So as someone who’s read his fare share of VN’s both with and without H-scenes, my opinion is that it doesn’t really matter. If I come across a H-scene, I just skip it, it’s not a big deal. And there are some people who enjoy them, so me going through a few seconds of holding down ctrl isn’t a huge sacrifice on my part for their enjoyment (though this is someone talking who grew up watching South Park, so I’m not exactly as sensitive to this stuff as some people.)
However, it does bother me a bit when a game is localised and the H-scenes are taken out. I have to wonder what the difference is between their western audience and the (in all likelihood) original Japanese audience. Is it because of the different ways such things are perceived by the culture? Even if that were true, the age demographic at least should be the same. I’ve always been behind what Katawa Shoujo did (can’t think of any others), to have a setting to turn them on or off.
However, while I don’t really mind if a game is censored when it gets localised, I will not read it if it is not uncut. I’m up to reading Eden of Grisaia, and I don’t particularly mind that the H-scenes have been taken out, but because all even slightly erotic content has been removed from the game, some actual story-relevant scenes have been altered/cut. This is equally true when they have to censor jokes. Therefore, I’m not gonna read it until I can get the full game I’m paying for. For these reasons, the censoring of a game can have greater effects than just the H-scenes.
And also, I noticed the If My Heart Had Wings censorship titbit, and I have to comment. As someone who played it without the fan patch for a while first, then patched it after finishing a route, I can say with a good measure of confidence that the reason Moenovel got so much flack wasn’t that it took out the H-scenes (though I guess it could have been a part of it), it was the terrible translation quality, as if the people who want to read it matter so little compared to the pure sales that they can get away with a translation that awful. I wouldn’t even call it half-assed, because I think the bare minimum requirement for even that would be that each line has to form a coherent sentence, and they fail to do so. So I really doubt that many people cared about the H-scenes, I think it was just because of the translation quality.
One more thing I forgot to mention. I guess it’s true that people are likely to pre-judge VN’s for having erotic content, and generalise this to all VN’s, which is a shame. But is this not more the fault of a society that rejects it’s own sexuality than the VN’s themselves? When the society is at the point where they reject something based just on the fact that it has erotic content, I question the society judging the VN’s, not the VN’s that are being judged. Although the one point I feel the need to concede is that it puts young readers in a difficult position, but I think problems like that are resolved when you put in a choice for turning them on or off (probably off by default, since a kid who doesn’t know about the setting obviously wouldn’t be able (willing?) to turn them off.)
Nah. If the VNs are looking to sell, it’s their responsibility to market towards societal guidelines and desires. ‘Society’ has little fault from a business standpoint; only the products and/or marketing have fault.
It’s not really that I disagree with that. It’s the company’s prerogative to market towards their intended demographic, and I’m not trying to say that people who fall outside of that demographic are at fault in any way, though I admit it probably came across that way.
But from the perspective of someone who plays(reads) Visual Novels and hesitates to admit it to people because they’ll think I’m just a pervert, I do think it’s a problem that people generalise it like that, and that people feel that just because something has pornographic content, it’s not worth looking into for the sake of it’s good qualities.
Of course, I don’t say this with conviction, I don’t say anything with conviction. I’m just some dumb-ass kid from the backwater suburbs of SA, what do I know? This is just my subjective opinion on the subject based on my experiences.
As someone who really enjoyed IMHHW, I have to say that’s why I went looking for the restoration patch myself. That being said, the fan translation wasn’t really any better than the official release, in my opinion. So while I’d like to agree with that statement, the work they produced didn’t show that. At the time, I felt that it had more to do with a knee jerk reaction to censorship rather than anything else. In fact, I’d argue that the H-scenes were weren’t just unnecessary, but made one of the routes look significantly worse, but that would be a discussion for a different thread.
Anyway, like others have mentioned way up the chain, I feel like the issue with H-scenes is both parts of Western cultures repressing sex (but oddly fine things like extreme violence), and also how they tend to feel forced, don’t add much of anything, or just used to placate audiences or pad time. Those scenes (and fanservice in general) personally don’t bother me anymore, as I’ve just accepted that it’s ingrained in this kind of media and there isn’t really any getting away from it. I used to completely avoid any sort of fanservice-y anime or H-scene VNs, but now that I both have been reading/watching this stuff long enough (and have a lock on my door 
), I just stopping giving a shit and skip through them. They don’t bother me, but I certainly can’t say I enjoyed any of the ones I’ve seen or thought they were good/additive in any way. Generally speaking, alluding to sex can be just as poignant and effective as actually showing it, so on that basis I don’t think that the full H-scenes can really be viewed as necessary to the overall narrative.
