Fred the Barber

Finished Nekoko's route. On to Aeka's route. Sadly, I'm mostly looking forward to it just so I can be done with this VN and move on to read something both better and more to my taste...

Can confirm I found Rin's route both boring and strange. But, yes, I agree that that route seemed like it could be appealing depending on what you're looking for in a VN - I just wasn't looking for that, so it didn't do much for me.

vegetables and eat their delicious innards. I could leave my house today, or...

Yay, another Disgaea fan! Unfortunately, yes, clerics are useless; you should probably cut Ren from the squad . Meanwhile, mages are both OP and easy to grind - so, appropriately enough, Eclipsed will probably continue to eclipse everybody else. I was completely seriously joking. And all those Canadians were so sad...

Ahh, well, fortunately they're not all going to be about getting closure on some incident in the past. Each route has a pretty unique conflict, so, that's just Emi. So, it's just a romance VN. If anything, I think the disabilities are typically used to show off how little that has to do with their issues, and to show off how capable each of the heroines is. Emi has no legs? Doesn't care; she's a track star. Shizune is deaf? Still the most outspoken, outgoing person around. And so on.

No, you can't quit! The combat in Graces F is the biggest part of what makes it miles better than the other Tales games I've played from the same era (Xillia, Xillia 2, and Vesperia). Are you using the back-step and side-step enough? You've got to abuse the heck out of those mechanics to do well in the game... but if you're using those heavily, then I dunno.

Ahh, that's pretty much my preferred party, anyway. I think that's usually how I set it up when I could pick my own party, though it does always feel weird having Maxim in the back row. I think Lufia 2 is the only game where I've really, thoroughly enjoyed that pure dungeon crawling gameplay; there's some serious magic in the way they set everything up. I still pick up Lufia 2 and play it for a while every couple of years, mostly because of the Ancient Cave, but also for the really fun puzzles. I remember they released a Lufia 2 remake for the DS a few years ago, and I was super excited, but playing it was really disappointing... they'd missed all the best parts of the original game (the turn-based combat, and the fun puzzles...)

... I'm not sure if that was well-intentioned, or if that was the smoothest insult I've seen in a while. Anyway, 8/10. Looks pretty nice; doesn't really suit you, though.

Persona 4 Golden; and they were right. Before I can go to bed tonight, I must...

run the hell away

Confession: I once created a chatroom (ICQ, maybe?) with the stated purpose of "changing the name of Canada to Canadia", with some extremely flimsy argument for why it should be done. I was shocked when a lot of very sincere, very upset Canadians joined the chatroom and started complaining at me.

Getsuya, did you know there's a Lufia 2 game mode where you only play the Ancient Cave? If you beat the game once, you unlock "Retry" mode, which is just the ordinary game but you get 4x EXP and 4x Money (speed run!). If you beat "Retry" mode, though, it unlocks the Ancient Cave-only mode. I don't know if there's another mode after that, but I have a suspicion there is, because there was room for it on the game start menu, IIRC... Anyway, the cool thing about the Ancient Cave-only mode is that you can select your party from the whole game's cast each time before you go into the cave. So, you can tune your party based on the blue chest gear you get, for one thing. And for another, you can bring Dekar along with you all the time. Not only is he a total badass stats-wise, if you get lucky you can get a Dekar Blade, which you will really, really want to beat the final boss (I actually did beat the cave once, but only because I used a cheat code [either with a Game Genie or with the emulator] to instant level-up to 99 from the first fight ... and it still wasn't easy). I think the farthest I've legitimately gotten was somewhere in the level 50s or so. Even if you're Level 99, with a good set of gear, it's still easy to get clobbered on the bottom floors by random monsters - the baddies from about 70 onwards are all seriously bad news, from what I recall. The boss... is weird. What you really need to beat the boss is a lot of gear with AP abilities (I think that's what it was called?) that do percentage-based damage, because the boss has a crapton of HP and you have a limited time to beat him.

Hide your pitchforks people. This is merely my opinion and I have only read one route so far and I believe there was more than one writer so it should be different. My take on Katawa Shoujo is that it's... fine. Some routes are definitely better than others - Emi's was right in the middle, for me (I enjoyed Lilly and Hanako more, Rin and Shizune less). One thing I think you might be missing about Katawa Shoujo: a big, big point of the story is that the characters' disabilities aren't related to the problems they have (and when I say characters, I include not just the heroines, but also Hisao). It's a moral the game likes to harp on: disabled people are not defined by their disabilities. I do completely agree with you that the conflicts in the game are just not heavy enough to leave a huge impact, really.

