Fred the Barber

I watched the first four episodes of Charlotte. It's a "watching while cooking" show for me, so I'm not watching it that carefully, which means it would have to hit a pretty high level for me to get attached to it. Definitely not there yet. So far, the show is fine but nothing special. The best part of the show so far is the female lead's character and her voice actress. There's something about the way she's written and the way the voice actress delivers her lines that I find unique and enjoyable. The male lead's little sister was adorable at first, but now is just grating. None of the other characters has really grabbed me at all. The show's ideas and setting are interesting, but not all that interesting. I realize I'm not to the controversial part yet. Frankly, I'm ready for it; episodic stuff (which is the current vibe of the show) isn't really my thing, and I'm about ready for a twist or ten that can be turned into a longer plot arc. I'm hoping my unabashedly shit taste will carry me through whatever it is that so many people dislike about it, but only time will tell. Still, it's already kind of disappointing. I'm only four episodes in, I suppose, but to put it in perspective, Angel Beats! quite literally changed my life within three episodes, so this one definitely isn't living up to, well, any other Key anime I've ever seen. I'm not surprised, given the reactions I've seen, but I'm still disappointed.

This is the most hurt I've felt in the last five minutes.

I don't think they really intended people to think this was some high-profile announcement, despite the Twitter teases. Who reads Twitter anyway? Real announcements will come with more fanfare, at conventions if possible.

I think part of the reason I avoid reading the Little Busters! review is because I worry I'll come back and post something like the above, in spite of my vaunted rationality. People get emotional about shit they like, even if it is objectively kind of shitty. Couldn't agree more with that particular negative on Clannad, though. The game has its moments, but it's just too damn long. Also, good luck getting to the most important content of it without following a guide (or, I guess if you were crazy, sinking another 20 hours into it)... real top-notch game design there.

Here's a few I suspect you'll like: Kokoro Connect AnoHana Say "I Love You" Princess Jellyfish Maria-sama ga Miteru

I haven't seen the two Fate/Stay Night anime adaptations, but I know that each of them covers one of the three routes. That means one full route doesn't have any anime adaptation at all, although it was recently announced that they're making an adaptation for that last route, sometime in the next couple years IIRC. Each F/SN route is radically different, so you're basically missing at least 1/3 of the content, if you just watch the anime. Beyond that, I don't know how much of the content within the routes they cut. For Steins;Gate, I've both played the VN and watched the anime. The anime is actually astonishingly close to the VN in terms of covering every little detail, except for one very big difference: at several key points, the VN lets you make choices that lead to very different endings. Though each of those alternate endings is pretty short compared to the overall main story (they each took me about one hour to read through, vs. ~20 hours for the whole game), they're excellent stories that do a lot to flesh out some of the important side characters, and I found they give a very satisfying feeling of closure for those characters which I didn't get from the anime. So, in short, definitely play F/SN, if only so you can see the Heavens Feel route. And as far as Steins;Gate, since they're mostly very similar, if you've pretty recently watched the anime, I probably wouldn't play the VN. However, if and when you've had a couple of years after seeing the anime, I'd recommend playing the VN. I found it was a surprisingly different feeling to experience the story for a second time, and the alternate endings are well worth your time.

No country east of Turkey knows how to make dessert, and Japan may actually be the very worst at it. Taro, red bean, mochi (especially green tea flavored mochi, WTF)... burn it all to the ground. But hey, as they say, there's no accounting for matters of taste. Especially yours, apparently. More positively, these just arrived: I would apologize for potato-quality pictures, but first of all that seems to be in vogue in this thread, and second of all I don't actually care about the pictures anyway, so... enjoy!

This phrase keeps haunting me. I know it means a succulent market for selling weapons, not a market for selling succulent weapons, but I keep picturing shady cacti dealers speaking Russian. I apologize for the blatantly off-topic post, but this is the CoC, and I had a pretty strong drink earlier. Anyway, on the actual topic, I'll throw in a vote for Spanish. There are a vast number of people speaking it across the world, and that number is growing rapidly. And, seemingly more importantly for your goals, there's also a fantastic amount of great literature in Spanish, from Cervantes in the 16th-17th century to recent Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, with a whole lot in between, including legends like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. I'm mostly a novel and short story reader, which reflects in those names I dropped, but poetry is notoriously difficult to translate (which seems to be a relevant consideration as well?), and in that arena Spanish again yields such literary titans as Octavio Paz.

