Hoping wrote on 2024-08-02, 15:48:

I don't know, nor have I ever seen, any anime aesthetics/style game that is Shareware or Freeware, maybe because most of the games that are created in Japan don't come out of Japan, as it happens with other things.

most freeware in Japan aren't even anime styled, a lot of polygonal ships and/or stick figures. It doesn't get any better than Kenta Cho games and Cave Story

Hoping wrote on 2024-08-02, 15:48:

I don't know, nor have I ever seen, any anime aesthetics/style game that is Shareware or Freeware,
maybe because most of the games that are created in Japan don't come out of Japan, as it happens with other things.

Um, I've seen some freeware titles at old Caiman.us site back in the 2000s.
There might be more, I simply haven't explicitly searched for such games at the time.

- Holdover (by Fox Eye)
- Empipe (by Emsoft)
- Magical Feeling 2 (by Crystal light stage)
- Fushigina Mori no Pokora (by Marcken Software Developer)
- Guardian of Paradise (by E. Hashimoto aka Buster)
- Same Cube (by yamahara)

In addition, The White Chamber (freeware) also comes to mind.
It's a fine sc-ifi horror adventure game with anime aesthetics.

Personally, I think it's difficult to make a statement about the genre.
Here in Europe we didn't have heard about anime/manga until the 90s.

While we had seen 70s era Japanese cartoons such as Maja the Bee, Nils Holgerson,
Captain Tsubasa, Kickers, Mila Superstar or Moomins (early 90s) or Warriors of the Wind (Nausicaä) before,
I think we didn't really recognize them as an art form of their own before.

That roughly started withSailor Moon or Detective Conan in early/mid 90s, I think.
Roughly, I mean. Italy, Spain and other Euro countries had a very energetic anime phase back then or so I heard.

In the States it was different, I suppose. Big animes like Warriors of the Wind, Bubblegum Crisis,
Robotech: The Movie, Dirty Pair, Dragonball, Akira, Ranma ½ had already been localized to English prior that time.

A lot of then-current anime films like Tank Police or Plastic Little were available to VHS or Laserdic by early 90s.
In UK or Sweden circa 1994, too, maybe. I've got a few of such Video CDs from that era.

The US-specific MovieCD format for Windows 3.1 PCs has some of these classics and was on market between 1994 and 1998.
There's an catalog on the archived MovieCD site at Wayback Machine, I think.

In same time frame (ca 1994), QuickTime CDs contained anime titles in MOV format
and could be played back on Windows 3.1 PCs and System 7 Macs. They were sold under US Manga Corps label, I think.

_
Anyway, I think it's difficult to talk about this internationally. It's an tightrope walk, almost.
Because US, Japan and Europe have a different understanding about what is "okay" and what is not.

Both bare skin and violence seems to be okay to Japan, but not US and Europe (thinking of Germany especially).
Here in western Europe we don't mind a few scenes with a bit of bare skin (general speaking), but strong violence is a no-go (blood and dead eyes get censored etc).

In the US, it's other way round it seems. That's why the NSFW (not safe for work) topic is difficult, also.
It means different things to different groups, I think.

Harmless and trivial things (-from our point of view-) like a glimpse sight of a woman's cleavage is okay to western European audiences, but gets completely removed in US syndication.
Even if the female character wears a whole swimsuit with no visible skin, the sheer curvature of its chest can still be an issue.

So it comes that one anime or game may be categorized as hentai or NSFW in US, while it's just another silly Japanese anime to Europeans.
Mobygames, the game database with its nsfw tags often reminds me of this issue. I'm often surprised by the use of them on certain games.

_
Another thing is that the times have changed, maybe. The US was a tad bit more open in the 80s/early 90s it seems.
Germany, too, especially in the 90s/early 2000s.

And Japanese Anime/Manga culture of the 80s/early 90s was different, too.:
Back then, the main audience were young men and teenagers ("Seinen" genre ?).

This was before anime was about magical girls, underaged High School characters doing fan service or Naruto/One Piece type of shows.
My own sister often is confused about classics from the 80s, because in her eyes things don't look like anime to her at all.

I still remember discovering Anime in the 90's as a teenager. There were a lot of things that we didn't even know were anime that were huge, like Volton or Robotech. They were also incredibly bowdlerized in ways that are flatly hilarious now. Like how in Volton when a member of the team dies, and everything about how the scene is composed screams this is a death scene. Yet all the English dialog is weirdly upbeat about how he just needs to get to a hospital and he'll be ok. And then he's never seen again.

I first really discovered Anime when Sci-Fi channel started having their annual Japanimation weeks. Back when there were VHS rental stores, they didn't quite know what to do with anime. I remember renting Akira once upon a time, but not much else. I remember a lot of it being in the adults only section, like Urotsukidoji. If you know, you know. Naturally I never saw that as a kid.

