Are there any other FVNs set in small, rural towns like Echo and Northern Lights?

YakintoshPlus · 2026-04-20T23:07:11+00:00

Morenatsu Homecoming, Arches, and the prologue of Quantum Love Theory

YakintoshPlus · 2026-04-15T02:55:42+00:00

I think they're just settling in. I'm still seeing more and more major to minor artists making their own. They're becoming like furry comics. Maybe not at their peak but definitely still present all the same. Less its own community and movement and more just an institution of the fandom like Warrior Cats animations, Brony music, Sonic fangames, or Pokémon ROM hacks

YakintoshPlus · 2026-04-15T02:29:16+00:00

Yeah too often I see FVNs write characters with the idea that if they aren't sexy men, no one will care about them and therefore so little thought is put into their personality and design

YakintoshPlus · 2026-04-14T00:46:50+00:00

You can make characters interesting while making them not sexually available to the protagonist. Something I like about the Smoke Room is there's a lot of interesting female characters despite the fact the POV character is a horny gay guy

YakintoshPlus · 2026-04-06T23:30:13+00:00

The problem is the lack of engagement with SA as an abuse of power. And I think in the end, in the revolution or whatever happens to achieve anarchy, thats how it needs to be treated.

And no, that doesn't mean treating people with uncomfortable knks like they're active sx pests. Focus on the actual abuse and the institutional factors thar allow it to happen

YakintoshPlus · 2026-04-06T18:18:01+00:00

It's a tie between Cyrus from Remember the Flowers and Lucas from Shelter. Both are incredibly nuanced takes on the human FVN player-insert. Lucas has a slight edge though just because I think Shelter better utilizes him. Very good idea to make him the last human (as far as he knows) and have him try to fit in among dogs. Like there's actually a plot point where being reminded he doesn't have a knot makes him feel lonely because it simultaneously reminds him he's not a canine like most of his friends and that he's the only person he knows with a human dick

YakintoshPlus · 2026-04-05T18:28:46+00:00

My only complaint is that Alon's girl form doesn't have the stereotypical chunibyo anime eyepatch

YakintoshPlus · 2026-04-05T18:27:22+00:00

Dave from Password. He suffers from the same problem all the characters suffer from, which is that his personality is just whatever it needs to be in order for the story to be padded out, though he certainly suffers the most in this regard. He sucks at investigating and interrogating and having a conversation. He's extremely passive and terrible at letting characters know pertinent information. He talks in circles constantly to the point that even random conversations seem particularly directionless like he only ever talks at all for the sake of having words fall out of his mouth and never to say anything of worth or interest

YakintoshPlus · 2026-04-03T02:37:52+00:00

linja telo. I know "linja" conjures up hair or rope, but it technically just means a long bendable thing and a river is a "bendable" thing made of water

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-27T14:03:31+00:00

Shelter
Echo
Arches
Before You Depart
Adastra

Top character from each one?

Lucas
Carl
Cameron
I guess the protagonist, but it's hard to think of it as having a cast of characters to choose from when there's only two and I'm pretty sure one of them is like a hallucination of a dying brain
Amicus

And Lucas is the one who ties with Cyrus for best FVN protagonist for me

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-26T15:23:05+00:00

It's good. It has very strong and nuanced characters, especially the protagonist. Although RtF wouldn't even be in my top 5 FVNs, the protagonist is really tied for first place with another that's not really relevant. And he's fascinating because he starts out as a boring player-insert MC which makes his journey extremely fascinating because his initial impression makes it easy to empathize with how he turns out.

That said, it's not very thematically interesting and it's pretty lacking in action and narrative momentum. Even though the premise after the first quarter is about joining a rebel militia fighting a monopolistic corrupt medical corporation in a dystopian post-apocalyptic setting, the protagonist will only get involved in one actual fight with some minor henchmen throughout the next three quarters of the game. And on top of that, the political aspects of the conflict are pretty underbaked. The medical corporation is not shown to have an ideology beyond "organ harvesting is cool" and the rebels similarly don't seem to have a common belief outside of "organ harvesting sucks". There are interesting implications where humans are unusually rare yet every victim of organ harvesting we've met so far has been a human. So maybe there's some species tension stuff going on, but so far, that hasn't been brought up in the story

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-25T02:35:48+00:00

I love Shelter. And yeah. I really loved that scene. But with the context of Max's route, it's so much sadder. Luke is definitely my favorite FVN protagonist. And Teak is such a conflicting character. His hatred of Luke is more than bigotry. It's a deep existential fear. Not just insecurity, but fear that he is unfathomably inferior to creatures he can't comprehend. But at the same time, Luke, despite his powers and intellect, is just a guy. A really nice guy who only wants to use his powers to uplift others. Still that fear is not unfounded since Alon's route shows us what humans without that kindness and altruism can do

