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I'm enjoying Island a lot more than I thought it would. I think that's the particular VN formula I enjoy the most- charamoeges with beautiful scenery that more importantly ultimately builds up to a greater plot. Probably why Rewrite is one of my top VNs. Island really keeps you guessing though. Is all the scientific hypothesis jargon really true, or is it all just some grand delusions from a bunch of wishful islander kids? The heroines are all great. Going off of my 5yearold Grisaia memories, Frontwing was always good at making heroines with top-notch-common-route-bantering-prowess-but-with-fundamentally-flawed-personal-issues-that-will-be-explored-in-their-routes: Karen, who longs to leave the island and its outdated traditions. Sara, who longs to uphold tradition and save the island. Rinne, who believes she and Setsuna are the same Rinne and Setsuna of legend. Btw, devs were generous enough to give her a whopping 1 CG without her hat: I CANT HELP IT! YOU LOOK SO GOOD WITHOUT THE HAT! Rinne is obviously my best gal, and so I bawled absolutely hard at her ending. Now, I would've been fine if things ended the way they did, but hoh boy, Island gains massive bonus points for:

For me, Sakura no Kisetsu is a classic. However, it's a bit unapproachable now, with old engine and awkward adventure-gameplay system - which is much more annoying than, say, YU-NO. As I wrote recently in recommendations thread: Well, sometimes I do things on a whim, and shortly after writing the above, I decided to give it a try Actually it's quite fun for now - writing things in Ren'py is almost like directing your own puppet-show . The goal is to rewrite Sakura no Kisetsu into standard VN structure with branching choices system - getting rid of the "look/think/talk with everything to trigger next scene" system. I do this by arranging texts from various "think" "look" and "talk" sections into the order that gives the best flow (and inserting small connecting bits in between where absolutely neccessary). I also plan to re-edit it or partially retranslate the lines that annoy me too much As I see, Brazilian Portugese translation uses similar approach, but they used assets (graphics and music) from the remake, which I'm not too fond of - they are very blurry, while the pixels from dithering are still very visible, so it's like the worst of both worlds . I'm working with assets from PC98 and DOS versions. I also plan to have switchable soundtrack, with all three versions available: PC98 - original FM soundtrack, GS - PC98 MIDI music replayed with SoundCanvas soundfont and AdLib - PC DOS version FM soundtrack. While browsing graphic files extracted from both versions I was surprised. I expected Japanese PC98 version to have mosaics (and if such were the case, planned to have mosaics on/off switch in the options), however, the version that is floating around the net is uncensored. Probably somebody hacked files with HCGs from English PC version into it? Graphics and scripts formats are identical between two versions, only music files are different because of different sound hardware. I looked at files more closely and yes, it seems that some CG files were replaced - while all graphic files from PC98 have 1996-04 dates, HCGs have 1999-10. For now I have ported first two scenes - talk with parents in Shuuji's home and first meeting with Reiko on the way to school - complete with music and sprites with facial animations, just like in the original Some preliminary screenshots coming in ~12 hours. Of course for now it is all pretty basic - just full-screen background and standard ren'py textbox. I'm still not sure whether to go with that approach, or try something more like in the original, with borders etc, and the actual scenes taking just small portion of the screen? Also, I'm still not sure how much smoothing (if any) should I use while converting backgrounds and sprites. But we can discuss that when there are screenshots. *I'm not sure in which subforum should I place it. It's clearly not "Original Visual Novel", it's also not exactly "Translation Project" (although probably some translating will be involved). Well, I hope our mods will help me by moving it into most suited section.

I'd also recommend it. It's one of the best mixtures of slice-of-life, romance, mystery and chuuni I've read so far.

I'm going to give game a try:)

I would say 9-nine- is a pretty good game. It starts off pretty slow and pretty unremarkably, but things really pick up from episode 3 and episode 4 is a really great finale. I did a brief review of the tetralogy that you can find here.