Fred the Barber

The general term for what you're looking for is a multimodal distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution. It should be vastly easier to test for in the VNDB data than in the general continuous probably distribution function case since the data is (mostly) discrete. One can download the raw VNDB vote data from https://vndb.org/d14 and cobble together a script to find all games matching a simple condition like: second-highest vote bucket is more than one point away from highest vote bucket Some people put non-integer votes in VNDB, but I'd probably deal with that by just rounding those off and not lose any sleep over it. It seems rare, and from what I've seen is mostly done by people who are using their VNDB votes to put up a relative ranking of VNs, rather than an independent rating of each VN.

Cool, thanks for this. I learned from watching K-On! that if it's done well, a character-focused show is perfectly fine with me, so that should be fine. I have to agree that KyoAni doesn't do closure on romances especially well, but it doesn't stop me from wishing for them to learn how

And that's the last time I'm going to mind blow you, so find somebody else next time.

Oh thank God. I love it and it needs to be done soon.

I gave up on Guilty Crown after one episode despite being enormously hyped because of the music. It just completely failed to grab me. Sometimes I think I should give it another chance, but then I read statements like the above and decide I made the right call.

Still playing the Grisaia common route. Still loving it. Kind of ready for a character route, though... On the one hand I want to know how much longer I have to wait until I get to see a character route and some drama, but on the other hand I'm worried someone will see where I am and answer "you're about halfway there". As much as I'm loving it, I wish Front Wing had some notion of pacing - a little bit of comedy here, a little bit of drama there, back and forth, ya know? It's just easier to read that way. Makes me want to get Nasu to give them a presentation on pacing. That might result in its own problems though... Front Wing presents: Cooking The Fruit Of Grisaia

@Funyarinpa: I wasn't with Rooke until that last paragraph, but yeah, that about nails it. When I was younger and lived with my parents, I spent quite a lot of time playing video games, and they didn't bother me about it at all. But I was also doing very well in high school, and then went off on my own to a good college where I did fine. When I asked them about it, years after I'd finished college, they said roughly "Well, you seemed to get good grades and have friends, so we decided we didn't have any reason to stop you from playing games." So, find out what they're worried about, and then (for your sake as well as theirs) work on that. You're clearly a bright guy, so you should be able to do that and still have plenty of time to do the things you want to do, and I expect you'll find you end up in a better place because of it. You often talk about wanting to do particular things, like astrophysics, in and after college - what your parents are doing right now is probably targeted at getting you on that path. And it's not a binary choice - you can do both, if you properly focus. It's hard, and it's harder for some people (maybe including you) than for others, but the sooner you learn to work hard and focus on schoolwork, the better prepared you will be for college and a subsequent career. And as much as I'm a bad example for some things, I'm a good example for someone who has a satisfying, decent-paying job, and still gets a great deal of pleasure out of playing games. It's absolutely possible to have it both ways, if you're willing to work for it.

Yeah, while I was writing and rewriting the OP I had that same link around and some commentary about how it apparently hadn't been updated in a while... here's to hoping the Kazamatsuri posts are closer to the truth than the official Amaterasu page. To be completely honest, I wonder if @PAscension is maybe on the right track, and the ominous silence is actually because of some ongoing official licensing talks with Key, perhaps for a package deal of the previous Rewrite translation and the nearly-done Rewrite Harvest Festa translation. I'd actually be delighted if that's the case - we'd probably see some delay, sure, but official English releases are nourishment for my VN-loving soul, a sign that things are moving in a good direction for us lowly non-Japanese-reading plebes.

That level of commitment kind of makes me want to make the time to watch the UBW anime just to see if it's really up to all this hype. One of my two real-life otaku friends, who could be accurately stereotyped as a typical mecha anime fan, was willing to try VNs for the first time on the strength of that show alone, so I expect it's pretty damn good. At any rate, F/SN was a pretty great VN for me, so I can't really fault Type Moon fans for wanting moar moar moar.

