/jp/ - Otaku Culture

[Anonymous No.]

Seeing how we do have some in depth discussions about VNs and eroge industry here on occasions. Have any of you been to Elf's homepage lately? Just today I noticed that the banner about them working on Maro chapter 3 and 4 got replaced with a picture of the same banner burning....

What exactly does that mean? Is Elf going into implosion mode? I know recently many of it's staff along with many of Silkys staff went off to form a new company called Silkys+. Was the lost of blood so much that the good old Elf has finally drawn it's last breath?

[Anonymous No.]

>>12227919
Abandon all hope.

[Anonymous No.]

That's fucking hilarious. At least some artist is having fun.

[Anonymous No.]

Ask /tg. It's probably due to Chandra or a bright wizard assault.

[Anonymous No.]

Considering Elf's terrible development times, I assume they were doing jack shit and just abandoned the eroge altogether when Silkys+ was formed.

What's odd is that Sylkis' latest nukige was pretty well liked by the community and Sylkis+ seems to be going for the generic vanilla eroge formula.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12227940
It's funnier if you see the whole sequence. >>12226846

[Anonymous No.]

FAQ:
https://www.silkysplus.jp/contact/contact00.html

[Anonymous No.]

>>12228749
well shit, based on that FAQ, it sounds like they had a pretty ugly break up from their parent company...

[Anonymous No.]

>>12227919

oh you're over reacting, that just means 3 and 4 are done and they're ready to rise from the ashes!

right.. ; ;

[Anonymous No.]

People are speculating that having 遺作 show up on the banner is to indicate it's going to be their final work.
Also interesting to note is that the artist reacted to it on twitter:

https://twitter.com/sakagami_umi/status/479059428717510656
https://twitter.com/sakagami_umi/status/482403997332942848

I think it's unlikely they're doing all that just to say it's cancelled.

By the way it seems there was a banner between the 2nd and 3rd on that image, does anyone have it?

[Anonymous No.]

>>12229133
遺作 was rumored to be Elf's last game back in the 95 as well. But all that happened after it was that Yokoda left Elf.

I'm guess this might mean that instead of coming out with another Maro chapter, the next Elf title might have something to do with the itouke series. Or perhaps a member of Itou family will appear in the Maro chapters and completely overtake Maro as the focus of the story?

Or maybe this is all just wishful thinking on my part. Elf's situation does seen very dire by all account...

[Anonymous No.]

Umm.. could someone give me a brief summary of what happened? Elf is probably my favourite eroge developer, absolutely the stuffs they made in the 90s.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12230252
Elf has been going through tons of delay on releasing the Maro chapter 3 and 4. Of which, they put up a banner saying that they're still working on the series and has not dropped them as some rumor suggested.

Sometimes later, a considerable number of staffs from both Elf and Silkys went off to create their own seperate company named Silkys+. Soon after, the same banner Elf put up start smoking and burning.

People are guessing that the burning banner hints that Elf has abandoned the project. And thta the lost of staff might have irreversibly crippled Elf's capacity in developing new games. And that this might be the end of the rope for Elf.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12227919
What? Silky's did that? I have been out of touch recently.

I was surprised if any of old Elf staff remains though. Most either went away or died by now.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12229218
Well, that's what happens when they kill off their oldest and most loyal fans. You don't put NTR in a Renai game.

It was still a good game though. Damn shame.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12229218
They never did make Doukyuusei 3...

[Anonymous No.]

This is too fucking sad. Sakimi was the best heroine in a long time.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12231186
>Doukyuusei 3

Well, since you mentioned it... I guess I'll put those concept art of Doukyuusei 3 characters here that never led to anything.

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

>>12232177
>>12232181
>>12232186
Why are their heads so tiny?

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

>>12232191
because they used to draw anime characters with heads that are closer to their size in reality?

[Anonymous No.]

Don't these really take you back to the 90's? Elf's golden days....

[Anonymous No.]

They updated the banner on their homepage again...


God... It can't end like this... I'm a child of the 90's and this is really hitting me harder than I thought it could...

[Anonymous No.]

Like tears....in rain.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12232177
>>12232181
>>12232186
>>12232189
>>12232194
>>12232196
>>12232199

I'll be the first to admit that when I first saw Takei's art all those years ago, I absolutely hated it to guts. The seemingly weirdly shaped eyes, strange looking nose that always appears different in every angle... But as I progresses further and further into the game (The original Doukyuusei), I completely fell in love with his style. His art is pretty much the definition of acquired taste to me, as opposed to me pretty much fell love immediately with Horibe's art, god blesses his soul, btw.

