!otomegames@ani.social has now acquired an icon that fits in with the rest of the instance—it’s an anime picture! Still have to get going on the backup instance.

The weekly What are you playing posts tend to get at least some engagement nowadays.

I fixed up the OtomeGamesBot to post them for me, which I correctly marked as a bot account.

One upvote and nothing else.

I also recall it being possible to prevent bot posts from being shown to you. (Settings > uncheck Show Bot Accounts)

I’ll let the bot post again two more weeks, and if the posts continue getting less engagement than I’m used to seeing I’ll probably need to go back to posting them on my account instead.

Genius!MC. Intelligence isn’t just for the LIs! No, I am not a genius. But when I was younger, I was quite the academic overachiever, which left me wanting to see someone like that—whether an academic overachiever or just anyone who would be conventionally considered “smart”—as the main character in more media than just Sherlock Holmes and Death Note. The desire to see an MC like that that would have pleased little!me still has not gone away. So far, the closest I have seen to this is that in Tokimeki Memorial, you can raise your stats enough that you’ll have higher grades than any other student character.

This is kind of cheating because I have seen this, but not in a Japanese otome, funnily enough. I can empathize with and relate to MCs who do not look like me at all, but it was really nice seeing an MC with super long, straight black hair worn down in Talents, as that is basically my one defining physical feature. And as I was scrolling around itch.io looking for this (I ended up finding it via search engine) I passed by a lot more otome that might fit that description. Meanwhile I cannot name any Japanese ones I know with an MC who looks like that… am I just dumb/don’t know enough Japanese games?

REJOICE THE BOT WORKS

the trope the guy in my icon falls under

This is a little funny to me because your icon did not federate over, so what I see as your icon is the default for people who don’t set an icon: a cute little mouse head. I checked to see where your home instance is both so I could see your profile picture and to try to figure out why this is happening, and you’re on Mastodon. I have had trouble with Lemmy and/or Kbin and Mastodon talking to each other nicely in the past, so that might explain it.

It’s always pleasing when you are expecting people to handle something poorly and instead they handle it well. I hope you find more of #4.

Curious about your take on Paradigm Paradox now.

having long hair comes with its own usual tropes I’m familiar with

I’m guessing you like these tropes. May I ask what they are?

If the premise intrigues me, then I’ll usually be willing to play.

Art plays a strong role—but even if I love the art, I won’t play if the premise sounds boring. I’ll push through bad art for a good story. I find this weird because I am not willing to do the same for an anime or manga. This isn’t exactly a harmful double standard, but I wonder why I have it. Off the top of my head I’ll guess that I have less choice of otome to play because there are less otome out in English so I’ll put up with more, while there are so many different anime and manga translated to English that I can afford to be choosy.

If it crosses some personal content lines I won’t play—I am no good with gory images (descriptions are fine!). I also do not want to play a game where the MC faces sexism/misogyny, or anything that reads as too “serious real world issue in the media spotlight today”.

If it has good self-insertion, tropes I love, an MC with a personality I want to see, or gameplay besides usual VN gameplay I’ll be more likely to want to touch it.

Took me a bit to identify her without the hat, and then I saw the shirt.

Hi! I noticed the tagging guide seems to assume people are mostly going to post images of stuff they or someone else made.

Is there room for character design articles, and would that still be tagged [Not OC]?

I am interested in the topic despite not being an artist myself and I like to read articles.

r/otomegames has it so advertisements for other communities are all relegated to a Self-Promotion Sunday thread that nobody looks at.

I did reach out to the mods to ask if they’d be willing to do anything for this, they’re not interested on moderating off of Reddit or putting this in the sidebar, so very slow organic growth it is…

I do exist on otome Discords and I talk there way more than I self-promote, but I have promoted this there and I don’t think anyone has bitten yet. ;-;

I actually don’t remember what taught me about Lemmy and Kbin’s existence. I know it was over the API exodus, but not sure if it was a news article or a Reddit thread. It definitely wasn’t someone DMing me to join, I would have taken that as spammy and annoyingly promotional and rejected it instantly. Bringing this up because if we want to grow the Fediverse it’s probably worth thinking about what got us to move, and what let us even know it was an option.

Not sure where else to put this, but I appreciate ani.social for new anime/manga discovery. Sometimes I toggle on Local and look around, and I often find an anime or manga title that sounds interesting, I click it, I look it up online and maybe read some discussion here about it if applicable, and add it to my ever-growing list of stuff to read or watch.

It is also funny because I see people writing that they didn’t like an anime or manga for X reason, and X reason is exactly what draws me to it. I find both positive and negative reviews pretty useful as long as you say why you (dis)liked it. You tell people what kind of content is there (often tells more than just the promo content for the anime/manga/book/film/game/whatever it is), and they can judge for themselves. I always toss over an upvote to these because they are useful on telling me if I’d like the content or not, even if the opinion they have on the work ends up being opposite to mine.

