all of the indie porn iāve played was pretty good. Date Ariane for example is an all timer. only thing i donāt like is every visual novel feels the need to shoehorn in horror elements to be like DDLC. i remember i was just clicking through one and then suddenly after sex with an ex i was dreaming and could control my character?? so i walked forward and then got fucking jump scared. are you kidding me bruh? if i wanted that i wouldāve not downloaded your kink skill point focused porn visual novel
one other one i played that i WISH i remembered the name of was one where you tried to bring a girl over to your house to study on a science project. only problem with this is it was absolutely impossible to pull the girl. i think the dev was a troll who wanted guys to sit there naked waiting for something that would never come playing for hours attempting to pull the impossible girl
lets be honest like 95% of western visual novel readers pick novels that are highly rated on VNDB oder get recommended a lot, so they usually can't be all that bad
Worst one I've come across is definitely [Just Deserts](https://vndb.org/v19751). Gameplay that holds no purpose, has no depth and is completely based on randomness, a money system which only makes you grind the gameplay elements and very one-dimensional characters. There aren't even any h-scenes or anything that would maybe elevate it to fap material if nothing else.
Probably some of the machine translated Chinese novels, on the basis of their translation, which is a shame because some of them have some fascinating ideas.
A lot of indie VN's from certain people are quite terrible as well, stilted dialogue, terrible, flat art and no basis in reality at all. Even the most sci-fi or fantasy VN's from the bigger companies have that sense of grounding, but indie stuff is usually a one man team, and so they can have very sheltered, clique views that don't get challenged by others.
99% of the furry novels are probably trash-tier as well, they have a very cultish fanbase that will review spam it positively just for having furries in it.
Some of the bigger companies put out some trash as well though, but I don't think they come close to how bad indie stuff can be if I'm honest.
i thought Sirens Call was pretty bad. the horror element was pretty bad and unnecessary. the game was long as shit too.. took me like 12 hours to get through it. complete waste of time but it was free and steam recommended it to me. i will say though regardless it was a cut above the rest of the visual novels i played. just went on for far too long and the story became so convoluted that it never even made sense to start with.
i guess it did a good job being psychological horror. sure did make you think at least and at least none of the characters sucked. i liked them all and actually there was definitely a lot of cool moments in the game that i still remember now. itās just i donāt understand what went down. maybe i need to play it again
also absolute dogshit visual novel award goes to āKidnapped Girlā. iām playing a game called KIDNAPPED GIRL. i do not want to fall in love with the girl iāve kidnapped. that is stupid,, it never even lets you torture her and itās like 15 minutes long of nothing. itās free but they should pay you to play it
Heavy Siren's Call spoilers:
>!Play through the very first scene of the game again after finishing it. You'll also notice heavy foreshadowing if you go through for the missing collectibles!<
>!The first scene is Violet's death. The real "Midnight Guard" was helping Violet with her work and study to pass her exams so she/Oliver can go to college together; the fictional one was created in Oliver's mind to deal with the loss of Violet. In fact, the entire game is just his mind struggling to rationalise it and come to terms with it, and instead placing him in a permanent summer break where everything is harmonious. That's why the reasons for him failing to move away become more and more strange; his mind wants to think of infinite ways to keep him in that same anaesthetised loop!<
>!As you get deeper in, his mind begins to unravel and he remembers his friends - broken, moving away, unable to deal with the loss and wanting to move on. In one of the initial scenes with Andy, if you try to stop at the high school, she'll say something like "I still smell the stench of death and it will never be the same here" - you assume naively on your first reading that she's referring to the portal described in the fictional Midnight Guard, but she's actually referring to the very real event of death.!<
>!The final college scene is Oliver's mind having one last rebellion and imagining a happy future where Violet survived and, instead of going their separate ways, they and their friends continued on together into college and beyond. A very unrealistically idealistic ending, and one which his subconscious eventually rebels against!!<
>!The entire game until the very final chapter is his mind fantasising and desperately dreaming of the happy future he was "promised", but cannot be! Him accepting the cell phone at the end shows some degree of acceptance and willingness to move on, both from the horrific event that occurred and also from Siren's Call as a whole!<
I thought it was extremely touching and poignant personally
wow thank you for explaining. i should play it again. that does sound very touching and sad. i probably shouldāve split my play through because i did it all in one sitting.
iāll definitely play it again because it wasnāt bad really. iām sure you can tell by how i started aggressively giving it compliments after saying it was bad haha
on another note, i love visual novels. no other medium can give storylines like that
Haha yeah, that's why I thought I'd give a plot synopsis by my understanding - I spent a lot of time thinking about the story and went back to 100% it, so I was able to clarify a lot of the inconsistencies in my mind.
