dating sims and surfed the web where i found renplay, then i was there for a while and played Tales of Lemma 1 and arrived here on Lemma Soft.
I am a typical game player who loves games with great in-deapth storylines and mature themes, things with content for olderagesjust makes the story alot more interesting.
Well thats my story. Whats yours?

[monele]

I did start with dating sims, then H visual novels and finally found out there *were* non-H VNs and quickly found out about Ren'Py at that time too.

[Ren]

I think I was really young when I read an article about H games on a magazine.They were all really cute and I immediately thought"Awww, who cares if it's porny!".
I never played a visual novel before my brother bought Crescendo(which I played and loved) and then I bought Ever 17 for myself(which I played and worshiped).

I found Renpy through Deviantart because some friends of mine wanted to make a visual novel but they couldn't find anything useful, so I did a research for them and found Naru's(Ciel on here) deviation where she was talking about Renpy and since the forum was such a nice place to hang around in and everyone was so kind and I found out even the most noobish question was answered without anyone mocking someone else I thought it could be interesting to stay around, read tutorials and stuff :3

[Hime]

I kind of found it through anime, because many of the shows that I watched - like To Heart, Tsukihime and AIR - were VN-based, so I kind of got interested in what they're based on. As I've always loved gaming, literature and anime, I fell in love with visual novels as soon as I found out what they were! For a year or so I didn't really find anything to play until I bumped into insani.org's translated doujin games, ending up playing a lot of them. About a year from that I also found Tsukihime's translated version and Lemmasoft, which was a great found for me. Then, half an year from that, I begun making my first VN myself.

[Samu-kun]

Hmm... Well, I've been making games on Game Maker for years now. And then I get really obsessed with anime and one thing led to another and I got into visual novels. I guess the one that really got me hooked on VN was Narcissu. :3 I nearly cried through that game! ^_^;;

[musical74]

Hmmmmmmmm....

I think, for me, it was a couple of things. First off, I'm a gamer and like games that have actual stories behind them. That doesn't fit into dating sims much, but there was a anime-style game from NES days that I thought was interesting and it was funny how events would pan out. You're supposed to rescue a gal at one point but if you take your sweet time about doing so she lets you know I THINK the game was Dragon Power but don't remember

Secondly, I do enjoy dating sims - those that put some thought into it anyway. Games like Season of the Sakura are fun to play, and it's great that there's actual thought behind the dating sim. Granted I probably picked the best example of a date sim for an example, but you get the idea...games where there's more than just *build stats and then everyone will want to be your friend* types.

Combine those two and it led me to search for anime-style games, and in turn that led me to Lemmasoft and some of the best VN freeware games I've seen! <yeah, yeah, I'm biased >

[M12]

Some how I stumbled upon Narcissu. The ending made me teary. Then I checked out Planetarian, and other Insani games. Eventually, I decided to write The Sight of Autumn, and now I have many friends here on lemmasoft =D.

Buddies !

[Vatina]

Hmm I'm not sure I remember anymore. It came slowly along the way, I think.

Maybe my first exposure was in Excel Saga And then Megatokyo.... so my first thoughts were of course - "That's so lame and sick o_O" (sorry!)
Then I read a little more Megatokyo, and saw how the author obsessed with some anime called Air. I watched it and loved it... then I stumbled across a video made with pictures from the game, and went "OMG I gotta play this!!!!!"

Yeah, that's basically it When I later found out how the games actually work, I just got more interested. Stories that you can influence that way just sounded really interesting. (Just like in WC4 That was so fun.)

The first game I bought was Kanon, but I couldn't really play that. So my first real game was Narcissu and then Ever17 I think (not counting translated demo's that I had tried.)

I have no idea how I found Lemmasoft anymore. I had been using RPGmaker for some time, and was playing around with how you could make a vn in it, without being really serious. That must have lead me here somehow.

Edit: No, wait! Now I remember ^^;; I cam here because I was looking for game projects in the need of an artist. Yes, that was all... lol. Of course it only got better when I found out what kind of games you made here.

[Jake]

I was sitting around at home one day after work when a friend from university (Ficedula, who later collaborated on MorningStar) asked if I'd help draw backgrounds for a ren'ai game he and a couple of other guys were making. I asked what the hell a ren'ai game was, then did a few BGs, the character designs were done, the character artist did a few sprites, Fice got an engine mostly working and nobody did any writing at all, so the project died.

Some many years later, I was thinking about comics and the format occurred to me as a relatively low-effort way to tell side-stories or alternate choices for my webcomic, so I looked around for existing engines and rapidly decided that Ren'Py was the best of the bunch, joined the forum here... and a short while later re-structured the story of the webcomic and gave up on the side-story idea anyway.

[chronoluminaire]

It was quite a seedy route in, for me. Five or six years ago I had quite a bit of time on my hands, and was getting bored of flash H games. I found a pirate copy of Three Sisters' Story, and was impressed by the branching novel concept. Then I found a pirate copy of Season of the Sakura, and fell in love.
I played many more H games, noticing that I had a strong preference for the ones which were more story-driven, more romantic, and less mindless sex.
I started making an idle list of things I liked in ren'ai games, or things I'd like to see in a ren'ai game but hadn't. This gradually transformed into plans for a big story-driven dating game of my own, Beautiful Days.

