New VN recommendation site launched

[BunnyAdvocate]

Our new VN recommendation site just went live! It's more geared towards helping those relatively new to the medium, so the regulars here might not find it terribly useful, but hopefully you might get some use of it. It's at least prettier than VNDB if nothing else.

Thank you to everyone who voted in our sorter quiz and submitted VNs to add to it! You ensured that lots of fantastic EVNs made it to the top of the suggestions~

[Preseva]

I am picky about what qualities I want in a VN, so I've been waiting for this and am excited it's here! I've already found some intriguing games. Do you think in the future you will expand it with more criteria? I like the LGBT+ tag and would be interested in having that broken down further into specific categories of L / G / B / T / Q/ etc.

[sasquatchii]

This is absolutely AMAZING!!! Thank you so much for creating something like this. After going through the quiz, some of my all time *favorite* VNs popped up, along with quite a few that look very cool which I'm super excited to try out.

Awesome work!

[Zelan]

Awesome job on this! The finished site looks great. I think the quiz is pretty accurate considering the first game it recommended to me was A Foretold Affair (which I love).

[LateWhiteRabbit]

Nice. It is definitely much better than VNDB. Maybe I'm out of the loop or missing something obvious, but where did the name Fuwanovel come from?

I also really appreciate the option to specify whether the VN is HD or not in the quiz. That's awesome. I can't tell you the times I've been excited to find a VN only for it to be an older Japanese title that has the resolution of a postage stamp, and me having to decide whether to squint to see anything, or blow it up fullscreen and try and live with the Vaseline effect. Or not play it. (I usually don't play it.)

And apparently I dislike the most popular VN of all time ... I knew I was in the minority on Steins;Gate - I just didn't know HOW far in the minority. Oh, well. I could write an essay on why I think Steins;Gate could be brilliant, but misses the mark in execution.

[BunnyAdvocate]

Thanks for the kind words everyone! It was quite a lot of work to get this done so it means a lot to see that it's been enjoyed.

Do you think in the future you will expand it with more criteria? I like the LGBT+ tag and would be interested in having that broken down further into specific categories of L / G / B / T / Q/ etc.

There's a girls' love and boys' love genre which kind of covers L and G, although only in regards to romance VNs. That doesn't cover if there's just an LGBT person in main characters etc. A more specific breakdown could be really good, although I'm not sure if there would be that many results yet unfortunately for some of them. But with us adding more VNs to it every month, and more LGBT+ VNs being released every month (yay yaoi game jam), that'll change. So I'll note down the idea as a future feature to look at. Thanks for the suggestion!

Nice. It is definitely much better than VNDB. Maybe I'm out of the loop or missing something obvious, but where did the name Fuwanovel come from?

The Fuwanovel name just came from the forum where Palas posted about the possibility of making a VN recommendation chart. Also Emi, the person who so kindly agreed to host the site and did a lot of the visual design, is one of the main designers behind Fuwanovel. In hindsight, perhaps it might have been better to brand it something unique.

I'm glad the HD feature works well for you! It astonishes me for how long Japanese devs were releasing tiny 640x480 or 800x600 resolution games. There might be a couple of mistakes with it, in regards to those VNs with HD re-releases like Devil on a G-string, but we'll try to fix any mistakes we find as we go.

As for S;G, yeah, I'm a fan but I certainly thing there were a lot of missed opportunities to really do something more interesting. Plus there's the annoyingly problematic "but he's a girl" thing too.

[BunnyAdvocate]

I just wanted to give a little update that we've added content warning filter options to the quiz along with several other little tweaks and additions (like mac and linux platform options). We're planning to start adding new VNs to the list in batches each month, so if there any suggestions for additional VNs to add then please get in touch~