Fred the Barber

I haven't watched the show, but I've read the LNs, and in those it's obviously a harem. In the LNs, the main character even directly talks about having a harem, though always through the lens of his grandfather's desires, not as his own goal. But the way everything plays out, with approximately half the girls in the world throwing themselves at the MC, and a remaining quarter of them being too emotionally immature in one way or another to throw themselves at him, this is easily the most haremy thing I've seen/read since Date A Live.

Don't worry Eclipsed, the quotation of the original version will live forever, so it's fine. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to figure out where I belong...

I'm not following you, maybe... but are you implying that someone is never precisely 15 years old for any meaningful amount of time, so a 15-year-old is therefore a member of the 15 < x < 20 set? It's an oddly fine point for the definition to hang on, but I suppose it is a possible interpretation that makes sense... otherwise, I can't figure out where I belong. And really, figuring out where you belong is pretty important.

Wow. Eclipsed just declared that all the 15, 20, 25, and 30-year-olds don't exist. Help me, I'm melting away... melting away...

Confession: It's nice having Valmore around to make me feel less old.

To all appearances, no. I guess it could be a reference, but the plots really couldn't look more different.

I finished Demonbane today. - I think the biggest weakness of it is characters. I found exactly one character interesting (the rest were all very flat and predictable), and I did get rather attached to her. Unfortunately, Ennea is kind of a side character and invariably gets screwed by the plot in every route, so that didn't help any. - The plot was ok, but the routes got rather repetitive due to a lot of reused content. Worse, oftentimes when I was reading an identical scene within a different route, I guess the script had actually been copy-pasted or something, since I couldn't even use the Skip Unread functionality to get through it (while this was not always the case, it probably was the case more than half the times that I tried to use the skip button). And then other scenes weren't actually identical, but had only very minor changes which had so little impact that it wasn't worth the differentiation. - The translation was by and large good, but there was a large swath of one of the three routes which almost seemed like it hadn't been edited - it was very inconsistent (core terminology was suddenly translated differently, for instance), clearly a very raw translation (had a lot of awkward phrasing that looked like Japanese words had been translated directly without care for making the resulting sentence scan well in English), and lastly it had a lot more grammar and spelling errors than the rest of the VN. - Graphics were acceptable but unremarkable, and I thought the music was actually pretty good. - The first time I played it, I really enjoyed the sense of humor throughout the common route. But the later parts of the game are very serious most of the time, so I had frankly almost forgotten that, after slogging through three routes... All in all, I enjoyed it at times and certainly don't regret reading it, but it wasn't great. I probably wouldn't recommend it to anybody else, especially since it's kind of showing its age. I'm undecided about what I'll read next. Part of me doesn't want to embark on anything very long right now since March is just around the corner and will presumably bring another VN reading club title, so I'm inclined to go for something short. But on the other hand I do still have quite a lot of free time until that decision will be made, and I'd like to play something that I think I'll really enjoy, so it might finally be time for me to play Grisaia no Kajitsu.

Huh, didn't hear about it before, but it does look promising. I was looking for something short to play next, so maybe I'll pick this up tomorrow. Thanks for bringing it up!

Finished Ruri's Bad Ending and Leica's route, and with that the VN. Ruri's Bad Ending was simply unpleasant - not interesting, like Al's Bad Ending. I kind of expected that given where the ending diverged, but it was still kind of disappointing after how good Al's Bad Ending was. Thoughts on Leica's route: I realized a few days ago the reason I wasn't all that attached to this VN: I frankly don't care for the characters that much. Almost all of them are flat and predictable. The only character I really looked forward to seeing get stage time was Ennea, and

I finished Disgaea 5 to my satisfaction today. I didn't beat Baal (though I could where I am right now stats-wise, but strategizing is a pain) let alone Carnage Baal, but I did get all the trophies, which is more than I usually do for a Disgaea game. I unceremoniously sealed it away in a container in my closet. Not sure what I'll pick up next. Tales of Zestiria is likely, but I might pick up Stella Glow again first. I was rather enjoying Stella Glow a while back, but I'm no longer commuting on a bus for ~1.5 hours per work day, so my time that was largely spent on portable games disappeared. I also need to go back and play almost all of the Hebijo storyline for Senran Kagura Burst and then try the later games... so much to do.

