Yu-No was a porn game that legitimized the visual novel genre back in 1996. It’s still a porn game (and with some pretty heinous content), but it made the industry wake up to what games could be.

Yes, but I also like tits and blood.

Oh god I remember watching the 2019 anime but getting really confused a few episodes in because things just seemed off and like I was missing something. When I searched for it the next day on the site I was using showed the 1998 OVA “series”, and I thought it might provide the context I was missing. And oh boy it certainly did, just not in the way I expected…

Never knew it had such a big role in Visual Novel history. That’s cool to learn!

It’s always amused me that so called ‘mature’ games are usually pretty puerile.

Yes. Like bones, muscles, organs…

The original game was on Sega Saturn in Japan and very uncensored

Am i weird for having played Witcher 3 mainly for the story?

Violence and sex fade to black.

Not at all. It’s one of the very few games where I didn’t skip any cutscenes. I also found it extremely easy to follow along, and also continue the main quest lines. I’ve never finished skyrim, and not just because of the modding rabbit hole, I just never gave a shit about the story. (I honestly think bethesda is extremely overrated for games, but thats another thing entirely). Even though I found the story easy to play and actually got invested in it, the side quests and side stories were just as fun. Although I don’t think I have ever played any mission as fun and different then drunk dialing while dressing up. That shit was hilarious.

Cyberpunk is edgy mature. Even more so than the Witcher series. I’m not saying that disapprovingly. I like both but I don’t think they’re a far cry from the previous 15 years of mature video game stories. They’re still stories that need direct physical violence to work. They have a grand scale.

Some standouts I remember, of course all violent, from the past would be KOTOR 2, GTAIV, Eternal Sonata, Xenogears, StarCraft 1/Brood War, Persona series has been consistently interesting, Yakuza games and that reminded me of Shenmue, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age 2 is cool with the timespan of story in a single city, Bioshock games, the first 2 Fallout games, Planetscape Torment. There’s a lot. What makes Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk standout to me is primarily graphics and scale. A bunch of interesting questlines in single games. They’re all a bunch of violent games though.

Eternal Sonata I think was the most memorably unique of the games I listed and maybe across all the games I could remember that had high production values for the time. I wish that got a PC release/remaster

Yes. Any normal person would be in it for the Gwent.

Not weird. It’s the main reason to play. For me it wasn’t even really about the main plot line, ended up not caring for the Wild Hunt or the White Frost at all but every tidbit about the conjunction of spheres, Heart of Stone, and the various non-Wild Hunt factions and quests were pretty captivating to me. The small quest lines were usually interesting. The Crones were a lot more interesting than the Wild Hunt

That’s why Blood and Wine was great; lots of interesting small stories.