At a certain point, I had to ask myself if I was willing to completely stop watching/reading my favorite genre types/tropes (slice of life, slapstick rom/coms, school life, etc. kind of stuff) or stop in the middle the ones I had already started simply because a few scenes made me feel like I was doing something wrong, but then realized it was kind of silly. I know what I am, I don’t find 2D sprites in and of themselves attractive in any way, so I realized I didn’t have anything to worry about, and therefore shouldn’t let that keep me from the things I might be otherwise interested in or enjoy.
I’m not sure if you got an earlier version of the restoration patch or something, but I didn’t have any problems with it at all. In fact, I was very impressed by the fan translation and had no difficulties reading it to the end. I can’t speak Japanese myself mind you, but I know enough Japanese to tell a good translation from a bad one.
I do have a point in mentioning this, and it’s that I’m trying to say that it was the translation quality of the original and not it’s lack of h-scenes that prompted people into making a patch for it. In fact, though it was years ago, I remember the guy who posted the patch on the forum I downloaded it from saying that the intent was to let Moenovel know that it’s level of negligence in translating the game wouldn’t just be taken lying down by the community - at no point did he mention the h-scenes.
i’m not saying there was no demand for the h-scenes to be put back in, they were, after all, put back in. But the driving force behind the team who made the patch had little to do with the h-scenes, and more to do with the translation quality, as I understand it.
In all but one of the visual novels I’ve read, I’ve just sped through H-scenes and waited for the plot to resume. Ironically, the only VN with relevant H-scenes in it was One: Kagayaku Kisetsu e, the predecessor to Kanon, written by Jun Maeda and Naoki Hisaya. One scene was plot-related, and another was so comedic I couldn’t stop laughing.
I didn’t know this topic existed!
I know many people have an adversion against everything H-themed for whatever mystical reason, but personally I don’t find H scenes or H images of bad taste inherently. Nevertheless, I understand most people don’t like talking about it, so I don’t talk too much about it if people don’t want to.
Back on topic, basically everyone on the Internet says that H scenes in Key VNs are done very poorly. The only Key VN I played is Little Busters, so I can only comment about H scenes in it. Moreover, I only read through Haruka, Kurugaya and Kud’s, and I skipped through Komari’s because it’s in a bad ending and I don’t like bad endings.
They were added later. They’re not essential. They don’t add much to the story. They are quite sudden and end a bit abrutply in some cases.
But hey, I still enjoyed them. While they don’t add to the story, they help building intimacy between the characters, and I personally found them to be very cute. I also got aroused by them.
I’m not very happy about the fact that H scenes were cut completely from newer editions of Little Busters, but unfortunately I can’t say I don’t understand the motivation behind it.
As much as I agree with you (in that the H-scenes do not improve the story in any way, but the translation was absolutely horrible), I also believe that its harshest critics never bothered to even try reading it So yes, it was very much a kneejerk reaction as @Odinbeard_McSparkles has stated
It occurs to me though that it might not have been because the h-scenes were censored that caused this reaction, but rather, that the was any censorship at all. Some people, including myself to a certain extent, feel very strongly about censorship. If it hadn’t been there to begin with, it’s absence wouldn’t bother me at all.
But yes, there will always be some people who act badly because their h-scenes or whatever else were taken away, but it’s not like we can line up all the assholes on earth and summarily execute them. What we need to do as a community is make it clear to developers that their views don’t represent the wider community. It seriously wouldn’t be funny if Moenovel translated another game with the same quality, but thought they’d done their job to their fans just by leaving the h-scenes in.
Which scenes are you talking about? I just skipped all of them, so I’m now worried I missed something important.
Specifically, (One spoilers) Mio’s and Nanase’s routes. I forget the exact details, but the scene directly before Kouhei begins undressing Mio had some interesting text before it, and in Nanase’s route she’s so awkward about it she starts watching TV during the scene and tries to distract herself by watching sumo wrestling.
I neglected to mention it, but this is actually the part of it that I wholeheartedly agree with you on. I would rather the original work be as untouched as possible during the localization/translation part of things. Again, I don’t personally enjoy H-Scenes, but if a skip option is there, I couldn’t care less. Even if there wasn’t, I can just click through really fast, and I’m not bothered by seeing some naughty bits for a few seconds. I subscribe two lines of thinking on this, which is that the author’s vision should remain intact and they should be able to create what they want and how they want to. However, I also strongly believe that the reader’s interpretation is ultimately king over the author’s intent, and the reader is not at fault for not jiving with what is presented.
