Abyss

I think this is my favorite so far of the lists you've posted. ~5 per category, roughly ordered by "noob-friendliness" is a good way to go. Particularly the inclusion of "Gameplay" as its own category is helpful to separate out games with elements beyond the usual read + make choices. Super information dense, but my eyes just passed over most of the symbols the first time so it's apparently easy to ignore the extra information if you're not looking for it. Besides not having read most of the works here, there's not much to comment on the game choices because they're largely the same in all these lists, so it's mostly the presentation of this version that I prefer.

I think for a branching / multiple endings game, the first route will always be the most special. Because at that point you'll be going in blind, to some extent. You may understand the vibe of the beginning of the game, and can extrapolate on the tone of the endings, but you'll never know for sure until you complete the route. You're forced to prepare yourself for the tonal shift that may or may not happen. And from that uncertainty comes a better payoff, in my mind.

For that reason I'll nominate my first ending of Grisaia no Kajitsu, Sachi.

Strange that this one recommends Euphoria without any sort of content warning.

It's probably better to play the standard Vampire: The Masquerade, although it is not a VN it is a story-driven RPG, and it's commonly regarded as a masterpiece in its genre.

Certainly the general formula is sound: learn basics then do some form of immersion. VNs are a bit more fiddly than something like anime, because of the technical overhead for setting up an efficient workflow, but visuals + sounds providing context is more helpful for the reader than a pure text medium.

I'm not sure if these "I had success with method X, copy me and so can you" posts are actually inspiring or rather discouraging (e.g. I put in K hours and I'm still not as good as you so I must be ....) But I think attempting almost any method is still worthwhile, and don't be afraid to quit if you don't enjoy it. The only advice I would give is to not follow a "pure" learn the kanji method, because knowing just kanji doesn't do you any good, and it's not fun either. As long as you're learning vocab along with kanji practice (even Wanikani does this) then I think basically any do X then (try to) immerse is viable.

Also, this post is a bit more stat-heavy than most of these tend to be, so it's kind of nice to look at from a "data is beautiful" perspective, anyway.

Tsukihime is definitely on my radar, every time I see the "not quite Saber" girl it catches my eye, in almost an uncanny valley sort of way lol. If the UX is approximately as good as Fate then it would be no problem, although it seems like it's not voice acted, which is a bit of a shame. I know Fate wasn't originally voice acted either, but to me the voice acting work is one of the best parts of the game.

In any case, it's always fun to see a dedicated fan of a single series, and thanks for your suggestion. And as a slight aside, I've still gotta figure out my profile picture for this site. I don't quite know what kinda impression I want to give yet =)

Having not delved too deep into attempting VNs in Japanese, I've only used the anime difficulty features, but I've found it to be useful for narrowing things down. In particular I first search for something I'm interested in, and if it's above a Difficulty 3 I sigh and pass it by =P

I've always liked this, it has pretty much everything you could want in a personal project: a catchy name and a whimsical idea that is just on the edge of being actually practical.

It's interesting to see the changes relative to the current recommendations list. Having a snapshot frozen in time is actually quite nice in its own right, since it helps mitigate hindsight bias (or at least moves the bias back 8 years).

I will say, Katawa Shoujo is a surprising omission, considering how freely available it is, and putting Fate/stay Night in the beginner's category seems a bit funny now, but it's an interesting list overall. I haven't played a lot of these "classics" myself, so it might serve as a good reference if I'm ever looking to pick one.