EVN Chronicles

Great review! And for free?  I'll definitely play this in my summer vacation (meaning: soon, I live in the south hemisphere)!!!

IT'S FREE?! LIKE SWIMMING CLUB ANIME FREE? (Dumb jk, I know)

Joking aside, great review mate, next week I will start a "Emptying short\very short VNs from my Giant VNDB wishlist", I will definitely include this one.

Edited December 8, 2017 by Guest

1 hour ago, MaggieROBOT said:

Great review! And for free?  I'll definitely play this in my summer vacation (meaning: soon, I live in the south hemisphere)!!!

Thank you. :3 And well, there's quite a few quality free VNs if you know where to look for them. I actually have two free-to-play Otome high on my to-read list, it's quite possible I will get to at least one of them during the winter break and put up a review somewhere next month.

Obviously, I should be writing my PhD during the whole break, but I have a feeling I will achieve much more when it goes to reading VNs and writing blog posts...

12 minutes ago, SeniorBlitz said:

IT'S FREE?! LIKE SWIMMING CLUB ANIME FREE? (Dumb jk, I know)

Joking aside, great review mate, next week I will start a "Emptying short\very short VNs from my Giant VNDB wishlist", I will definitely include this one.

Thank you. ^^ Considering how the western VN market works, rather short and cheap/free titles will dominate this blog in the foreseeable future. :>

8 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

 

Thank you. ^^ Considering how the western VN market works, rather short and cheap/free titles will dominate this blog in the foreseeable future. :>

I read one called "Moonshine", it's pretty short, but, also pretty c00t. The final CG made me tear up a little ;-;

I recommend giving it a shot it's also free.

Edited December 8, 2017 by Guest

5 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

Thank you. :3 And well, there's quite a few quality free VNs if you know where to look for them. I actually have two free-to-play Otome high on my to-read list, it's quite possible I will get to at least one of them during the winter break and put up a review somewhere next month.

Obviously, I should be writing my PhD during the whole break, but I have a feeling I will achieve much more when it goes to reading VNs and writing blog posts...

*You got me on the Otome part* Is one of them Cinderella Phenomenon?  I really want to play it!! It'll be nice to read your opinion about it!

And I totally understand you, I should be writing my graduation thesis now...

Just now, MaggieROBOT said:

 Cinderella Phenomenon

I thought the same.

5 minutes ago, MaggieROBOT said:

*You got me on the Otome part* Is one of them Cinderella Phenomenon?  I really want to play it!! It'll be nice to read your opinion about it!

And I totally understand you, I should be writing my graduation thesis now...

It is one of them indeed, although I'm not sure how much my opinion on it will be worth. This will be the first time I'm playing an Otome without any f/f routes. ^^

Also I know this is kind of nitpick-y, but you spelled DDLC wrong (You wrote DDCL)

15 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

It is one of them indeed, although I'm not sure how much my opinion on it will be worth. This will be the first time I'm playing an Otome without any f/f routes. ^^

You know what? At least for me, a first timer's opinion is as valuable than one from a veteran. I mean, sure, someone who played a lot of certain genre clearly knows what makes them so special, but a first time sometimes picks things up that veteran already are, I don't know, desensitized (is that a proper word?) and thus provide some fair, unbiased opinion. Ofc, if they are willing to give one, bc some dumb people just play like minutes of games of a genre they dislike only to bash it. 

5 minutes ago, MaggieROBOT said:

 Ofc, if they are willing to give one, bc some dumb people just play like minutes of games of a genre they dislike only to bash it. 

Are you talking about, somefin' like a good portion of the Sonic series? Where critics just shit on it 'cause it's sonic?

Edited December 8, 2017 by Guest

6 minutes ago, SeniorBlitz said:

Are you talking about, somefin' like a good portion of the Sonic series? Where critics just shit on it 'cause it's sonic?

Pretty much. In the list of dumb things I read are: people bashing otomes bc "it's a VN and they are horrible in comparison with VNs like S;G" (like VN is a genre...), BL games bc they have gay sex (like duh), Yuri games bc they doesn't have dicks (like duh 2), trap games bc people feel cheated (like this blocks you of liking the character, yea right...), and western VN bc western (I'll not even comment anything).

This saddens me. Really.

2 minutes ago, MaggieROBOT said:

Pretty much. In the list of dumb things I read are: people bashing otomes bc "it's a VN and they are horrible in comparison with VNs like S;G" (like VN is a genre...), BL games bc they have gay sex (like duh), Yuri games bc they doesn't have dicks (like duh 2), trap games bc people feel cheated (like this blocks you of liking the character, yea right...), and western VN bc western (I'll not even comment anything).

This type of Bullshit makes me so angry, srsly people should abandon stereotypes and be more open minded (like it's okay if you don't like a certain genre, but bashing and shit talking it for no reason is just being an ass.)

Nice review.