But I totally would understand if newerfags would find Takei's classic style to be ugly and strange looking at this day and age. It STILL doesn't look dated at all to me, though. I guess I'm just that big of a fool in love.

I mean, the guy was instrumentally responsible to the original Loddoss OVA's key animations. That's gotta count for something even for you newbies....

[Anonymous No.]

>>12232218
Don't worry, the next banners will have Sakimi show up, slowly rebuild the banner and the completed one will have the release date on it.


And since this is an elf thread:
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm2322894
Elf's office in 1991 (Probably, there's Dragon Knight 2 and they didn't release Foxy 2 yet)
Features Hiruta, Kanao and Abiru.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12232218
The banner got a small update again.
The web membership service ends today so there probably will be another update soon.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12232730
Well okay, she's up alright. But she's bulldozing shits away...

I guess we'll have to wait one more day to see if shits are actually gonna get rebuilt, or it's just gonna be left empty... Which will basically mean Elf's complete demise.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12232730
>Don't worry, the next banners will have Sakimi show up, slowly rebuild the banner and the completed one will have the release date on it.

wow, are you an elf insider or something!? please tell us, is maro 3&4 really elf's swan song as rumor has it!? I gotta know!

[Anonymous No.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_pornography

[Anonymous No.]

>>12234482
That's Misaki.

[Anonymous No.]

Feels like we're having a candlelight vigil as Elf slowly living out it's final days...

[Anonymous No.]

>>12234482
?

[Anonymous No.]

>>12235791
>Misaki
Are you blind?

[Anonymous No.]

so long as we're on the subject of elf. here's an interesting little theory for you moonfags about what happened to hiruta after he mysteriously stepped down in 2000. whoever wrote this does make some pretty convincing evidence supporting his theory.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12239002
forgot url:

http://inanna.sakura.ne.jp/hirutamasato.html

[Anonymous No.]

Banner updated once again. Now with a sign says "Authorized Personnel Only!".

[Anonymous No.]

Updated again.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12242026
They are rebuilding oh yeah!

[Anonymous No.]

>>12242026

this is giving me hope!

[Anonymous No.]

Fucking weirdos and their clown fetish.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12244667
It's Kabuki makeups, you fool!

[Anonymous No.]

>>12247010

It's Bakatono-samaでおじゃる

[Anonymous No.]

>>12247049
ah, the good ol shimura ken, how i miss yee

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

>>12250300

Complicated feeling. I'm glad the sequels seemingly aren't dead, but the original staff is gone so I don't know if they'll deliver anything worthwhile.

[Anonymous No.]

There are apparently either 3 or 8 people still at Elf.

[Anonymous No.]

Third update today.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12250869
Back in Elf's golden days, they had even less than 8 people. While I'm still worried, I really do have at least a silver of hope that they might pull through...

[Anonymous No.]

Just out of curiosity, did the first 2 games really sell that well? Just wondering why they decided we needed 4 games in this series.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12252517

It was a gamble. The first game already had a "to be continued" massage, as far as I remember.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12252517
They were doing the whole bits of content for cheap strategy with Maro. Which supposedly worked well enough judging by the feedbacks.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12252416
Yeah, but they were people WITH FUCKING TALENT.

Long gone are the writers and composers. Even freaking Aya Kadoi moved on.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12250869
Uh...is the artist even part of their team now? If not, I have no idea what they can even do. If yes, I don't really care...it's just a nukige.

[Anonymous No.]

What puzzles me is that ELF made a lot of money back then with Doukyuusei and Kakyuusei. Hell, I have the DVDs and music CDs for Kakyuusei sitting in front of me right now. Where did all that money go? I know the Kakyuusei 2 anime failed badly because of the reasons you already know, but that shouldn't have been enough to kill them off.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12253500
It probably didn't matter whether they still had money at that point or not. The brand image was destroyed. They certainly wouldn't have sold any more Doukyuusei/Kakyuusei games.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12253508
You may be right. It's been 10 years since Kakyuusei 2 was released, enough to bleed the company out, even if they gained a new NTR fandom.

