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Confession: I'm getting my surgery done tomorrow, so I won't be around to post anything for a couple weeks. Finally getting rid of this damn numbness in my hand.

I survived, the customer survey gave me a clean 5/5 across the board, suck it

I've still got Grisaia 2/3 + the "OVAs" to read, but long term I definitely plan to check this out. Gonna be hard to match up to the incredible cast of the original series, but hopefully they give it the old college try. It's especially difficult to see Juicy Yuuji being topped personality wise, but I do like this new guy's fabulous character design; generally a fan of guys with long hair. Though when I was scrolling through the thumbnails on their official site I was under the impression there was no male MC due to them all looking like girls.

Suisei Ginka is the latest VN made by Akatsuki Works, the makers of such classic VNs as Ruitomo, Comyu, and Devils Devel Concept. This was written by Morisaki Ryoto, the writer of multiple kamige including Hapymaher, Komorebi no Nostalgica (as an assistant writer), and Re:Birth Colony. He is one of the most flexible and skilled writers out there, and I've yet to fail to enjoy a VN he's had a hand in. This VN is based in a port city half-owned by a company that caused a disastrous chemical spill there ten years ago. It begins with the reunion of Izana, a young woman with a rather unusual attitude toward life, and Tetsuo, a straightforward young man with an utter disregard for his own safety and survival. Naturally, this being an Akatsuki Works game, this is the beginning of numerous troubles and tribulations. Structurally, this VN is pretty 'to the point', in that the story uses the bare minimum of slice-of-life to give life to the characters and setting, while constantly keeping a laser focus on what is moving in the shadows... and the disastrous potential it holds. Maria Looking at it in retrospect, I probably should have done this path second or third. However, I followed my instincts on the game's first major story choice, and as a result I got into this path. Maria's path is focused on the company that caused everything to go so horribly wrong, so it reveals details of some factors that spoil the other paths a little bit. Maria herself is a classic 'expressionless loli' of the type that is common to a lot of chuunige that have loli heroines. Normally expressionless and nearly emotionless, she is very much like a cat, acting sweet to those few people she cares about and disregarding just about everyone else based on their use or lack of to her. Edit: That isn't to say she's completely devoid of emotion... but with the guy who acts as her guardian being the kind of guy he is... she's naturally a little warped. This path has a lot of violence to it, primarily because of what the characters face in it. It is a solid path though... it is just one that I really should have waited on. Seika Seika is Izana's best female friend and more than a little bit prickly toward anyone who approaches her with ulterior motives (and because of Izana's easy manner and physical beauty, that is pretty common). She was raised by a strict asshole father who sees her only as a convenient object to augment his own ambitions for the family line, which is a lot of the reason why she is so prickly in general. Her sole point of softness is Izana, whom she would probably do anything for. Seika's path is wrapped up in dealing with the plot element that drives most of the protagonist-side characters, in a very intimate manner. It's a fairly standard path for a game like this, serving as a fitting intro to the ins and outs of the story while setting the stage for elaborations in future paths. I liked how it turned out, though a lot of people might find it an odd ending. It is more solid than say... Benio's path in Comyu, which was fundamentally unsatisfying (for some reason, Hino Wataru sometimes chooses to drop a single weak heroine path in some of his games). Momo Momo is Tetsuo's guardian/oneesan/coworker. She is a heavy-drinker and a heavy-smoker and she is actually thirty, though she looks twenty. She is also a brilliant (genius-level) individual as well as being highly perceptive when it comes to people in general. She and Tetsuo have lived most of the last ten years around one another, and they know each other about as well as it is possible to know another person without being them. After playing this path, I definitely realized there was a play order... Seika>Momo>Maria>Izana. The reason is fairly simple... Maria's path reveals too much about the 'causes' of all this, removing a great deal of the mystery about what the protagonist is trying to do at the end of Momo's path and the 'why' of certain elements of Seika's path. Seika's path, on the other hand, paves the way for things that are elaborated on in Momo's path. Izana's path is, of course, the true one. Momo's path focuses on one of the more obvious, if mid-boss type antagonists. This antagonist is a 'rationally insane' type who has no morals whatsoever outside of their personal ruleset. In addition, this path has more death than the other two paths combined, lol. I will say I liked the ending of this one, as well. Izana Izana is the true heroine of this VN. She is also one of those 'always involved with the protagonist's life' heroines in the style of Kagome from Comyu or Suzu from Ayakashibito (meaning that even if they aren't lovers, they never really separate). Izana is a very odd young girl... she seems at first to be something of a tomboy, but when you get to know her, she also shows a kind of quiet wisdom that the average tomboy heroine just doesn't possess. Rather than being intelligent, she really is just 'wise'. Her relationship with Tetsuo is so strong that it is unchanged by the ten years of parting between them. They both care deeply about one another and trust each other absolutely, without reservations. Her path, true to the form of true paths in chuunige, is the most exciting of the paths, bringing together all the elements of the other paths with a focus on the central conflict that isn't resolved in the others. Tetsuo shows off his manliness quite nicely in this path, as well as his own bit of wisdom (If he was a D&D character, he'd be a true neutral barbarian with an intelligence stat of 9 and a wisdom stat of 16), though it is born of him having such a solid sense of who he is, where he stands, and how he intends to live and die. Neither Tetsuo nor Izana is the type to hesitate or stand around worrying about consequences, as they both have very distinct senses of priorities. I honestly wept at the climax of this VN. I couldn't help but cry for a certain character who got the sharp end of the stick from beginning to end throughout this story (even mentioning her name is a spoiler). A toast to those who suffer so that others can be saved! *Clephas smiles sadly and clings his glass of rum against an empty one* A few extra comments One thing you should keep in mind when reading this VN is that neither this writer nor Hino Wataru produces 'standard' romances. Their romantic elements are generally good, but they are almost universally 'romance born out of a stressful situation', so don't expect a charage-style romantic element in here. What romance is in there is good, at least from my point of view, and Tetsuo is straight-out one of the manliest protagonists I've seen in a chuunige (since most chuunige protagonists tend to have issues that make them fall a bit short of that standard). I'm glad that this VN kept up the four year tradition of good VNs coming out on or near my birthday, hahaha...

