Fred the Barber

Bragfession: I made a chili recipe from my new cookbook tonight, and it was the first good chili I've had since I left the South some ten years ago. Now I just need to figure out how to make good barbecue for myself and I won't have even the slightest regret about never going back there again.

Anybody playing Al Fine? When I first read about it a couple days ago, I thought it was pretty funny to see a Recettear clone so soon after discovering Recettear, and I didn't really feel like picking up another item shop simulator quite so soon. But I admit, my interest is piqued. I found one review which seemed to be saying "It's fine but nothing special", which isn't really what I'm looking for, seeing as Recettear really did have a lot of charm to it. From what I read there, it sounds like this game falls short of Recettear on several fronts, and only surpasses it on visuals, which I can find in any number of other games. So, anyway, curious if anybody else has played and formed an opinion on it, before I go try it out.

Pretty damn cute. Kaguya, you've always got good taste (except that time you had the glasses girl, but we'll pretend that didn't happen). 9.5/10

Kokoro Connect is one of my very favorites, but I always thought of it as more of a character-focused drama, rather than a rom-com. I guess it's got a bit of com, and a bit more rom, but mostly, it's a drom. I love it to death, though.

One of the only two comments on the blog right now is one saying they're "not comfortable with buying re-makes without having tried the original", and that someone should fan translate the original so they can play that first. I can't even. At any rate, I preordered, yay for what should be a good game, hope it hasn't been too over-hyped.

You have thought entirely too much about this. I kinda liked the movie, but I had even forgotten this scene happened. Not in the sense that I blocked it out of my mind, but in the sense that I just said "Okay, and then?"

Soothes us, it does.

Yeah, waiting "a year or two" for fantranslators to pick those up is incredibly optimistic. And agreed with both Asonn and RedK that SP is probably your best bet. You won't see immediate results, but it never hurts to send them requests; from what I hear, they can and do use that when trying to convince Japanese developers to license.

I just plain don't like avatar changes. Incidentally though, @AaronIsCrunchy, you are in no position to criticize people for changing avatars.

The VNDB API is not really well-suited to being called dynamically from a website, unfortunately, just because the protocol isn't particularly friendly to typical webby AJAX technologies: it's a custom TCP protocol, rather than a REST protocol (though it does at least return JSON documents in the response payload). While that's not the end of the world, it's definitely more of a hassle than one might expect.

I meant the JRPG combat side of things. I don't actually mind repetitive and grindy, if it at least feels tactical, but Neptunia didn't really meet that bar for me. If I'm playing a game which is largely a JRPG, the gameplay in the Atelier series is the minimum bar for complexity and engagement (and of course Atelier has all the added bonus complexity of the alchemy, which takes the games from okay to really good, in spite of a fairly mediocre combat system), and I'd generally rather be playing something faster and more twitchy, like a Tales game or Lightning Returns, or something with a deeper tactical angle, like a Disgaea game. Neptunia combat was just kind of bland. As far as the cute girls doing cute things, I guess that was okay, but I guess it's not enough when that's the only part I'm enjoying, and there are other parts I'm not enjoying. Games like Recettear, for example, are nice because I enjoy all the pieces of it, from the cute girls being cute to the dungeon crawling to the item shop sales optimization problem.

I usually play even weeb games like Neptunia or the Atelier series with the English dub, but I seriously could not handle the voices in Neptunia. Then again, it turned out I just couldn't handle Neptunia - I barely played HDN;Rebirth for a few hours, months ago, and haven't ever gone back. I just didn't enjoy the gameplay very much.

... https://vndb.org/v1179

Eclipsed is Louise. Louise is Eclipsed. So it has ever been. So it shall always be.

Sparkly. 7/10

Stick with it. It takes a few chapters to get good.

False. Most of the shit I have is pretty expensive, to be honest, because VNs. Next person has played Recettear.

We can still call him that.

To be honest, I thought G-Senjou was just okay, not a masterpiece. Though I did enjoy the ending immensely, the journey there was slow at times. If I hadn't had a mountain of spare time on my hands when I was reading it, I probably would have dropped it. Steins;Gate, on the other hand, is one of only two games I've ever given a 10/10, and that in spite of the fact that I had already watched the anime, which usually makes me less interested in reading the VN. It's as close to perfect as any VN I've ever read.

The goals of the text I read were clearly in line with writing popular genre fiction, not with writing the next Recherche. I mean no negativity by that; I personally spend a lot more time reading genre fiction than I do reading highbrow literature, though I have spent plenty of time on both. From what I can tell, the writing style in good genre fiction descends from the style blazed by Hemingway and Dos Passos in the early 20th century, so I'd encourage looking to them for guidance, rather than the ponderous musings of Proust. I went poking around for some such direct guidance from the masters and found this article. Most of it is irrelevant to the conversation at hand (though likely still good advice), but see points 5 and 7. Those are at the heart of writing a powerful text in this style.

