This game goes directly into the prologue, and only shows the title screen once the prologue has been read.

The prologue is kinda good. Especially the normal soldier in Berlin part. It would be a pity to skip.

Being required to sit through 5 minutes of text that would otherwise take me 20 seconds to read is not helping me enjoy the game. I'm sure it's a lovely intro but I just want the option of skipping past it.

The prologue is the setup for the rest of the story. This is a visual novel - story is just about all it is. You only have to sit through it once to unlock the title screen, and from there the title screen is the first thing to pop up when you open the game.

If you're just upset at the idea of reading five minutes of text, it's time put the game aside and never come back. You're not going to like anything that comes afterwards (spoiler: it's just more text).

No, you're right. Not worth bothering with a game that doesn't respect my time. Moving on to better options.

I think we have a strong contender for the 2017 iteration of the "Silliest reason to drop a VN" awards.

This is the first time I've seen someone drop a VN because they thought a section that lasts a few minutes took too long.

I'm not dropping it at all. You can't drop a game you never started.

I'm rather amused by how much people seem to think it's my duty to play this game. Why do any of you care about this at all? If you are seriously bothered that someone may not want to play this one game you like, I think you need to think about whether that's healthy for you.

No one said you needed to play the game, just that it'd be pointless to skip the prologue. I'm just not entirely certain that you understand what a visual novel is. You're complaining that you can't skip through the text when all that'd do is get you to the next chunk of text.

If you really want, after you're through the opening video, you can go to options and turn on skipping for unread text, and blast through the prologue in under a minute. There's just no benefit to doing so, aside from unlocking the title screen, although it gives you the option to go back and view the prologue from there, at least.

Maybe I wasn't clear in my OP then. I'm not trying to skip text. I'm trying to skip the opening pre-rendered movie, which lasts a solid 5 minutes and contains nothing but a very slow text crawl.

In that case, you still only need to view it once. Once it's completed, it's counted as viewed text, and you can skip it by pressing Ctrl if it ever comes up again. After the prologue is completed, the game opens to the title screen rather than the video, and you don't even have to bother skipping it.

I can see how it can be frustrating, but aside from a couple tiny video clips and credit scenes it's more or less the only part of a 40-50 hour experience that doesn't allow you to go at your own pace. I'd rather deal with a 4:30 video clip once than the two-hour forced tutorial that seems to be the norm for AAA games these days.

Unskippable videos, tutorials, or whatever. From my perspective it's all inexcusable.

When I free up some hard drive space I may try Dies irae again.

The skip setting is preset to skip all text that has been read. To change this, press Esc or right click your mouse, go to config, under Text setting, there is a Skip settings. Change that to "All" from "Pre-read only" and you'll be able to skip everything.

I'm not asking about skipping text. I'm asking about skipping pre-rendered movies.

Yeah that thing is impossible to skip

This was seriously NOT 5 minutes. Maybe if you raidly click the mouse button or other button you're using. I did eventually and it was still not 5 minutes. I couldn,t be bothered with the overflowery text that could have been shortened beautifully. But really, I was bothered by the "We nazi are to be pitied" "We only wanted to protect our home land!" Well, mabe you should ahve stood up to the leader and not joined in on the obviousl bad side. I have a German family, this is utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. It felt like supremacist propaganda. Like hell I'm going to feel pity for those who chose some people didn't deserve to exist based on their etnical/religious background. I for one was put off by the intro. I have no clue what the rest of the routes are about, but I'm not going to play them. If you don't want to be put off, just click away until it's over. This was truly disturbing to read (until I skiped most of the rest, which was really bad writing, as it too much text to say something and repetitions formed differently to try to gain some effect.).