I'm back. I have always actually been here lurking but been unable to write any sort of update about my backlog—especially when there was almost to none!
I had a come-to-Jesus realization and have been too disheartened about the (lack of) quality of most vns on Steam (come on, let's be real, the majority of it is shovelware for achievements or crappy amateur first-time projects on renpy). I finally was able to put two and two together and accept that I am the only one who curates my library and the media I consume. If I activated crappy vns I knew I wouldn't enjoy from cheap bundles in the past just to have a +1 then it's my fault. I'm not going to go back to how I was ('gotta read EVERYTHING!!') and maybe that means I'll never complete my backlog, but that's okay. I'll have to change my profile description here.
More on my thoughts on this and also on Steam behaving badly towards vns can be found in this post. Can I manage to go back to my reviews after all this? We'll see!
PS: I changed my Steam username to Morgana, but I am using here my Steamgifts name which is currently GiseIIe (Gise capital i capital i e lmao) just to let people know in case they type giselle somewhere and can't find me anymore.
We're lucky to live in a world where Hatoful Boyfriend exists, but if that doesn't satisfy your daily dose of birds visual novels, then Aviary Attorney comes to your rescue.
This is the game whose developers have been lost in the woods and never to be heard of again. Such a shame! When it was released, this vn was incomplete and missing one of its three endings and what's worse, the game wasn't tagged as early-access—causing customers to be rightfully upset. That's actually the reason I didn't buy it at launch. That ending was luckily added later, but developers had also promised a bonus episode to their Kickstarter backers which never came. I have been unable to contact these people anywhere in the past years, they don't even seem to reply to press requests! Goodbye Sketchy Logic devs, your career was very short-lived but promising.
The art for this game is actually by 19th century French caricaturist J.J. Grandville and music is by composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Reusing this stuff worked better than I thought and I did enjoy playing this, although not being able to have normal save slots was upsetting to me. Also, despite liking the art a lot, I had major issues with it while playing because there was too much whitish (yellow for me—I use color-temperature adjustment software) which I find too blinding to have to look on a monitor for long period of times. I think that maybe a reddish hue would have helped more, but I have no idea and don't want to try this, because guess what? It's not my job to come out with ideas to fix this.
Description
The year is 1848. Paris is on the brink of yet another revolution, and the prisons are overflowing with guilty and innocent alike. One bird stands for justice amid society's chaos.
Play the role of Monsieur Jayjay Falcon, a bird of prey with a good heart and questionable lawyering expertise. Join him and his witty apprentice, Sparrowson, as the two take on clients, interview witnesses, collect evidence, and deliver justice to the guilty.
Screenshots
I noticed the change of name and was all: WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT? Next thing… you changed your ava and I was even more: WHHHHAAAAAAAATTTT? ;)
I still know it’s you though, so I’m happy, GiseIIe with to ii =) <3
On that note: I. Abandoned. A. VN. \o/
Not even knowing about this going on for you, I literally did that just this week. And I’m proud of myself.
Not so happy about giving up with one route in one Winter Wolves game, but… yeah, I did that too :]
So let’s try and only read, what we enjoy! And even more do it! Don’t let steam or what ever platform tell us what we may or may not read, bc of morally stuff ;)
Hope you’ll have an awesome time with good VNs <3
Hope to see you around a bit more again too <3
yeah……. winterwolves practically means grinding to me now… but I gotta complete again Loren cause I love that one!!!
Yeah, sadly that seems to be true. But I still love them :)
Also yes, Loren was great, although I’m not so much for the fighting system. But then again I also played Stronghold and want to play the second, sooooo I shouldn’t complain :D
I’ve personally done the same thing as you in the past, activated whatever bundle games I had just to add in my collection, not thinking if I’d ever even want to play them. I took a more extreme measure of removing a bunch of games from my library (although I later learned that still doesn’t remove any license from your account, they’re still recoverable). Also, I wouldn’t say you aren’t able to “complete your backlog”; In a way, if you finish sorting out the “crap” you don’t want to play and end up finishing the ones worth playing, I’d say your backlog would be completed at that point?
Those screenshots from Aviary Attorney are chilling. They’ve even got the detail about the construction work correct. D:
it’s true that deleted games are recoverable, but you gotta remember which one you had!! there’s not a list of games you remove so let’s pretend they’re lost into forgetfulness
But… I actually made such a list of removed games, in a txt file. :I It’s haunting me somewhere in the unorganized maze of folders in my PC.
