Leaderboard

So we all know there's multiple ways to help us read Japanese VNs by now. All Japanese VNs have text you can grab and display, which makes them an easy target for practicing reading. There's one downside though, visual novels are typically incredibly long, especially if you are a beginner (yes, even the shorter ones can take a while to read if you're inexperienced). I always thought this downside affected lots of people that wanted to practice reading but didn't have the time/energy to read through an entire VN in Japanese to start with. However, other mediums like manga and LNs are much more difficult due to requiring you to either constantly look at a dictionary or just know all those kanji from memory (with the exception of manga that have furigana, but those are usually aimed at younger audiences and might not be the most interesting). It felt unfair that such fun media couldn't be used as easily to study Japanese. Well luckily yesterday I was talking to a friend on discord and fanboying over the Monogatari Series with them and they ended up showing me a few tools they used to read LNs, and after that I myself looked up for ways to read manga in Japanese, and thus we come to this thread in which I'm hoping to share something useful with those of you who wish to read these mediums as a way to practice Japanese. Note: If you know any other/better software, please by all means share it! Kanjitomo Kanjitomo is an incredibly useful software to read manga on your computer. It detects kanji/words by simply hovering over them with your mouse. But not only that, it gives you the reading/meaning of those words/kanji. And lastly, if it fails to show the correct kanji, it shows you a list with similar looking kanji for you to browse, it also lets you edit the individual kanji contained in the word in case it guessed the 2nd or 3rd characters wrong, thus always letting you pick which is the right one. Some screenshots: Advantages: Easy word lookup Very customizeable Let's you actually import images and scroll through multiple images in a single folder. Also supports Chinese Disadvantages Can get laggy sometimes (mostly on startup) The zoom feature can get somewhat annoying to control Although it lets you import files, I found the file viewer annoying to use and prefer to just use some other software to open the images Download (requires Java to be installed): http://kanjitomo.net/ JGloss This software is primarily geared towards books. What it does is it lets you import .txt files (or copy text) and open them in the reader. After that it places furigana on top of all the words, and also creates a glossary of words on the right for you to look up if you need. One feature I really appreciated in it was that it only displays furigana for the first instance of a word only, forcing you to memorize the word after that (although if you want to, you can select the word and it'll look it up for you regardless). Now you might be thinking, doesn't Translation Aggregator also do something similar? While TA does indeed have these same functions, TA is mostly practical for smaller chunks of text, not whole sections of a book. Screenshots: With translation enabled: Advantages: Easy way to read large chunks of text with furigana Can use different parsers. Can also place the English translation underneath the words if needed Creates a glossary of words for an easy lookup Pretty costumizeable interface (you can change the font/size/colors/etc.) Also works with German Disadvantages: Requires you to copy the text or have a text file of the book you're reading, which doesn't always happen. Parsing is not perfect and you may find some weird results at times (but that's the same for any Japanese parser). It seems to have a certain limit of text it can display (I kept running into an error when I imported a lot of text), so you may not be able to import whole books but instead have to copy multiple chunks (they're pretty big chunks though) Download: http://jgloss.sourceforge.net/ Yomichan Yomichan is an Anki add-on that lets you read text and look up words while simultaneously being able to create an anki deck for the words you want. This tool is incredibly useful if you want to study and read a book at the same time. Screenshot: Advantages: Lets you read entire books at once (you can also copy the text) Very easy to create an anki deck with the words from the text Disadvantages No furigana on the text itself Requires you to have the book in a .txt file More useful for studying than actually reading Download (requires anki to be installed): https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/934748696 Capture2Text Capture2Text is a simple but intuitive OCR (Optic Character Recognition) program that lets you select a part of your screen to convert into text. It's useful to grab whole sentences from a specific bubble of text or a sentence from a book and automatically copy them to your clipboard, which you can then use to do whatever. If you're a translator, it makes the script writing process much easier since you don't have to manually input everything. (I don't really have any screenshots since all the software does is grab and copy text.) Advantages: Easy way to grab text from an image and paste it onto your clipboard (or someplace else) Works well in conjunction with other software like TA. Disatvantages: The recognition can fail pretty hard depending on the font used (you can easily end up with scrambled jibberish) Download: http://capture2text.sourceforge.net/ I know it's not groundbreaking and it might not even be as appealing as just grabbing text in a VN, but I find manga and LNs very fun and less tiresome to read and so these tools come in really handy for that purpose. Think of it this way, do you want to start practicing Japanese by reading an entire visual novel with more than a thousand lines from the get go, or would something smaller like a 20 page manga chapter be a little easier for starters? Of course, this doesn't mean you shouldn't try to read visual novels, they're great practice, but I think a lot of people lose themselves when starting off with them and perhaps these tools will help keep the focus on studying and memorizing things a bit more instead of just reading.

