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They're all waiting for me, since I got a job my time is gone, at least for now.

So, I finished two more VN's... Gekkou no Carnevale is the first one. It's a bit of a mixed bag and therefore it took me quite a while to finish it. That said, I only finished Rebecca's route. I also wanted to play Lunaria's route, but it was blocked by Noel's and and Anna's routes and I didn't really have any motivation to go through these. Noel was too loli and Anna... not exactly the brightest light to phrase it carefully. And with the massive technical issues this title came with, like using the mouse interface freezing the game, skipping not working correctly, etc. I just had no motivation for a skipping session just to get to Lunaria's route. Nevertheless, let's start with the good things. The protagonist is actually a really cool guy. Not your typical teenage brat, but a fully grown-up adult. Furthermore, the voice acting of the protagonist and also most of the other male characters is top-notch, which is a pretty rare thing, at least for non-otome VN's. It's one of the very rare VN's where I didn't switch off the protagonist voice. Plot-wise it has a fairly interesting scenario with a mix-up of werewolves, living dolls and the Italian mafia. The werewolves are a mafia clan called Oruma Rossa and their arch enemies are a hunter-force called Luparia consisting mainly of several particular powerful and ancient silver dolls. Romeo, also a werewolf and once part of Oruma Rossa, is now a simple taxi driver living now together with Anna, a living doll. He left them in turmoil because his true love was killed and is now hunted by both Oruma Rossa and Luparia. The VN is rather chuuni focused, with lots of fighting scenes. The writing is decent for the most part, but the pacing of the story left a lot to be desired. For example, there were too many fights without a clear resolution or consequences. A good fight isn't just about showcasing an entertaining action scene, but also about it's 'impact' on the story. Carmelo was actually a fun antagonist, but if you have to fight him for the god knows how often time, then it gets quite annoying after a while. I also didn't really get that much werewolve vibes from the story. Overall it felt more like super mafiosi vs. power dolls. The story parts I liked most were the beginning and the puppet master arc around Lunaria and Davide. Those had a fairly good pacing and interesting twists and characters. The weaker story parts of the VN were certainly the slow pacing, rather limited plot development and some questionable antagonists. Luparia in particular felt like a bunch of lunatics led by a chuuni edge lord. Perla was almost the only character that didn't suck from them. Ourma Rossa was better, especially Valentino and Gugliemo, while Silvio was also more on the annoying side. He had some good moments towards the end though. The VN also had a tendency to throw in random H-scenes with questionable context, which was quite annoying. Obvious technical issues aside, I didn't like that they used photographs as backgrounds. Some of the heavy edited night locations looked quite decent, but the daylight scenes looked far too pale and didn't fit at all to the colorful character sprites. At least they didn't blur the images down. Sprites and CG's were pretty decent for the age of the VN though. Music wasn't bad, but got very repetitive after a while. Heroine ranking: Lunaria > Rebecca > Noel > Anna Overall rating: 6.5/10 (I would have given a 7, but the technical issues were simply too annoying to ignore) Next one is Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai - one of the August classics. I want to keep this one short since there's actually not much to say about it. It's a fairly decently written (club) slice of life VN with likable characters, but a rather thin plot even for a moege. Although there was some 'Shepherd' plot teased, it pretty much went nowhere. At least in the heroine routes I read and that covers the main heroine. It's possible there's an after-story though, which goes a bit deeper into that. Didn't have any motivation to go through all character routes just for that though. Routes itself weren't too long and didn't offer much, but at least didn't overstay its welcome. I played the ones of Tamamo, Maho and Tsugumi. Senri and Kana were too loli and I didn't like Nagi enough to play her route. Character art feels a bit old-fashioned nowadays, but interface and backgrounds were pretty good. Music was okay for what it was. Overall, I expected a bit more from the title considering it was a fairly popular VN in Japan, but it was still on the okayish side. Heroine ranking: Tamamo > Maho > Senri > Tsugumi > Kana > Nagi Overall rating: 6.5/10