Fred the Barber

<softwareDeveloper>I'm guessing 65535 is the max value for the post counter and the Scottsune account was assigned that value as a joke? The precise value would be a monstrous coincidence, otherwise. 65535 is 2^16 - 1, so it's the largest value that fits in a 2-byte unsigned integer.</softwareDeveloper>

True, for dinner at least. Gotta multitask, or I'd have no hours left in the day for playing visual novels, right? Next person drinks more soda than water.

Another Rewrite apologist. Good, good. I just wrapped up Rin's route in Katawa Shoujo (4/5 done - intentionally saved Hanako for last). I had kinda low expectations for Rin based on the Common Route and her minor involvement in Emi's route, but to my surprise I ended up really enjoying her route. The feels were strong. Lilly is my favorite heroine so far, by a pretty wide margin, but the drama in Rin's route makes that story my favorite so far. I don't think I can bring myself to go back and get the bad/neutral endings for her...

Assuming this is being run from a disc image rather than an actual CD, what tool did you use to mount the disc image? I got exactly the same error you got when mounting the disc image with any tool aside from Daemon Tools Lite (which I had to install from the Daemon Tools website - be careful when installing it since it will try pretty hard to get you to install adware with it).

I don't know why this one always stuck with me, but I found this selection of the bizarre dream exchange from Clannad very memorable. Unfortunately it doesn't work as a single quotation, so maybe this isn't exactly what the thread is for, but whatever: Kyou: The aroma of baking bread makes the mental state of a person unhealthy. Tomoya: [Tomoya appears on the operating table as a giant maggot] That makes no sense. Kyou: Oh, yes it does. And it's all due to the aroma of baking bread. [Kyou disappears]

True. Four stars out of five is my usual Thai order; not the max admittedly, but a sight more than most people I know. On with the food theme! Next person likes sour foods.

Uhh. Don't remember. I just know it hit all three of my people for ~70% of their HP when she used it. Played a bit more, picked up Life Rings for everybody, and the harder enemies in the game are substantially easier now; the healing being based on a percentage of HP means suddenly doubling your party's HP makes a pretty huge difference.

I was hitting Blaze Break (and didn't notice the 0 popping up at first... I did eventually correct that), and I think I also had Hot Edge equipped in Nep-nep's Power combo. So... lots of missed damage. Just finished playing the fight again (without going back and grinding; just switched up combo settings), and no problems this time. Though she also didn't use her AoE at all this time...

Welcome to the forums! I'd say Rewrite or Little Busters!, so you can experience the magic that is a Key VN. Also, ... WTF did I just watch.

This is also not reflective of my experience; I loved both Little Busters! (my first VN) and Rewrite (my second). The common routes were a bit long in all the Key VNs I've played (frankly, I was pleasantly surprised the first time I played a non-Key VN at how short the common route was), but I mostly enjoy them, and the heroine routes are my favorite parts. Moreover, much of the enjoyment I get out of the heroine routes comes from the emotional attachment built up during the common route. I think I fully played through (no skipping) both the Little Busters! and Rewrite common routes 3 times, mostly skipping through on the other playthroughs. I especially liked how the Rewrite common route felt so different after each additional heroine route was completed, since the plot shifts so dramatically after the common route, and since you get a pretty different view of the overarching world from each heroine's route. But, well, I guess you wouldn't know

False. Not my cup of tea. Next person plays VNs for the feels and the tears, and... well, maybe some additional things too. But mostly the feels.

Both Neptune's and Compa's English voices bothered me (though IIRC, I liked transformed Neptune's English voice fine). I briefly considered switching back to English just to see if I liked IF's voice, but didn't bother. Looks like I'm level 12, so I should be able to do this easily, but I only tried once and got wrecked when she surprised me with the AoE. Knowing about that, and her apparent fire immunity (which hurt my damage output substantially...), if I just strategize a bit it'll probably come out ok. Also, still using crappy default accessories for all three characters, so maybe I should fix that, but it's probably not really needed. Life rings would certainly make it vastly easier, since I think Compa's healing is percentage-based. I'm also digging the soundtrack; bouncy, catchy hooks FTW.

False. I'm not in school, so no spring break for me. Next person has a trophy in the room.

Confession: I've been laughing about this for about a minute now. Confession: I intended to do something vaguely productive today, but I basically ended up playing Hyperdimension Neptunia all day instead.