More annoying than "I remember red..." was that it was inevitably paired with the same BGM on every utterance. Repetitiveness level: maximum! But, even so, my gripes with this VN are few and minor. It's a little bit darker and more action-oriented than I typically like, but it was still all-around very good.

Absolutely hilarious. It's a shame I don't care for the character art at all...

Pray with her

Very true, except at work. At work, I'm a ridiculously detail-oriented alpha who ensures that everything I hear about or have control over is done just so. Then I go home and turn off the part of my brain that cares about things, and life becomes a whole lot calmer. Next person believes that extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth.

Good info, thanks. For what it's worth, I'm not only praising the translation: the quality of the proof-reading, for instance, is also noticeably higher than the few professionally-translated VNs I've read, as well as other fan patches. There are also no technical problems (which professionally-translated VNs do sometimes have), and text flows naturally (I'm reminded of the Little Busters! fan patch which never did text wrapping... kind of unfortunate; or some translations where you see blank text boxes from time to time; that sort of thing). The translation is the most obvious good part, because those various other angles don't slap you in the face quite as hard when they're done poorly (as long as they work at all).

Wow. I had totally forgotten it, but I used to do something really similar. I ran a club in college that had a room reserved in the campus center, and I used to have to "pick the lock" when they forgot to unlock it. "Picking the lock" involved using a plastic spoon from the cafeteria downstairs and sussing the bolt back until it opened. Locks keep honest people honest; they do not keep actually-interested people out. If you get a bump key, you can very, very easily learn to open any tumbler lock (those extremely common ones) in a handful of seconds with no sign of forced entry... it's ludicrously easier than traditional lock-picking.

Hmm. Mashup two of my favorite things, and... well, I can't really imagine how it would work, but I don't think I would care. I'd still be throwing money at the screen.

I've not played either Symphonia 2 or Abyss (for more than a couple hours), but Xillia 2 was very good IMO; in particular, I liked it quite a bit more than original Xillia. No other Tales game I've played comes close to Graces F, though, for me. Since I don't seem to exactly be in the majority on that opinion, you might want to take my comments with a grain of salt. I've been playing Suikoden 2 on my Vita. I'm still too early to say much, but I'd forgotten a lot of the fun elements in Suikoden games (especially the strategy battles). My favorite part of the Suikoden games is how ridiculously easy it is to pick up most characters: run into a person, tell them "you should totally join my army", and they just hop on board. The only plausible explanation that comes to mind is that all Suikoden main characters have 255 Charisma from level 1.

I'm most of the way through Stella Women's Academy ... . I was pretty shocked when it took a hard turn about halfway through, as the goody-two-shoes main character went full-on Darth Vader. I wasn't expecting any drama at all from this show, after the cutesy first ~4 episodes, but it's been surprisingly well-executed, and the show has actually got me pretty involved at this point. I'm honestly unsure how it's going to all get tied up neatly at the end (given that it's only a 13-episode show total). Given the atmosphere, I'm 99% sure everything's going to end up sunshine and rainbows, but I'm extremely curious to see how it gets there. Overall, it's been a very pleasant surprise, and a way better anime than I expected. My random backlog choice really paid off.

100% agreed. I do get the correct emotion off it, but it still looks weird. On the nii-san thing: I think they're trying to find an Anglicized way to differentiate between "nii-san" and "nii-chan" (I think it was? at any rate, some more affectionate term), which at one point Kouhei gripes about wanting to be called. I don't fault them much for doing this, though: everybody in this thread is probably going to be happier seeing the original form of address, because form of address in Japanese is very important for communicating relationship, and we get that. However, the vast majority of English speakers are going to be confused as hell by "nii-san". Granted, that vast majority isn't all that likely to be playing VNs, but optimizing the translation for us weebs means decreasing your appeal to a very large market. It's probably helping with that impression that the same voice actress voices both Mizuki and Kagome (and also Kurugaya from Little Busters! - which I now can't help but think of every time she calls Kouhei "shounen").