Idea Factory and its otome factory, Otomate, is at its best when working with stories based in history. Hakuouki, for example. Or the first Birushana, which was set in the Heian period of Japanese history and let you hang out with Benkei and other famous boys (made pretty) while the Genpei War raged around Japan. I believe this to be…
People love K-pop idol groups, and this is one of the least controversial things I’ve ever written. Where J-pop has traditionally struggled outside of the domestic market, K-pop has become one of Korea’s most powerful cultural exports. So it’s entirely unsurprising that there would be K-Pop Idol Stories: Road to…
As you all know, I’m working on a visual novel about my…
FallenCranberry and Okasan’s Recipe have announced that the dark dating sim and…
Idea Factory International is bringing otome visual novel Battlefield Waltz to the West over a decade after its original Japanese launch. First announced during IFI’s Summer Festival 2024, the game will be available in physical and digital editions.) It follows a young woman named Lan on her journey as the…
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Delays in the game industry are a dime a dozen, and the indie rookie detective game Paper Perjury is no different. It was planned for an October 2024 release, which was bumped to a November launch date and then to a December launch window. Hopefully, the announced December date will…
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The Infinity Series are well-known visual novels by Kotaro Uchikoshi that sit firmly in the science fiction, suspense, and adventure game genres. It began in the early 2000s, branching out to three mainline games, one spin-off, and one reboot. Today, Spike Chunsoft announced that remastered versions of the series’ first…
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It’s such a tough gig to be an indie VN developer. It’s a niche genre at the best of times, and the resources that you have to dedicate to it are going to be limited. It’s a question of what you throw money into to try to make your project…
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I admit, I might have a slight obsession with Urban Myth Dissolution Center, which launches in February 2025. It sounds wonderful: the publisher describes it as a single-player psycho-detective mystery adventure that has a unique blend of psychological intrigue and supernatural investigation. It is split into episodes/chapters, and the latest…
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SINce Memories: Off the Starry Sky is a spin-off of an incredibly long-running series: Memories Off, which has been running since 1999, is now close to twenty titles deep, and has, over the years, had some legends of the visual novel medium work on it, including Mr. Zero Escape himself,…
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Writing horror is a tough gig. It’s challenging for writers to create and maintain fear and tension. Horror needs to be character-driven and it needs to make the audience care about the horrible things that are happening to those characters. Meanwhile, it’s difficult for visual artists because even the slightest…
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Dance is a difficult subject to tackle, for many reasons. These challenges are, fundamentally, why it’s not a topic that video game developers typically touch (or filmmakers, or novelists, or painters, or most other art forms). The Ukrainian developer behind Light de Deux has given a ballet-themed visual novel a…
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Otomate can always be trusted to find some way to repurpose the established otome formula for a visual novel that at least feels a little different, even if functionally it’s not. 9 R.I.P. lands at the perfect time for Halloween, and even though it’s Otomate playing it safe with the…
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Valentine’s Day 2025 is shaping up to be a wonderful week for video game players: so far, Date Everything! and The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II both launch that day. But one day prior, a game that may not be on your radar (yet) will be released. Urban…
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