Here’s how my process went:
- Made a BLAEO list of removed games to consider
- Reviewed the list some time later, dropped games from the list if I had any second thought of removing them
- Copied the list to a back-up, then nuked the games from library
I think I deleted about 70 games, something like that. Haven’t had any regret on doing so, I especially won’t miss games like Goocubelets that actually managed to expand into FOUR games, like some sort of wacky self-duplicating digital organism.
I’m trying to take your opinion on Steam VNs seriously, but… I mean, I understand limiting yourself to spending time on things you know you’re gonna enjoy, but like… you’ve got less VNs in your library than I do. And how can you judge things before trying them out? I take it you are informed enough to know what not to go for (shitty practices from companies like SakuraGame or MoeNovel), but then again, you can’t assume the quality of everything you see at first glance. Bad is bad, I’m not going to argue about that, but I respect devs who might not find it easy to spend just to get their game(s) on Steam.
edit: oh god this is a longer post than I wanted to write, sorry :(
I don’t understand your sentence about the number of vns. My whole post and new change of heart can be summarised with ‘quality over quantity’.
Anyway, my list here on BLAEO is not up to date or accurate anymore thanks to the new privacy settings. Obviously there’s tons of other stuff outside of steam that I used to put on hold with the plan to finish my steam backlog first (that was not a good idea).
In the past I used to gladly take any vn that was launched at me: if there was something I wanted in a bundle, I would have nevertheless activated all the titles; if I stumbled upon a free vn on steam, I would have mindlessly added it to my account.
I did not do any kind of quality control and found myself with dozens and dozens of unenjoyable stuff, just for the sake of a +1 on my vndb account (which by the way has alway been private, so it’s not like there was anyone I wanted to impress in the first place).
I found myself playing from start to finish stuff which I rated 1 out of 10 without dropping it and for whose sake? What’s the point in that? Why must my vndb account have a string of 1-rated titles just to make my game count rise? That does not make sense.
You say I should not judge things before trying them and that’s what I’ve been thinking too for the past decade, but guess what? There are vns that seem to be good, vns that could be good or bad, and then there’s a whole new level of bad you just know it’s bad and this is the stuff one can easily sort out thanks to reviews, earlier dev works, or presentation.
For example, I have started noticing that certain developers make all their games in a certain way, always using the same themes, and should I really bother with their newer titles if I haven’t enjoyed their works up until now? It does not make sense for me to want to play all games of a certain dev if there’s none I ended up liking.
but I respect devs who might not find it easy to spend just to get their game(s) on Steam.
I can’t magically respect the work of certain devs just because they have spent money to publish their games on Steam. (Steam is no more synonym for quality, certainly not for most indie vns. I can find better stuff on lemmasoft forums.)
Actually, as a paying customer, I feel myself insulted by the fact that I pay to receive a product so unpolished that you can clearly see the creator did not bother to start their game not even once to check whether all was okay (see this or this). The lack of caring is obvious.
A fifteen-year-old by its own with no previous experience in Python can manage to deliver a first-time renpy project with no such issues.
I wrote that sentence cause I just thought “hey, you’ve got much less VNs than me and you’ve read most of them already anyway, what up with that?”
It just seems we’re polar opposites, really. I’d rather experience some meh or just plain bad stuff, I suppose - my list is more balanced that way… ? (as in, the ratings on my VNDB profile [not that they probably concern anyone except me, lol] are evened out, as compared to my MAL profile, which, in the past has suffered from a way-too-high count of good marks) I mean, I regret playing off-Steam stuff that was just plain bad (as if I didn’t know better, especially when good localizations of even better VNs are coming out month by month), but as long as I get something on Steam, I aim to play it as leaving it be feels like I’m just throwing away money. That’s why I’m probably struggling to understand why you hadn’t come to this realization sooner - you “wasted” money yourself and that’s just bad :/
I didn’t mean to say Steam = quality, I rather meant that it’s not easy to pay up for getting your game published - maybe it’s just me, but I probably wouldn’t find it easy to spend $100 or however more Steam wants for publishing your game, especially if I didn’t spend anything on making the game in the first place.
But who knows, I’m just somewhat of a VN freak, who, from your standpoint, might still be waiting for the same epiphany to come - personally, I just wanna check out as much stuff as I can, low- or high-tier. But for now I’d rather focus on Steam, as, if I went around digging on itch.io or LemmaSoft, I’d find way too many titles I’d want to check out and I would have to sell my soul to my computer or something to get through it all. Seriously, you can check out my VNDB profile and wonder when the hell I’m gonna get to X - the answer might be never. Whatever your opinion on VNs, however, you did conquer more of your backlog (and therefore, read more VNs) than me so far, so kudos for that.
personally, I just wanna check out as much stuff as I can, low- or high-tier.
