Bewitched – that visual novel I've helped proofreading & other games by Graven Visual Novels

Today I wanted to talk a bit about an interesting project, and one that provided me with a unique opportunity to, for the first time, act as a proof-reader and do minor editing for a sizeable VN. Because of this personal involvement, this won’t be a full-on review, but more of a loose rant, highlighting both the worthwhile aspects of the game and my somewhat-peculiar experience with it. The VN in question, Bewitched is indeed a rather interesting one, as all games by Graven Visual Novels are – just as they are weighted down by extremely awkward translations from Russian and inherent flaws of their author’s prose. This time, however, the developer made their first attempt to work on properly polishing the game’s English script with the help of a few volunteers (including my gloriously dyslectic person). This move was quite likely inspired by the discussions I had with them regarding their previous projects and the problems with their English versions. If my involvement in the EVN scene ever made a tangible difference, this is the most concrete example of it, and I hope you’ll be willing to join me as I briefly explore what that difference actually is…

Gruesome and featuring a memorably grim story, Silenced had a lot of potential that was never fully realized, mostly due to its writing and poor translation

 

I’ll be very blunt: Graven’s first game, Silenced: The House was something of an amusing trainwreck. Its interesting artstyle and effective gore were combined with edgy, needlessly flowery writing and rather awful English, creating an experience that was nowhere as fun to read as it was to look at. The general idea, with a villainous protagonist luring a group of obnoxious teenagers to meet their doom in a haunted house, is the kind of cheesy fun I genuinely enjoy, while the amazing amount of well-stylized art could easily make it an absolute treat. The clunky user interface, most quality-of-life features typical for visual novels missing or broken, underlined the fact that its ideas and efforts of the visual artists were simply squandered by poor execution of all other aspects of the game. The end effect was something I didn’t hate, but still had a hard time recommending to anyone.

                The studio’s second project, Still Alive, was more competent from the technical standpoint, but repeated all the other issues that plagued Silenced: occasionally confusing script and English that was well below acceptable levels. This time, the consequences were more significant: as it tried to catch people’s attention on Kickstarter, neither the project page nor the demo could gather the confidence of English-speaking crowd and despite the unique premise and once more decent art, the game barely reached half of its funding goal. This was something I was personally a bit sad about, as the sci-fi horror and yuri elements were very in-line with my taste and I expected to enjoy the end product quite a lot if the game hasn’t been cancelled.

Terminator-like, post-apocalyptic setting of Still Alive showed quite a lot of promise, especially because Graven were never afraid to go really dark and grotesque with their games – even in the demo, some events and enemy designs were genuinely unsettling

 

It wasn’t that long after the Still Alive’s Kickstarter failure that I was surprised with a proposition to help edit the script for Graven’s newest project, a game named Bewitched – a story about a young boy becoming an apprentice of his Aunt, a powerful witch and potion maker. It was by most measures a stark departure from the studio’s grim horror stories and while working on the game’s text, I couldn’t help but enjoy the change in stylistics. The English script, however, was once more a giant mess, with me and another volunteer editor (who I had no contact with) tasked to make it readable within a pretty short timeframe. The effects were, as you can imagine, pretty ambivalent – a major improvement on the original draft that was still not fully up to standards I would usually like to see from a VN. While I’m really satisfied with some of the things I’ve done while polishing the text, a lot of awkward sentences and even occasional typos slipped through. Ultimately though, after seeing the final game, I think we managed to make it reasonably enjoyable to read, at least not less than the Russian original likely is, which makes the game something I’m willing to recommend. Maybe if I wasn’t involved, someone else would step in to do the proofreading, but there’s also a chance I’ve saved this game from being more or less lost for the English-speaking audience, and that is honestly quite a good feeling.