At some point in the early 00's Suncoast Video became known for actually carrying Anime, where as most dvd outlets like Bestbuy didn't. Or at least not anything outside of the mainstream. And then of course there were all the fansubs. At first VHS scans, usually encoded in realmedia. Later dedicated fansub teams released things straight to irc channels with file serving bots. There was a program called DirectConnect I think that I used a lot between limewire and when torrenting just took over everything. Suncoast eventually gave way to online retailers like Rightstuf (RIP).

I remember the hottest fansub releases back then were Berserk and Rurouni Kenshin, along with advance episodes of Dragonball Z that Cartoon Network hadn't gotten to yet.

I guess since then Crunchyroll monopolized everything and turned to shit? I'm under the impression physical releases are getting less and less common.

I found one of the ads for those Anime inspired games I saw in CGW. Powerdolls from 1994.

The description I found of it is rather humorous.

Using the ludicrous backronym “Detachment of Limited Line Service,” Power DoLLS is a hex-grid turn-based tactical war game that takes itself rather seriously but for one major hook: all of the mechs, airplanes, and self-propelled artillery units are piloted by attractive women. [I'd say “cute”, but that would imply “kawaii,” and these are more of the classic 80s/early 90s anime style].

Namrok wrote on 2024-08-02, 19:46:

Volton Robotech Akira Urotsukidoji Berserk Rurouni Kenshin Dragonball Z […]
Show full quote

Volton
Robotech
Akira
Urotsukidoji
Berserk
Rurouni Kenshin
Dragonball Z

Good grief, you are really an exemplar of typical American anime fans. 🤣 All of them were milestones of "introductory" anime to North American audiences.

Namrok wrote on 2024-08-02, 19:46:

[I'd say “cute”, but that would imply “kawaii,” and these are more of the classic 80s/early 90s anime style].

Kogado's art styles do change with time. Take a look at character designs of Advanced Power Dolls 2 and Power Dolls 6:

With the exception of Matilda Metternich (first from left), all other three characters in PD6 (Appleton, Lee, Nagase) had been heavily "moe-fied" with more modern styles.

For the record, I didn't buy them when they came out; a friend was clearing his collections and gave them to me as his new computer no longer had an optical drive.

Here in Spain there was a boom of anime series, movies and OVAS at the end of the 80's, although almost nobody knew that they were anime, they were only cartoons for children, the main causes were that the localization was very bad, creating a different story, some of these anime were derived from the Italian version and for this reason suffered many modifications.
It is said that the Spanish version of Dash Kappei changes the original story. Ranma 1/2 was quite censored and they only used one opening and one ending of the many that it has, but even so Ranma 1/2 was quite successful.
Here Captain Tsubasa was a success with several reruns.
Sailor Moon, it is said that it had a quite acceptable version and it was broadcasted with very little difference with respect to Japan. At the time I saw the series almost complete, I say almost, because I think they didn't complete the broadcast at that time, although I'm not sure.
The anime that definitely got me hooked was Kimagure Orange Road, which unfortunately at the time had a rather altered version but fortunately received a new version very faithful to the original in the early years of this century.
Touch was quite unnoticed but Maison Ikoku was very successful. And for those older than me, Mazinger Z was very important.
The first movie I remember and still have on VHS, was Akira, and the first OVA series I remember was Gunbuster.
Talking about games, the first anime themed/style game for PC that I remember was in 1997, Takeru: Letter of the Law that used Quiktime if I'm not mistaken.
Knights of Xentar was a JRPG for MSDOS, but with an adult theme, the first adult themed JRPG I played, but a few years after its release, although I don't remember finishing it
Then the most common were the hentai visual novels, like Three Sisters' Story and others of the time, the oldest one I played I think was Princes maker.
From the end of the 90's the number of visual novels available in English increased a lot, The visual novel I remember most from the first decade of this century was School days.
But anime themed/style games that were not visual novels, I don't remember anything for PC apart from Oni, which I still have since then.
I didn't play any anime style game on PC until Tales of Zestiria, all the games of that style that were available were for consoles and although I have consoles from all that time I never liked, nor I like to play on console.
I remember and still have, Wild arms for PS2. Although as I said, I didn't play that game very much. My biggest problem is not consoles, it's that I hate gamepads, because I can't use them properly due to physical problems.
But I just remembered that the first anime-themed game I played was Ranma 1/2 on the original Gameboy DMG-001.I still have the console, but unfortunately I don't have the game.
As for Visual novels, there are currently quite a few freeware ones, and some of them are of high quality, but they are almost all Hentai, so they are not suitable for all audiences obviously.
A free visual novel that I liked a lot is Katawa Shoujo, but obviously it's for adults, so the warning is given.

AppleSauce wrote on 2024-08-02, 13:59:

I'm surprised no one mentioned Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, that game is basically a love letter to mecha animes.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Doki Doki Literature Club.

It's free, too.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-08-02, 22:35:

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Doki Doki Literature Club.

It's free, too.

I played it last year and it wasn't bad, but it didn't leave a mark on me.

