Will Jack The Ripper sempai notice me?

Not into the whole visual novels thing, but nice to see a developer take the time to optimize the GOG version with achievements.

Is this anything like Phoenix Wright? I liked those games a lot.

Serious question time: If this is set in Victorian England, why do all the main characters look like J-Pop Singers?

same here .... i have one visual novel :project pastorate (Steam) its a nice one and < 29.99 euro

29.99 euro for a Visual Novel


i Googled the req.
somethin is "wrong"


says 1.80 ghz (mobile?)

BUT its a PC cpu @ 4ghz

quite confusing :D
anyway check the link and read the info

Thanks for the release! XSEED is awesome for always giving us feature parity. <3
[[edit: the base game also comes with an artbook! That hasn't been mentioned anywhere here. :s You will have to install the game to gain access to it though]]
It's also really nice to have something on here that isn't just girl x girl, so bonus points for that too! I look forward to picking this up soon.

For those complaining about cost of VNs, this might be of interest to you:
https://noisypixel.net/western-visual-novel-piracy-hurting-industry/
TL;DR - for every 1 sale, 5 people pirate VNs.

It wouldn't surprise me if their high cost is a big factor in this. But given how much it costs the Western companies to translate and publish them, on top of how costly it is for the original devs to produce them in the first place, I'm not really sure anyone has the one right answer to solving this issue.

Crunching numbers about what "is" and "isn't" worth the cost tends to be really subjective, anyway. Lumping VNs in with games certainly doesn't help either, because as games they.. well.. suck (their strength doesn't lie in gameplay but immersion and storytelling). And as books they are completely different (and imho justify the higher price: illustration, music, voice acting, generally far longer "playtime" than games and anime, sometimes branching plots/multiple routes).

I will say, their specs usually are hot garbage. You can blame that on inefficient engines that hinge on poorly optimised assets (a full sprite for every changing expression! Why?!).

That seems wrong, all right. A visual novel doesn't require a core i7 processor as "minimum requirement". Those games(?) typically run on, well... just about anything. Even games as complex as Witcher 3 run fine on slower processors. Looks like someone goofed up, or they simply didn't test it on a slower processor?

I was just about to say that. People are much more likely to pirate software if they feel the price is unjustified, or simply too high for them to afford a purchase. Are they that costly to produce and translate, though? In terms of complexity and required assets they're generally among the most minimalistic game genres. And ~30 Euro is the price you pay for many new AA or even AAA games, with much greater production values and complexity. My guess would be, the reason for the high price is the niché audience they're producing these games for. Fairly high production costs + small but loyal customer base = higher price point per unit. Either that, or visual novel publishers/ devs simply add an "erotica tax", since many games in the genre do have erotic themes. And for whatever reason porn is more expensive than regular entertainment ( when people pay for it, that is ).

High price? Damn, I'm paying like 8500+ Yen for a new VN. 30€ is incredibly cheap in comparison.

I would straight out buy MANY more VNs, if they would be released here and WITHOUT DRM.

As long as many of the good VNs are locked behind DRM walls I am not interrested in buying them.

So I hope GOG starts to increase the number of releases here, so at least a few number of additional sales are generated.

...So I looked at their output.

> “Onii-chan, let’s kiss a whole lot today, okay?”
> I was still a child when I noticed something was off about our house rules.
> Perhaps thanks to the influence of our mother, the kiss demon, my four sisters and I would take pretty much any excuse we could to share a kiss.
> Good morning kisses, goodnight kisses, and of course, kisses before picking up a call or going to the bathroom.
> Since they were all girls and I was the only man in the house, the rules said they had to kiss me.

Yeah, I'm going to file this under "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". People, as a rule, don't pay for porn, and indeed feel it's unseemly to pay for porn. Camwhore bathwater is a niche product for whales.

--------------
Now for the release in the OP: This isn't actually a plus, it means the name can't be voice-acted, so any time anyone addresses the protagonist, they're going to do it in an extra-obnoxious way ("m'lady").

Maybe its because i am a 'classic' gamer, afteral i started with a c64 and played some LCD games before that ( clock and watch things), pretty ugly if i look back but they were fun to play when i was a kid :D.

Lateron i started to play ATARI 2600 ( also crap compared to what we have now, but that was then and this is now and games are much better ( well some of them) then the old 'crappy' games we had before the PC games like jagged alliance came out ( my alltime favorite, no VN can compare itself with the good old games)

Anyway i know you cant compare apples and oranges but somehow i feel "cheated" when VN are so expensive compared to other games that are more fun to play imho, that is the real games , a VN can be fun but not at 30 euros dollars or thousands of other coins ( other currency), and there are so many VN already ..... like i mentioned earlier i have one nice VN , and maybe it can't be compared with expensive VN but i like the game.

I think the other BIG factor is that the western audience simply got used to pirating VNs, since for the longest time very few of them were officially translated and released in the west. That meant most translations were done as a labour of love by fans, and piracy was pretty much the only way to get these translated VNs. I mean I suppose they could've made patches and tell people to buy the original release from Japan, but that was and still is a pain in the ass because the Japanese shops often deal with national customers & local shipping only (and don't have a storefront in English).. so ordering a VN from Japan only to install a fan patch on top of it is something very very few people would've done.

Once mostly everyone got used to getting their VNs for free, translated by caring fans, it's no big surprise that most of these people did not all of a sudden feel compelled to start paying the high asking price for official translations.

I don't know what the situation was with VNs (I did not read them back in the day), but with anime it was also true that fan translations were very quick to be released (a translated anime episode could be released within a day since airing, and within a week or three if you waited for the groups that do a prettier job). By contrast, for an official western translation & release, you might have had to wait a very long time.. and you had no way of knowing whether it'd ever come. Just as we don't know whether a particular game will ever be released here on GOG. For fans, any such title was essentially abandonware in the west since Japan didn't care and no official release in the west was confirmed.

Add insult to the injury, many of these official translations were actually pretty bad or mediocre as compared to the translations made by loving fans. So again, it's no surprise that anime fans got used to just pirating their shows.

Do you feel the same way about books? On amazon.com, The Hobbit + LoTR kindle edition is 40 USD, hardcover set is 70 USD, paperback can be had for 24 USD currently.

So that's it for a very popular book.. one that did not need to be translated! Given these prices, it does not really surprise me that a (by comparison, very niche) VN with scripting, music, sprites, backgrounds, translation, maybe voice acting, etcetra.. cost at least as much. If anything, it kinda surprises me. And then I'm not really surprised that these shops find it difficult to turn a profit.