Foreword: I liked De-Ja a lot so sequel was a natural choice. Title: De-Ja 2 Original Title: デ・ジャ2 Developer: Elf Release Date: 1992-06-25 Summary: After events of De-Ja you're the winner in life. You have fame, respect, money and the love of pretty Gachako. What else to wish for? New adventures and unveiling new mysteries, of course. You get intrigued by the story of "crystal skulls" and one mad archaeologist knows exactly how to find them...
Year 1991 was the first with monthly issues and for that reason the hardest. Let's first try to determine its prominent features for VNs: - Number of adult games increased greately to some 100 titles overall - PC-98 era arrives with mouse support and the older systems finally lose support - RPG percentage remains high at some 20% while ADV grows significantly to some 50% - New sub-genres appear - point-and-click, quiz, board game. - Some games start to use action icons instead of command selection thanks to mouse use. - It's the last year without any government regulation. After November 1991 shoplifting incident regulations being created.
Foreword: I just had to try Elf adventure title. Now I joined the army of Hiruda scenario fans. Title: ELLE Original Title: エル Developer: Elf Release Date: 1991-06-23 Summary: Postnuclear world last survivors dome city. "Black Widow" organization is trying to obstruct plans for human survival while anti-terror organization along with lady sniper Elle oppose them.
Foreword: I've wanted to play this game for a long time. I've always considered it to be the grandfather of all adventure visual novels, but only found time for it while doing year 1990 coverage. So this is Elf's first grand work and the first Elf work to have Hiruda as story writer. Game is amazing but at the same time there aren't that many japanese reviews and as many as zero English ones. How can that even be possible?! I've no answers. My best guess is that work is prior to internet era and Multi-pack (2004) only brought contemporary systems and graphics, so japanese din't really bother to discuss a remake. Let's start already.
In 1988 there are even more games, but I have only selected 9 as masterpieces: 1. Soft de Hard na Monogatari 2. Chatty 3. Famicom Tantei Club: Kieta Koukeisha 4. Lipstick. ADV 5. Onryou Senki 6. Psy-O-Blade 7. Angelus ~Akuma no Fukuin~ 8. Snatcher 9. Akira Year 1988 is the year when PC-98 won. In 1987 there were only couple games with pc-98 versions. Occasional games start to have animation and sometimes even certain phrases voiced. In 1988 there's a very big share of visual novels made deliberately for famicom. Lipstick ADV was very revolutionary for that time and marked the birth of "Elf" games. It is a worthy champion of 1988.
1987 has become a great breakthrough for visual novels. Text parser has been made obsolete by command selection and quite many games that amplify text over gameplay or graphics have showed up (even though the graphics have evolutioned immensely as well). But the most innovative and engaging game of 1987 is Hiatari Ryoukou adapted from anime by Toho. That's the first galge in modern sense - it's about daily routine and chasing one of the girls with lots of sunshine and comedy scenes. The charm of characters is overwhelming and gameplay is quite easy and infectious. If only it could be hooked...