Fred the Barber

I know that feel, from when I was watching Date A Live. I still haven't watched High School DxD. I remain (somewhat) strong.

Son, I am disappoint. Faris is way too smart to be dismissed that lightly. Well, I'm sure you'll see in time.

Seriously, why are there trees in your greenhouse. That question is so deadpan it doesn't even get a question mark. Did I miss a memo somewhere?

Confession: After posting over in VN talk, I just remembered I was somewhere around 1000 posts and checked, and lo and behold, exactly 1000. \/ I prefer to celebrate digit rollovers with the computers, rather than with the humans, though, so don't expect a retrospective from me until after my 65,536th post.

Finished chapter 5 I'm still trying to figure out how routes are going to work in this VN... if it's all based off my cellphone actions taken so far (which were frankly just targeted at getting the most interesting reply), I might very well flip a table in frustration, since I don't really get any sense of purpose or agency out any of the cellphone stuff. If there are actual choices coming, then it's all good. I also would be fine if there basically are no routes, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case given what people said about getting the last ending basically requiring a guide.

#ThankNosebleed2016 - is it happening?

Nagisa's father Akio is probably my favorite character in Clannad. His record across all the various conditions initially listed is kind of mixed, but I think he comes out on top. - definitely not normal - pretty damn cool, almost all of the time - kind of does act like a child around his daughter, though I'm not certain it's the same as what you're saying - doesn't act like he hates you and wants to kill you. Does act childishly jealous at times, but he's usually joking around with it. - does test how much of a man you are, but in a way which I didn't find obnoxious - gives you porn mags That last one was on the list, right?

When I need to vocalize that I am transitively acting on a VN, my brain picks a verb randomly from the set {"to play", "to read"}. So like Fiddle said: yes

Landmark day: someone else on Fuwa actually mentioned Maria-sama ga Miteru! MariMite is an odd one compared to modern yuri - there's almost no romance at all (I want to say there's one brief kiss across the entire four seasons?), and there's even very little implication of it. In a very large cast there are two or perhaps four characters who seem to have any kind of romantic relationship. What little there is of that is extremely well-handled - there's definitely no pandering to a male audience. It is, I believe, firmly directed at a female audience. So far, MariMite is the only thing classified as yuri which I've ever enjoyed (and I love it - quite possibly my favorite anime, because drama). I did try Utena because it's such a classic, but that one proved to be just too old for me to handle - even the first season of MariMite is still totally watchable today; apparently it came out about 7 years after the first season of Utena.

Okabe is complicated. Here's my perception of his character, as of where I am somewhere in Chapter 4, supplemented with as much evidence as I can get. Some of this comes from the very rare honest introspection on his part, but more of it comes by assessing his relationships with other people: - He doesn't believe all the nonsense he spouts. The best evidence for this is how he acts when he's with Faris, since she's better at this nonsense game than he is, and he freely admits it (to himself). The way he acts during his banter with her, where she's directing the conversation, is basically identical to his ordinary Organization shtick, except that he occasionally admits that he can't keep up the game as well as she does. - Although he doesn't actually believe in any Organization, Okabe seems to be deeply entertained by pretending to believe in it. The reason he goes around telling everybody about it is on the off-chance they'll play along with him and he can have some fun. To some extent you can see this when he chats with Faris, but much more so when he chats with Luka, since Luka is so deeply invested in Okabe that he'll play along with anything Okabe does. - This is the most interesting point, to me: Okabe is as unsure and worried as all the people around him about the severity of the situation he suddenly finds himself in. He reveals this pretty directly through a big internal monologue, at one point, after some of the events in chapter 2 or 3 (can't remember which). I don't think they're trying to make him funny in particular, so much as they're trying to show that he's just a goofball playing around all day who suddenly ends up way, way over his head.

That's roughly the intention of the pixel art style - it's probably more about evoking nostalgia than anything else, but I have to admit, it appeals to me. The character portraits are vastly more detailed than you'd see in most old games using that style and that level of detail for everything else, though. Chrono Trigger's character portraits are, IMO, actually even more detailed than these, but that's kind of generally true of that game - it was pushing the limits of the style, whereas this game is firmly embracing them.

No. I slowed down a lot after the first week of playing, and I'm only playing around 5 in-game days per day at this point, so I'm still in fall of year 2. ... I accidentally read a spoiler for what you're talking about, and was wondering about that. At any rate, thanks for confirming that I can start fretting a little bit less about iridium. Given where I am, I'm pretty sure the game is going to judge me worthy.

Iiinteresting. I haven't been hitting up the peddler enough, and the couple times she had Ancient Seeds I was out of money (probably because I was burning so much cash on Starfruit seeds at the time...). I guess you're using the seed harvesting thing to make more? It didn't even cross my mind, but now I'll definitely do that with some of the rare fruit from my fall harvest and then start greenhousing it, so I can at least hit the mark of shipping 15 of them (I only had 5 rare seeds which I'd saved up for when the second fall rolled around). Iridium remains the most annoying thing, by a long shot. But I made an iridium ring anyway, because it glows and it's a magnet and it makes me deal more damage; gotta gear up, y'know?

Crap, there's a new competitor for Onett Starfruit Winery. You certainly have me beat on volume.

Take care, Ren; hope to see you back here and feeling better soon.