                And speaking about the game proper, Bewitched getting destroyed by a bad translation would be a genuine shame. While working on the text, I wondered how certain things would be portrayed in the final product, but I didn’t expect the art to be this detailed and vibrant. Some of the CGs and backgrounds are honestly stunning for a tiny indie game like this – visual quality was always Graven’s strongest side, but Bewitched still managed to be a major improvement in this regard. While from the technical point of view it’s still not perfect, mostly because of not being made in a dedicated visual novel engine, its story is fairly linear, without much reason to fully replay the game and really feel the absence of some quality-of-live features, such as a precise skip-read option. While some branching is present, it’s fairly minimal and mostly related to how you approach certain puzzles in the point-and-click adventure game sections. The interactivity, by the way, is pretty significant, so the game might not be a good pick if you’re not into exploring environments and completing tasks through various interactions – while there are many “pure” story sections, especially dominating its later chapters, you’ll spend a good portion of the 4-5 hour playtime collecting ingredients and exploring the protagonist’s aunt’s house.

Bewitched created an effective vision of a wacky, danger-filled magical world – one colourful and cheerful at first look, but featuring plenty of dark undertones

 

While I stressed the stylistically change between Bewitched and Graven’s previous projects, it doesn’t mean the game is all sunshine and rainbows. Like in the studio’s previous titles, there’s a plenty of ways to get the protagonist killed and there are intensely dark moments to its story and setting, along with some disturbingly grim humour. You can easily feel that the story was ultimately created by the same team, still holding very similar sensibilities and whether intentional clashes between the colourful visuals and edgy plot elements will bother you is very much up to personal taste. For me, it’s still quite enjoyable, especially when presented through more-readable English than Silenced and Still Alive. It’s also not a deep experience, with neither the story nor characters being particularly complex or meaningful, but it’s fully functional as a silly adventure tale and at times genuinely imaginative.

                In the end, while I’ll refrain from giving Bewitched a rating, I think it’s definitely the best title Graven produced so far and something well-worth the 5$ asking price. It will also always hold a special place in my heart, as I’ve learned some valuable things through my involvement with it. So, give it a chance – and if you ever think editors did a questionable job polishing certain VN’s text, remember that you don’t know what they were starting with. 😉

VNDB Page
Buy Bewitched on Steam

Blog Update + My Visual Novel Fan Translation University Project

Hello there, all you good people still following my content-starved blog! There will be no regular review post this week (I’ll be catching up next week with one about Reine Work’s Our Lovely Escape, and hopefully a week after that with one of the long-overdue games sent to me for review), but I’ve wanted to take this opportunity to share the reasons behind the recent slowdown on the site and talk a bit my plans for the future. A warning: this will contain a lot of personal musings that most of you are probably not very interested in. However, I kind of need this opportunity to vent and reset. I’ll add a tl;dr version at the end of this post.

             Outside of my, not-extremely-successful attempt to jumpstart a new wave of activity on Fuwanovel, there have been a few other things happening behind the scenes. The major one was my academic project on visual novel fan translations, which led me to submitting a paper for an international fan studies conference in Cracow. Preparing the speech in English (this was the first time I wasn’t speaking in Polish on such an event), running a survey with people involved in fan translation projects… It all took a lot out of me and gave me little time and energy to actually enjoy VNs as such. It also coincided with a minor health issue, which despite its non-threatening nature made it impossible for me to sit straight for nearly two weeks – a truly infuriating thing when you should be working on your computer and are basically running out of time. This was probably a major factor which destroyed my motivation for working on the project, which in turn made it be the most painful and depressing one to date. I, however, still made my short presentation in the presence of prof. Matt Hills, one of the most influential researchers in my obscure field of study, and learned quite a lot from other speakers. Here’s some photographic proof, courtesy of my girlfriend who once more agreed to help me inflate my ego by documenting my speech. 😉

As you can see, I was asking the Heavens to help me and my listeners to get through those 20+ minutes of my horrible English accent. Not sure to what degree my prayers were heard, but at least there were no fatalities. Oh, and in the lower-left corner, it’s Matt Hills. That was both awesome and terrifying.

And here’s a rare moment where my conference ID wasn’t hanging backwards! You can see the fear in my eyes – one would think after nearly 10 similar presentations I’d be a little bit calmer, but it’s apparently in my nature to stress out over everything.

And here’s me taking one of two questions that were still possible to ask after I’ve used all the discussion time for my way-too-long PowerPoint slideshow. And yup, I will insert Flowers whenever that's even remotely appropriate. Suou x Rikka forever. You can't stop me!