I missed this thread the first time around, and I probably wasn't qualified to comment on it then anyway, but since I'm here, now, and since the OP is back and posting, I figure I'll throw in my two cents. From what I read, I agreed with most of Velociraptor's feedback and all of Rooke's feedback. You said you're looking for criticism, but you're receiving good criticism and you largely appear to be ignoring it. You're not going to improve if you take that attitude. Listen to Rooke. I'll just cover a few points: I don't agree with Velociraptor's concern around terminology — jumping into the story in medias res, as you've done, is a technique as old as writing itself, and with genre fiction, I don't think people are uncomfortable with a cold start like this involving a lot of world-building jargon thrown at them. The terminology itself isn't unfamiliar and will just have your own specific definitions of more generic words, so I don't think Velociraptor's feedback that it's nonsense is valid. They're both right that your text has way too much telling and not enough showing. Rooke has already given pretty exhaustive examples, but just to pick one I particularly disliked, here: "Theirs was not a good situation, and while at the moment they could barely manage, their chances of escape reduced by the second." That sentence is a pile of weak words in an awkward sentence construction that hardly gives me any insight into what's happening. You clearly want your first paragraphs to be simultaneously an introduction to the setting and characters, and also a tense action scene. This sentence is only holding you back. You need to stop telling the reader how to feel and what to think, and instead focus on relating a sequence of events in a way that makes the reader feel what you want them to. Where the former is boring, the latter is engaging. If you take only one point of criticism, please, take the one most of us are trying to tell you: you need to do a lot less telling and a lot more showing. You do this a couple of times: "Calling Evangeline’s current emotional state ‘troubled’ would not do it justice." I don't know what to call this, but I do not find it pleasant to read. Describe something, or don't: don't undescribe something. While you really shouldn't be editing yet, line editing is kind of my thing, and I can't help giving you feedback since you need more awareness of what makes a sentence good. Consider this sentence: "The once organized, albeit abandoned book haven could literally be seen as a shadow of its former self as the scant electric supply was not enough to power anything but the lights to a dim glow." The phrasing is awkward, and the plot of it is incredibly hard to follow. I tried to glance over it three or four times and I wasn't able to guess at what it might be trying to say. I had to read it slowly, jumping back a few words on a couple occasions because of the syntactic complexity, before I could get through it and comprehend it. While this is not true of all genres, certainly in genre fiction like you're writing, you don't want people stumbling over your narrative sentences, re-reading them to try to figure out what's being said. The plot of your narration should be natural and easy to follow so the reader can get through it quickly and keep reading more. This isn't to say that your sentences should be simple or short (though often they should be); rather, I mean that the flow of ideas through a sentence, and then a paragraph, and then a chapter, should almost always be immediately comprehensible. This can still be accomplished even with longer, more complex structures, if the situation calls for them. More often than not, though, it doesn't. Short sentences are powerful. You mentioned cutting word count, but cutting word count by telling instead of showing is definitely not doing it right. Rooke is correct that you should not worry about cutting word count for the purposes of publication until after you have a draft, but the second, more important reason to cut word count is that it's usually the key to making a sentence more interesting. Consider this sentence: "Two young redheads were at the moment hiding behind a bookshelf at the far back of the deserted Grand Capitol Library." Compare: "Two redheads hid behind a bookshelf in the depths of the deserted Grand Capitol Library." You have a lot of empty modifiers like "at the moment" (temporal modifiers are especially empty; generally speaking, cut them and your prose will get better), and the "far back" is verbose and boring; why use two words when you can use one? I dropped "young", too, but I'm not married to that decision, if you really need this to be the sentence where the characters are established as young. But you probably don't. To be completely blunt, I found the high-level ideas engaging (setting, plot), but the writing so frustrating that I stopped reading it about a quarter of the way through. You can certainly do this. I'm sure you're better at it than I would be if I tried. But you need to start taking the advice of the helpful critics you have in this thread.

I had no idea. I remember reading the summary from the lead TL about TitS, and since you mentioned it, I did recognize the name when I saw it in the credits. That's rough. I wonder how many times more text (and meta-text, for that matter; lore and shit) there is in TitS than there is in Recettear. That's a rough way to learn your limits.

You mean mine? I'm just quoting the game, which seems to be set in a fictional version of France, given that it's full of French names.

After getting sucked into the game for a few more hours, I came back to the forum literally just to say "Capitalism ho!" only to find that it had already been said for me. Merde. Someday, I hope to meet either whoever wrote this gem, or whoever translated it, and shake their hand.

I started playing Recettear and promptly lost three hours of my life This game is fun and addicting.