Thanks, Decay, for a characteristically thoughtful and thorough review. I'll definitely be trying this once I clear out what I'm currently reading.

I just finished that part last night and was pretty amused by it as well. I rate 88/88

I'll give it a try if a critical mass signs up. I've been mostly stuck in a rut on traditional video games for quite a while, and I've got a fair bit of time on my hands at the moment, so playing what other people suggest would probably be good for me. As far as selection categories, I think broad selection themes (e.g., good music, good plot, ...) are better than genres (e.g., fighting games, FPS, ...), since you're more likely to hit on what more people find interesting. Not so sure about limiting the discussion to that theme, but I don't mind either way, I suppose.

Well, it's mid-March now, so it's about time for first impressions IMO. Here's what I've got. I'm alternating playing this and Grisaia, which makes for a great study in contrasts. Where Grisaia is, so far, following the Key formula (meaning in the early stages it's mostly focused on making me bond with the heroines), this VN has me pretty deeply engaged in an overarching plot right from the beginning. I actually remember the Steins;Gate anime being a little bit boring for the first 50% of it, but even though the same material is handled here, I'm not bored at all - on the contrary, I'm feeling pretty heavily invested. However, that might be in part due to my experience watching the anime, though, which helps me feel the greater significance of many events. I wish I could read this VN with no background at all, but unfortunately induction of highly-localized amnesia doesn't yet exist. A pity. If I have a modicum of conscious control over this, I'm going for Suzuha first - it's always bugged me that she is so capable, yet nonetheless gets rather marginalized. Capable, competent, responsible people are my favorite people, and Suzuha wins that race handily in Steins;Gate. That said, there's something about Mayushii. She remains my favorite, so I'll be saving her route for as late as possible. Kurisu is fine; the story is going to take care of giving her more importance, though, so I'll let that be. I love the art style overall, but for some reason I'm not a huge fan of the heroines' sprites. The males, especially (Daru and Mr. Braun, I guess, are the main ones), look fantastic to me, but the females are just a little off, somehow - might be the anime's influence again, unfortunately. I'm gradually getting more used to it, but I'm still not crazy about any of them yet. Suzuha is the closest to looking good; Mayushii especially looks somehow off to me, and Kurisu is not far behind. The soundtrack is excellent. I'm definitely going to get MP3s of it, one way or another, once I'm done playing the whole VN (soundtrack spoilers are spoilers too, for me at least).

Despite clicking this thread the moment I saw it, I categorically refuse to like the OP.

Good to have you back, Getsuya. Thanks for playing and reviewing this so I know not to

So I landed in Sachi's route and have been reading that for an hour or so. Being a chronically nice guy, at least in my own mind, my first time through when I'm just making whatever choices feel right, I tend to fall into the lap of the first girl to whom I'm given choices of the nature of "be nice" vs. "be callous", which was Sachi during the common route. I think I nonetheless got a choice to pursue Amane instead, which I declined. Sorry, Amane, but these are my honest feelings right now. I'm liking the character route so far - there's clear romance going on now, which is a pretty big change of pace from the comedy in the common route. Maybe I'll get lynched for saying this, but GnK is actually following the Key formula pretty faithfully: it started off with a long, SoL- and comedy-oriented common route, and now it's cleanly pivoted to a gentle romantic character route. The inevitable drama is starting to loom a bit larger already, but isn't yet really casting a shadow over the sweet romance phase. Good stuff, at any rate - there's a reason the formula is popular. Naturally, I'm expecting things are going to go off those particular rails by the end of the whole VN, though maybe not during the character routes. That's usually my favorite part anyway - certainly for both Little Busters! and Rewrite, IMO, they were at their strongest when they broke out of the formula. So I'm looking forward to the idea of that that, too, off in the distance ahead. In the meantime, I've got a whole lot of juicy character route ahead of me still to go.

Well, this assumes that the people who voted in the tournament are readers, which may arguably be putting too fine a point on it, but given where the Type-Moon voters apparently came from, I don't think it's necessarily unfair to draw that distinction. That said, as long as the results represent an audience of people who would actually buy a localized VN release (regardless of whether they then actually read it ), then it's still perfectly reasonable to use this for the sake of prioritizing VNs to localize (and, yes, I fully realize that the licensing process is by no means as simple as simply deciding that you want to localize a game)... at least as long as those people keep buying.

I think there are several reasons, and this is probably one of the bigger ones, but a little more specifically, I don't want to look bad in front of a roomful of strangers. I didn't put in anything like this level of effort for presentations at work, even though they were in front of probably more people than I'll get at SakuraCon, and that's probably in part because they already knew and respected me. The other big reason that I see is that I actually care about the material and I really want people to get something out of the presentation, ideally both enthusiasm and information.

Confession: Since finishing college, I've literally never read anything which I thought would be "useful" for me professionally (books on programming languages or technology, business-oriented books, that sort thing). I've rarely picked up the occasional technology books, but never gotten more than a few pages in. However, because I have this presentation at SakuraCon next week, I hit up my older brother (who loves this sort of stuff) for recommendations on books about presentations (covering presentation structure, graphic design, and the actual act6 of presenting), and just finished reading both of the books he recommended to me. Apparently I'm pretty dedicated to making my presentation not suck.