It depends on the VN, but I've noticed a few at least that don't do well with touchscreens. The weirdest thing is that they all have different problems. Majikoi, for instance, will click in the previous place you pressed down, rather than the location of your current press, which makes menu interaction a serious pain. I mostly used the touchscreen anyway and just dealt with it (if you press really quickly, or press-and-drag, you can sometimes make it work). Steins;Gate is basically not functional at all. I gave up and used a mouse. Try it and you will, too. Grisaia actually has one major annoyance: there's no way to load the text backlog on a touchscreen. I think everything else I've played on the tablet has been fine. I'm not delighted to hear Tokyo Babel has this issue, though, since I was probably going to play it pretty soon, and was planning to do so on my tablet... but this is a tiny niche of a tiny niche, and frankly Windows tablets probably weren't even as commonly-used as they are now at the time most of these games were made. I probably should feel pleasantly surprised that so many of them actually do work well on a tablet.

I can't believe the confessions thread went for 17 hours without a post. Confession: I go back to work in 11 days, and I don't want to Edit: Another Confession: I love picking up the soundtrack for a VN a week or two after I finish it. Just got the Steins;Gate soundtrack and started flipping through it. So. Much. Nostalgia.

Yeah, I could've been clearer about this point specifically. Keep in mind three things during my blatantly uninformed hypothesizing: At this point I'm getting pretty far into a stereotype, and am taking it to an extreme (though a logical one, IMO). I'm not talking about any actual people, but rather about a general target market that is considered when making one of these idealized high school life VNs. I'm really talking about the Japanese market, at whom this media is targeted. The rest of the world is pretty different, and is at best an afterthought. I strongly suspect the target audience for VNs generally hated high school, but they felt like they were supposed to enjoy it (either because everybody else they knew did, or simply because they'd been spoon-fed so much idealized school life media). So, they have some residual envy for high school students at large, and a desire to experience the ideal school life they missed out on. So, VNs try to fill that gap. Naturally, this has long since turned into a self-reinforcing cycle. There's vast amounts of otaku media out there celebrating high school life, and in Japan, probably quite a lot of it is getting consumed by people not even in high school yet (or at least, who haven't yet graduated from high school). All of that media builds an idealized image of what high school life ought to be, but of course nobody (I think) actually lives the insane high school life of your typical VN protagonist. Since they didn't have a harem in high school, they feel like they've missed out on some fundamental part of the experience. Well, at least they can play a game and pretend. Anyway, this is kind of far afield from the original topic at this point... sorry about that. Rooke started it.

While Gahkthun is obviously a lock for the general topic, the specifics of the announcement aren't 100% clear yet. Yes, 99:1 odds say they're just announcing that they'll start selling hard copies, but until the announcement comes, we can keep holding out hope for that remaining 1% chance that they licensed the fandisk. It's important to have hope, if only so you can learn about disappointment.

Ehh, I think both @tymmur and @Rooke are wrong about the motivation for the constant school setting. Rooke claims the target audience is in school. Tymmur basically claims the target audience was in school. I propose, instead, that the target audience wishes they were in school. VNs are almost always going for simple entertainment, and more specifically entertainment through escapism. The school setting is probably no more common a VN cliché than the bland self-insert protagonist and the gaggle of girls following around said protagonist. The whole suite of clichés is obviously architected around providing a nice, comfortable world for the reader to escape to. That they can relate to it is important, sure, and it's especially easy to relate to something you are, but the core of the motivation is that the reader wants to be there. Now, obviously there are plenty of VNs out there breaking that mold, and for that matter there are plenty of VNs doing good things even within that mold. Most of them are, nonetheless, probably going to get dismissed by any literary critic as escapism. But for what it's worth, despite the negative overtones usually associated with the word, I don't view entertainment in general or escapism in particular as a negative in the slightest - it's probably how I spend the majority of my life, and by choice.

The best thing about the way you said this is that we can quote it directly in a year (and two, and three) without even needing to change it.

When an argument reaches an apparent impasse, I do one of two things If I don't care, I walk away and make sure to let the other person have the last word, so they can "win" the argument. If I do care (rare, but it does happen, almost exclusively at work), I just keep explaining my position and I ask questions and try really hard to better understand their position and their reasons for holding it. People (at least the ones I meet - your experience may be different, especially those of you working in retail ) are actually pretty rational. If you're having that serious an argument, and what they're saying just doesn't make sense given what you know, then one or both of you is almost certainly just doing a poor job of explaining either your facts or your reasoning. So, both of you need to listen better and explain better, and you can usually work through that. Compromising, even on a really ugly argument, can be done (I know; I've done it, many times). But everybody involved has to fix their brains first, because people don't start that way. Practice by losing a lot of arguments. By that I mean actually admitting to yourself that you were incorrect, and further realize that it was a fact or rationale that the other person provided you that convinced you of your incorrectness. For that practice, I highly recommend philosophy - most of that shit hardly matters at all and is incredibly subtle. Find someone who knows more about it than you do and go to town.