             While, in general, my project was fruitful and I’m satisfied with my performance, I also ended up so physically and emotionally drained that I’ve ditched the other two days of the conference, just enjoying my time in Cracow. Even after coming back, I had a day of what could be described as a full-on breakdown before I kind of got my shit together. All this, of course, has some very real consequences for the blog: for quite a while, I didn’t have the time and energy to really read VNs. And, obviously, without any new material to cover, I didn’t write anything either. It’s the first time since establishing the Blogger site that I have no “emergency” posts to use or quick ideas to supplement more involved write-ups with, even despite switching to the biweekly schedule. And honestly, I don’t expect to write much in-advance anymore. The “one post every two weeks” frequency is here to stay and I’m going to be flexible about it, switching content and dates when necessary.

             The other thing is that I still want to make the blog a little bit more of my personal space. I’ve kept up the regular stream of content both to become a better writer and to prove a few things to myself. I think I’m satisfied with what I’ve achieved, and while I’m definitely not discarding the general profile of the blog and the responsibilities I’ve taken upon myself (like covering the games sent to me), I’m going to have fun with it too. Write silly stuff connected to the weeb culture and my peculiar experience with it. I’ve already hinted at this at the beginning of the summer, but I’m even more determined to make it happen now. No hobby I’ve picked up over the years was this intellectually stimulating and satisfying as this one and I want to do all I can to keep it this way – I can't let things go too stale. 

             And while I’m doing all this weird stuff and overthinking things, I hope you guys will stay and still read my crappy writing. Exploring the creativity and passion of EVN devs is not something I’ll ever get tired of, and I hope we can enjoy their stuff together for years to come. Thank you all for following my work, and until next week!

tl;dr I’ve been to a fan studies conference which, together with minor health issues, ate a month and a half of my life. I’ll get back to “serious” posting next week, returning to the bi-weekly schedule. I might sneak in some weird posts about Japanese popculture between “proper” EVN ones. EVNs are love, EVNs are life (still). See you next week for actual content!

Fuwanovel Revitalisation Efforts & my The Language of Love review

Today there's a thing happening that is probably pretty minor in anyone else's eyes, but feels quite huge to me: my review of ebi-hime's The Language of Love is being published on Fuwanovel main site as my first contribution there. It is also the first review to go up in the Review Hub after the leadership changes and attempts to revitalize the site started a bit over a month ago. While I'm a latecomer when it goes to the VN community, Fuwanovel played a massive role in my involvement with it, with discussions on the Forums and people I met there being a constant source of fun, information and motivation to pursue this hobby further. It is the Fuwa Forums where this blog originated from and where I've spent a decent portion of my time and energy in the past two years. 

From early 2017, I was consistently one of the most active people in the Fuwanovel community, sharing the anguish of others seeing the site die due to its owner's absence. This was all happening despite the presence of many people willing to work on giving the site a new life – whatever our initiatives tried to achieve, always ended up crashing on the barrier of not having access to the main site and the impossibility of getting anything from the admins. After a few months of trying, even I simply had to accept that Fuwa is a sinking ship and there's quite likely nothing I'll be even able to do about it.

My Fuwanovel Forums stats clearly show that I've spent way more time there than should reasonably allowed...

I'll not get into the specifics of Fuwa's internal drama, because it's neither important nor it'd be in good tone to share any of that. There's a much more important thing I want to say: for the first time in literal years, Fuwa is making steps towards recovery. And while I'm hoping to keep doing my part in the foreseeable future, there's something the site needs more of in order to survive: contributors. Fuwa was always a community, but also a fan site that offered something interesting and useful for anyone willing to visit it from time to time. Was it VNTS, the review hub, news articles... This usefulness was completely lost of the last period of the site being dead, and is something we need to reclaim.

If you think there's something you could offer to Fuwa's main site, check out this recruitment post or try visiting our Discord and asking around. We don't expect anyone to overwork themselves for us, or contribute stuff on any fixed schedule. We don't pay for content, as no one is making money from the site. We just want to keep this community alive and share our love for VNs. And if you think that is something worth helping with and decide to join us in this project, we'll be forever grateful for it.

And as always, thank you very much for following my work and I hope you’ll enjoy the review! If everything goes according to plans, that’s not the last one I’m putting there.