Pleased that !otomegames@ani.social gained what looks like another active participant :)

Lots of downvotes on a recent post on !otomegames@ani.social that regular commenters engaged with happily, so I’m wondering if it’s just people seeing it on local and disliking it as typical mainstream social media fodder, or if it’s subscribers who don’t comment not liking it, or both. Remember all those “which pill would you take” and then there’s a couple different-color pills giving you different superpowers? It was something like that, but on-topic for otome games. Kind of bewildered by that.

Have looked at other Fedi instances including Mbin for backups, didn’t find one that was just centered on games. Guess it’ll probably be lemmy.zip.

I do wonder if I’m going to lose touch with the broader gaming community

Part of me wants to make the knee-jerk response that that is not so bad, but I do wonder if the broader gaming community brings you value. After all, I also like to know about good games I might like, and popular taste often aligns with mine. Lots of people liked the game, there is a good chance that I, also a person, will like it too.

I do like to read gaming news. Although I used to read gaming communities on the Fediverse and the account and instance I want to use for it is unreliable, unable to log in, and has lots of federation issues, and because I do like that instance so much anyways I do not want to change to something more reliable, so that is not great for getting gaming news or staying connected to the gaming mainstream.

I totally forgot to add that I also don’t like gacha games. I had more of a tolerance for it when I was younger, though I was still annoyed by it.

I am one of those people who really likes those villainess stories. They’re entertaining!

I also notice that my gaming tastes spend more time looking back to pre-existing games (often I got there following a recommendation thread) than at new ones.

I tried Princess Debut and honestly, the rhythm aspects annoyed me a lot (it’s really ironic that I’m a musician who doesn’t really like rhythm games), and I did not like the game’s rearranges of the classical music. That alone stopped me from replaying different routes.

Where do you find out about these games, just curious?

(Also, I hope I’m not annoying you: I really do like discussing this stuff, hence me making the community :) )

I’m a sucker for things that are so bad they’re funny, and I also love drooling over high production value items. Absolutely need to step on trying to English patch it.

Haruka series

I looked into that and it sounds cool. I might join you on that Ruby Party quest someday…

I may be talking out of my butt because I didn’t consume that much shoujo content as a girl, I remember reading Shugo Chara! and Kitchen Princess, but I’d bet that the “villainess” phenomenon might come from the bullies seen in shoujo?

As for otome with gameplay, I just found this link with a ton, including a section for RPGs. I’ll probably make a separate post for that in a few days. In a dream world I’d make an otome with this, in reality time constraints, my terribad fiction writing abilities (will there be spelling errors? No. Will it be fun to read and will I have any idea of where to take the plot? Also no), and my programmer-tier art (I was one of the “good artists”… in middle school) means this isn’t happening. At best I program for someone else’s otome game.

“games aimed at women, mostly romance games”—non-otome or otome? Interested in hearing either way. I looked them up and they’re responsible for the La Corda d’Oro games. As a musician I want to play that series so badly but I’m regionlocked out of buying any of it on Steam… gotta figure out how to get around that.

Did you enjoy the games that you decided not to play? And also, curious if you understand Japanese or if any of these games have English patches or even releases.

I’m very interested to hear about the game. I’ve been trying to English patch it and it’s not working.

I think I asked mostly as a “what platform” question that in retrospect, I probably should have looked up on a search engine. (Released on Super Famicom. Also, apparently “A Game Boy Advance version was released on March 21, 2003. A full remake titled Angelique Retour (アンジェリーク ルトゥール) was released for PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita.”) I too am interested in otome with more gameplay than just making choices. I do like interactive fiction and visual novels, but I also play more genres than just those, and I wonder why otome has trended towards being a visual novel without having any other genres.

I know people talk about how the manga about being transmigrated into an otome game don’t reflect otome very well. But given the amount of manga with otome RPGs… part of me wishes it did reflect otome better so that I could have an otome RPG lol. I think Love and Deepspace is supposed to be like that, but the 3D models just don’t resonate with me well. They feel weird and off, but not in the uncanny valley THIS IS CREEPY kind of way… I’m also deathly allergic to freemium.

It’s okay that you don’t play otome, I understand it’s not to everyone’s taste. Although I would tell you a lot of manga that involves people transmigrating to otome games probably doesn’t do a great job at representing the genre. Yes, there are definitely capture targets/LIs for a female protagonist, but the settings in the mangas just aren’t what we usually have, at least in Western fandom, and if there were more like that in JP fandom I’m sure the people back on r/otomegames would have mentioned that instead of just talking about how these mangas don’t reflect the genre well. And we usually don’t have villainesses. Speaking as someone who is a fan of the “isekaied into an otome game” trope, not bashing on people who like those mangas at all!

I appreciate the advice you’re able to give via your perspective as a mod. I’m reading your links now. I do think that brittleness of instances is an issue, given I had a decent length of time on kbin.social before it died and then kbin.run before it died. But a decent stopgap for individual communities is to just make backups. It’s way less likely that two instances die on the same day. If Instance 1 goes down, just run to Instance 2 and set up a new backup on Instance 3 elsewhere.