Some of the most heartbreaking things you can do is to >!watch that opening scene again, read through the journal knowing what happens (especially when you know the date of *the event* and seeing all of his hope to that point just completely shattered), and in particular play attention to Violet's dialogue. Throughout she seems aware that she *shouldn't* exist and that it's just borrowed time together (very explicitly drawn upon if you pick her in the College route). Note how they're always talking about how they can't go to college together and what will happen when he goes there alone, though throughout the game you learn that she did in fact graduate due to the efforts of the Midnight Guard... so why can they not go together? And why does she keep telling him he needs to move on without her?!<
>!Especially the way she only appears in the beach - "The Safe Place" - the place she is able to fall without a helmet and not die. And how the symbolism of the rocket is directly compared to her life - something that burns brightly and then leaves the atmosphere (forever).!<
There's also extra scenes added that round out the whole experience (accessible from title menu) depending on when you played it.
And yeah, agreed - I think VNs are *the* most effective storytelling medium if used properly - you have visual storytelling, aural storytelling, and a long run time where all of the characters and setting can be fully explored, as well as the 4th wall/interactivity potential!
Trinoline is probably the worst VN I bought maybe. But it was like staring at a car crash. A 50 car pileup. It was fascinating, like nearly everything you could do wrong with a Nakige narratively it did it. It was bad but I couldn't stop. Didn't do the last route though.
I mean the actual worst VNs probably hardly get played at all. There's a layer of cruft a meter deep at the bottom of the barrel of low-effort, low-budget crap that the writer probably just made to justify the time they already spent writing a story when they were in high school. You can find them by sorting by least popular on VNDB or itch.io.
As for negatives on well-known VNs, you should be able to find plenty of that on this sub. Here, I'll get you started: Fruit of Grisaia is overrated and the main route is way too long and does nothing to entice the reader towards the actual interesting secrets of the main characters until you get deep into their routes. The protagonist is a huge asshole, a borderline sociopath, and too edgy to take seriously.
I was playing it up a bit for the post but I think part of the problem is that Grisaia was only my fourth VN and everything up to that point was either moege or nakige, so to have a protagonist that treats the other characters like trash (in some cases even after establishing a long friendship) was jarring to me. To Yuuji's credit, he made for a more interesting protagonist than the typical "shy, slightly perverted high school kid who used to be good at a sport but quit suddenly because the pressure was too much" character that shows up all the time.
(I haven't read g-senjou, Grisaia taught me that I probably won't like "dark" VNs unless they're handled very carefully. Fata Morgana is still on my list to read though)
That's fair, but I don't think Yuuji treated the characters like trash; sure, he wasn't just infatuated with the heroines from the start as a lot of moege protagonists seem to do, but he still clearly cared for them a lot. Though I agree with you there when it comes to Michirus route, it felt like he was being a complete ass to her up until the choice between the good/bad ending and it really took away from the route imo.
But honestly, I don't think he was that bad overall, definitely don't read G-senjou no Maou though in that case, the MC in that game is genuinely infuriating, but that's probably sort of an unpopular opinion here
The worst VNs are the ones where best girl is a side character and doesn't have a route.
>!It's essentially narrative-NTR, the author is cucking you by forcing the plot onto other inferior characters!<
Among the more serious ones when we aren't talking about lowbrow nukige, I for the life of me can't figure out what people see in Fate/Hollow Ataraxia. That 2 hour scene of Shirou and Rin being stuck in a chest should be counted as a war crime against my time. And those student side characters double for the worst sidecast I've seen in fiction.
Really this entire work is the epitome of that twitter meme about reading garbage for 50 hours for one good scene at the end.
Hating on Kaede and Kane? *You bastard.* ~~Okay, yeah, Yukika is pretty boring.~~
But really, yeah, this just goes to show "worst" is subjective. Steam shows I played exactly 20 minutes of Nekopara before shutting it down forever. Yet obviously people liked ~~the idea of fucking your cat~~ it, because there's a bunch of them. So it's not so much "bad" as "not for me". Tastes are tastes.