Yes, I played this. On the surface, this game looks like a straight-out thematic nukige... but in reality it is a comedy VN that just happens to have a lot of sexual humor and h-scenes, lol. Basically, the protagonist Shotarou receives a fatal wound protecting a pretty girl, who proceeds to kiss him, fusing her body with his, covering him in an armor suit and granting him incredible physical abilities while also healing his wounds... and then immediately asks for sex once he is finished beating up her attackers. He ends up in a '-rangers' type hero vs monster villains type situation where he faces off against plant monsters controlled by a scantily-dressed girl wielding a bow. This leads to a lot of wacky situations that are generally amusing from beginning to end. What surprised me was that they actually made an effort to tell a story in this game. Sure, it wasn't a GREAT story, but it was a decent one, far better than you usually expect from a game so reliant on sex and sex humor. I spent most of my time laughing, but I was also able to get into the story emotionally to an extent, despite the half-assed nature of the setting. While this isn't good enough to be a VN of the Month candidate, if you just want to play a VN with shotgun-fast humor and carefree h-scenes, this is a decent choice. PS: I know I didn't bother explaining about this VN in detail... but literally ninety-percent of this game is endless conversations that turn into jokes, halfway decent fight scenes, and h-scenes. The remaining ten percent is the halfway decent story they somehow managed to combine with this.

Two words, made famous in so many fan-bases thanks to Penis-- Peter Parker. Said during his first (possibly most iconic) appearance during Captain America: Civil War. Stealing Cap's shield and handing it back to him like a true friend. I have a ton of doubt everyone has seen that movie, and I'm probably wasting so much time by extending this reference any longer. But the point is, I would like to recreate that moment with all of you. (Minus the part where we choose sides, because I'm pretty sure it'll end up looking like BvS with how many participants we'll probably get out of it.) Anyway... Without further ado. Hey everyone... I'm Tekaji and I like to write. (And I should have probably went with a Naruto reference. And just said, "Believe it!")

You did your part for the war against the bugs, civilian! Would you like to know more?

My first 2D crush might have been Kagome from Inuyasha Now it's Kawakami Kazuko from Majikoi. Obviously

Finally we had Ai's patch released and for their next plan, they're gonna work on Maki's route starting from the next week. Go get Ai's patch here, and have fun. That's all for Tsujidou update this week here, and I'll try to talk about script size matter at my blogpost later.