EVN Chronicles First Anniversary Rant & Annoucements

tl;dr: I'll be switching to one post per two weeks, to avoid burnout and focus on RL responsibilities more. I'm moderately content with the place the blog is nowadays and hope to continue it ad infinitum. I might also mix in some random otaku-media-related posts outside of the usual time brackets, to keep things interesting for myself. If you're interested, enjoy the lengthy rant below!

Hello and welcome to the EVN Chronicles first-anniversary overview & announcements post, where I'll be doing a bit of a summary of my experience of writing this blog for the last 12+ months and outline my plans for the future. A little bit over a year ago, in June 2018, I've decided to move my blog, then called Pride of the West, from being hosted exclusively on Fuwanovel Forums. This came after eight months of posting reviews and commentary about EVNs every week, channelling my newfound passion for the medium. Apart from my own enjoyment, that project was explicitly oriented towards one goal – fighting the negative stereotypes about non-JP visual novels and promoting the quality games within the EVN niche. While it was EVNs that introduced me to visual novel formula and got me hooked on them, I realized that many people in the core VN community still considered them universally trash – poor, uninspired imitations of their Japanese predecessors, with only handful of exceptions being even worthy of a closer look. The idea I wished to change, at least within the context of discussions on Fuwa itself.

As dead as the site is nowadays, Fuwanovel still holds a great community, to which I owe much of passion for VNs, and which encouraged me in writing about them, in a major way

While I was, and still am extremely grateful to everything that the Fuwanovel community offered me, the slow decay of the site itself and the lack of control over my content made me realize that I can't rely on it as my only platform, even if I'm doing it just for the fun of it. This led to me establishing this humble site on Blogger, while also changing the brand I wasn't fully – the weirdly supremacist-sounding Pride of the West became EVN Chronicles, slowly fleshing out its new identity and formula, with gimmicks such as Shovelware Adventures series and somewhat standardized game jam coverage. Since then I had great fun writing posts every week and polishing the often rough, old content from Fuwa, but also kind of stressing myself out with keeping the schedules and staying even marginally relevant within the VN community (mostly through Reddit activity, as Fuwa's deterioration was only progressing, even if I'm still one of the most active members there).

At that same time, I've launched two affiliated activities – a Twitter account and a Steam Curator profile. All of it, by most measures, grossly unsuccessful: over the year, my blog had gathered 50k pageviews, mostly from sharing my articles from Reddit. I've earned around 150 Twitter followers, including a few genuinely paying attention to what I post and over 190 Steam followers – rather miserable numbers for sucha long period of uninterupted activity, but kind of expected considering the ultra-niche nature of what I do. I've also received, over time, progressively more positive feedback and got contacted by many developers willing to send me review copies – along with the experience of making interviews with people such as NomnomNami, Zetsubou or ebi-hime, it was probably the most satisfying part of the experience and I really cherish some of the contacts I've gathered over this period. I've also spend embarassing amount of time mindlessly watching Blogger stats, but I'm sure if you ever made a site or blog of your own, you've been there too...

Statssss, my precioussss statssss...

So, what all of this means for the future? First, during all this time, I kind of put my real life on hold, while I was dealing with some family and personal issues, but can't afford to focus on the blog this much for another year or two. Writing on a weekly basis also made it hard for me to tackle longer titles or just read VNs for fun, something I'd definitely want to reclaim. Thus, for the foreseeable future, I'll be switching to one post every two weeks, with possible extra material posted whenever I find time and energy to write something extra. I'm not the fastest reader or writer, having to deal with my dyslexia every step of the way, so the previous schedule was taxing, to the point I'm not exactly sure how I managed to keep it up for this long. On the other hand, this means some of my projects, like my next Yuri Game Jam coverage, will take the form of one longer post, instead of a few shorter ones. I'll also want to make an odd post from time to time, with various ideas, such as reviewing RWBY or writing about my experience with Japanese music, following me for a while now. In the end, this is not a commercial site, but my personal blog and I have to keep it interesting for myself, just as I strive to make it fun to read.
          There's also something very personal about this site and how I approach it, that I think I should talk about a little bit. For many years, I've been dealing with my compulsive video game habits, eating the vast majority of my free time and energy, and eventually killing off any more creative hobby I picked up along the way. My transferring to otaku media, including VNs that prioritize interesting narratives over time-burning gameplay, was a way to cope with limiting my involvement with "traditional" games and working to change some parts of my lifestyle. The blog was a huge part of this process, which, for the most part, turned out successful. For this reason alone, it's not something I could imagine myself fully dropping any time soon. It provided me with a lot of fun and encouregment, and I want to thank anyone that followed my work this far – you made this possible and while it might not be obvious from the previous paragraphs, it means a world to me. The whole VN community turned it interesting and inspiring probably more than any other group I got into over the web, and it's hard to express how happy I am that I decided to dive into this niche. And I hope you'll be willing to join me in next chapters of this silly, self-indulgent journey through the world of EVNs – there's still a lot, a lot to write about here and a lot of fun to be had. ^^