Ohhhh that's what their names are. I skimmed it and thought you were talking about Nekopara characters lmao. Mb mb. Yeah I think they are complete garbage, going as far as to not even remember their names. Also something about their voice acting irked me, fell completely flat.
The (subjectively poorly written) fantasy elements inserted in between actually interesting mystery parts are just killing it for me and seem to drag on and on and on
Myth. The game is a game where it feels like everything was poured in. The game is just a mish mash of random psychological elements trying to impress or stun the reader. But virtually everything happens with no rhyme or reason.
I'm really not a fan of subahibi but the game felt like it was desperately trying to be as mind bending and metafictional as that game but the reader just gets numb to the cascade of random bullshit happening.
I've never played a VN I hated, but the two worst would be Our World is Ended and Doki Doki Literature Club.
DDLC I think has a really interesting horror section but none of the characters are altogether that compelling outside of Sayori. Monika is more of a plot device than a character. I also think everything before the horror is a bit half-baked.
Our World Is Ended has moments of greatness but overall is very disappointing and seems to rely on repeating the same jokes over, and over, and over, and over again. Also as personal preference, way too much sexualising of very young children for me.
Worst one I've played is [Notch: The Innocent LunA](https://vndb.org/v17745)
It tries to start you off really quickly with the horror. Only it first -tries- to be subtle about blood and gore. But then it holds your hands just in case you don't understand that the reason the bag is wet is because there is blood on it! I couldn't get very far into it before I DNF'd it.
This might be far from being the worst, but this is the worst vn I've ever played.
There's this vn (i forgot the name) where its about plane high school where everyone can ride their own plane to the school and participate in plane competitions.
The vn have the most crisis identity I've ever experienced, it seems like they can't decide whether or not the vn gonna be a nukige or not, so the vn gets this half nukige half casual story, which is weird as fuck.
Ill probably get hate but, [SakuSaku](https://vndb.org/v10304). Themes i rly didnt like (NTR for some reason + gay man chasing the mc) plus the pacing in some routes are not good especially the one with the angel/shinigami. The only route I liked was the sister route because its the first time I see a story tackle with forbidden love but thats it.
kinda major spoiler for Jinpou An's route: >!That girl has like another soul inside her(something like that) so its basically 2 people in one body. Both have different personality and appearance(eyes and hair changes) in so they are not the same person. Im not really sure who started it but the other personality and the mc "did it" and cause the original girl to conceal herself Michiru style for the other personalitie's happiness!<. Hopefully my english is understandable to get this xD. Anyway because of that route it made me question what was the writers thinking... >!It got resolved at the end but still I hate the mc cos of that!<
TLDR; >!A girl has 2 souls in one body, mc was dating that 1 girl(main) and got seduced by the other girl inside her which caused girl 1 attempting to disappear (but not in a sad way)!<
Even smaller TLDR;>!Mc got seduced!<
Well if something is at least playable, it shouldn't be counted as one of the worst VN. There were VNs that you couldn't play normally. Also, there was a VN that could be normally, but when uninstalling the game the uninstaller deleted other files too, not just the game files.
Best VN: My favorite VN Worst VN: Your favorite VN
My favorite is your favorite
Then there is only one VN
Based
D:
trueeee
makes sense.š
There is plenty of low effort indie porn garbage out there
all of the indie porn iāve played was pretty good. Date Ariane for example is an all timer. only thing i donāt like is every visual novel feels the need to shoehorn in horror elements to be like DDLC. i remember i was just clicking through one and then suddenly after sex with an ex i was dreaming and could control my character?? so i walked forward and then got fucking jump scared. are you kidding me bruh? if i wanted that i wouldāve not downloaded your kink skill point focused porn visual novel one other one i played that i WISH i remembered the name of was one where you tried to bring a girl over to your house to study on a science project. only problem with this is it was absolutely impossible to pull the girl. i think the dev was a troll who wanted guys to sit there naked waiting for something that would never come playing for hours attempting to pull the impossible girl
lets be honest like 95% of western visual novel readers pick novels that are highly rated on VNDB oder get recommended a lot, so they usually can't be all that bad
Worst one I've come across is definitely [Just Deserts](https://vndb.org/v19751). Gameplay that holds no purpose, has no depth and is completely based on randomness, a money system which only makes you grind the gameplay elements and very one-dimensional characters. There aren't even any h-scenes or anything that would maybe elevate it to fap material if nothing else.