Side note: There is a IMHHW thread that was created not long ago in the Off-Topic section. Not sure if you saw/posted in it yet, but it’d be fun to discuss the game more directly if you were interested in doing so.
Because of the discusions of steam I have reached the conclussion that the only way to make Little Busters popular there is patching their horrible H-scenes in the steam version so… In a figurative situation where I, making a sacrifice and hurting my soul, was able to traslate then to english in a text file (the text only since I don’t know nothing about patching or developing) would be someone able to make a patch for steam?
I met the genre just because of H-scenes in 2004, playing True Love. My first visual novel without any kind of H-scenes was Rewrite, which ironically turned my favorite visual novel. Nowadays I do not care if the game has H-scenes or not. So far the only visual novels without H-scenes I’ve played was Rewrite, Clannad (Steam), Umineko (Steam) and Little Busters (Steam).
Sometimes it feels like people want H-Scenes for the sake of H-Scenes. If the H-Scenes are a significant part of the game, or part of the appeal of the game is the H-Content, I’d agree with them. But Little Busters! has never been any of these things. This situation also happened with Himawari. They didn’t have H-Scenes in the release and there was a bit of an uproar about it. The version that was being released was a port of the PS Vita version which had extra content added as well as redone art, meaning there was never any H-Scene art to begin with. But people heard the original version had H-Scenes so they got all riled up about it. Wanting sex in your games is fine, but don’t just demand it without knowing the full context of the reasoning behind the decision to exclude it, because sometimes the decision was for the best. It’s like if people got in Frontwing’s face for removing a sex scene from their release of Subahibi without knowing both the content of the scene and that it wasn’t that relevant to the plot.
Some visual novels are better with H-scenes, some are better without. It depends on the context and execution. Of course, nukige are all about them but that’s a separate genre.
From what I’ve seen, quality VNs that originally didn’t have H-scenes should just stick to not having them.
But when it comes to localizing VNs, the question of whether H-scenes that were originally present should be removed has become the topic of many frustrated discussions.
In this context, the best option is to make both an all-ages as well as an 18+ version of the VN available for purchase. Some games on Steam already have optional restoration patches. That shouldn’t be difficult for PC releases. PS Vita ports don’t really have that option, but not that many VNs are available for it as far as I’m aware.
From a business perspective, the companies have to keep the target audience in mind. Localizing popular VNs that originally had H-scenes and removing said scenes is a surefire way to lose potential customers. While the Japanese audience may have several versions of a VN from which to choose, the Western doesn’t have that luxury.
In my personal opinion the both extremes are the worse, the people who won’t try a non r-18 and the people who won’t ever play a r-18 no matter what. I heard someone say they won’t play air because it used to be a “porn game” they didn’t care if the content was gone even lol. But I do feel the ideal situation is having both. It is actually very simple the market is there then people want that version. They shouldn’t allow that to be their one checklist item that must be there, but they do. If that is your only reason to buying it why are you buying a game with such little amount of it? I can see if you are on the fence it can make you sway one way, but having that influence you entirely is puzzling.
The thing that makes me angry is when people start throwing the word “censored” around. In little busters case it is 5 vs 1 clearly EX is the “wild version” rather than the others being censored. Whats the reverse of “censored”? where they just slap some stuff in there so it sells to that market? It is like those guys want to be tricked into a marketing gimmick…
So just don’t be extreme on either side, don’t try to burn all r-18 games to the ground and don’t only buy games because they are r-18 just have it as one of your reasons.
But… lets be honest the devs are sort of at fault when they try to “reach too far” for that market. It is a grey line. How much can it be forced into one or the other before it is too forced?
I’m not in any of the extremes. I read both, with and without h-scenes. I’m only trying to Little Busters to get the level of popularity that deserves in steam and, even if I don’t like their h-scenes in special seems like is the only way to reach that popularity level in the actual market of VN in steam.
I think i know they cannot post h-games on steam, but could the company create a official patch out of steam? for players who want to add the scenes? I do not know if there are any companies that have already done this. if steam somehow forbids the creator of the game to do this
I really don’t know if a company can post a patch by therselves. I’m talking about a fan made patch.
That implies successfully importing the RealLive assets over to LUCA (voices, CGs edited to fit the new ratio, etc…) which no one managed to even successfully extract anything from yet and somehow successfully patching in the new elements without entirely breaking the game.
It’s really not as simple as translating a bunch of text and inserting it. None of this “BUT MUH CENSORSHIP” nonsense would ever motivate anyone to do it TBH.