Straight-up 10/10, for me. The claim of "when you look back on it, it wasn't that good" definitely doesn't apply to my experience with Key games (especially Little Busters! and Rewrite). When I look back on Little Busters!, if I actually start reflecting seriously on the plot of Refrain, and then view the rest of the routes and the common route plots through that lens, I actually get worked up to tears in a matter of seconds. To my own detriment, I have yet to play a Type-Moon game, so while I obviously voted Key over Type-Moon, it certainly wasn't an informed vote. Soon. Fate/Stay Night is, of course, in my queue. I'll get to it just as soon as I can find a few hundred hours to spare to start making real headway through that queue...

Reporting in: played for a lot of hours today. I prefer not to say how many hours are on my game, especially considering I just started last night. So far, I'm enjoying it a lot; it's got the mostly-optional grindy goodness that old-timer JRPG players like me crave. I just got my butt kicked by Noire in early Chapter 2 (well, I didn't really get beat all that badly; she was at maybe 50% when I decided I was taking too much damage and should just bail on the fight). I'll go grind up some levels (and some damn equipment, if I can find any...), return, and beat the snot out of her. So far, IF is best girl, but I'll keep re-evaluating that as the game progresses. The dialog is substantially less cringe-worthy with Japanese voice actors than it was with English voice actors, so that's a major plus.

I really loved Black Lagoon. It was always over-the-top, and it has unique, beautiful character art, a unique and compelling story and background, and unique and compelling individuals. Sure, sure, there are tropes to be found everywhere in the characters, but it's hard to write a character that isn't some trope at this point, and the character designs, character backgrounds, and their personalities were always way more than the sum of their tropes. Now, that said: I loathed Roberta's Blood Trail. It had none of the charm or heart that I saw in the rest of the series. In the rest of the series, I felt like people had souls: they were pretty black souls, usually, but they were there. The show has some beautiful scenes: The two seasons of the show are freaking deep, while still maintaining a high level of adrenaline. In Roberta's Blood Trail, there is nothing remotely near that level of greatness; no character advancement to speak of, no comprehensible motivation for most of the characters' actions, and a lot of gratuitous filler material. The OVA was just a blood-drenched fanservice festival.

False. Is that actually a thing people forget to do? Next person enjoys playing a sport.

Thanks, Rains! This is a great supplement to the other things I'm doing to learn; I definitely learned a lot of useful stuff in a short period of time. Most useful for me was the explanation of the informal particles; this isn't taught much by the other resources I have, since they're not expecting you to be doing much casual conversation, but casual speech is of course going to be very common in a VN, anime, etc. You were asking for suggestions on what to do about vocab: my suggestion would be to put the whole sentence in Japanese on the slide, pronounce it in Japanese, and on the line below, put translations for any vocab (spacing out the Japanese sentence as needed so the translation lines up with the original). Then we can hear how the sentence would flow in Japanese and see how the grammar particles are written in the sentence, but hopefully not get tripped up too much on the vocab.

False, but a friend/neighbor fell out of our tree when I was a kid. Next person is responding to the post above me, not my post.

Gah. You guys had my hopes up.

I thought it was obvious, but I meant that per my taste, not a general comment on how people ought to be shaped. And for what it's worth, she's one of a handful of realistically-proportioned females I can recall seeing in any anime, and that's the thing I like about her appearance - she looks like a cute girl you might actually walk by on the street. Virtually all anime women are built like nearly-impossible twigs with oversized breasts (unless they're made for the loli appeal, in which case they're all short twigs). Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet also has several more-realistically-shaped females, which I also appreciate... but that's about all I can think of. I guess you could take that as insulting and judgemental towards girls who are skinny and have large breasts, but I feel like they get enough implicit praise from the modern world and media already; they'll be ok even if I don't put them on an altar, too.

Started playing Re;birth 1. So far so good. However, I'm not really digging the English voice acting (which is unusual for me; normally I like English-dubbed anime, always use the English voice acting in JRPGs, etc.,). I'm debating going full weeb and switching to the Japanese voices - any thoughts? Should I give the English actors more time until I get used to them, or is the Japanese acting at noticeably better and I should just switch now? Obviously I'd simply have much higher tolerance for bad acting in Japanese, since at this point I understand maybe one word in ten and certainly don't pick up the nuances...