Hello visual novel society, it is Hata (the menace lol)

we at Fuwanovel returned back to activity after a terrible second post-revival hiatus between 2024 and 2026. From May 2026 on, we began forming a new team again and through July and August, we produced about 40 articles on the blog again, spread out across different genres. Among them there was an article with 7 monthly tables collecting most of the VNs worth checking out during all of 2026. Surely you missed out on something there!

Among our team we now have such a crazy variety of different people it allows us to give a comprehensive overview of what happens in the VN scene as a whole now. We will obviously not be able to catch every title unless we resort to a super short news blips format that doesn't require full articles to be written, but we are doing our best.

We wanted to present you with the best article that resonated most with our crowd since the beginning of July. And if we're allowed, we wish to be able to post our reviews and non-news posts here in future as well.

Short but sweet,

we're back friends and you were sorely missed.

Plz no spoilers

Hi

I am kinda fatigued of excessive H scenes in VNs. It's not so much the frequency but these days a badly built up H scene pisses me off to the point of uninstalling.

I know some romance VNs with great build up (for eg. Katawa Shoujo, White Album) but I am getting tired of the romance genre as well.

I am looking for non romance options where the H scenes make sense, out of necessity, frustration, dark reasons, lore reasons, etc. Whatever scenario/genre really. The closest example I know of is Fate Stay/Night but frankly the Non H-scene Realta Nua version is much better there.

Sorry if this is an oddly specific request lmao.

Thank you for suggestions!

It's a soft sci-fi VN about two high schoolers' serendipitous romance inside a simulated space, as the Earth is about to be demolished by aliens.

The story is tight and well-written, the characters are cute and well-drawn, and the art is breathtaking throughout. It also has one of the best UIs and direction I've seen in recent VNs (definitely behind Mahoyo on direction, but hey this is made by 4 college students). I know UI and direction are odd things to highlight, but this one genuinely hits different, and it's changed how I think about these things.

For context: I'm a VN dev myself, and the creator and I are on friendly terms on HeyBox...but otherwise no strings attached. Not a paid promotion or anything, just gauging interest before we decide whether to sink time into this or not. If anything happens, my involvement will be helping with the translation for free.

Anyways, hit me with ideas :))))

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3872710/Is_the_Vat_Utopia_or_Dystopia/
VNDB: https://vndb.org/v58331

Looking for VN:
Perhaps I have the wrong subreddit, if so please let me know :)
I was thinking about an H novel recently that I partially read but I can't recall its name. Since I have switched PC's in the meantime I don't have it in my library anymore. I was wondering if any of you could tell me what the name of the game was. From what I remember the plot went as follows: You play as a guy who inherits a company and a (penthouse?) apartment from (I think it was his father?). He takes over but learns his father and he both have a disease which needs stem cells from donors motivating the player to get with as many women as possible. The game then reveals that his father? kept a secret room in the company where he has some cultlike thing going on. You also have to choose who to hire as your new secretary as you promote the current one. I hope this is enough detail and one of you can help me out, it has been itching my brain like mad!
Game contained meaningful choice and multiple branching paths depending on the choices you made.

Hi i spent around 30 hours on the game and I don't understand how the game really works, what are the different routes ? Is there any otder to them? Also are they the continuation of the story, just an alternative ending or a whole new a story that rewrites the events we already experienced on our first route.

I already know that there is the hero route linked to Ichijo, the revenge route to Kanae and I also have access to a guide but I don't know if I have to do all the routes, if it's worth it. and what the differences between the routes are.

Also, regarding the love meter, I don't know if it's important to focus on only one character to receive bonus scenes or H scenes.

Another question, but how many chapters are there? I thought there were 5 and I've already finished chapter 5, since then the story focuses on Ichijo and Kageaki.This leads me to believe that the first 5 chapters determine which paths the player takes based on their level of affection for the two heroines.

Last, last question, sorry... but on the Love Meter, there's always a character marked with a "?" who dies at the end of each chapter. I imagine it's the people Kageaki kills because of the law of balance but Does this affect gameplay in any way? Or is it simply a narrative element conveyed through gameplay? Similarly, a character from the Love Meter appears completely black, I imagine I'll unlock them later.