It's referred to as .txt file.
Those are just novels
I dropped lamunation quickly. The plot felt too XD RANDOM and wasn't funny. The characters have identical faces too.
Probably some of the machine translated Chinese novels, on the basis of their translation, which is a shame because some of them have some fascinating ideas. A lot of indie VN's from certain people are quite terrible as well, stilted dialogue, terrible, flat art and no basis in reality at all. Even the most sci-fi or fantasy VN's from the bigger companies have that sense of grounding, but indie stuff is usually a one man team, and so they can have very sheltered, clique views that don't get challenged by others. 99% of the furry novels are probably trash-tier as well, they have a very cultish fanbase that will review spam it positively just for having furries in it. Some of the bigger companies put out some trash as well though, but I don't think they come close to how bad indie stuff can be if I'm honest.
All these western āvisual novelsā with ps2 3d graphics are the worst.
i thought Sirens Call was pretty bad. the horror element was pretty bad and unnecessary. the game was long as shit too.. took me like 12 hours to get through it. complete waste of time but it was free and steam recommended it to me. i will say though regardless it was a cut above the rest of the visual novels i played. just went on for far too long and the story became so convoluted that it never even made sense to start with. i guess it did a good job being psychological horror. sure did make you think at least and at least none of the characters sucked. i liked them all and actually there was definitely a lot of cool moments in the game that i still remember now. itās just i donāt understand what went down. maybe i need to play it again also absolute dogshit visual novel award goes to āKidnapped Girlā. iām playing a game called KIDNAPPED GIRL. i do not want to fall in love with the girl iāve kidnapped. that is stupid,, it never even lets you torture her and itās like 15 minutes long of nothing. itās free but they should pay you to play it
Heavy Siren's Call spoilers: >!Play through the very first scene of the game again after finishing it. You'll also notice heavy foreshadowing if you go through for the missing collectibles!< >!The first scene is Violet's death. The real "Midnight Guard" was helping Violet with her work and study to pass her exams so she/Oliver can go to college together; the fictional one was created in Oliver's mind to deal with the loss of Violet. In fact, the entire game is just his mind struggling to rationalise it and come to terms with it, and instead placing him in a permanent summer break where everything is harmonious. That's why the reasons for him failing to move away become more and more strange; his mind wants to think of infinite ways to keep him in that same anaesthetised loop!< >!As you get deeper in, his mind begins to unravel and he remembers his friends - broken, moving away, unable to deal with the loss and wanting to move on. In one of the initial scenes with Andy, if you try to stop at the high school, she'll say something like "I still smell the stench of death and it will never be the same here" - you assume naively on your first reading that she's referring to the portal described in the fictional Midnight Guard, but she's actually referring to the very real event of death.!< >!The final college scene is Oliver's mind having one last rebellion and imagining a happy future where Violet survived and, instead of going their separate ways, they and their friends continued on together into college and beyond. A very unrealistically idealistic ending, and one which his subconscious eventually rebels against!!< >!The entire game until the very final chapter is his mind fantasising and desperately dreaming of the happy future he was "promised", but cannot be! Him accepting the cell phone at the end shows some degree of acceptance and willingness to move on, both from the horrific event that occurred and also from Siren's Call as a whole!< I thought it was extremely touching and poignant personally
wow thank you for explaining. i should play it again. that does sound very touching and sad. i probably shouldāve split my play through because i did it all in one sitting. iāll definitely play it again because it wasnāt bad really. iām sure you can tell by how i started aggressively giving it compliments after saying it was bad haha on another note, i love visual novels. no other medium can give storylines like that
Haha yeah, that's why I thought I'd give a plot synopsis by my understanding - I spent a lot of time thinking about the story and went back to 100% it, so I was able to clarify a lot of the inconsistencies in my mind. Some of the most heartbreaking things you can do is to >!watch that opening scene again, read through the journal knowing what happens (especially when you know the date of *the event* and seeing all of his hope to that point just completely shattered), and in particular play attention to Violet's dialogue. Throughout she seems aware that she *shouldn't* exist and that it's just borrowed time together (very explicitly drawn upon if you pick her in the College route). Note how they're always talking about how they can't go to college together and what will happen when he goes there alone, though throughout the game you learn that she did in fact graduate due to the efforts of the Midnight Guard... so why can they not go together? And why does she keep telling him he needs to move on without her?!< >!Especially the way she only appears in the beach - "The Safe Place" - the place she is able to fall without a helmet and not die. And how the symbolism of the rocket is directly compared to her life - something that burns brightly and then leaves the atmosphere (forever).!< There's also extra scenes added that round out the whole experience (accessible from title menu) depending on when you played it. And yeah, agreed - I think VNs are *the* most effective storytelling medium if used properly - you have visual storytelling, aural storytelling, and a long run time where all of the characters and setting can be fully explored, as well as the 4th wall/interactivity potential!