Then I randomly surfed onto http://www.lemmasoft.net, and found Blue Lemma's Game-Making Tips. That was a revelation for me, and directly led to me postponing Beautiful Days to work on Elven Relations. I came to the forums here, got talking to people, and the rest is history

Oh, and I now own legal versions of Season of the Sakura and Three Sisters' Story, as part of the JAST USA Memorial Collection

[mugenjohncel]

- CONTENT NO LONGER RELEVANT -

[Blue123]

For me, just my desire for anything anime! I can't get enough of it, in any shape or form! Which reminds me, I must find a place where I can buy some of The melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in the UK...

[chronoluminaire]

For me, just my desire for anything anime! I can't get enough of it, in any shape or form! Which reminds me, I must find a place where I can buy some of The melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in the UK...

I'm the UK too. http://otaku.co.uk are usually pretty good. Searching their site for "suzumiya" shows that they can order a lot of stuff for you, including the Limited Edition disc 1 box, although they don't have much in stock right now.

[Blue123]

Looks like a good website. Thanks for that.

BTW, what's the difference bewteen their US and UK anime DVDs? Is it to do with the region and whatnot?

[Jake]

This post is totally off-topic now, but still:

http://otaku.co.uk are usually pretty good.

I would have said the same thing, only where you said 'good' I'd have said 'expensive'.

If you must buy R1 discs in this day and age, you're typically better off ordering direct from the US or Canada, particularly where you're looking at a merchant who doesn't keep much in stock in the first place. Go to somewhere like DVD Pacific and you'll typically see a 30% or so reduction from the prices at places like otaku.co.uk. There's a bit more hassle, 'cause you have to wait a little longer to get your DVD and if you order something too expensive you'll have to pay import duty, but it's rare to see a case where the import duty eliminates the saving.

If you want to buy from a UK supplier, I'd usually check United Publications first. They've had a long-standing 30%-off-list-price thanks to the less-than-stellar value of the US dollar, which helps cut their prices below most UK retailers. They're probably smuggling the discs into the country inside huge cartoon foxes, but hey.

Alternately, if you're looking for the disc as cheap as you can legally get it, then Australia is often a surprisingly good option. EzyDVD, once described to me as 'The Amazon of Australia', is at least worth checking out. They don't tend to do so well for larger stuff (like the collectors' boxes with the case and so on) 'cause of the shipping costs, but for single DVDs they're usually very competetive. And Australia typically gets anime before the UK as well, because they actually tried showing it on TV once down there.

Still, UK-based retailers are getting better.

BTW, what's the difference bewteen their US and UK anime DVDs? Is it to do with the region and whatnot?

From a technical point of view, generally speaking yes - it's just the region. DVDs are encoded to only play on a DVD player from the same region as the disc. To my eye, DVD regioning is 99% a price-fixing money-grab by corporate bodies who want all the benefits of globalisation and none of the drawbacks, so personally I have absolutely no problem with downloading DVD drive hacks, DVD-player unlock codes and/or software like VLC which will De-CSS the disc as you play it and allow you to watch DVDs from any region. But some jurisdictions consider it illegal to De-CSS a DVD you legally bought even if you're only doing it in order to play it, and some people might not want the extra effort - so be aware, at least, that while it's far from hard, playing DVDs out-of-region (UK is R2) isn't as straightforward as playing DVDs which are in-region.


However, my thoughts on the moral standing of Universal and co. bear little relation to the anime licensing business, and there are arguably some very good reasons to buy UK versions of anime DVDs.

While Hollywood Explosionfest XII will be distributed by the same studio in the US as in the UK, Japan, Australia and pretty much any other territory, anime is quite often distributed by a company who deals with only one territory. For example, Geneon Entertainment publishes a lot of very good anime, but they simply don't operate in the UK - they pulled out of the UK media market in 2000 or so back when they were called Pioneer Entertainment. Instead, Geneon titles are licensed by some other company - often MVM Entertainment - who distribute Geneon titles solely to the UK. Why does this matter to you? Well, because if everyone in the UK buys R1 DVDs their money is going to Geneon, not MVM. Thus, the sales are counted as US sales, not UK sales (regardless of where you bought it); this validates Geneon's decision to not sell to the UK, and it means MVM find it harder to survive because people are buying US discs instead of the ones they've worked hard to bring to the UK. And it's not just MVM - ADV UK is a separate business unit to ADV US, Manga Entertainment UK is a separate unit to Manga US, and so on. The UK often gets releases later than the US does, sometimes doesn't get titles at all which are published in the US, and part of this is that these UK-specific companies have their sales cannibalised by people importing US discs.

(This, incidentally, is exactly the excuse that the media companies came up with for implementing the regioning system in the first place, and about the only place I can think of where it's justified. MVM paid good hard money for the exclusive rights to sell particular anime to the UK audience, it's unfair on them to buy from somewhere else.)

So, seriously, I would counsel buying the R2 releases when you can. There's usually not much difference in the content, if any, but you'll be supporting the drive to bring anime to the UK rather than forcing everyone to get their stuff from the US, and help keep UK anime companies from going bust, which is far more likely than you might think. You may have to wait a little longer for the release, but the more people buy stuff in the UK and the less that wait will be.

The other thing to bear in mind is that because the UK is a different market, we actually sometimes get better deals on things than our American cousins, making it worth the wait. For example, I can buy the entire second series of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig from Amazon for £25 ($50) - if I bought from Amazon.com, it costs $65.