I was introduced to Anime in high school in the late 90's, where the first Anime I saw involved a pretty woman who can run very fast. I don't remember much more than that, but from then on I was hooked. 😀 More recently, I read some Manga and watched Anime from my computer. Before two Saturdays ago, I was absent from the scene for a couple years, though. BTW, any ideas of good Animes for systems other than Windows?

Hoping wrote on 2024-08-02, 23:07:

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-08-02, 22:35:

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Doki Doki Literature Club.

It's free, too.

I played it last year and it wasn't bad, but it didn't leave a mark on me.

I went into it completely blind and it... wasn't what I was expecting.

Harry Potter wrote on 2024-08-02, 23:18:

I was introduced to Anime in high school in the late 90's, where the first Anime I saw involved a pretty woman who can run very fast. I don't remember much more than that, but from then on I was hooked.

Battle Athletes maybe? It did have a Windows 95/98/NT4 game.

Harry Potter wrote on 2024-08-02, 23:18:

BTW, any ideas of good Animes for systems other than Windows?

Em, "anime" ≠ "games with anime style".

Harry Potter wrote on 2024-08-02, 23:18:

I was introduced to Anime in high school in the late 90's, where the first Anime I saw involved a pretty woman who can run very fast.

Project A-Ko?

dormcat: I'm sorry. Anime is the actual cartoon, while Anime-style means themed around the cartoon. I thank you for catching my mistake. 😀

leileilol: I'll try that now. 😀

Even though it’s not anime I always liked Future Wars asthetic mainly because it had nice animated graphics that also would run on my stock floppy only Tandy 1000rlx

I Googled Future Wars only to find out that I already have the Amiga version. I just found and downloaded the DOS version. Thank you. 😀

Harry Potter wrote on 2024-08-02, 11:20:

Jo22: I thank you for the link. I found lots of games but none I like for free.

Hi, there's a website called "The Asenheim Project", which lets you play many classic visual novels in the web browser.
Judging by the looks, it's likely a serious/legal website. It even has 18+ and nsfw warnings, so it cares about the well being of the visitors.

PS: I forgot. If you like any of the titles, you may consider having a look at online warehouses like amazon on ebay for a physical copy.
Because some games were being re-sold as "collections" over the years. DOS releases often got Windows 3.1 ports, then Windows 95/98 ports.
The aforementioned Jast USA games come bundled on a single CD-ROM, I think, but there also were individual CD releases of each game.

It seems that there are quite a few veteran Anime fans in this forum, even though there is not much talk about it. Or is it just what it seems to me?

Jo22 wrote on 2024-08-04, 11:59:

Hi, there's a website called "The Asenheim Project", which lets you play many classic visual novels in the web browser.
Judging by the looks, it's likely a serious/legal website. It even has 18+ and nsfw warnings, so it cares about the well being of the visitors.

Interesting, I played almost all the visual novels on that website quite a few years ago, good memories.
Although there are some very good contemporary ones missing from the ones that are there.

Hoping wrote on 2024-08-04, 12:00:

It seems that there are quite a few veteran Anime fans in this forum, even though there is not much talk about it. Or is it just what it seems to me?

LOL. :D

Maybe?

Well, um, personally, I got to visual novels because of adventure game genre. You know, Infocom titles, C64 text-adventures etc.
By the late 80s, the visual novel genre essentially took their place in Japan and continued to survive.

Our western adventure games by contrast, however, went to sleep in the late 90s, after the point&click genre had reached its height.
That's basically when I got interested in visual novels, too - I wanted to see new games and widen my horizon.

The artistic side is also another factor. VNs are usally in VGA like resolution, 640x400 or 640x480 with 16c.
So it's a contrast to 320x200 256c point&click games. VNs remind me of hi-res simulation games like SimCity or MS Flight Simulator on DOS PCs.
Or early VR games like Myst, which also were about exploration of new rooms (in game locations, scenes).

If a game has sci-fi or mystery theme, the even better.
Reminds me playing of The Last Half of Darkness back when I was little. :)
I just loved that game, I had built my first Covox plug expecially for it.

Hoping wrote on 2024-08-04, 12:03:

Interesting, I played almost all the visual novels on that website quite a few years ago, good memories.
Although there are some very good contemporary ones missing from the ones that are there.

Hm? I missed (in)famous DOR/Rance series or Yu-no (-both from PC-98-) from the list? Or Crit. Point, a newer Jast USA title.
Hm. That's all I can say so far, I think. The other few newer titles that I read reviews of are a tad bit too heavy. So I'll stop here.

PS: Other safe anime themed classics for Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Phantasy Star IV, Pier Solar and the Great Architects (Genesis and up), Gleylancer, Zero Wing..
Also visual impressive, but not necessarily anime themed per se: Monster World IV, Panorama Cotton, Comix Zone, High Seas Havoc

PS/2: I forgot. There are other anime style games besides VNs out there, of course. RPGs and Street Fighter type of games, for example.
And they're not necessarily all about nsfw stuff, but rather about gameplay.
A very cool Japanese simulation game that comes to mind is "E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution". It even had a SNES port.

Thank you. I have a whole lot of recommendations to digest.