We've all got it. Only a handful are brave enough to admit it. Welcome, Neek. What's your favorite VN? Looking for recommendations? We're a (mostly) friendly and welcoming community (with shit taste) - if you're looking for something, don't hesitate to ask.

Wow, really? I didn't like that last attack of Haruka's (damage was much smaller than the 10 SP attack ) and I used it at most once or twice per fight, so that first skill wouldn't have been worth it for me. The paralysis element is nice, don't get me wrong, but if you ever lost a fight, you could just reload and usually predict the turn when you needed to block a particularly annoying enemy attack (which was usually at most 1/3 of the turns). I always went for +1 to all stats for training, +10 Attack, and +10 Reflex, in that order, for the heroine whose route I was pursuing.

Definitely agreed - the romance did get a little bit of real screen time occasionally, and it was always a joy to watch the two emotional idiots wondering "Why did I do that nice thing for him/her?"

Finished Amagi Brilliant Park (the 12 episodes of the main series, not episode 13 or the OVA). That was pretty damn good. It's a matter of personal taste that I would've preferred to see a nice romance between Kamie and Sento, which I'm guessing is the main reason why @ittaku mentioned he'd like to see a sequel, but despite wanting that romantic closure I felt like the show did a great job of completing everything it set out to. Overall I'm very happy with it; typical superb KyoAni quality. And if they did make a sequel (it seems like the light novels are ongoing, so they certainly could), I wouldn't hesitate to watch. The only time I've been dissatisfied watching a KyoAni anime was when they tried to write their own story in Tamako Market. I should really get around to watching the others I've missed like Sound! Euphonium. Also, I just read on Wikipedia that Kanie's name was inspired by Kanye West. It makes such perfect sense that I almost can't believe I didn't think of it before.

Well, my name is not Fred, and I'm not a barber. The long story: perhaps in reaction to Secret of Mana giving you something like a paltry 6 letters to name all your main characters (and worse, forcing you to name them), Secret of Evermore gave some ludicrous amount of space like 20 letters (and, again, forced you to name the characters). Now, the intro to SoE had all these cheesy fake B-movie references, to such new classics as "Mars Needs Lumberjacks". I was so excited by both of these two things that I absolutely needed to give my two nameable characters super-long names that sounded like the leads in a B-movie. The dog became "Sam the Viking", and the main character became "Fred the Barber". Years later, I started using the latter as my handle whenever I played Halo (although the original Halo had a fairly limited number of letters for names, so FTB became an even more common nickname for me), and pretty soon I was using it everywhere.

Welcome! The Fuwa VN reading club (very informal) is actually reading Steins;Gate this month, so I'm reading it for the first time right now and am certainly enjoying it. If you do pick that one up, feel free to drop in to this thread to join in the discussion (discussion will probably start up in a few days after people have time to do some reading):

To my knowledge, Key has never announced an official localized release for any of Rewrite, Harvest Festa, or Angel Beats, but I could easily have missed something and I'd be happy to be proven wrong on any of those counts. What I can recall of theirs that is done or in the works, for official English releases: Planetarian (released), Clannad (released), Little Busters! (translation in the works), Tomoyo After (translation in the works?), Harmonia (game not released yet, translation to come around the same time as the game)

Actually, the text on the back of the disc release for the Steins;Gate anime does a fantastic job at this, and as I recall, the second one is used in the VN intro as well. I can't decide which of these is better, but I love them both: The microwave is a time machine. He should have been more careful. I was struggling with Gahkthun for a while, but then I realized what the real emotional hook of Gahkthun is, and a concise answer followed immediately: Nikola Freaking Tesla

Gnashes, a QCer with Amaterasu Translations, has been posting status over on the Kazamatsuri forums for the last year or so. If I'm reading it correctly (the information is all scattered throughout a general-purpose thread), it seems that literally everything has been QCed once over, as of a couple weeks ago. Full thread is here: https://forum.kazamatsuri.org/t/key-games-translation-status-updates/554/213. It's always hard to tell whether the release is actually coming soon, though Gnashes seemed to think so at the time of that post. Whoever is in control of the Kazamatsuri twitter account is at least confident enough in it to say the patch is "imminent", in a tweet yesterday, but it doesn't seem like they have any more context than that thread. At any rate, I'm getting a little bit hyped, deciding whether to order a physical copy of the game now or just to wait for the actual release. Who all is joining me on the hype train?

