Off-Topic - English Yuri VNs
This was actually my first Japanese Yuri VN. But it read some in English. Maybe someone of you has read those or wants to read them in the future. I can recommend them:
Synergia (vndb): I can recommend this to anyone interested in cyber punk. If you think the trailer, ost or art are cool, you should read it. I really like how the art is done. It’s not super beautiful. It’s not as detailed or well drawn as a high budget VN. But the use of neon colors together with the sound track are very effective at conveying a mood. Also, instead of putting a character sprite in the middle of the screen with whatever background, the characters are drawn as a part of the scene. The down side is that you will often look at the exact same image and sometimes have less facial expressions available. The upside is that it’s more immersive. For a comedy game that would be the wrong choice. But here it’s great. I think more VNs should be done this way.
A Little Lily Princess (vndb): This is based on the classic novel A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I have not read the original novel, only watched the anime adaptation. I think the VN is better than the anime. I think this one (unlike many other VNs) has very good prose. Maybe that’s no wonder given that large parts are taken from the novel. But to it’s credit, it’s not like the original parts are obvious by the quality of it’s writing. The writing style is quite different from other VNs in that it has much more narration (displayed at the bottom of the screen) and is written in 3rd person. Dialog is displayed as speech bubbles (which I like, makes it easier to see who is speaking). The downside is that there are six different character based routes. Thankfully there is no true end that requires you to read all of them. But unfortunately the route specific plot is interwoven with the main plot, so that you have to go skip the same main-plot every time. If you want to play only some of the routes, I would skip the maid and the baby, but don’t skip the villain characters, I thought they had the best route.
Off-Topic - accepting VN recommendations
I played Flowers because it’s the highest rated “Girls x Girls only” VN on vndb (well, except for pintemps. And since that acts as a filter, the ratings are probably inflated).
By that logic, I should put the 2nd highest rated on my to-read list. That would be SeaBed (vndb).
Another logic would be to say that Flowers is @AzusaChan favorite VN. So I should check out their 2nd favorite.
I’ve also started watching the Visual Novel Book Club-Thread. I kind of want something that is long, like a Flowers game, but not long like the Flowers series and also somewhat serious. Though this time I would take more caution with the language barrier (using text hooks or English translation depending on the difficulty). I’ve put Fata Morgana no Yakata from this vndb search on my wish-list (having already read Steins;Gate (elite)). And hey, SeaBed also shows up on that search.
@Akashelia, @AzusaChan I think you both read Flowers and Island. How would you compare them in terms of difficulty? It’s less that I want to try Island and more that I want to confirm my theory that the JPDB difficulty ratings are completely useless (they rate Flowers at 5 and Island at 6, so JPDB thinks Island is more difficult. But I found Flowers very difficult and would expect a higher number.). And maybe for SeaBed, if you have played it (6 on JPDB). I’m beginning to wish Natively would do video games or at least visual novels.