Tag Archives: visual novels

Ace Attorney: evolving the Japanese adventure game formula

Playing through the two Famicom Detective Club games got me well and truly in the mood for some more adventuring. And so it was that I finally booted up the Nintendo Switch version of the first Ace Attorney Trilogy that I’ve had on my shelf for quite some time.

I’ve previously played all the Ace Attorney games except for the sixth one (and The Great Ace Attorney, and Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney… and the unlocalised second Ace Attorney Investigations game) so I already know the series quite well, but it’s been a good few years since I sat down and gave them some proper attention.

Moreover, I’ve somehow gone this long without ever writing about them here on MoeGamer, so today’s the day we fix that. Perhaps not for the last time, either.

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Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind – a truly compelling mystery

The Famicom Detective Club games are something that I’d been meaning to get around to for a while, but have only just picked up. Having played through — and adored — first episode The Missing Heir, I was keen to follow that up with its prequel, The Girl Who Stands Behind.

Honestly, I was expecting more of the same, and to a certain extent that’s what you get with The Girl Who Stands Behind, at least in mechanical terms. From a narrative perspective, however, The Girl Who Stands Behind is arguably considerably more ambitious than its predecessor, and makes for a mystery even more compelling to unravel a bit at a time.

So let’s take a closer look at the 2021 remake from Nintendo and Mages, available as part of a double-pack with The Missing Heir — sadly, only digitally in its English language incarnation.

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Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and the Japanese adventure game tradition

Although Japanese-style adventure games are a bit of an acquired taste for some, I’ve become rather fond of the format over the years.

While the more “pure” visual novel format is considerably more commonplace these days, it does always make me smile when a new game comes out that makes use of those classic Japanese adventure game conventions rather than simply being “click to advance, perhaps with occasional choices”.

As such, I had been meaning to get around to the two Famicom Detective Club titles on Switch for quite some time. And, having played through the first of the duology, subtitled The Missing Heir, I feel compelled to talk about it at some length. So let’s do just that.

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Class of ’09: of cynicism and sociopathy

I’ve been a little leery of western-developed visual novels for a while now. I know that there are some genuinely good ones out there — but there are also a lot that play up the obnoxiously ironic, self-referential angle to such a degree that they’re hard to take seriously.

I’m not sure what made me think that Class of ’09, which describes itself as “the anti-visual novel” would be any different, but nonetheless something attracted me to it and made me think it might actually be worth a look. The fact it was £3 on sale at GOG.com helped, too, I must admit — even if it turned out to be complete horseshit, I would have spent less than the price of a cup of coffee on it.

Thankfully, it did not turn out to be complete horseshit. Nor, I’d argue, did it turn out to really be that which it described itself as. But it did turn out to be an enjoyable, worthwhile experience that I’m glad I spent four hours playing through. So let’s take a closer look at exactly why.

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Waifu Wednesday: Bubbles

I recently played through an interesting Taiwanese game called Food Girls. It’s a visual novel combined with a management sim about rescuing a street market from closure and demolition. You can read more about it in my feature over on Rice Digital; there’ll be more about it here when I’ve done a few more playthroughs!

As you might expect from the name, Food Girls primarily focuses on your relationships with the vendors who call the street market home. As you develop those relationships — and train up their important skills to ensure they’re making profit — you learn more about them.

For my first playthrough, I mostly focused on the tsundere bubble tea shop owner Bubbles. What can I say? I have a type. (I have multiple types, as it happens, but tsundere is a particular weak point.) So let’s take a closer look!

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Nekopara Vol. 4: The Smiles on Everyone’s Faces

cropped-nekopara-header-1959547This article is one chapter of a multi-part Cover Game feature!
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The first three volumes of the Nekopara series each focused on a pair of the catgirls from the core cast, and explored a key message or lesson they had to learn.

In Nekopara Vol. 1, Chocola and Vanilla learn how to function independently in human society, earning their “Bells” in the process. In Vol. 2, Coconut and Azuki both come at the idea of honesty always being the best policy from slightly different angles. And in Vol. 3, Maple and Cinnamon determine that staying true to yourself is a much better way to live your life than deliberately holding yourself back, or trying to be something that you’re not.

In Vol. 4, things are a little different. This time around, the core narrative focuses on the series protagonist Kashou, who longstanding followers of the series will know has had a certain amount of conflict brewing in his heart since the very beginning. It’s time for him to finally figure out some answers.

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Waifu Wednesday: Yasuko Yamanouchi

At the time of writing, I haven’t yet finished a full readthrough of Kogado Studio’s Nurse Love Syndrome, but I did want to show some love for one of its main characters. (And probably some more in the near future.)

For the unfamiliar, Nurse Love Syndrome is a visual novel that explores new nurse Kaori Sawai’s early days on the job, and everything that entails — both good and bad. Yasuko Yamanouchi is a character who is introduced early on as one of the more experienced members of the nursing staff but… well, let’s just say she’s a bit of a character.

And she’s voiced by Yumi Hara, too, so if you ever wanted to hear Yumi from Senran Kagura playing someone who isn’t Yumi for once… well, now’s your chance!

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My Time With Dee Dee, Vol. 4: First Look

If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ll know that friend of the site and big bossman of DigitallyDownloaded.net Matt Sainsbury has been beavering away at a series of visual novels of late.

Collectively known as My Time With Dee Dee, each “volume” of the series focuses on a particular aspect of literature and explores it in depth from a practical perspective, both through the volume’s own narrative and a bonus academic-style explanation of the genre or school of thought.

To date, we’ve taken on the erotic thriller in the first volume, the concept of the male gaze in the second, and existentialism in the third. Now, with the upcoming fourth volume, Sainsbury has set himself a challenging goal: to explore, challenge and confront the ideas of the Marquis de Sade. To that end, he sent me an early version of the new game to take a look at and see what I thought. So let’s do just that!

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Nurse Love Addiction: Learning to Love is Learning to Trust

And so, we come to the conclusion of our look at Kogado Studio’s fascinating visual novel Nurse Love Addiction with Kaede Ohara’s route — a path through the narrative that can quite reasonably be regarded as the most “normal” one.

Once you’ve played through Nurse Love Addiction once or twice, it will be clear that Kaede’s path is somewhat separated from the others, since there’s a very obvious “branch point” in the common route that either steers protagonist Asuka towards the three paths that deal with her past, or allows her to sidestep it in favour of Kaede’s story.

Will our heroine be able to get through this experience physically and mentally unscathed? Read on, and let’s explore further. Spoilers ahead, as always.

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Nutaku: Destigmatising and Democratising Adult Video Games

Nutaku, if you’re unfamiliar, is a Canadian adult gaming website that launched in December of 2014 and quickly racked up a million registered users within its first year of operation.

Over the course of the following five years, that number has exploded to over fifty million — and the platform has big plans for the future.

I had the good fortune to spend some time picking the brain of company representatives (who wished to remain anonymous) on the subject of these plans — and the platform’s place in the growing adult gaming sector. Read on to find out more!

NSFW images ahead. You can also go ahead and assume that all links are NSFW as a pretty safe bet!

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