Venus Blood Frontier – a normie's perspective

This is a Kickstarter campaign-related post. Check out my review of the game here!

Disclaimer: This post is not sponsored by Ninetail and I'm not in any way affiliated with the studio – this is simply an expression of my personal interest and support for the game

There are two days left until the end of Venus Blood Frontier translation Kickstarter campaign - a huge undertaking by Ninetail, who decided to bring to the West one of their most expansive and technically complex game, as pretty much their first step outside of Japan. One that apparently proved successful, even those the game's fate was uncertain just a week ago, before two individuals put an absurd amount of money on the table, to sponsor some custom story content - I applaud their dedication, as thanks to them, the English version has a good chance of being the best and most complete release of Frontier, something we rarely get as Western VN fans.

          But, why am I even talking about this, on my EVN blog? Why did I support this game and don't hide my excitement about it, even though it's not only a bit outside my main interest, but also, in the Japanese version, includes depictions of sexual violence that I have no interest in whatsoever? To put it as simply as possible, it's about the kind of story it tells, and the kind of choice it offers to the player. But first, a bit of a digression...

With all Star Wars: The Old Republic's failures, it was possibly the only game that caught the fantasy of playing as a Sith, with the freedom to embrace the Empire's brutality or try to reform it

A good few years ago, a now-dying MMO called Star Wars: The Old Republic was released by Bioware, promising to be the first title of this kind to offer a deep, personalised story for every player character. As I Bioware fan, I pre-ordered it and jumped right into the action as a Jedi Knight... And dropped the game before max level, deeply bored by the gameplay and storyline. The fantasy of being the saviour of the galaxy was just as over-the-top and bland as what I've seen in hundreds of RPGs before, the flashing lightsaber and Star Wars soundtrack not being able to make it that more engaging.

          However, two years later, I came back with the resolution to check out the other side of the coin - Sith storylines. It wasn't a natural choice for me, as I abhor most "evil" choices in RPGs, never being able to follow a truly dark path. I can accept my character being harsh, or even ruthless in following their goals, but not without the underlying cause being just. In other words, I'm a huge pussy that can't harm undeserving pixels without feeling sick. What I found in the Empire storylines, however, was mesmerizing to me. With my approach, they were stories of people that found themselves in hopeless circumstances, looking for ways to go through them with some kind of honour and looking for power to change their reality for the better. The game offered freedom to conform to the expectations, becoming a murderous maniac, or subvert them and find your own way through the horrors and challenges before you, creating a perfect fantasy of being a Sith - freedom through power, with the possibility to remain relatively pure, but without constraints put on you by the Jedi Code. For me it was, and is to this day, the best role playing experience I've ever had, in the quite literal sense of the term.

Loki is never really a "good guy", but if you can steer him to become a ruthless oppressor or a benevolent tyrant who uses force to change his ravaged world for the better

What all this has to do with Frontier though? A lot, actually, as the protagonist, Loki, is in a very similar position to the Sith of The Old Republic. He's a high-ranking demon, an ancient enemy of mankind sent on a mission to conquer the last bastion of humanity. He's a villain by default, having all the means and motivation to cruelly subjugate the human lands, along the goddesses that protect them and corrupt them into willing servants (through some very non-consensual meeting with tentacles) - servants who can help him to get his revenge on the Demon King, murderer of his parents and claim the supreme rulerships over his crumbled world. Considering how weak his forces are initially, the game pretty much compels you to use all the resources at your disposal, without looking at the moral value of it all.

