On the 13th of July, the Visual Novel Database user Mert posted in the discussion forums announcing that they created an “AMQ-like quiz game for visual novel songs using VNDB data” and then shared a website plus sourcecode in the thread.
Anime fans might be familiar with the popular Anime Music Quiz. This project uses the same idea, just for visual novel/eroge songs, fetching from your personal VNDB list.
As it’s a project made by a group of friends, the current version is really basic and has little in the way of aesthetics.
Basic Login
This is simple enough. As you enter the website, you’re prompted to enter your desired username as well as the option to enter your VNDB ID. It demands you to use the format “u123456”.
Hotel
Next, you are thrown into the EMQ Hotel, where you can choose to either reserve a room or, if there are other rooms available, you may enter another players room.
Creating a room
At first glance, it appears to require a password to create a room but a room will still be made if you decide to move on without typing in one. Once inside the room, you can set a room password, change some settings like filters for what songs are heard and finally launch the game. There are no invite links so you’re left with having to share the room password. I can see this becoming as fun as the original AMQ with a group of VN enthusiasts.
Inside the Rooms
Once you’re in a game, by default you have to wait for the quiz to fully initialize (it may timeout after 180 seconds). Afterwards you have 30 seconds to guess a song. In our test run, we didn’t hit any titles that had a video included, so it felt a little colorless and boring to not have a sparkly energetic anime video popping up after the guessing period has passed. According to the developer, the number of video submissions are just vastly outnumbered by sound only submissions at the current time.
When you want to guess one of the titles, the entire volume of the VNDB will be suggested to you, based on the letters you input. From how it looks, this will require really specific knowledge of the exact game or fandisc. It’s not enough to just get the series right.
There’s a chat on the right side where you can fool around in, or in my case shill your own social media.
Options Menu
Here are have all the adjustable settings. If you have suggestions for more, feel free to post them in the thread.
As can be seen in the images, the room defaults to having not only OP tracks but also ED, Insert and BGM tracks.
Library
In the Library, you can trace live how music tracks are being uploaded by users. A lot of them will be accepted, but there seems to be quality control going on to prevent things like bad audio or non-music material from being added. Feel free to contribute to the project if you can!
Verdict
From what we can tell, this project is a really basic and niche version of Anime Music Quiz. I remember having had a lot of fun with that site when I was still watching anime, but I also feel that most visual novel music is much harder to remember, especially if you’re not listening to playlists filled with them on the daily. One potential addition I have is, if the library becomes expansive enough, the filters section of the rooms could use a filter for western and eastern visual novels as some players maybe more experienced with one or the other. Maybe the existence of EMQ can give people an incentive to listen to game OST more closely – how awesome would that be?
“There currently are no videos connected, so it feels a little colorless and boring to guess music from a grey screen with a number ticking down.”
Isn’t the reason for that, once you see a video your guess will be based on videos instead of music and that’s against to purpose?
Well, the video is shown usually after the time for guesses has passed. Maybe that wasn’t formulated correctly. I’ll make an edit.