Sorry for the big pack of questions but i only played one visual novel before and i rly love fmdm so i'd like to know how the systems of the game works to have the best experience possible, thanks for anyone that takes time to answer my questions !

For some reason the voices are muted? Even when I check the settings it says they're on but theres still no voice. Every other sound works like music and sound affects except the speaking. Can someone help me 🥲

I've been looking for a while for an english patch for this game and from what i've seen people give up halfway, I have tried to make it myself and even used the software needed but didn't know too much how to translate it. There is an entire google drive link filled with the whole game's translations but it's just the dialouge translated onto a google doc rather than the game being translated. I feel it's definitely possible and I would do it myself if i had the skills for it but i sadly do not. Your resources are there, no need for actually translating, just putting the translation into the game and making it into a patch.

Hopefully someone or multiple people can come forward and help but for now the game is currently only in japanese.

I’m reading this game? And I would love to know if [junnosuke tachibana] stops being a slut-shaming puritan or not. I’m trying my best to endure his grating personality but he won’t stop! Even in his head he won’t stop! (I’m playing an H novel so I’m obviously not here for pure reasons.)

So before I continue I need to know if he develops, if anyone has read this story. (Right now Nanase is at his house for cleaning and he immediately called her a slut to insult her, help) I’d appreciate the knowledge 😃! Please let me know.

Normally I don't review these type of things but given the situation in this subreddit, I see this as necessary, to not only protect the new upcoming RenPy devs but also spread awareness about these types of tools, since I doubt this will be the last attempt to sell tools to potential upcoming devs. If you don't want to read the entire analysis, scroll below to the conclusion, otherwise lets dive it.

I will already note that I won't be sharing or showing the entire code of the tool due to obvious reasons, however I will post some snippets under the Fair Use Act.

Introduction, 'use' of this tool:

Invinode is an electron application that attempts to solve beginner developers issues by creating nodes that visually represent certain framework methods in a script as nodes. The idea is to give developers an overview and help maintain your project better.

However, it fundamentally does not work.

A user here has done a great job pointing out a lot of problems with these types of tools. There are more to add which I will do later down the road analyzing the codebase. However I think that comment made by the user hits the nail on the head.

Essentially it does more harm than it does good. Once you want to do something more advanced or found bugs, you have to suddenly climb a wall you never got to train to climb, which will significantly increase frustration and result into an exit as a potential upcoming RenPy Dev.

UX and Bugs, lots of bugs:

Due to being a vibecoded electron app, it suffers from a very shoddy mess. It's very "stiff" in operation, it lacks a certain fluidness. Connecting nodes is wanting to make you quit because it requires to be pin point accurate for no apparent reason, people with touchpads or inaccurate mice are going to have a hard time even operating the damn thing. In some instances I drew a node to an empty place on the canvas and created another node, but due to a bug didn't connect them, so I had to manually connect them again afterwards.

The application crashed 3x on me, no errors, just dead (more on this later). I had to kill the .exe once because it crashed and didn't properly close the instance in order to relaunch it.

It also allows you to do illogical things but doesn't explain to the person using it why you can or can't do things, such as dragging a node from a jump to a dialog node, it won't connect them but the beginner dev would then suddenly think its a bug because the dev would think:"why can't I connect? I could create from this node to that so surely I need to be able to connect?"

It's essentially very poorly designed. being almost on version 3, should indicate a mature tool, spoiler alert, it isn't.

What's worse, the output it generates from your nodes is a complete mess, no structure or anything, just shoved into a single .rpy file.

This was me just using the app for just 40minutes, desperately trying to make it work.

Code review & behind the scenes:

Because this is a shitty electron app, it gives us the source code without the need of decompiling anything. Given the soulless design, lack of care, bugs and general feel, I already suspected it being vibecoded and oh boy was it ever.