I finally finished Chrono Chlock. I really enjoyed the common route and Makoto's route and in retrospect it would have been the best to just leave it at that and walk away as a happy man, since the other routes were unfortunately not quite up to that standard. The main strength of the VN were certainly the charming characters. Especially in the common route when the plot around the clock was still strong, the character interactions were engaging and funny. Makoto's route then showed how it 'should' be continued, with a slow transition to nakige and a dramatic heartwarming ending. Unfortunately, for whatever reasons, the other routes turned out as low effort filler routes at best where the core plot was largely abandoned. And without any plot or at least the minimum tension the inclusion of the H scenes would have brought, there was just never ending, repetitive sweet talking. And the route I was mostly looking forward to, Chronos' route, was pretty much the worst of them. Taking such a beautiful and interesting character, and coming up with a complete bogus plot twist, just to turn her into a loli with all measurements halfed including IQ for the sole purpose of making a cheap and boring imouto route, was borderline heresy. Changing a character for a route is a big no-go anyway. If they wanted a loli Chrono, then why didn't they created her that way in the first place? Anyway, the VN had certainly good parts, but most of the routes felt like they desperately wanted to keep their annual release date. But if they wanted that, they would have been better off skipping some routes to be able to flesh out others. Or just make one main route with optional romance choices for all heroines. Character ranking: Chrono (true) = Makoto > Misaki > Miu > Michiru > D.D. > Chrono (loli) Overall rating: 6.5/10 I would have still given the VN a 7 despite the weak routes because of its likable characters and at least the common route and Makoto's route were solid. But turning Chrono into a loli demands for some additional... punishment. Regarding other translated VN's I'm currently reading, I pretty much stalled Dies for the moment in favor of Fata Morgana. I still finished Kei's route though. Wasn't too fond of it - it mostly resembled a bunch of Street Figher videos with Nazi posers on Youtube in slow motion. Fata Morgana has its weaknesses too, but the plot feels a lot more engaging and interesting. Besides that, I started reading Wagamama HighSpec. It was this or Hatsukoi and Wagamama just won for the sole reason that it was already play-ready and I was too lazy to install game & patch of Hatsukoi.

Made in abyss that final double episode was both brutal and brilliant, even though it only finished the series, not the story. I haven't cried so much watching anime in years. Fingers crossed for a followup season and that they can make something of the same calibre. 9/10

Honestly, I can't really remember my first crush >.< I think it was Demyx from Kingdom Hearts 2? But the most important one is Archer from Fate Stay Night, I can't really remember anyone before him. Hell, I'm only reading VNs now because of him. Currently, I'm adding to the harem (2D harem all the way) Yusuke from Persona 5 and Van Helsing from Code Realize.

Hikari from Digimon

My first was Aoi from Ai Yori Aoshi... I still have a thing for Yamato Nadeshiko that is primarily from her. If I dig back into the early days, maybe Deedlit from Record of Lodoss War, but that was more of an automatic occurrence due to the elf obsession I had back then. My current one... hard to say. It would be easier to make a harem than choose a single one at this point, considering how many VNs and anime I've experienced.

I think I saw the mention of 18+ patch on Dies irae's discord channel but I thought it should have been released by the end of this month? xD Nevertheless, even without H-scenes, Dies irae is one of the most amazing VNs I had read so far and I can understand why many people didn't like it (despite me finding it amazing, I agree with the popular opinion in the community that the villain cast is more interesting than the good guys xD). I'd recommend you play it even if the H-scenes don't come out soon, you can check H-CGs on the net, it's nothing special and some of those even looked too forced in my opinion so you aren't missing that much without seeing them. You'll easily make a deduction on where an H-scene should have popped out, (there's maybe like 13 or so H-scenes in the entirety of Dies irae ... most of the time you'll be enjoying real chuuni plot than H-scenes which mostly look bad, except maybe the ones for Marie). Since you mentioned SubaHibi in one of the posts later, I'd like to mention that while both Dies irae and SubaHibi were overhyped - only Dies irae felt to me like it delivered on the hype. SubaHibi was very good but not a "kamige"-tier VN in my opinon. Also, you can enjoy Dies irae even if you don't have any background on philosophical stuff, while SubaHibi on the other hand ... Well, you can enjoy it to a certain degree but after that, it gets weaker once it starts revealing its mysteries (I at least found those parts weaker). I guess it's a real "kamige" only if you really understand the philosophical backgrounds behind it. So to wrap up what I wanted to say here ... Dies irae is more likely to be enjoyed than SubaHibi if you don't have any background knowledge on philosophical matters.

