Ooh, a perennially good topic choice, OP. Only problem is, idk to what extent the games I like are well-known haha
Well, I'm currently translating a game called Afterschool Mix Fighters, which I wouldn't be doing if I didn't like it on some level. It's an RPGmaker game with time management, spread over the course of a month, in which the protagonist, a boxer, must save his boxing club from foreclosure by the student council. To do so, he has to defeat the heads of various groups who want the boxing club's clubroom in boxing matches, and if he ever loses three matches to the same person, it may have dire consequences to his personal freedom and livelihood. It's overall a pretty ambitious RPGM project, given that it attempts to simulate an entire school with enough NPCs to make that believable, and it's clearly a labor of love for the dev.
There's also Take That Succubus, a charming and promising femdom foot fetish RPG in early development atm. Quite niche, in that it's largely focused on that one branch of fetishes, but the writing is pretty good, and the dev's imagination really shines in the things they choose for loss scenes.
There's the 'The Three Charms' series, if one is willing to overlook the protagonist's iffy age. Is Three Charms lesser known? Idk. Anyway, they're about a young buddhist monk's misadventures with the supernatural, in a 'spirited away' sort of scenario of stumbling in/out of the spirit world, usually while pursued by yokai with varyingly lewd intentions for him. The series has
great atmosphere for RPGmaker titles, very consistent and pretty art direction, and super interesting turn-based chase mechanics utilizing the titular 'three charms' to seal your pursuers' movements.
What else... there's One More Time From The Top, a gay mystery/romance VN about solving a crime in the movie industry alongside some of the tastiest looking men I've seen on this site in a long while.
My partner
swears by Reform School, but its particlar brand of homophobic boarding school isn't really my jam. Very good production value tho, and definitely worth checking out if you enjoy M/M games.