OTL is such a great OELVN. Definitely worth a read, (or two, to make sure you understand everything! )

I'm a sucker for mysteries, so I was hooked from start to finish when I read this. (Phew, can't believe it's been well over a year since I read it.)

7 hours ago, Dergonu said:

Nice review.

OTL is such a great OELVN. Definitely worth a read, (or two, to make sure you understand everything! )

I'm a sucker for mysteries, so I was hooked from start to finish when I read this. (Phew, can't believe it's been well over a year since I read it.)

It's more like an "OSLVN" though? I think there are even some traslation-related jokes in there. That's why I avoid the "OELVN" term by the way, not all I want to write about fits that category presicely.

49 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

It's more like an "OSLVN" though? I think there are even some traslation-related jokes in there. That's why I avoid the "OELVN" term by the way, not all I want to write about fits that category presicely.

I don't think that detailed about the term, tbh. If it's not Japanese, it's "OELVN" in my head. To me that just means "Not Japanese VN." Perhaps that's kind of "elitist" of me.

Incidentally I actually helped proofread this game, and from what I can recall, the English and Spanish versions were released at the same time, so in a sense it's still an "OELVN."

I think the only thing I remember from OTL that bothered me was that it kept giving me prompts of "well, you should be able to figure out the rest" for complicated statements, and some pretty unclear philosophical segments. I might just be stupid, but then again the author might just be bad at conveying things or giving unreasonable challenges sometimes. Or maybe I wasn't supposed to understand, I suppose. I did like the writing most of the time, as well as the eventual structure of the thing, though personally I wasn't sure anything weird was going on at all for some time because the main character's actions were entirely in line with a larger-than-life JVN character. I also didn't feel the protagonist was dislikeable at all from what I can remember, but then again I don't find even Fuminori from Saya bad, neither did I find Hisao (except in Rin, I guess) or the protag in the Work in Progress demo much of an issue (and they had lots of complaints about the guy). I think my most hated character I can remember is probably Nanami from Utena who is apparently some people's fave.

I might look through the text of the review a bit more closely later (I should probably sleep, it's 12 AM,) but one recommendation is to look up the definition of deus ex machina because I don't remember any kind of magical tier save of anyone. An unpredictable or unfair reveal or twist is not at all the same thing.

2 hours ago, Zakamutt said:

I might look through the text of the review a bit more closely later (I should probably sleep, it's 12 AM,) but one recommendation is to look up the definition of deus ex machina because I don't remember any kind of magical tier save of anyone. An unpredictable or unfair reveal or twist is not at all the same thing.

Well, maybe it's a strech in this case, but I reffered to the fact that the reveal rapidly resolves the story in a way that was pretty much impossible to predict from the reader's point of view. I don't think it's that much of a difference whether its an actor, an event or a piece of information falling from the sky to break the logic of the plot and pass judgment on the characters. But it might be just me being an uneducated peasant.

With the protagonist, it might be subjective, but I saw him as more or less neutral at first and grew to hate him during the story, just because how he treated people who actually cared about him. My reaction might be a bit against the point of the story, but some things cannot be easily justified even by any serious issues he had with himself.

With ambiguity of meaning, I think it was to some extent intentional, especially considering the structure of the story. The protagonist's fairy tales all gain clear meaning after the reveal, I think that some of the Ziva's monologues or interactions with Claire would also gain a lot more sense when re-reading tge story. And some things are simply left for interpretation, I don't think it's a bad thing by itself, unless you go overboard and end up with pretencious, pseudo-intellectual gibberish. I think OTL kept the right balance, at least for the most part. 

Edited December 9, 2017 by Plk_Lesiak

That's quite interesting blog that you have there. In regard of EVN, I admit that I noticed less compared to their Japanese counterpart but I knew that there's some potential EVN out there. So I would say keep up the good work there, and sorry for being late to give my comment here.

PS - Just asking here, will you gonna play Everlasting Summer sometimes in the future? I wonder about that here, because I did play that in the past.

14 minutes ago, littleshogun said:

PS - Just asking here, will you gonna play Everlasting Summer sometimes in the future? I wonder about that here, because I did play that in the past.

Thank you for the comment. ^^ And yeah, I've played it, but for now I'm trying to prioritize stuff that was never reviewed/never properly discussed on Fuwa. The main idea is to give those VNs visibility, because most people around here don't look for them and have no way to stumble on them on the forums or on similar JP VN-centric sites.

Everlasting Summer is so well known that I don't think it needs much additional exposure - I will most likely get to it at some point, it's just much lower on my list of priorities.

It looks interesting and its only 7 hours. You motivated me to read it. I like how you review.

 

1 hour ago, Akshay said:

It looks interesting and its only 7 hours. You motivated me to read it. I like how you review.

Thank you! I'll be going into a bit more niche stuff in coming weeks, but I hope you'll find something interesting in there too.