          It, however, also offers a different path and many choices that lets you craft your personal story and your own interpretation on what Loki is really about. Will you be a just ruler, or wreak havoc across the land? Will you corrupt the goddesses to gain powerful servants, or leave them as they are and earn their loyalty through your actions? Will you romance one of them, form a harem, or skip that part of the experience altogether? The options are... Well, not limitless, but impressive, in a way that is pretty hard to find in Western media. A compelling anti-hero, in my opinion, is an extremely rare occurrence and one that should be celebrated.

I know keeping the goddesses pure and following the Law route strictly is not the "main" allure of the game for most, but the option to do so is in no way an afterthought or a lesser experience

And now let's address the elephant in the room. While you can imagine how I will play this game, it's not really what this series is known for in Japan or what some would consider an "intended" way to experience it. The corruption mechanic is pretty much the selling point of the Venus Blood series and the original cover of Frontier leaves no doubt that tentacle rape is its core element, part of its identity even. I'm also not sure how playable the Chaos route, normally full of such h-scenes, will be in the all-ages version of the game. However, the existence of Steam version and the way it was marketed in the West makes it possible to experience the game's storyline and impressively deep SRPG mechanics regardless whether you're ok with that kind of content or not.

         So why I'm writing all this? I do because I want you to consider supporting the Kickstarter - it's very close to the first stretch goal, with will include additional guarantees for the translation quality of the final product, including full retranslation of the trial portion of the game. This is something that will likely influence the future of this title and the possibility of other Venus Blood titles reaching the West. And above all, I want you to keep an eye for this game, which not only caters to my personal "storytelling fetish", but also seems like an great piece of entertainment that has something to offer for pretty much anyone - hardcore eroge fans, people looking for strategy RPG with a compelling narrative and even VN fans in general, considering how flexible the difficulty settings are, up to the ability skip much of the gameplay and focus on the story parts. It is something worth supporting and cheering for and I hope you'll consider giving it a chance, either now or when the English release is out.

Thank you for your time!

Vacation + State of the Blog update

Welcome again to my humble blog!

It's been three months already since I've started posting my reviews outside of Fuwanovel Forums and it's been quite an intense period, both in my fan activities and in my personal life. Still, I'm quite satisfied with the direction things are going and I'm definitely not planning to slow down any time soon.

         The first thing I'm particularly happy about is that I've been able to sort out the visual side of EVN Chronicles, which I struggled with for literal months - I'm sure I'll be still changing it a lot in the future, but for the first time I look at the frontpage with a bit of satisfaction and without worrying what kind of impression it will give to the visitors (in other words, I no longer think that everyone that sees my site once will run away screaming and never come back to it again).

I might never surpass my role model in visual and website design, Oliver Age 24, but I'm getting there!

Also, I'm quite satisfied with the content I was putting out since the rebranding - while my shovelware reviews are a bit more of a relaxed, trashy format, making them is both a lot of fun and gave me time to tackle some more involved projects, which are already coming to fruition (like the series about ebi-hime's work) or will happen in near future. I have a huge ambition of thoroughly covering this year's Yuri Game Jam, checking out and reviewing all the more-interesting VNs that show up in the contest. I'll most likely get to releasing that post in November, rather than directly after the jam is over, considering I'll need some time to go over it all, but nonetheless, I'll be working on it for some time, doing my best to not miss anything worthwhile. It'll be quite a task, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Gay games = best games (it's official!)

Other than that, I'm quite satisfied with how other parts of my online presence are growing - the Steam Curator site and the Twitter are still small, but I see the numbers rising over time and know that my work doesn't go completely unnoticed. And while this gives me quite a lot of energy to work on the site, basically for the first time since I've started posting on the Fuwanovel blog in December, I'll be going for a week-long vacation, from tomorrow till next Wednesday. While I might not feel like taking a break, my family wanted me to be with them on that one and I don't want to disappoint. For this reason, this and next week's reposts of my old articles will be moved to a later date. Friday's post will show up as usual and it's quite a cool one, if I can say so myself.

...and this is basically it! For the coming months, I'll be going forward with more or less the same rhythm I've established so far and I hope you'll enjoy my content. There are many interesting games I still want to cover this year and the next one looks only more interesting. So, if you got this far, thank you for your time and I hope I'll see you in my next post. Take care!