If perhaps you’ve been within a few miles of the otakusphere in the last few days, you will have noticed that something quite interesting has come out of its innermost workings in the form of a doujin-esque visual novel from Hinano, named RenAi Blogger.

Now of course, like most things I write, I’m too lazy to fill you in on the details especially given that many other bloggers have helpfully done it for me – suckers – so I will skip to the meat of this review and that is tearing this effort a new one.

To do this today I decided to disseminate RenAi Blogger in a completely novel and unique format that no other idiotic dinosaur could copy and that is in an exhausting multi-round fight contrasting and comparing it to some other popular visual novels in the industry in a half-humorous, half-serious manner.

Of course, RenAi Blogger is only a four-month, one-person effort and so it would be cruel to line it up against visual novels that took dozens of people years to complete … so I decided to set the bar a bit lower. I figured another doujin effort would be fine – but I only had one of those that I actually played, so I settled for picking up another first visual novel, one that was the beginning in a long pedigree of games.

And so there the three competitors sat…at least virtually, on my hard drive.

One doujin visual novel, and one first-in-a-series visual novel. Can Hinano’s top either? Read the rest of this entry »