Hana to Hebi, AV King, some remakes of old titles. Assuming that the NTR titles, which have been plenty, sold reasonably well (or so claims some anon here) that still wouldn't be enough.

Sabotage? Purposefully bad reviews?

Also, Kakyuusei 1 costs over twice as much as Kakyuusei 2 does now. Not even the inclusion of DMM was enough either.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12253124
>Long gone are the writers
If you're talking about the good old Hiruta.
see>>12239005
Whoever wrote that article made some pretty convincing connections.

At the moment at least, Elf only uses contract artists. And I do agree it's ashame. I miss Takei's classic art greatly.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12253508
i swear i roll my eyes everytime i hear the whole kakyuusei 2 supposely ruined elf. not that i don't believe it couldn't have happened that way, just that it's absolutly pathetic how some lame ass otaku tards obsessed about pureness is all that took to ruin the brand name.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12253124
>Aya Kadoi
>talent

Sorry but her art turned super generic saucer sized eyes tiny nose mouth moe-moe cluster fuck when K2 came around. She is pretty much the ONLY elf artist whom I do not miss at all.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12253472
Looking at the artist's tweets about the drama (>>12229133) it's reasonable to assume that they're contracted like >>12254077 mentions.

The most important person for this project is the writer anyways (fuck your "just a nukige") and I haven't seen anything about whether or not he's still at Elf.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12254087
>play pure vanilla eroge from a vanilla company
>there's NTR in it

Eh...I'd be pissed off too. Imagine if it happened in Clochette or Palette's games nowadays?

[Anonymous No.]

>>12254087
It was not the NTR itself, but that Tamaki is a slut. Plain and simple. I would like to put it in nicer terms, but there aren't.

If NTR was an issue, then Kakyuusei 1 would have suffered too, since:

1) Your best bud hits on one of the girls.
2) The school casanova actively tries to seduce Mizuho herself (And pretty much any other girl for that matter).
3) One of the heroines is a prostitute. Yet she never got as much condemnation as Tamaki does.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12256303
Seriously though, NTR is not the issue.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12256309
It is a heroine who does not respect herself.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12256313
Or that has no redeeming qualities.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12256316
"Dirty" girls were never an issue.

Fuck. Now I must replay Kakyuusei.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12256303
Well, yeah, half the girls in Kakyuusei 1 and Doukyuusei 1/2 are non-virgins and no one cared. Tamaki's route was just a disaster, and the fact that she was the main heroine and the childhood friend just threw fuel on the fire. As much as it sucks that it more or less killed Elf, they have no one to blame but themselves.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12256325
Hmm. On top of my head:

Mizuho - Virgin
Miko - Virgin
Ryoko - Virgin
Reiko - Virgin
Mayumi - Not a virgin
Mahoko - Virgin
Nana - Virgin (Poor girl never had a chance)
Maki - Not a virgin
Miyuki - Virgin
Ai - Virgin
Minatsu - Not a virgin
Shizuka - Not a virgin
Tina - Virgin

It's been too long since I played Doukyuusei 2, so I cannot tell anymore.

[Anonymous No.]

otakus with purity complex are the scourge of all entertainment industry. look how fast they always turn against idol/seiyuu/anime/eroge the moment their favorite girl stopped being single and/or virgin.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12256659
pls stop bandwagoning, you are proven wrong, otakus don't give a shit if some of their waifus are non-virgin.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12229133
why does it start burning before the guy comes with a match?

[Anonymous No.]

I like to think of it the other way around. The fact there was so much rage about Tamaki, kinda shows that the writer at least did a relatively successful job, in terms of making the players wanna care about the characters. Even if the route was pretty masochistic to the players.

To that, I still applaud to him.

I personally think Tamaki is great, cause I'm a mother fucking rebel.

[Anonymous No.]

i'll even go as far as to add that wither the player care or not regarding to the characters in the story is a huge part of what differentiates an actual vn and a nukiges.

a good example would be the very recent silky title aishimai 2. what ended up making it so surprisingly interesting was the fact that it started out like any typical nukige, but the way the writer was able to quickly develop the characters and made you care for them. you start to invest more and more emotions as the story progress, and eventually you actually want everything to work out well for everyone, including the good for nothing sleazy main character. i won't say that aishimai 2 is super well written and all that, because it really wasn't. but the way the writer was able to casually connect you emotionally to the characters without ever feeling strong-armed. really does show that dotenmeikai knows his shit, and that elf still got good writing talents

hell, i might actually buy >>12239005's theory in that toten is actually just hiruta writing under alias to dodge all the heat he got from kakyuusei 2 debacle.

