Saturday 10 August 2019

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.

2 comments:

  1. I remember having heard about this game before. I'm going to go buy it on Itch.io. :D

    I like shorter VNs. Many long VNs are full of counterproductive bloat IMO. Shorter ones can have just as much sweetness while eating less of your time. :)

    (I cannot comment on Fuwanovel because it rejects my VPN, and it's inconvenient to disable it, so I am posting here for now. Sorry! :P )

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    1. Haha, no worries, I definitely don't mind comments here. :D Yeah, you could say I'm used to shorter VNs while dealing mostly with EVNs, but I hardly have the time to tackle those really big Japanese titles even if I wanted too. They're kind of unwieldy if you have a busy/unpredictable schedule, so those 6-10 hour VNs feels kind of optimal. And this one in particular managed to express quite a lot in that relatively short reading time. ^^

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