Leaderboard

My forever love, Naruto Uzumaki

Slowly slogging through Robotics;Notes, took me literally like a week just to do Phase 1 lol. I'm a huge slacker sorrz Thoughts/First Impressions: The 3D sprites + animations take some time to get used to. It's kind of like when you first red Steins;gate and it might've taken you some time to get used to the watercolory artstyle. Doesn't help that the N.Switch has some anti-aliasing issues compared to all the other versions (rip). But it eventually grows on you/you get used to it. ...I already miss YU-NO soundtracks. Stuff from the 1990s just had more identity and flavor. Everything in Robotics;Notes so far is forgetful generic elevator-tier sounding. Story takes a bit to take off, then again I'm barely starting Phase 2 so I'm probably speaking waaay too soon. I think it's the general overall premise/initial hook. Steins;Gate's premise was time travel. Intriguing. Chaos;Child was murder mystery supernatural. Interesting. Robotic;Notes? High school robot competitions. The main heroine Akiho is the genki-hardheaded-charge-towards-your-dreams-full-speed-ahead type but she just wants to do too much/has pretty unrealistic goals. Then we have the protagonist Kaito who doesn't help either with him being 100% disinterested in the Robotics Club (and being quite vocal about it too). He's more into his online pvp game KILL-BALLAD, where he ranks #5 in Japan. He sticks with Akiho though because they're childhood friends/the two need to watch over each other because of their Fast Forward and Slo-mo handicaps. On the plus side, the duo do have excellent dynamics and so far its a pleasure to see them interact with each other. One of the great things about the Sci-ADV series is their continuity: R;N literally gives you a glimpse of 1.048596 in the opening, and you'll get a famous one liner about eyes pretty early on. Lovely callbacks, though I hope R;N can hold its own and not overly rely on the glory of its earlier siblings. ~~ Since it's ROBOTICS;notes-> Robotics-> technology, the devs got a bit more creative with the level of technological interactivity in the world you can have via Kaito's PhoneDroid/smartphone. Whereas in S;G you were limited to receiving and replying to texts only when the narrative demanded it, in R;N there is a barebones Twitter replica called Twipo that adds a hearty amount of flavor to the entirety of the cast/plot/setting via the characters twipping about their lives and ongoing events day by day, and Kaito can even reply to a handful of those twips. It's one of the things R;N does well and it makes the world feel alive: Slight character reveal spoiler (though you learn their identity within a couple hours of meeting them so it's not too bad of a spoiler):

Evenicle 2 is also about to be released soon. And no VN/RPG hybrid suggestion with Eushully classic Kamidori Alchemy Meister of course and Kami no Rhapsody just got recently translated. And then there are the old Xuse classics The Spirit of Eternity Sword 1 & 2. There's also one title of the Venus Blood series translated: Frontier. Soon to be followed by Hypno. But those are apparently very tentacle rapy, so those are more for peole with such fetish interests. There's also another series, but I can't remember the name at the moment. Rapey protag minus the tentacles. - a bit like Rance but not as popular.

ShiraVN has now announced when exactly the game os going to release. Oct. 23, 2020 10AM PDT And you can win a free copy in their give-away on Twitter: https://twitter.com/shira_vn/status/1317857976405774338 And since it hasn't been mentioned here John Hooper / Lemnisca handled the translations for Iwaihime. They worked on Root Double, Dies irae and Raging Loop before. Furthermore the release offers the extra content of the console release as an DLC on steam. Oh and the Demos apparently skips a scene so keep than in mind if you played the Demo and buy the full release.

As for ShiraVN itself, so far there's no much controversy when it come to their policy especially in regard of all age release only. Not to mention that their VNs so far are quite well received and there's no much complain (Or perhaps almost none) in regard of bad translation, so I can say that in term of release number they already doing well compared to Sol Press lol. Lastly, it's good to see that we can see more Ryukishi's work being translated even though it's not by Mangagamer, and Iwaihime here is one of most requested VNs to be translated so I'll look forward to see what ShiraVN can do in the future. About Iwaihime itself I played the trial and as I can see some of the characters are quite deja vu of Higurashi (Susumu here is like Keichi while Kiko here is like Mion), although of course this time there's none of the bad art happen in there. For the Rika's clone that Dreamysyu ask about, obviously it's Toe even though her hair is not blue especially if you look at her setting later.

Hey, those are the brain cells that count!