Fred the Barber

Oops, I did forget to add that one. Thanks for so meanly pointing it out, Jun Edit: To think I'd be criticized by someone who hasn't even watched Chihayafuru.

I support this strategy, but obviously you should use my MAL instead of Ittaku's ANN list <----

Princess Jellyfish is the shit, and is one of many shows that has me suspect I actually prefer watching shoujo anime adaptations more than most others (especially shounen...). I'd trade a generic school battle harem for Princess Jellyfish any day of the week.

Yeah, the combat is a little dated, for sure; I like FFVII's mechanics a lot better, since they start you off with that same optimization problem right from the beginning, with Materia. One thing that helped keep me entertained in FFVI was always taking Sabin with me, since he has one of the few unique abilities that's both useful and entertaining - it's like a minigame unto itself to see how quickly and reliably you can enter a blitz.

FFVI is one of my favorites. I'm really glad to hear you're enjoying it as a newcomer to the game, since I sometimes worry that I just think it's great because of nostalgia, until I think about it more and say "nah, it really is that good". What did you think of the opera? What do you think of this version of the opera? Be sure to wait for Shadow, and I hope you have fun with the rest. Aside from the opera (probably the single best scene in the game for me), the best is all yet to come, from where you are.

I added about a dozen shows to my Crunchyroll queue after scrolling through looking for stuff that I'd heard good things about but had never tried, and I got started with Chaika. Good stuff.

Uhhh. Not sure if serious, but that would be a property of your blu ray player, not blu ray discs themselves... My Xbone has no problem resuming playback.

Can confirm, I no longer remember my age until I actually calculate it, and then I have to go to the trouble of remembering the year and everything. It's such a hassle. That's why I just stick with "old" (when comparing myself to these whippersnappers) and "young" (when at work )

I tried Shakugan no Shana a while back (maybe 6 months or so?) and although I watched several episodes, I couldn't really get into it. I ended up dropping it, which is honestly a pretty rare thing for me. Assuming your MAL is up to date and you're fishing for recommendations, after looking through your "plan to watch", you should totally watch NagiAsu; I love it, and I think you will too.

Nah, I'd bet on it being what MiyazawaLulu hinted at - character encoding problems. Most VN scripts are encoded in Shift JIS, and those 'ö' and 'é' characters don't exist in Shift-JIS. We had exactly the same problem on the word "café" in Majo Koi Nikki as well... Until, you know, we fixed it.

Yeah, the Köchel numbers and the café clearly should've been caught by QC and fixed. "Cafe", though less than ideal, is a perfectly good English word at this point, and for Köchel there's even a long-established convention for writing German words with umlauts in a character set that doesn't support it.

Me too... though only somewhat recently, since someone whose taste I respect was talking about how good it was, and that intensified when I later noticed that it's ridiculously highly rated on VNDB for being untranslated.

I used Facebook back when I was in college and it was new and pleasant to use (get off my lawn); now it's basically a glorified address book for me. It's nice for that, but I certainly don't use it on a regular basis. I do use Twitter now, but in waves depending on how busy and/or bored I am: @fred_the_barber

Hmm, I don't remember that inconsistency, but it's possible it happened and I forgot about it. Then that is a mistake - they happen. They did, for one line, refer to her as senpai for the reason I described, but they clearly intended not to for the rest of the time. It's still a good decision to cut things like honorifics. I'm going for an appeal to authority here, since I've already given my own personal argument, but I think it's a pretty valid appeal to authority, when I say that your assertion that honorifics and Japanese terms like "senpai" are somehow fundamental and untranslatable is obviously wrong, given that literally only VN translators (and usually just weeb fan translators, at that) do it. No professional translator of Japanese literature feels the need to do this. I've read Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata, and Oe in translation - nary a "senpai" or a "-chan" to be found. If those were fundamental to the nuance, don't you think that would be all the more important for literature? We're talking Nobel Prize winners here; don't you think they get top-quality translations? Or are you really going to sit there and tell me, no, the VN fan translators are clearly better at their work than Jay Rubin because the fan translators realize that "senpai" is a fundamentally untranslatable word?

Excellent shitpost, derg, but I see through your scheme and you're not getting a like from me. I'm still in the running.

I recall the one instance where "senpai" was kept in the translation and could see why they had to do it there. The use of "senpai" in that one instance was evidence that a specific character was speaking, in the original work. Therefore, in the localization where they had chosen to remove the term "senpai", they needed something there to provide that evidence, and so they put in that explanation. They chose not to put "senpai" back in in literally all the other instances to save this one case, and thus did the sensible thing: explained the term at that time, and that only that one character would have referred to her as such. I personally think it was a good decision, but it's obviously a tradeoff. It was certainly neither a mistake nor unprofessional. And in general, unsurprisingly, I agree with the majority of the dog pile here. I'm tired of reading half-translations written for weebs. I want to read stuff that treats me as a literate English speaker, exactly the way the original works treat their audience as literate Japanese speakers.

You can alternate them, and feel bipolar.

Same here on Overdrive stuff; I really like stories about musicians, so KiraKira and Deardrops should be right up my alley. Kindred Spirits. It's always at the front of my non-existent list, except for brief moments where something else piques my interest at just the right time, and I end up playing that "something else" instead.

You really shouldn't have any problems. I actually don't think I ever played to the same ending twice, even, and I played completely blind.

Moar Steins;Gate 0 spoilers, on same topic

The one full route I played, Sango's, had a fair bit of drama, too, FWIW. Too much, honestly - it had serious pacing issues in resolving it, scenes and arcs that should have been resolved much faster but dragged on. If anything, that route needed more slice-of-life and fluff. That said, I really did enjoy it. Just not enough to be really excited and stick with it. The art and music are both lovely.

This is a good example of I have so much trouble appreciating most VN protagonists... they have so little physical presence that you don't even know basics about their appearance. Without a face to go with it, they just kind of fade away, and then if you try to put them being an actual person to any use (say, by having them be the object of a mean joke like "four-eyes"), it falls flat on its face. I was playing KoiRizo a few months ago. Got through about 1.2 routes. I was enjoying it somewhat, but then got sidetracked onto other things which I liked more anyway, and haven't really felt like going back.

If you're up for something shorter, take a look at Karakara.

True. I actually dream of sleeping in my dreams of sleeping, though it gets diminishing returns at that point. Next person has a dream.