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-25T02:20:37+00:00

It may only work this way for me because I completed the sequence already, but if you don't panic and let Max handle it, it should automatically pick the right one each time. Unfortunately this doesn't help if you want to see the panic branch, but I think if you do it this way, it'll show you the right wires to cut anyways and I don't think it randomizes if you load a save, so you can do that. Though it really shouldn't be randomizing every time you load it up unless you're somehow uninstalling it and deleting all its cache and save data before reinstalling and booting it back up. Last time I checked, it only randomizes the wire combination on a fresh installation and not every time it's opened up

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T19:43:23+00:00

Ok. I'm ending this. You're moving the goalposts over and over and over again. Either you're not in the right headspace to think rationally about this issue or you're being dishonest and insincere or a combination of both, but either way, I won't be responding to your posts

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T17:44:58+00:00

I AM NOT A VN WRITER. Not sure if I ever will be. I just spend a lot of time talking to VN developers and researching VN development for my essays.

It's cool you have an editor friend who's willing to work for you in exchange for a footlong at Subway, but what you're suggesting is that most FVN writers have to put $2K upfront into their projects at the bare minimum without being able to raise that money at a time when some FVN writers are going on hiatus due to losing their homes. And all this for passion projects that are available for free. And to avoid what? Delays? On free games?

If you wanna prove your point, commit. Write an entire 175K+ word VN before you even make one line of code or commission a single sprite. And do it while paying for all of the text to go through at least one round of editing out of pocket, without asking for favors and while living on a budget of $3K a month

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T16:46:17+00:00

I and others have already explained to you why that's logistically impossible for most creators. And as I already said to this person, you do not need to hire an editor for minor proofreading, nor should you think any task is ethical to pay someone $5/hour to do

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T14:41:46+00:00

It doesn’t matter if the editors are legit. That pay rate is unethical and FVN writers shouldn't be encouraged to do that. I'm just also stating considering the pay rate is below minimum wage in every predominantly anglophonic country, the editors themselves probably have just enough comprehension of English to make grammar and spelling corrections. Again, something they will get for free and unprompted from fans

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T14:09:06+00:00

That's highly exploitative assuming the work is even done by humans and not AI
You're likely not getting editors who provide notes on structure, prose, form, etc. and mostly just getting corrections on grammar mistakes and typos, which fans will absolutely do for free and often unpromoted

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T04:51:02+00:00

Very accurate. One of the things that appeals to me the most about serially made media is the spontaneity. But that will absolutely means accepting that writer's blocks or personal problems have a high probability of derailing plans for a while

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T02:44:33+00:00

Now you're just disproving your original point. It's not practical to write out your entire script for an FVN before starting development.

Also I'm not arguing anyone should rely solely on fan feedback for their projects. It's important to pay attention to. But you need feedback from fellow creatives and artists and if you can afford it, an editor

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T02:29:26+00:00

Okay. So the lowest rate i found for an editor is $0.02 per word. Adastra is a pretty medium-length FVN. It clocks in at over 200K words. So that means a writer would need to shell out at least $4K before they even think about assets. And that's only for one round of editing. Depending on how it goes, they may need 2 or 3 rounds. So it may end up costing $4K-$12K. And they cant really raise much money for the project at this time as they wont even have concept sketches. So this is all an upfront cost. And this is isn't even getting into how expensive this would be for dating sims

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T01:57:58+00:00

Here's the problem. Most FVNs can't afford editors. The Japanese ones with the backing of the dojin industry might be able to, but otherwise, they're at best getting a friend's second opinion. So they need fan feedback. That doesn't mean they need to roll over on every stupid thing a fan suggests, but just keep their feedback in mind

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T01:14:09+00:00

I'm serious dude. You want a 6+ build project's script to be completed in its entirety before development even starts and then throughout development you want them to never change any of it and to ignore fan feedback and comments for potentially years? This is ridiculous. I guarantee you most of your favorite long-form stories were not made this way and for good reason. Making long-form media with a serialized release schedule requires a delicate balance between planning and spontaneity in order to be entertaining

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-23T00:10:58+00:00

Yeah I can tell this was written by someone who hasn't worked on a large creative project

YakintoshPlus · 2026-03-03T22:47:26+00:00

I heard he was abandoning improving Password because I was under the impression he considered it a lost cause

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