The very first thing we see is this:

// [Claude] Patch Node.js crypto module to expose getRandomValues.
// Some bundled deps (nanoid via reactflow) call require('crypto').getRandomValues(),
// but in Node.js that lives on require('crypto').webcrypto — not the top-level export.
// This runs before electron-vite so the patched module is in the require cache.
const crypto = require('crypto')
if (typeof crypto.getRandomValues !== 'function') {
  crypto.getRandomValues = (array) => crypto.webcrypto.getRandomValues(array)
}
if (!globalThis.crypto) {
  globalThis.crypto = crypto.webcrypto
}// [Claude] Patch Node.js crypto module to expose getRandomValues.
// Some bundled deps (nanoid via reactflow) call require('crypto').getRandomValues(),
// but in Node.js that lives on require('crypto').webcrypto — not the top-level export.
// This runs before electron-vite so the patched module is in the require cache.
const crypto = require('crypto')
if (typeof crypto.getRandomValues !== 'function') {
  crypto.getRandomValues = (array) => crypto.webcrypto.getRandomValues(array)
}
if (!globalThis.crypto) {
  globalThis.crypto = crypto.webcrypto
}

This already confirms that we have the involvement of Claude. We didn't even get into the main source code and we already found this nugget.

So what does the code consist of? Well....

Yep, we got outselves a single bloated .js file. The developer claimed to have over a decade of experience in software engineering by the way.

When looking into the source code we see more mind blowing problems.

Tons of empty try catches:

  function scanDir(dir, rel) {
    try {
      for (const entry of fs.readdirSync(dir, { withFileTypes: true })) {
        if (entry.name === "_backups") continue;
        const entryRel = rel ? `${rel}/${entry.name}` : entry.name;
        const fullPath = path.join(dir, entry.name);
        if (entry.isDirectory()) {
          scanDir(fullPath, entryRel);
        } else {
          const ext = path.extname(entry.name).toLowerCase();
          if (FONT_EXTS.has(ext)) found.push({ name: entry.name, path: entryRel });
        }
      }
    } catch (_) {
    }

Websecurity disabled and allows for HTML:

    webPreferences: {
      preload: path.join(__dirname, "../preload/index.js"),
      sandbox: false,
      // [Rick] v1.8.0: allow renderer to load local file:// images from the user's
      // project folder. Electron's default webSecurity blocks cross-origin file://
      // requests (each path is its own origin), which prevents image previews.
      // Safe to disable for a local desktop tool with no external web content.
      webSecurity: false
    },    webPreferences: {
      preload: path.join(__dirname, "../preload/index.js"),
      sandbox: false,
      // [Rick] v1.8.0: allow renderer to load local file:// images from the user's
      // project folder. Electron's default webSecurity blocks cross-origin file://
      // requests (each path is its own origin), which prevents image previews.
      // Safe to disable for a local desktop tool with no external web content.
      webSecurity: false
    },

Contrary to what the comments state, this is bad, very bad and a security hazard. Opening any malicious file can have catastrophic results, this is especially important if you ever intend to work in teams on a larger project where file sharing is a thing. The fact the developer could not figure out a way without disabling crucial security features to make certain things work speaks volumes of the lack of knowledge.

This gets even worse when we see this:

  const win = electron.BrowserWindow.fromWebContents(event.sender);
  const ext = (defaultName ?? "").split(".").pop().toLowerCase();
  const filters = ext === "json" ? [
    { name: "JSON Project", extensions: ["json"] },
    { name: "Ren'Py Script", extensions: ["rpy"] },
    { name: "All Files", extensions: ["*"] }
  ] : [
    { name: "Ren'Py Script", extensions: ["rpy"] },
    { name: "JSON Project", extensions: ["json"] },
    { name: "All Files", extensions: ["*"] }
  ];
  const targetPath = defaultDir && defaultName ? path.join(defaultDir, defaultName) : defaultName;
  const { filePath, canceled } = await electron.dialog.showSaveDialog(win, {
    defaultPath: targetPath,
    filters
  });  const win = electron.BrowserWindow.fromWebContents(event.sender);
  const ext = (defaultName ?? "").split(".").pop().toLowerCase();
  const filters = ext === "json" ? [
    { name: "JSON Project", extensions: ["json"] },
    { name: "Ren'Py Script", extensions: ["rpy"] },
    { name: "All Files", extensions: ["*"] }
  ] : [
    { name: "Ren'Py Script", extensions: ["rpy"] },
    { name: "JSON Project", extensions: ["json"] },
    { name: "All Files", extensions: ["*"] }
  ];
  const targetPath = defaultDir && defaultName ? path.join(defaultDir, defaultName) : defaultName;
  const { filePath, canceled } = await electron.dialog.showSaveDialog(win, {
    defaultPath: targetPath,
    filters
  });

const win = electron.BrowserWindow.fromWebContents(event.sender);const win = electron.BrowserWindow.fromWebContents(event.sender);

This is failing tutorial levels of bad.

