An update on BCM and a first look at Swan Grimoire, our upcoming otome game!
You know something, I wish I could start this article positively but seriously: screw Webs in their collective rectums. You ask for something simple from them: SIMPLE. And if it’s anything other than full tongue ass-kissing, the way they like then suddenly they go into fifteen year old girl mode at the end of a breakup. Before the New Year it was trying to take control of my analytical service (which they wouldn’t let me do so I had to cancel it) NOW it’s switching over my domain name to Weebly (which, I guess, is also suddenly impossible).
This is how they treat a long time consumer of their product? Fine: DO NOT use Webs Premium Service if you expect to be treated as anything other than an annoyance. The minute they give me the domain name (and they will…they will) I never even want to hear about Webs again. And now I’m done bitching, but the reason that happened is because this was supposed to be the first feature on the new site but with the domain name stick ups that clearly has not happened.
Oh well, moving forward.
2012 was an amazing year for the OELVN world, with massive steps taken to forward the genre as a whole. But, as all good things tend to do, it has come to an end. And with 2012 in the history books, what do we all have to look forward to in the coming year? That is what this little feature is all about!
Now, let me be absolutely clear before we get started. This isn’t a ‘people’s choice’ listing that polls the entire EVN community to find out a general consensus of what everyone is looking forward to. This is a personal list: it’s what I’m looking forward to. If there is an EVN under development that you don’t see here there are most likely multiple reasons why it’s not. The top two reasons are more than likely A) I am not aware of the visual novel you’re talking about, so it didn’t make the list. Or B) I AM aware of the visual novel you’re talking about, but I’m not looking forward to it with the same amount of hype as you.
Please keep these things in mind as I consider the five EVNs I’m anticipating the most in 2013 by first breaking my own rules.
If BCM doesn’t come out this year, I will seriously eat my hat. ^^;;
Ah NaNoRenO…how I failed the crap outta you.
Okay some of you may not be completely acquainted with what happened so I’ll give you the abridged version. NaNoRenO is the EVN equivalent to National Novel Writing Month or whatever the abbreviation means. EVN writers have one month to produce a full visual novels: no small feat. To celebrate this, I planned to release a video series on all of the completed projects…then I played all of the completed projects. While I have a lot of respect for the people who write or draw EVNs, a month is an incredibly short time to do anything completely well: least of all what is technically a video game.
So, after a few weeks of recording and playing back my work, I realized that I sounded like a world-class jerk on some of them. Because I actually do want people to get something more from this idea of mine and believe it or not I’m not a pompous twit 14/7*, I went back to the drawing board. I figured instead of talking about them all, I could talk about a handful of the ones I felt stood out while mentioning the positives of as many as I felt were appropriate. Along the way, it was pointed out by a friend that if I did that, the one’s that stood out might get a raw deal from others who didn’t know why I gave so little attention to their work. By the way, if she’s reading this, thanks a lot for that realization…really.
When June hit and I had no video, I figured, screw it. It was too late to do anything timely and instead I’ll just do a few reviews for again the ones that I felt stood out and that way, while I liked them all in their own way, not doing average or possibly even negative reviews would be better than not talking about them on a video dedicated to NaNoRenO. That was around the same time my website started giving me crap so again it was put on the backburner until the issue could be resolved.
However, at the end of the day what is important to me is that this period of time passed and I never gave their developers their due. It goes against everything I am and so in the past week I replayed those titles in order to give you as good of a take on why they stood out to me three months ago as I can. While it’s too late to do what I wanted, I can still do what I should’ve done from the beginning: a full and proper review. With all of that said, let’s dig into the first of the NaNoRenO projects I absolutely loved - Cyanide Tea’s Ristorante Amore.
This review made me laugh so hard, haha. His hatred towards Liam is just hilarious somehow because Liam really is a SPOILER SPOILER manipulative little snot. |D I’m a bit worried now because (post-prologue) Liam’s the type of character that I like to write the most…
The line about RisAmo being our black sheep because “no one dies” also made smile. I suppose it really will be a while before we have another game like this… Even the (actual) otome game we have planned for 2013 sometime is a dark fantasy (hint: don’t get too attached to the characters).
I do think that the post-prologue was about as corny and predictable as the prologue, but that was actually done on purpose. Some people seem to think that Auro and I hate otome games and that’s why we made this game the way we did, but that wasn’t really the point. Ultimately (in most all of the routes) Josh comes to the realization that people enjoy otoge for the fantasy/escapism aspect and that sometimes even in real life it’s better to be honest with your feelings, even if it makes you look lame and cheesy. I purposely wrote a lot of parallels into the post-prologue (such as Ethan getting sick in both his routes) and overall the whole story was pretty fluffy.
If I could go back and triple the amount of time I had to work on the script, I would have done a lot of things differently. I’m sure Auro would have done some of the art differently, too, and there are things she’d like to fix even now. Me too, of course—I cringe when I re-read certain parts of the story now. But in the end, finishing RisAmo was a great learning experience for both of us. For example, I realized that I can write 61,000 words in 30 days if I really put my mind to it and forego sleep for the month. 8Db We’re glad that as many people enjoyed RisAmo as they did. And even for the people who didn’t like the game (there are plenty), we’re honored that they took the time to give it a try. We toyed with the idea of a sequel or a ~revamped version 2~ but ultimately decided to move on. We both still miss the characters, though, so I guess you can’t completely rule out the possibility.
This game surely is different from what Cyanide Tea will be cranking out for a while—in many ways. I worked on the characters and story for Break Chance Memento for almost a whole year before even thinking about turning it into a visual novel, so I’m hoping that the plot and various character arcs aren’t nearly as predictable. BCM is also much longer and the themes and genre are different. Still, we hope everyone can look forward to our future works, too. /o/ We’ll be sticking around for a while, so do watch our progress. :D Thanks for playing and reviewing RisAmo! I have a lot of new things to think about now thanks to this review (I thrive on constructive criticism) and hope to apply myself even more to working on BCM in the coming weeks and months. /o/
As I work towards completing my own game, I’ve been thinking a lot about finishing projects in general. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of really talented developers out there that have trouble finishing games. Truthfully, I’ve left a long trail of unfinished games in my wake… I think everyone has. Not every project is going to pan out, for whatever reason. But if you find yourself consistently backing out of game projects that have a lot of potential, it could be worth taking a step back and examining why this happens.
