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Good morning everybody, Tonight I'm planning on finishing the update process for the forums (including all themes) as well as finalizing some back-end sharing necessary for Emi to take over my admin duties. I'm still alive and around, paying for the site (etc.), but enough is enough and this is what needs to happen. I'll post later today with more definite hours/timezones for the update, and will hop on Discord closer to the appointed FuwApocalypse hour. Much < 3, Tay

Lots done, working with Nay and Emi for the next steps.

Yep, this one. I'm not really sure if I'm going to finish the whole series since it seems to be pretty massive, but if I do I'll probably follow the first suggested order in this tweet. I haven't played it for that much time yet, but I'm really enjoying it so far! Though I'm not really sure how interesting my impressions are going to be, considering that my experience with JRPGs is pretty close to zero, so I don't really have anything to compare it to, lol.

@Eclipsed Under what rock did you pull out that yuri game I knew nothing of!? I mean, not to say I always know about all releases or anything, but I know these developers (Nurse Love Addiction) and find it odd I never registered that this thing released, much less that it had a fandisc/sequel. These guys have been escaping me, so I better register this all down.

Forums to go offline in the next half hour,

That sure took a while. I think we can rule out the porn having been written in from the start in this one, lmao.

I guess, it's finally time to see what Trails series is about.

Forums will go offline 01/20/2021 starting between 18:00 and 19:00 EST for an unknown amount of time while I update software, purge the party, and bring peace to our new Empire. - Tay

I actually enjoyed Danganronpa solely because of the loud, obnoxious, over the top characters and bombastic class trials , but can totally see how it can be off putting to some. Definitely think just watching the Class Trials is a bit of a disservice though, that stuff should be played! Aaaand there's another person who vouches pretty heavily for VA-11 HALL-A, I'm definitely gonna bump it up priority wise on my to read list, it's been on my backlog for years now. ~~ So I was supposed to read Flowers, but work started picking up again for me yay 2021 so I did jack all in terms of reading this month. Also realized that Flowers is not a trilogy, but instead a quadrilogy or w.e you wanna call four entries, so I've decided to hold off on it since the last entry le volume sur Hiver apparently isn't EN yet. I did pick up some really random short VN called Prison Princess. It was aight. Just like Neko Para you expected a short VN about cute cat grills and !animated! pr0n, Prison Princess is a short VN about helping two princesses escape a dungeon. Some of the puzzles can put the heroines in some pretty... provocative situations, and there's standard live2D animations going on and !touch support! so if you get tempted enough you can totally just say fk the puzzle and tap away on the heroines to hear all of their moaning goodness. Which, not surprisingly, will lower your compatibility with said heroine(s) and lock you into the bad endings. Escape first, play later! ~~ I also picked up Yumeutsutsu Remaster. I think this will be my first Yuri / girl's love VN? The protagonist is (first) Ai Ohtori, a 21 year old naive cutie country girl who moves to the city to work at a small game development company. You'd think this VN would thus be heavy game design jargon infodumpy and maybe Ai would be this genius programmer with mad skillz or perhaps SOMETHING technical, but unfortunately Ai's position is circumstantial: she has never worked a job in her life prior, has absolutely 0 game design knowledge, and she was mainly approached by the company's President, Honoka, to work as an Assistant Director under her younger sister, 19 y.o Director Kokoro Yanagiya who I guess has been in some sort of slump and so the President went out of her way to set this up to rectify things power-of-sisterly love-style. Unfortunately, Ai and Kokoro are not on the greatest of terms, and that seems to be the core conflict of this VN: Ai's a really nice girl, it's great to have a female protagonist with moege-tier / casual / first world problems inner monologues for once. Most of the otomes I've read were mature story based so the protagonists and their inner monologues often reflected that.

So, as actually reading stuff is apparently beyond my mental capacities lately, I'm slowly watching through two long playthroughs. The first one is Danganronpa and while there are things I definitely like about it, I kind of find most of its interactivity a bit obnoxious. While the limited game mechanics of Ace Attorney were more like tools to get you involved in the story, setting it much closer to visual novel territories, the Danganronpa trials, repetition involved and puzzles... I never felt they added to the experience. Also, the levels of dumb in characters' behaviour somehow got on my nerves a bit. I heard that the translation of the first game is generally considered poor, but I'm not how much that could break outside of some cultural appropriation that I was able to decipher and which didn't really change that much. It's stylish, well-produced and occasionally quite funny, but rarely genuinely smart or surprising. Shaping into something like a 7/10 rather than a real classic. And I'm kind of surprised by this impression, because I hold Ace Attorney in much higher regard and through it would be able to capture that charm in slightly more-mature format. Maybe the sequel will grip me a bit more? Now part of me just wants to replay euphoria for some genuine death game action. VA-11 HALL-A on the other hand do not disappoint me in the slightest. Non-intrusive game mechanics, massive focus on dialogue and atmosphere... It's gloomy with its cyberpunk setting, but at the same time massively a feel-good game that let's you immerse yourself in its world and slowly get to know its characters, building towards more meaningful developments with subtle hints and seemingly trivial conversations. I don't think there's a single character introduced so far that I didn't enjoy on some level and it's interesting to see the deeper stories developing from this mostly-detached perspective of a bartender. It's hard for me to find anything to complain about here – not sure whether the concept itself was done before by any notable game, but its execution is just so good here... I'll be surprised if I don't feel like giving it at least 9/10 by the end. Oh, and by the way, VA-11 HALL-A in now available on game pass for PC. If you want to cheese it, the first month of subscription literally costs $1, so you can read VA-11 HALL-A and probably finish a few other games virtually for free if you cancel before 30 days.