NEW DISCOVERY: The Japan-exclusive, officially Disney licensed GBC game Minnie & Friends: Yume no Kuni wo Sagashite contains a hidden message "I AM MIKKY KILLER" that can be seen by setting the level name string index to the very last entry.
VNDB founder Yorhel passed away on March 17, 2026.
He created the website in September 2007, which eventually became one of the largest visual novel databases on the internet.
vndb.org/t24787
I love mario!
never forget
I’m sure they would’ve preferred a different font but had technical limitations. The original Japanese font is too large to sufficiently put an English script in.
Honorable mention to HELL NIGHT and BIKE MAN
I like this magazine in the background of a 加奈…おかえり!! CG that's just titled GIRL's
BOTUMISA.BMP
THANKS.DOC
THANKS.DOC (English)
(2/2) The fifth file OMAKE5.BMP" is another disguised archive. Use the MS-DOS tool ish to unpack it into thanks.lzh, which contains BOTUMISA.BMP and THANKS.DOC, a hidden message from the director. I've attached both as well as an AI English translation of the message.
I'm not the first to discover.
OMAKE1.BMP
OMAKE2.BMP
OMAKE3.BMP
OMAKE4.BMP
(1/2) In Doukyuusei If, the Sega Saturn port of elf's 1992 dating sim 同級生, there's a file called CLASS.DAT that looks like a normal game file. It's actually a disguised .LZH archive. Open it with 7-Zip to find 5 .BMP files. The first four are bonus art not found in the game, attached here.
It could very well be; I had no clue TOSE was a company.
On the ToHeart2 Desktop Accessories disc, there's widgets that show a character from the game and a clock - like an anime Bonzai Buddy with less features. I found an easter egg: click it exactly 5888 and 8888 times (!!!) to get popup messages from “SADTICE” and “KEN,” presumably the programmers.
I had NO idea that the full source code for ToHeart2 was publicly available! Leaf was required to publish it due to using XViD, which was licensed under GPL. So for a while, Japanese players could pay 600 yen to have Leaf mail them a CD-R with the source burned on it...
github.com/autch/aquapl...
ToHeart2 XRATED版のミニゲーム「ドキドキぱにっくライブラリ」のデータに、使われていなさそうな画像が2枚ありました。
Two (presumably) unused images sitting in the data files of ToHeart2 XRATED's minigame "ドキドキぱにっくライブラリ".
#TH2 #ToHeart2 #AQUAPLUS
PC-88のADVゲームの中には、自己言及的なユーモアがあって大好きw
Some PC-88 adventure games have this self-aware humor in the writing that I really enjoy, lol.
#PC88 #PC98 #カクテルソフト
The 2008 Windows visual novel BIFRONTE～公界島奇譚～ contains a hilariously sloppy anti-piracy check: it looks for Daemon Tools installed in the default installation folder, and then blindly runs "daemon.exe -unmount 0", automatically unmounting ALL virtual drives.
Please play "The Dog Island" I promise you it's a rollercoaster.
ffmpreg
Some CG used exclusively in the PS1 version of "Doukyuusei 2".
[同級生2]
Some interesting books on Saeki's shelf in
Bible Black -La noche de walpurgis- (visual novel), including the Voynich manuscript
If you are a visual novel developer affected by the recent itch.io changes, and your VN was free-of-charge, I can mirror + provide a direct download link to your VN on my webserver, completely free of charge. I may recompress your files into a new archive format (rar, zip) to reduce size.
A Japanese developer of a visual novel on the closed-source Ikura GDL engine left the entirety of the descriptions for what the engine's opcodes do in the .exe file's strings. Can't complain about that.
Harmless anime girl CG, or cryptid??
New hidden developer rant found in Alice Soft's PC-98 game DALK (1992). A developer fires a few shots at a coworker for taking credit for his work, and complains about their game engine.
アリスソフトのPC-98ゲーム『DALK』（1992年）で、新たな開発者の隠れた愚痴が発見された。同僚に自分の功績を横取りされたことに不満をぶつけ、エンジンへの不満も述べている。 #PC98 #PC-98
Damn that sucks... yeah English VN translations can be really rough, unfortunately companies will sometimes just straight up MTL the text to English and release it w/o checking
Discovered a NEW hidden message in the 1989 adventure game Angelus ~Akuma no Fukuin~ by ENIX (now Square Enix) - but this message is only in the PC-98 version, buried on the disk. Original Japanese and AI-translated English provided in images.
Shots fired
"$80 Mario Kart"
"$20 The Shell Part I: Inferno"