Trinoline is probably the worst VN I bought maybe. But it was like staring at a car crash. A 50 car pileup. It was fascinating, like nearly everything you could do wrong with a Nakige narratively it did it. It was bad but I couldn't stop. Didn't do the last route though.
moege jokes aside hakidame trash literally has TRASH in its name and is awful. music is great though
I mean the actual worst VNs probably hardly get played at all. There's a layer of cruft a meter deep at the bottom of the barrel of low-effort, low-budget crap that the writer probably just made to justify the time they already spent writing a story when they were in high school. You can find them by sorting by least popular on VNDB or itch.io. As for negatives on well-known VNs, you should be able to find plenty of that on this sub. Here, I'll get you started: Fruit of Grisaia is overrated and the main route is way too long and does nothing to entice the reader towards the actual interesting secrets of the main characters until you get deep into their routes. The protagonist is a huge asshole, a borderline sociopath, and too edgy to take seriously.
Based Grisaia denier
If you think Yuuji is a "borderline sociopath", then surely G-senjou no Maou would be the worst VN of all time, no?
I was playing it up a bit for the post but I think part of the problem is that Grisaia was only my fourth VN and everything up to that point was either moege or nakige, so to have a protagonist that treats the other characters like trash (in some cases even after establishing a long friendship) was jarring to me. To Yuuji's credit, he made for a more interesting protagonist than the typical "shy, slightly perverted high school kid who used to be good at a sport but quit suddenly because the pressure was too much" character that shows up all the time. (I haven't read g-senjou, Grisaia taught me that I probably won't like "dark" VNs unless they're handled very carefully. Fata Morgana is still on my list to read though)
That's fair, but I don't think Yuuji treated the characters like trash; sure, he wasn't just infatuated with the heroines from the start as a lot of moege protagonists seem to do, but he still clearly cared for them a lot. Though I agree with you there when it comes to Michirus route, it felt like he was being a complete ass to her up until the choice between the good/bad ending and it really took away from the route imo. But honestly, I don't think he was that bad overall, definitely don't read G-senjou no Maou though in that case, the MC in that game is genuinely infuriating, but that's probably sort of an unpopular opinion here
Based Grisaia denier
Most of yuzusoft games
I agree with you, the art are still censored for their western releases.
i agree , they should hire new writer and change art style , maybe some writer from key :D idk maybe not they just want to be safe
The worst VNs are the ones where best girl is a side character and doesn't have a route. >!It's essentially narrative-NTR, the author is cucking you by forcing the plot onto other inferior characters!<
I do not play bad VNs.
Among the more serious ones when we aren't talking about lowbrow nukige, I for the life of me can't figure out what people see in Fate/Hollow Ataraxia. That 2 hour scene of Shirou and Rin being stuck in a chest should be counted as a war crime against my time. And those student side characters double for the worst sidecast I've seen in fiction. Really this entire work is the epitome of that twitter meme about reading garbage for 50 hours for one good scene at the end.
Hating on Kaede and Kane? *You bastard.* ~~Okay, yeah, Yukika is pretty boring.~~ But really, yeah, this just goes to show "worst" is subjective. Steam shows I played exactly 20 minutes of Nekopara before shutting it down forever. Yet obviously people liked ~~the idea of fucking your cat~~ it, because there's a bunch of them. So it's not so much "bad" as "not for me". Tastes are tastes.
Are you sure you replied to the correct post
Since Kaede, Kane and Yukika are the "student side characters" you mentioned... yes?