Confession: I'm having a wonderful day. Just thought you'd want to know.

I'm... interested, although I've heard Voko say many of these arcs are pretty shitty lol. I just hope this won't delay their PS3 asset/VA patches for the official retranslation. Edit: For the record, I'm following MangaGamer's retranslation for my first Higurashi experience and I always wait for the Higutweak patch to get released before I play it. And I love the first four chapters, they're incredible. That's why I care so much that they won't delay the newest patch once Meakashi comes out.

The handsome bastard!

My day was going fine, until someone (who shall remain nameless) made a dig about my age. Now I’m sad My tears are making my tea salty, which is a horrible combination and is making me sadder Hopefully random people will airmail me cookies so I can feel better @Kenshin_sama Consider getting a Dvorak keyboard when you're released from surgery. Even normal Dvorak's are naturally ergonomic, and puts far less pressure on your wrist.

Been reading Kindred Spirits, first VN in a while. Nice read, all the characters are likable and fun. Main character is thankfully not a blank slate, but rather a cool and fairly unique character with a concrete backstory. As most of the game is unvoiced, the few voiced scenes can sometimes take me off guard. I kind of just mentally implant my own voices for the chars when reading the majority of scenes, based on their sprite and personality. In many cases it's a little off, and so it's kind of interesting to picture the subtle differences in how I would judge things if the whole game was voiced. It's hard to pick a fav character since everyone is so solid and likable, might actually lean towards Yuna because of how consistently cool she is. But in terms of absolute PEAK it's hard to go past

