Strife425

It really depends. I'm a pirate at heart, so I just tend to torrent a lot of visual novels. But every once in a while I'll buy some legitimately. I got the Kara no Shoujos legitimately because I wanted to support them. And I bought Umineko after I got into it because I liked it so much and wanted to support it. But for the most part, I just torrent everything.

It really sucks to hear that your first experience with Umineko was the anime. >_> Yeah, they really rushed the story and left a bunch of stuff out in the anime. It'd be literally impossible to figure everything out going off of the anime alone. But by the halfway point in the visual novel it's entirely possible to figure it all out. And it really sucks that they only adapted the first half of it. It's all kind of meaningless without the second half. The House of Fata Morgana is mature in the sense that it's not exactly a family-friendly feel-good story. It's fairly dark, and there's some violence and things of that nature. Nothing sexually explicit or anything, though.

Hmmm...I would recommend reading Umineko if you haven't already. It's a very unique, multi-layered murder mystery (although it doesn't seem so complex at first). It's one of the very few works of fiction I've experienced that I would say changed my life and changed my way of thinking/looking at things. I see you've watched Higurashi according to your anime list. Umineko was written by the same guy who did Higurashi's visual novel, although I would consider Umineko to be better than Higurashi. Out of what else I've been reading, I would say check out the House in Fata Morgana. It's very recently released (just came out last month), but it's been pretty good so far. It's a kind of horror-y visual novel if you like that sort of thing.