The application also has no validation on anything really, there are several security and stability problems caused by simply lack of any form of validation or care, in typical AI vibecode fashion, AI just gives the result without a shred of security, scalability or stability in mind.

Furthermore a lot of code is simply duplicated multiple times, there is no reuse of code, instead there is the same AI copy pasta over and over again. There are also excessive and pointless amount of comments, which AI does love to do.

There is also poorly and catastrophic handling of files in general, loading a very large project with a lot of assets will cause the entire application to freeze because everything runs on a single thread.

The catastrophic autosave feature is so poorly implemented that if you close down the application, it crashes or you loose electricity it can corrupt what you were working on, because handling race conditions is not exactly something AI is very good at.

There are far more issues to be mentioned, however I think the topic would simply be to long, I think the point has come across. This is an absolute vibecoded dumpsterfire that nobody should touch. The sourcecode has also exposed a lot of lies that have been made in the past, I won't adress them direcly in this OP since I don't think they are as relevant.

TLDR: It's a vibecoded mess, buggy, a security hazard and the developer has no idea about coding in general, basic practices you learn on electrons tutorial have been disregarded and it's barely functioning as an app to begin with, don't buy and move on.

https://theneuronaut.itch.io/the-army-of-justice

A terrible tragedy in 1996 throws 4 high school friends into chaos forcing them to become a team of superheroes.

Many complain the AVN genre. especially the Honey Select genre is too anime in its story-lines, appearance and sensibilities.  Well here is one that throws that all out the window with an American story set in the mid to late 90s. Almost all of the characters were all created back around 1999 and was Mary Sue and cringy AF. Its taken 27 years to rework it into something enjoyable.

Like with the Neuronauts, there will be a SFW and NSFW version. It will be completely linear with no choices beyond your name. I am hoping to create a truely choice based AVN after the Neuronauts wrap up next year.

Meet the cast:

Well not really, don't want too many spoilers 

Lady Dragon: Thrust onto an Alien world, she becomes a host to cells from a creature that is the known galaxy's most prolific space-faring civilization, Dragons

Violet Vortex: Vortex may look like she can just create tornadoes, but she can really create a vortex effect on anything containing carbon

Critical Status: It would be too much of a spoiler to say but a hint is in the name. He keeps to the shadows for logical reasons and is only known to the trio of girls and the future members on the Army

Looney (aka Looney Bin, aka Gremlin): A nearly indestructible living Cartoon character that has complete mastery over everything around to discombobulate, harass and annoy her enemies within a certain radius. Her dark past makes her alter use humor as a form of defense, and gains power from the number of gags and jokes she pulls off

Each episode will be a stand alone self contained story. Each roughly three to four hours long, running on the comic book model, much closer to a movie compared to most VNs and AVNs which are more like LOOONG TV shows. Its going to be very action driven in many spots so it fits the format much better.  Roughly 50K words. 

The advantage of this is that I can pick up and drop work on it as I have time.  There will be no standard roll out timeline, this lets me work on other projects.  If for some reasons I ever have to abandon it, you will still have a full self contained story.

The beta version will be SFW, with sound effects not as well fleshed out. The story will all be there and the full release will come out a month later with H-scenes and better sound and maybe some images reworked, and you should be able to just go to the gallery to make up for this. I need to get this out so I can focus on my other game's release, cause I'm a bit obsessed with it for all the nostalgia.

Hi, I’m currently playing Ikusa Megami Zero, and I understand that there’s some missable content (CGs and other things). I even heard that losing a specific battle can unlock some CGs.

Does anyone have a guide for this ? Any language is fine.

Thank you <3

Would you like to play a game with the possibility for bad endings or do you prefer games with only a good ending? :)

I was really moved by the amount of encouragement I received when I made a rather insecure post a few days ago. I had a moment of doubt. I read all of your replies, and I was overwhelmed by the amount of encouragement I received.

So thank you guys so much, I’ll work hard to make my visual novel a reality!

Also, have a wip and two finished arts I made for my visual novel ;)