It's immature, but the characters are basically in high school, and a lot of us were immature in high school.

Wrong, I know full well what these games are. I've seen vids, read reviews here. Games like Eselia the Eternal that have actual rpg gameplay to go with the visual novel sex shenanigans.

So why not play these instead? Because:

1. I'm a married 35 yr old father of two. I can play a game like conception 2 on Vita whenever while sitting with my kids, or in bed right next to my non-gamer wife, and not rankle any feathers. Because other than some occasional innuendo laden text, the game is basically no different than any other JRPG. I certainly couldn't fire up some sex game nex to my wife, or in front of my six year old. 


2. I"m a pretty much a console gamer only. All I play is purchased from Gamestop/Target/PSN store. I don't do PC gaming, homebrew, steal games on torrents, or purchase those types of games from places like JastUSA (again, yes I do know about this stuff),. That said, don't call me a newb- I've had almost every console made since Colecovision, and I was a heavy PC gamer in the 90s, pre 3d acceleration, when I kind of stopped because I tired of trying to keep up with it all, and decided to stick with consoles. But no, I'm not a pc gamer anymore. My pc is just for work and internet now.

3. Honestly, I'm just not really into porn/hentai/eroge. Maybe, if I were younger, but I find the majority of it kind of weird and gross. If I want sex, you know, I go have some. So there.

If I had to get all arm-chair economist on this game and guess the reasons for why this game did so poorly in Japan, I'd say:

- Really poor timing due to the most recent tax rate hike inflating costs.
- And I mean REALLY poor timing since people who might have picked this up, tapped themselves out for the near future trying to get the most out of the previous tax rate before the hike.
- The fact that it was released for so many platforms has probably divided the fanbase and thus causing total sales per console to be divided too heavily.
- That it was targeting a niche audience to begin with.
- That the developer isn't a company usually associated with SRPGs, which might lead to several potential customers wanting to 'wait and see'.
- Not enough Moe Pedo Bait Waifu Wars CCG.

Either way, hopefully it'll be a self contained story because there's now a zero percent chance of this ever getting a sequel.

Just don't go all raving an ranting about how reviewers know nothing and your opinion is fact. That's annoying.

The movement is definitely reminiscent of Valkyria Chronicles. It's surprising to me that a game that revolutionized the turn-based strategy genre like VC seemingly had so little effect on the genre. It often seems to me that, while new games in longstanding SRPG series are still fun, that they are still so dependent on many of their legacy systems and fearful of branching out.

Not necessarily RPG, but Rockstar titles are great sandbox titles with (perhaps?) RPG-ish elements (or at least I like it, maybe you will too?).  Red Dead Redemption is a really great game.

I got weirdly hooked to Kingdoms of Amalur and Dragon Age is a lot of fun too.

Er, even if it wasn't I'm not sure how that's related to this.

Okay, that makes more sense. Also noticed Wikipedia didn't have a source for Shinovi Versus, so I guess I should've known better than to trust it.