Yesterday the prominent visual novel developers Mages. and 5pb. announced three Xbox One exclusive (at least for now) visual novels for the Japanese market during a livestream on the popular video portal Nico Nico, but the gamers watching the broadcast didn’t exactly appreciate what they saw.
At the end of every Nico Nico stream the system runs a poll to gauge the audience’s appreciation of the show, and in this case the results weren’t really what you’d call positive, as you can see from the screen capture below.
Here’s a translation of the result:
- It was very good: 12,8%
- It was pretty good: 6.6%
- It was average: 14.0%
- It wasn’t very good: 16.5%
- It was bad: 50%
That’s a massive 66.5% of viewers displeased by what they saw. In the past few years I followed a ton of gaming-related broadcasts on Nico Nico, but I don’t think I ever saw this kind of overwhelmingly negative result before.
Turning on Nico Nico’s infamous on-screen comments painted an even worse situation, with long strinng of “www” scrolling all over the screen. That’s the Japanese equivalent of our “lol,” and it basically means that the announcement was followed by a storm of laughing and mocking.
Personally, I think it’s quite interesting to see this kind of games heading to the Xbox One (it isn’t such a new occurrence, as the Xbox 360 got its fair share of visual novels too), but his kind of result isn’t too surprising, considering the fact that Japanese gamers have been very refractary towards the Xbox brand for the past two generations.
As a matter of fact, if we want to look at it from a different angle, and considering the abysmal local sales of the Xbox 360, we could even say that managing to get a 19.4% positive rating could be defined an achievement.