Chiltrans in layman's terms is another version of VNR or ITH/ITHVNR+Translation Aggregator (TA in short), but it can just be used in place of TA - personally I run ITH/ITHVNR + Chiitrans as for some reason Chiitrans seems to parse the some words better than TA. The stay on top feature works for some games in full screen. TA should also be able do things such as google translate of a sentence or hook into Atlas (I've never gotten them to work/needed them to work) - that is if you are desperate to see what different translation engine translates the same text as. The easier way to think of text hooking translators is 1. You first need something to extract the text from the game engine, once you have the text 2. With the japanese text you'll need to either: 2a. Throw it into a machine translator and see the Engrish output (eg/ google translate/Atlas) - very bad idea for most VNs as its generally gibberish. 2b. Display it on screen with dictionary lookup on each word. As Japanese is not similar to English where one word is a word (eg/ みな means something different to say みなと even though they start with the same characters), there needs to be something to split the sentence into dictionary understandable words - that's where parsers such as JParser comes in.

Damn it! Congratulations!

Jparser is an engine built into Translation Aggregator that can transform kanji to katakana, Hiragana, or romaji. This lets you get around limited knowledge of kanji in order to read the text as a phonetic system rather than a symbolic system. For most people with a knowledge of the language but lacking a knowledge of kanji, this is more than enough to let them play VNs untranslated. There are other, machine translation engines that can be installed into TA, but I'll let someone else explain those, since I've never used anything but Jparser.

I'd have one which works for me (the source I got it from doesn't exist anymore), I don't know how to give it to you though. Are there any services like Dropbox or the ones you mentioned where you don't have to create an account? If not I could send you the script as a text, which you can save as a .CT file via Notepad++.

the trial edition can usually be downloaded for free from the developer's hp, so get that one

Thanks for the review.

Which is completely useless simply because a) almost all western localizations don't have dates until the last month and GameFaq doesn't count them b) GF list is literally empty, it doesn't even have any indies, obviously noone updates it It's quite clear you have no idea what games are localized and/or are actually good enough to be brought over, I don't understand why would you get into this debate. But we can discuss it of course, if you want, and I'm sorry everyone that this turned into the vita off-topic. Firstly, let's look at the confirmed 2017 vita localizations that are not accounted for in your attempt to show the list. Some of those even have dates so GF is, again, simply not updated by anyone: I probably missed a few, I don't count extremely late ports like Rabi-Ribi, Fault, WEE, Root Double etc and I don't even count KS games like Sharin and Dies Irae to be completely fair. Not to mention that this list is mostly for the first half of the year, fall/winter localizations are usually announced in april/may, and among those we already know a few that are as good as confirmed like Chaos;Child, Yu-No, Punchline and Blue Reflection. Next let's talk japanese exclusives. Among the unlocalized exclusive vita games the only relatively decent enough games I would like to see brought over are Tales of Innocence R, Phantasy Star Nova, Net High, Yuusha Shisu, Demon Gaze II, Luminous Arc Infinity, Uppers, SaGa: Scarlet Grace, Coven and Labyrinth of Refrain, The Princess is Money-Hungry, Idol Death Game TV, Dungeon Travelers 2-2 and Death Mark. Among those only PS Nova and ToI R don't have absolutely any chance to be localized, and chances for LA Infinity are slim. Net High/Uppers are rumored to be brought over by PQube, Yuusha/Coven/Princess are NIS games which always have good chances to be translated, DG II/Death Mark are Exp. projects most of which end up localized, SaGa has been heavily hinted by SE recently, IDG TV are on the table for XSEED as they themselves mentioned and DT 2-2 is likely to be picked up by Atlus as they were the ones to localize the DT 2. What are those mythical exclusive japanese masterpieces you talk about I have no idea, Vita library in Japan is nowhere near PSP in terms of good exclusive games. You won't even find that many great multiplatform unlocalized games, even though I'm forever sad that noone translated Time Travellers.

You should guess the meaning based on the context. However, you can set up some kind of softwares (eg: Greenshot) to take a screentshot of the current VN window then automatically save it as an image (with a single hotkey). Take screenshot whenever you found a new word, and after a reading session, look them up & write down in a flash card program.

Don't be; the anime is a fairly accurate representation of the game. It has little to no story, the 'characters' are actually just caricatures, and only the art and voice acting redeem the product at all. Choosing a different Liquid game, or sticking with Clockup, or trying Cyc, would have been better.