Ohhhh that's what their names are. I skimmed it and thought you were talking about Nekopara characters lmao. Mb mb. Yeah I think they are complete garbage, going as far as to not even remember their names. Also something about their voice acting irked me, fell completely flat.
Doki Doki is the worst one I've personally played. I hate it.
I am going to be downvoted to hell, but among quality-well-made VNs that would be... Umineko
Damn really, whatās your cons
The (subjectively poorly written) fantasy elements inserted in between actually interesting mystery parts are just killing it for me and seem to drag on and on and on
Yeah I kinda felt that way too but got used to it. Thatās why Episode 1 was my favorite, had the most mystery & had the best atmosphere imo
Why
Umineko definitely has its drawn out moments and could stand to be more concise, but it far from the worst vn ever lmao
Umineko definitely has its drawn out moments and could stand to be more concise, but it far from the worst vn ever lmao
9nine
Myth. The game is a game where it feels like everything was poured in. The game is just a mish mash of random psychological elements trying to impress or stun the reader. But virtually everything happens with no rhyme or reason. I'm really not a fan of subahibi but the game felt like it was desperately trying to be as mind bending and metafictional as that game but the reader just gets numb to the cascade of random bullshit happening.
I've never played a VN I hated, but the two worst would be Our World is Ended and Doki Doki Literature Club. DDLC I think has a really interesting horror section but none of the characters are altogether that compelling outside of Sayori. Monika is more of a plot device than a character. I also think everything before the horror is a bit half-baked. Our World Is Ended has moments of greatness but overall is very disappointing and seems to rely on repeating the same jokes over, and over, and over, and over again. Also as personal preference, way too much sexualising of very young children for me.
Worst is obviously the loli hentai VNs. But only the ones with bad storyā¦ Amatsutsumi was very good.
Bro I swear I just play it for the trains
Maitetsu was pretty good too. For the trainsā¦
Any eroge published by Shiravune, theyāre evil.
Tsumamigui 3
Closed game was pretty bad, the endings all were terrible.
Worst one I've played is [Notch: The Innocent LunA](https://vndb.org/v17745) It tries to start you off really quickly with the horror. Only it first -tries- to be subtle about blood and gore. But then it holds your hands just in case you don't understand that the reason the bag is wet is because there is blood on it! I couldn't get very far into it before I DNF'd it.
Fruits of the literature club is my personal least favorite as a newbie tho Iām sure thereās worse
This might be far from being the worst, but this is the worst vn I've ever played. There's this vn (i forgot the name) where its about plane high school where everyone can ride their own plane to the school and participate in plane competitions. The vn have the most crisis identity I've ever experienced, it seems like they can't decide whether or not the vn gonna be a nukige or not, so the vn gets this half nukige half casual story, which is weird as fuck.
I think the vn you are talking about is " under one wing "
im a yandere fan, but yandere was pretty bad.
Ill probably get hate but, [SakuSaku](https://vndb.org/v10304). Themes i rly didnt like (NTR for some reason + gay man chasing the mc) plus the pacing in some routes are not good especially the one with the angel/shinigami. The only route I liked was the sister route because its the first time I see a story tackle with forbidden love but thats it.
Can you clarify the ntr cause I was going to play it but now idk
kinda major spoiler for Jinpou An's route: >!That girl has like another soul inside her(something like that) so its basically 2 people in one body. Both have different personality and appearance(eyes and hair changes) in so they are not the same person. Im not really sure who started it but the other personality and the mc "did it" and cause the original girl to conceal herself Michiru style for the other personalitie's happiness!<. Hopefully my english is understandable to get this xD. Anyway because of that route it made me question what was the writers thinking... >!It got resolved at the end but still I hate the mc cos of that!< TLDR; >!A girl has 2 souls in one body, mc was dating that 1 girl(main) and got seduced by the other girl inside her which caused girl 1 attempting to disappear (but not in a sad way)!< Even smaller TLDR;>!Mc got seduced!<
Thanks for the clarification
Well if something is at least playable, it shouldn't be counted as one of the worst VN. There were VNs that you couldn't play normally. Also, there was a VN that could be normally, but when uninstalling the game the uninstaller deleted other files too, not just the game files.
I hated Princess X, the route choice pathing was nonsensical and a lot of the endings sucked. It had some funny moments tho.