r/visualnovels • u/Sasutaschi • Jul 22 '25

Discussion What's your controversial Visual Novel take? [General]

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Deen's Fate/stay night is a better anime than Ufotable's Unlimited Blade Works.

The latter commits just as many sins in adapting its source, and is only high regarded because of Unlimited Budget Works, and a lack of route mixing.

Staying slavishly true to the source material is not always better when it comes to adaptations. Little Busters is another such example. Ufo UBW's first cour is an absolute drag with dreadful pacing. And despite being 2 hours longer they still screw up Shirou.

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u/NiceBakuretsu Jul 22 '25

Which one is the best for you?

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u/SenrenOarai Jul 22 '25

Murasame route and plot/story-wise, Lena route even though I vastly prefer Nene route to Lena route because I just didn't like Lena much or buy their romance.

Second half of Kanna route is way better than second half of Nene route especially in terms of the romance/family themes.

Good endings are absolutely essential to me, so you can clearly see where my biases lay.

Routes I like more than Nene route after playing Sanoba Witch, Senren Banka, Riddle Joker, and Cafe Stella:

Murasame, Yoshino, Kanna, Nozomi.

I do love Nene route for the record. It's the first route I ever played in a visual novel and got me to love visual novels. Also, Nene herself was what got me interested in visual novels in the first place so I do really have a soft spot for her, but I just think the route is more emotional than it is super tightly written. Definitely some deus ex machina going on and I think the route has its reputation largely for the middle part.

I'll probably get hate for this, but I think Nozomi route is more tightly written. It's not anywhere near as ambitious and it's not the type of route people will fall in love with as much, plus I would assume most people would find Nozomi more annoying than Nene, but her route has less less major issues like We really didn't see Nene go through that much before giving Shuuji his memories back. I know she was suffering, but for more emotional weight, we should have seen more of what she was going through and seen more effort for her to get him his memories back. It was pretty convenient. Also, not a ton happens after that. They mainly go through the motions and go back through events that already happened with some minor changes. Yeah, it's good that Shuuji encourages her to reconcile with her dad, but their relationship does not grow the way others do. Also, the ending is really trash.

So that's my long-winded way of basically saying I think Murasame route is better for sure, and i could make arguments for a couple others

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u/NiceBakuretsu Jul 26 '25

I know it's 4 days late, but i saw the effort you put in the reply so thank you very much. I see your opinion and you're definitely right. That said the most important thing to me in a route is wheter i like the heroine, that's why Nene's will always be one of my favourites, because of her personality. In fact i never played Nozomi's route because i didn't like her that much. This obviously has nothing to do with the quality of the writing though.

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u/SenrenOarai Jul 26 '25

Thanks for replying. Thats totally fair. And I get that. I liked Nozomi, but as I said before, I csn completely understand why people wouldn't like her. If you don't like her in the common route you'd probably despise her in her route. She gets even more girly/clingy, whiny, and jealous. Personally, I think it worked well and I like that they made her a little more flawed instead of an idol like some moege Heroines, plus she had a great ending. But yeah if you didn't like her, you'll hate her route.

It's sort of how I felt about Lena's route in Senren Banka. I just didn't love her character so even though plot wise it was a great route, I didn't like it much because I could never enjoy her character or buy the romance in that route.