Got back to periodically watching an episode of season 2 of Love Live.

Welcome! Definitely go for it with G-Senjou. It's pretty good, and should be quite a change of pace from what you've seen so far if you've only played Katawa Shoujo and Key games. It's generally considered a good "starter" VN, and is pretty easy to pick up these days since it has an officially-licensed release on Steam.

I didn't enjoy either of those routes, to be completely honest. And I even rather enjoyed the weirdified Ageha route, and loved both Kotori and Amane routes. I admit I was more prudish at the time, but still, they just weren't very interesting. Also I kind of liked Yoru as a standalone character, and I felt like she got ripped off by the way her route went. Just my two cents. I might perceive them differently if I played them today, after my brain has changed so much in the past ~year, but I actually kind of doubt it. If I do replay this game some day (which I actually probably will, if/when the retranslation patch comes out), I'll just be playing Kotori, Amane, and Ageha's routes, probably in that order.

This type of thread should go into Voluntary Tech Support, FYI. I've run into this problem each time I've installed Comyu, and each time I've fixed it with this: Download this zip: http://wordpress.click3.org/garakuta/Win8WOH.zip Copy the "version.dll" file in it right next to where the Comyu EXE file is. I can't speak to Dracu-riot, since I haven't played it. And, yeah, that probably looks really sketchy. For what it's worth, the source code is in that zip file as well, and when I scanned it briefly a long while back it looked pretty harmless. Also, just for a little more confirmation that I'm not leading you astray, there's another thread over here mentioning the same problem and fix for Comyu (where I got the link from):

I am so envious right now. If I'd managed that, I would've woken up at 8 AM and probably fixed my jetlag in one night. Instead, I woke up at 5 AM. Make a list. Make specific goals. Make sure you're making progress on those goals. And do the cleaning within the next two days, because you can actually knock that out in a day and make your list shorter, which feels good.

Watching this thread is like watching a train wreck, so naturally, I want in on that action. The fact that one person can't actually know exactly what another person would think about any given stimulus isn't especially relevant to the discussion, because pragmatically speaking, people actually do communicate effectively about their tastes and preferences. You probably know someone who has tastes similar to you. And much more interestingly, you probably know people who have tastes different from you, and you can predict (with some degree of accuracy, obviously not 100%) how they will react to certain stimuli. This is powered by empathy and sympathy. These fundamental human faculties can, when put to good use, make that judgement on behalf of other people fairly effective, especially when helped by broad categorizations like genre, theme, etc., (e.g., "While I'm not a nakige fan, people who are able to emotionally invest themselves in that formula will probably get a lot out of this"). But obviously one opinion is never going to be exactly the same, or exactly accurate, as that of another person. While not "objective" in a strict sense, this is still potentially useful information to provide to others, and is frankly extremely common in reviews.

Let me just have a word with Admiral Ackbar before clicking that. ... Ok, he's given his full support to me watching your video. I have, therefore, decided to play Huniepop instead.

The jetlag of a 32-hour day really isn't so bad, except that I occasionally wobble severely enough that I'm likely very soon to fall out of my chair and crash onto the floor. If I stay awake for five more hours, I give myself a 50-50 chance of waking up at a reasonable time tomorrow. Confession: I'm getting too old for this shit.

@Ryechu why do we have to proceed on the basis of the assumptions you made? Isn't the point of this thread to question those assumptions and present alternatives? A lot of people seem upset precisely because of the "quick summary". If there's no willingness to change based on valid criticism of the system, then this thread is pointless. @Down, you brought up serious reviews. I'm on board with that. Here's the New York Times book reviews: http://www.nytimes.com/section/books/review. The masthead for each is apparently "'Title' by Author", and the first paragraph. No read/don't read recommendation. Certainly no rating. Looks good to me. @solidbatman I want to make it abundantly clear here: I have no intention of criticizing any individual review or reviewer, and in fact have gone out of my way to call out that all the reviews I've read have been good. I am trying to point out an unintended and frankly absurd consequence of the fact that individual reviewers have individual preferences, which the system puts into a ranking. The resulting ranking is, of necessity because of the subjectivity of reviews, irrational and almost certainly inconsistent with the reviewers' own views, not just my own.

Nah, dude. The Reject Demon Toko and Go! Go! Nippon! are the cream of the crop, universally acclaimed, vastly superior to Ever17, Little Busters!, Hoshimemo, Gahkthun, ... can I keep going? Because next is eden*, Yume Miru Kusuri, Clannad, ... Really, we could be here all day listing the games that Fuwareviews thinks are vastly inferior to Go! Go! Nippon! The people who are arguing for numerical scores on the basis of the sorting have clearly never actually used the sorting.