[Anonymous No.]

Looks like they're now cycling between these two banners on their website according to their work hours.

[Anonymous No.]

I don't know much about elf aside from the whole Kakyuusei 2 scandal, but this is kinda neat.

Maybe I should go play Maro.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12257031
Enlighten me about this Kakyuusei 2 scandal

[Anonymous No.]

>>12257043
Go play the game.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12256676
>>12256731
That may have been the issue. The writer managed to make Tamaki seem good, just to end up making seem like just a slut rather than just a girl who got advantage of.

A blunder, but it was still shooting themselves in the foot.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12257043
Basically Tamaki first appears to be a really nice gal. She's funny, clever, kind and energetic. She wasn't an annoying tsun-tsun osananajimi, and she mashes with the main character extremely well, constantly having interesting conversations and smart bantering. But it's later revealed that she was having casual sex with some guy she knows, and it went on even after she and the main character officially started dating.

Needless to say, this pissed off a lot of otakus who emotional invested into her character but then felt they got bait and switched when it was all revealed.

I personally didn't mind it all that much, she just turned out to be a deeply flawed character, if anything that made her that much closer to a real person. Think about it, in reality, a person who appears unnaturally perfect or nice, generally have some major character flaws, that are either real or something that they coached themselves into believing.

It's known for a while now that there's this psychological condition called compensation. When a person felt that he/she is deeply flawed in some way, often times, they'll compensate it by being extremely nice/excellence on other aspects of their character, just to cover up their real or imagined personal deficiencies.

I think Hiruta took a gamble with Tamaki, by giving her some layers, counting on that most players would get what he's trying to do with her character. Needless to say, it didn't pan out that way. While I do believe most players, by various degree, understood, but the hardcore otakus, who are comparably extremely vocal, didn't/refused to see what he tried to accomplish. At the time it had gotten so bad that the character artist Aya Kadoi couldn't even find work after K2 because of her association to it, Elf had to put her under one of their subdivision studios just so she can stay employed. And Hiruto soon resigned his CEO post as well and all but disappeared from the eroge industry, "Officially", at least.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12258355
I do not see why people would lash out against Kadoi. She is perfectly innocent. Sometimes artists do not even know the story when they are drawing.

Didn't Hiruta went off to make Yellow Pig or something?

[Anonymous No.]

>>12258372
However, she did work for BANANA shu-shu, after working on K2, about 2 years after it was released. I wanted to buy her Heaven's Gate comics, but for some reason they were out of print and weren't getting new issues.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12258372
>I do not see why people would lash out against Kadoi. She is perfectly innocent. Sometimes artists do not even know the story when they are drawing.

Again, we're talking about hardcore otakus. Common sense are often not their strong suit.

And yeah, Hiruta went on to form Yellow Pig for a while. then just disappears all together. But interestingly, that's also precisely when Dotenmeikai came on to the scene. Who had strikingly similar writing style (down to puns and grammar), who has so far, only worked on Elf and Silky's titles. Even disregard the fact that the name Dotenmeikai can very well be a reference to BE-YOND, an early Elf title that Hiruta instrumentally created.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12258387
I loved Be-yond's intro. Its main character is among my most favored. Hell, even the PC08 version is quite impressive for a galge. How often do you see so much effort nowadays?

[Anonymous No.]

>>12258405
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7vuqPaUb5s

The game was kinda unremarkable, but the intro is easily Shinkai Makoto quality. In fact, I'm pretty confident that this was he moonlighting in between his projects. Animating eroge intros was how he started after all.

[Anonymous No.]

>>12229133
>>12242026
>>12250869

I think I can kinda figure out what happened by the clues from these banners.

They were going along with the Maro 3&4's development. Then the staffs who were involved with the Itouke series started some drama, which ended up putting Maro development on hold. Then the shit hits the fan. The staffs left in droves. Finally when the dust settles, there are now only 3 people left in the development team. Hence that Sakimi, Boy friend, and Maro were the ones left standing and looking at the empty field...

[Anonymous No.]

>>12256746
Any more?

[Anonymous No.]

>>12265442
They're just alternating between day and night banners basing on their work hours now.