I understand you very well. Up until some time ago I used to be “I need to read 50 books for my goodreads yearly challenge” and then at the end of the year you’d find that many of the ‘books’ I read were freebies whose quality was on the same level of buzzfeed articles. I read those freebies only because they were free and I was somehow scared I’d run out of free reading materials. Same thing for advanced reader copies. That wasn’t very rational of me. Like, did I forget about the existence of libraries or public domain ebooks?
I was applying the same reasoning to visual novels: I was thouroughly reading each one of them I owned, free or paid, no matter how boring or bad I found them, because I was somehow scared that in the end I’d run out of good stuff to read! So, screw the bad stuff, let’s directly jump to the dessert. Life is short, the worst thing that could happen to me right now would be to die without having read stuff I’ve been wanting to read since f o r e v e r but never did!
It’s still weird how much of an epiphany this is and how much positive feedback you’re getting, cause at the end of the day… it’s not that hard to just say “no”, it’s just that not many actually wanna do it, I suppose?
mmm in the past before this I managed to stop caring about steam achievements stats (another time sink). There were lots of people who cared about it immensely, to the point of not activating certain games on their main account to not ruin their completion stats (there may be some that still do). Luckily, things are getting better and it’s always nice to see someone say “fuck it, i don’t want to spend 50 hours of my time grinding to get the last achievement”.
I am finally applying this reasoning to vns too, I was known here to be very stubborn about not skipping stuff (“Every time someone skips through visual novels for achievements, a kitten sheds a tear.”) LMAO this is a legit quote from my account so yeah, after years in this community, this comes as a big change for me ;D
Personally, I mostly don’t play complicated games anyway; the stuff I “won’t play” is either freebies or stuff that only revealed itself when I redeemed the code - tough, but they’re there and they mess with my completion indeed :/
Also, I mean… the one thing about reading VNs is not skipping them. They’re already a niche and underdeveloped genre because so many people don’t see the point in them (and don’t want to see it, apparently), therefore skipping VNs for achievements if those are available. Same with the discussion of how much one has read - if one read half the VN diligently and skipped the other half or only read one, maybe two character routes and decided to stop there, I don’t think they have the right to say they completed it. If anything, at least their incomplete progress should be noted somewhere. Ugh, I care about this genre way too much :<
To quote Blind Guardian’s Miracle Machine song:
Their fire must grow
They have to feed it
I’ve come to terms with the fact my backlog always grows and I just nip it here and there. There simply isn’t enough time and too many good deals abound.
Hey I appreciate brutal honesty about games, and although I’m not at all a VN connoisseur (that is genre I’ve actively been trying to play + learn about recently) I absolutely +1 your attitude of “life is too short to spend not having fun.” Rock on and I hope you find more treasures out of the trash heap!
GISELLE!!!! GISELLE!!!!
edit: OOPS IT’S TEENY NOW
I’ve waited eagerly for your official return debut. Your post is as stylish as ever, and I always adore the meta-knowledge of the VN industry you bring into your reviews. I never realized the people who made Aviary Attorney just up and vanished. That blows. Reading about Notre Dame burning in a game that came out a while ago after this week is something I find bonechilling, too.
I wish you tons of luck and love and joy in viciously excising shitty VNs from your library, never to be read or +1’d again. I think I’m going to do the same
I clicked on my unread messages notification and a huge-ass creepy yakuza 0 image appeared, thanks i hate it, now i’m gonna have nightmares :D
yeah i’m just gonna focus on good stuff. UNFORTUNATELY i completed most of those shitty ones last year before my change of heart :( so much good time wasted
Hahahaha, oh no! I didn’t mean for it to come off as creepy! I gotta have more appropriately-sized reaction images for forum use… forgive meeeeeeeee
but hey! You’re still young! You’ll have so much more good time ahead
no, wait!! huge-ass was okay and more impactful, put it back!!! ;D
AHHHH I RESIZED IT AND SAVED OVER IT BC I WAS SO ASHAMED AT STARTLING YOU SO
LOOK AT THIS!! FINALLY THE WEBSITE WAIFU2X TO ENLARGE ANIME STUFF WAS USEFUL TO ME AT LAST
You are an incredible joy, this comment string went full 360 degree majima and I for one love it