Some of the historical figures are pretty great. My favorite is the one in chapter 9 (I think?), though:

Happy I could help a fellow time traveler

Yeah, Ensai got wrecked by Super Subaru. I'm well aware of how to build max SP. The problem with Haruka is that you need two skills to be an effective castle runner (both trap avoidance and enemy avoidance), which means 15 fights for Haruka, lots of turns spent getting her SP back between all those fights, and lots of turns just to do those fights. That's quite a lot of turns spent in the early part of the game, especially if you're wanting to focus on building up Narika. I was definitely nowhere near 60 max SP for Haruka by the time Narika became available, which would have been my preference. On the other hand, Narika starts with 60 max SP - so you actually never need to put her in combat at all to make her a castle runner. You spend about two turns refilling her SP, and then you're done. On my Subaru playthrough, I ended up with a rather powerful Haruka, a completely wimpy Narika (who nonetheless made a great castle runner), and also a powerful Subaru after about 45 turns. Then I spent 45 turns making Subaru godly, to no point

I had planned to find that out just now, but apparently on Subaru's route, unlike at least Narika's Pure Love route (probably Haruka's as well, but I didn't notice), you don't get a chance at the fight against Strong or Super Noroi. So after lovingly and sometimes rather roughly grinding all of Subaru's stats up to ~90, I found that I had just wasted about an hour. Oh well. Incidentally, I've never before played a game where grinding was quite so aptly-named.

Shrimp scampi: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes-menus/how-to-make-shrimp-scampi-without-a-recipe-article The first time I made it I screwed it up pretty badly: I had the heat up too high, and the wine evaporated on contact. To salvage it, I dropped the heat quickly and added more wine, but I ended up with too much sugar left behind, and the result tasted weird. But I just tried it a second time, and fixing that mistake resulted in it being a pretty solid dinner. Importantly for this thread, it is by far the fastest dinner worth mentioning in my repertoire. Between preparation, eating, and cleaning up the dishes afterwards, I was done in 45 minutes. I usually stream anime while I'm cooking, and this was the first time I've ever watched only one episode during prep + cooking; most everything I make is at least two episodes. I have fond memories of marathoning some 10 episodes, mostly of Akatsuki no Yona, the first time I made Japanese curry Anyway, one further caveat on the recipe, in case it's relevant to you. I'm actually using dry vermouth instead of wine, but the vermouth I have is not ideal: it's too sweet, even when I use a reasonable amount. I'd find a decent white wine, but I can't get a whole bottle or I'll have to either let most of it sit overnight and start to taste lousy, or get hammered each time I make this - not a dilemma I want to sign up for. The options I'm considering are: 1) find a decent half-size bottle of fairly dry white wine (although I don't especially like wine, so even signing up to drink that much might not be a great idea...), 2) find a drier vermouth (probably my best bet), or 3) try to find a good boxed white wine (the kind that comes in a bladder so it has high shelf life, even after you open it).

Actually, bananas do not grow on trees - they are an herbaceous fruit.

Awesome! This is actually helpful for something I'm working on, and I'm going to directly use a few of those. Oh, and by the way, even if somebody's already done one, feel free to do it again. I'm betting this is the sort of thing where you can get a few completely different takes on the same thing. A few more from me: Fate/Stay Night: Magicians and their Heroic Servants battle Symphonic Rain: The rain never stops. Deus Machina Demonbane: giant robot vs. eldritch horrors Still working on a good one for Majikoi...