Shuffle Essence! + is the definitive version of Shuffle, which was originally released in 2004. Shuffle was also the first game where Agobarrier, the now-deceased writer of the Tiny Dungeon series, made a claim to fame. First, I should note that I originally played Shuffle in English and was not in any way satisfied with the results. My primary reasons were the low quality of the localization (though it was better than what MG had done up to that point) and certain differences with the anime involving Kaede. To be blunt, the Kaede portrayed in the anime is a solid yandere, so I was kind of disappointed that she was only mildly yandere in the game, lol. Anyway, now to the obvious differences between the two versions of Shuffle... Well, the biggest one is the doubling of the number of heroines. Kareha, her sister Tsubomi, Mayumi, Sakura, the teacher Nadeshiko, and the new divine race girl, Daisy are the new heroines. In realistic terms, they actually consist four separate arcs... Tsubomi, Kareha, and Nadeshiko are connected loosely, with the remaining three routes standing on their own with extensive amounts of new text. This is in addition, to adding a second ending onto Shia's path and extensively re-writing it in the particulars. All in all, the length of the game is more than doubled, since the three heroine arcs are very long. Anyway, the new routes show off something that was only touched on lightly in the anime and the original version of the game... Agobarrier's obsession with harems. Basically, the result of each of the paths is that the 'main wife' of the harem gets picked, and the girls basically make the decision to create a harem without seriously consulting Rin, since he isn't good at refusing them in the first place. If you hate harem situations, this game is pure poison, but if you like your harems, this is good stuff. Now, to the difference between the English and Japanese versions... it does make a difference, obviously. Actually, there is a glaring difference in style between the new routes and the ones made for the original game. While the original routes were decent and tear-jerking, it seems like the popularity of Shuffle in Japan essentially gave Agobarrier license to do what he wanted with the new routes. More detail is given (including in the original heroine routes) and more loose ends are closed up. Each of the routes has a number of non-ero CGs unthinkable in a modern charage, and they are all of about as good of quality as could be produced ten years ago, lol. Overall, the end result of this is a vastly-improved game with a much more solid cast of characters. The holdovers from the original version (abandoned stylistic issues like random cameo scenes) are sometimes jarring because of the remade aspects, but the game doesn't suffer too much from that. Daisy's route, which comes across as a 'true' route (since all the might-have-been-fatal heroine issues are resolved) seems to have been specifically designed to satisfy fans of the original who didn't like the feeling that you were 'abandoning' certain of the heroines (such as Primula or Shia) to their fates by picking another. Agobarrier loved his happy harems, lol. May he rest in peace.

I thought that Dies Irae was a pretty enjoyable read. There aren't a lot of visual novels of its kind that's been translated, so it was a refreshing experience. It had pretentious depth to it , you get the feeling like the writer just got sucked into this world he created. I didn't mind the pretentiousness, its nice to have some variation to stories. Also with all the references to religion, culture and history, its the kind of story that'll promote further reading of the subjects mentioned. Oh like clephas mentioned, i think a lot of people just started nitpicking because Dies Irae was so hyped and people were mentioning stuff like "best Vn ever!" etc. Personally I didn't find anything wrong with it, I loved the characters [va's were great!] , the music, the art, the banter, references, relationships, mystery, reveals and well, the whole grandiose play, to put it simply. There can never be a perfect story that satisfies everyone that reads it. People will always nickpick and sure they have the right to do so. Personally, in regards to stories, I rather not sweat the small stuff and just enjoy the ride. I mean I did choose to get on, and there's ample information about the kind of ride it is . This Vn will most likely make you feel and think about all sorts of things. Its a rainbow . I read the all ages version and for this particular story I don't think h-scenes were necessary, its all about the dialog and the dialog does a good job of painting a clear picture of the characters relationships. Its definitely worth reading without the h content. I pretty much forgot about the 18+ version shortly after I started reading, the story pulled me in . Cheers!

Clown: Hey guys, I have donuts down here!