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. :)

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. ^^

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!