The short post-mortem of EVN Chronicles + new content on Fuwanovel

EVN Chronicles is in many ways a huge source of pride for me – a project that I was able to keep running for more than two years, producing an impressive library of content. I've learned a lot about VNs and about writing while working on it, trading the early passion for talking about the medium I've then recently fell in love with for decent amounts of knowledge and somewhat-justified confidence in my work. While my burnout effectively put a stop to me using that in any meaningful way for many months, I never doubted that my hiatus for writing won't be permanent, even if the hiatus of the blog itself is.

So, this is enough rambling, I'll get to the point. Staying in this weird position of ex-blogger that doesn't do anything useful wasn't exactly inspiring or comfortable, so I want to close this chapter officially. EVN Chronicles as a project is over. I will continue the Steam Curator, as it is something I just organically do while reading VNs on Steam, but other than that, the blog won't receive any new updates.

That doesn't mean I gave up on writing. From now on, any projects and reviews that I find interesting enough to work on will find their way to the Fuwanovel frontpage. The newest piece of content I've published there is an interview with one of my favourite upstart VN devs, PunishedHag, but I hope to throw game jam coverage and an occasional review to the mix. It won't be very frequent, but I want every post I put there to feel worthwhile. Fuwa is a very dear place to me and at this point, I feel it's way more meaningful to apply myself there than to struggle to keep this personal project alive. I'll post about everything I post there on Twitter, so if you want to know about my future projects, please consider following me there. 

Once more, thank you all for following this blog and, hopefully, see you on Fuwanovel!

Thank you all for coming along for this ride! (Indefinite Hiatus)

Hey there all!

I will start with saying  that I really treasure my time spent writing this blog and interacting with various people involved in the EVN community. You guys were awesome company in this journey and despite the obscurity of this project, I feel like it benefited me personally in many ways and maybe even helped people appreciate the value within the non-JP visual novel scene. I'm really thankful to all the people that read my blog, the devs that offered me their time and gave me their games for review – they all made these 2+ years into something special.

When I started this project, there were two main things that motivated me. The first one was the frustration over dismissal of EVNs which is still common sense in the large parts of the VN fan community – belittling of the very games that made me fall in love with the visual novel formula. I wanted to create a space that is fully dedicated to discussion and promotion of EVNs as worthwhile and significant part of the genre. The second part was even more personal – my personal struggles with video game addiction and other issues, my ambition to shift my focus into a more challenging and creative activity. In many ways, I consider both my goals relative successes. While slowly, the perception of EVNs is changing and the scene evolving in interesting ways – while it shares pretty much all the suffering of other indie niches, with PC gaming in general being oversaturated and hard to navigate, I feel that it at least established itself as a significant formula that is attractive for story-oriented devs and appreciated by a significant audience. In other words, EVNs are here to stay and in time fewer and fewer people will be able to easily dismiss them as poor imitations of Japanese games. Whether my work had any impact in this regard? Apart from a bunch of people on Fuwanovel that I know I influenced in personal interactions, I honestly have no idea. I want to think there was some minor impact, but I had enough fun in the process and learned enough that I don't mind either way. I did my best and changed a few things about myself, which was the most important part for me.

Of course, I'm in no way saying that I'm putting the blog on hiatus because my job here is done. The real reason is much more prosaic – I just can't keep up with it. The last month was particularly devastating in this regard, with very little time for me to either read or write. And while an obvious answer would be to just work at my own pace and publish stuff whenever I'm able to, it's not really something that would work out for me. Missing deadlines, thinking about future projects, it all became a source of stress rather than a source of fun, and I feel it would only get worse with time. While I really wanted to keep the project alive, I don't want to do so at any cost. I feel burned out. I barely read VNs for fun. I don't watch anime for a few months now. I need a change of pace and ability to rediscover my love for these hobbies. The blog, sadly, became a prime obstacle in this.

So, what's going to happen now? The blog will cease to get updates, unless something special happens. I might still do game jam summaries, as those are something I massively enjoy. I might also publish something on Fuwanovel from time to time – I'm theoretically still an editor there. The one part of the project that's definitely here to stay is the Steam Curator account. The devs that sent me their games deserve to at least get a Steam review and, generally, an evaluation of their work. I will also use my Twitter to publish updates about new games listed on the Curator account. The Steam reviews themselves will likely be a bit more polished – not that much though, I don't want to jump straight into the same burnout-inducing rabbit hole.

So, once more, thank you for sticking around and I hope my project gave you some amusement. And, of course, see you around – I'm not giving up on EVNs and the community around them any time soon. :)

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. ^^

Welcome to EVN Chronicles!

Hello and welcome to EVS Chronicles, the (soon, hopefully) prime source of reviews, news and commentary about the Western-made visual novels and the OELVN market! 

This blog is a continuation of my previous project, the Pride of the West community blog published on the Fuwanovel Forums - one that was created explicitly to popularize and promote OELVNs within the core visual novel fan community and challenge its heavy pro-JP VN biases. Before establishing this site, I've published over 30 reviews, interviews and editorials and spent countless hours discussion Western VNs on Fuwanovel and other sites.

Still, this core mission never really changed. I hope to bring the same positive message that was once targeted specifically towards Fowanovel to the broader audience and promote the industry I genuinely love for its inclusiveness, creativity and passion.

Of course, every semi-amateur industry has its share of problems and bad actors - I will not shy away from criticizing negative practices and exposing bad VNs and shovelware-spewing developers within the EVN scene. I will try however, to the best on my abilities and whenever it's appropriate, to keep the criticism in the fun and lighthearted tone, one that doesn't go into insulting the creators or the games themselves.

In the coming months, you can expect this release schedule for new content:

• Every Friday - a brand new review, top-list or developer interview

• Every Wednesday - reposts of the old articles previously published on Fuwanovel 

The first post will show up tomorrow, after that, I will hopefully be able to deliver new content on the weekly basis. You can also expect news posts and blog-related announcements on different days of the week.

Also, if you want to be updated on my activities without, be sure to follow me on Twitter and follow my Steam Curator page, which offers recommendations for the games I included in my posts.

I hope you'll be willing to join me in this journey through the world of Western-produced VNs - I promise, it will be worth it!