My story coming into this scene is err... insane. Let's see...
It was a long while ago, the year was 2007. I moved to an apartment in the city to stay close to my workplace, and finally had some actual private, parentless time. Around the same time, a tech mag I subscribed to ran an article about Hentai and how it's breeding on the 'net. Looking back at it, the article was full of ignorant, oblivious criticisms, and has the word "propaganda" written all over it, but I guess you can figure that out by yourselves. Now, before reading that issue, I didn't know what the fuck Hentai was about so the article kind of had an indoctrination effect on me. Made me kind of skeptical about the whole concept of it. But at least while I was skeptical, I wasn't very vocal about it. It was less "Aww this shit sounds disgusting, hideous, the fuck why it has to exist?" and more "Well, it ain't my thing, but it's out there 'cause somebody's into it, so good for them". Oooooooh boy did that view change drastically 5 years later.
A short time later, early 2008, I was 22 years old, almost forgotten about said article when suddenly at the forum I was active at, bursted out from nowhere a heated debate about Hentai, or more specifically, Hentai games. I won't give the name of the site and his username but basically, a guy in the forum caught a gameplay footage of RapeLay (the more "action packed" part) and got so furious about it that he wrote a 7-paragraph post expressing his rant and posted it on the site. It took me 30-40 minutes to read every word of that post, and when I was done and hit the refresh button, the thread reached the 5th page. I shit you not! 5 pages of reply in half a fucking hour! That thread was heated and suddenly became the talk of the day... naw, scratch that, the talk of the month. That thread reached about 20-something pages at the end of the day, by the way.
Minus the spammers, the thread bascially had 2 sides, the skeptics and the supporters (not being the vocal guy, I stayed out of it and just lurked). At first I thought there would be a lot of members agreeing with the furious OP, turns out there are a lot of hentai supporters on the site too. And I thought the skeptics would tip the scale on their side, but the longer the thread goes on, the supporters owned a lot of the debates. Generally speaking, the skeptics all had the same prejudices that they repeated over and over again, while the supporters, having actually played these games, constantly attacked and exposed the inexperience of the skeptics. They also name-dropped quite a lot of story-centric games in the thread which, at the time, I and other skeptics have no idea what they're about. I picked out a selected numbers of games that were mentioned the most by the supporters, which are One, Tsukihime and Kana Little Sister (keep in mind, this was early 2008, not a lot of VNs had been translated at this point). I sent the URL to one of my friend on Yahoo! Messenger to which he replied that he's on the supporters' side (to my surprise). So I asked him again about whether I should try out said games, getting a reply along the lines of "Dude, you gonna dig this shit. I know what kind of shit you'd dig, man.". That guy knew I was a skeptic before all of this happened, by the way.
So I whipped up my Google skills, found One and the English patch in 5 minutes (and did some research about the terminologies on Wikipedia while it was downloading) and got the game running in an afternoon. I was a bit entranced by the light, concise, more accessible writing than the books I usually read, but at the same kind of felt comfortable in a way. The game goes on smoothly for a good length, climaxes came and go (bad puns not intended, I'm sorry), it was not as bad as I was afraid, but didn't impress me much. I gave these games a second chance nonetheless.
This time, whipped up Google again, found Tsukihime the next day and started playing it for the next week. GOD-FREAKING-DAMN did I hit the jackpot. Tsukihime being good is one thing, but the fact that it is so bizarre that it's unlike anything I've read before sucked me in. The game is so long that half way through, I found myself wondering "How are they gonna fit a sex scene into this kind of stor... oh wait a minute, here it comes, uh oh.". Yeah, thank god I found Tsukihime before FSN because god knows how terrible FSN's ero scenes were, but that's another matter.
Next thing I know, 4 years later, I find myself playing Yuzusoft games hooked up with Interactive Text Hooker.