I used to live in the first floor of a condo building and got insects somewhat frequently. In particular we would get fruit flies seasonally, and one year we had a constant plague of them - maybe a dozen or so in the condo at any point in time, for a period of a month. It was disgusting and horrifying. One day, we moved some stuff around in the pantry and discovered the source: we had obscured some potatoes deep in the recesses of the pantry, and they had long since rotted and become a fruit fly breeding ground. Uncovering that unholy relic was even more disgusting and horrifying (and my god they were swarming around it, maybe 50 of them), but cleaning it up resulted in the fruit fly infestation being fully resolved within a couple more days. I was seeing phantom fruit flies in the corner of my eye for months afterwards, and I became quite talented at squashing them one-handed (it's actually much easier to clasp them one-handed than it is to go for the two-handed clap, it turns out). Now I live in an apartment on the 21st floor. I have literally seen exactly one insect in the nearly 2.5 years I have lived here: a single fruit fly stowed away on some fruit I bought one day. Needless to say, its life was short.

Arcadeotic's order is a pretty good recommendation for meeting the "best ones first and last" requirement. Wanko's route may also be considered the best, depending on what you're looking for. Chris is the weakest (IMO, but I think that's a pretty common opinion), and Miyako is ok (again, IMO, but in general people don't talk about her route much). As someone else on this thread once phrased it, Wanko's is the designated feels route in Majikoi. Meanwhile, Yukie's and Momoyo's routes have the most satisfying action-oriented plots (particularly Momoyo). And you have to do all five of those to unlock Agave, so you're going to be getting what most people consider the best route last regardless.

Well, this is pretty disappointing to hear. @Getsuya used to rave about Flowers and seemed to have a good head on his shoulders, so I was rather looking forward to this. If they're willing to release a demo in this bad a shape, I'm probably not even going to look at the official release, unless I hear people specifically talking about how much they turned it around after the demo.

I know this isn't really the main thing you wanted to talk about, but I do want to talk to this one point briefly - the general gaming communities I've been involved with were basically completely unaware of the existence of visual novels (though that changed a bit a few months ago when Hatoful Boyfriend, of all things, was briefly popular on reddit). I'm sure there are some outspoken gamers out there who are actually aware of visual novels and hate them, but the vastly larger population of gamers is simply completely unaware of their existence, for better or worse. I haven't actually seen an example of people exhibiting the double standard you seem to be hinting at: the same people saying good things about games like Mass Effect, which prominently feature sex, and also slamming visual novels specifically because of their sex content. If I had to guess, you'll probably find that the reasons are usually separate: gamers who hate visual novels probably by and large feel that way because they find them boring - there's no gameplay, and little or no animation to hold their attention; people who would object to sexual content in a VN, on the other hand, will probably say the same negative things about the sex in Mass Effect or The Witcher.

So you've decided to redefine the word censorship for the purpose of your blog post that is trying to highlight censorship in an attempt to make your case look stronger than it actually is. This is not a great strategy for being taken seriously.

Hmm. I thought it was an attempt to document acts of censorship, given the thread title, splash image, tone, etc. But if it's just an attempt to document that different versions available, then I stand corrected... but probably the melodrama needs to be toned down a bit, if that's it.

Fair enough, but I expect the writers of Symphonic Rain know even less Italian than I do . I'm pretty sure they were using it purely in the sense of the musical term, which makes interpreting it as "to the end" not unnatural at all for a Japanese audience (or even an American one) with some musical background.

If your goal is to document censorship, then I don't think it's rational to include eden* in the discussion. The "censored" release is identical to the original, and as far as I know only, Japanese release. It's more rational to refer to the other one (with its modified CGs and additional post-game content) as a pornified release - or whatever less derogatory term you prefer. By your classification, it's probably more accurate to just say that eden* wasn't an eroge, and then was made into one, rather than that an eroge was made and then censored.

Thanks for putting my age in perspective, old man.

The "Al Fine" ending is most definitely a pun - it carries at least the two meanings you're talking about: the reference to Torta's last name, and a sense of finality. That said, here's another way you can make sense of the name using that latter interpretation: At any rate, I don't think it's the intention of the author to enshrine Al Fine as canon, and I certainly agree with Yukiru - as with any non-linear VN, all the endings are simultaneously canon. Your "head canon" can be whichever you like. For what it's worth, my head canon for Symphonic Rain is also the Al Fine route, but I view that perspective as just my intention as a reader.

Not Railgun? I can't imagine why but I enjoy the Railgun spinoff a lot more than Index.

Finished Ruri's route's Good Ending and Happy Ending (will go back for the Bad Ending tomorrow, I guess). It was good to have some things straightened out, and the Happy Ending was sweet, but as I kind of expected after I finished Al's route, there was nothing really surprising here. Oh well. Debating whether to even do Leica's route at this point... I expect very few surprises there, mostly just filling in a couple gaps. But I'll probably do it just so I can feel justified in marking this one as "Finished" on VNDB.

Finished My Little Monster. The second-to-last episode was actually quite good, and the last episode was solid as well, so I bumped its rating back up a bit, although it never did get close to the potential it showed in those first couple episodes. Ah well. I probably won't read the manga as Mr. Ofvarela suggested, though, because the conclusion was reasonable enough for me. There were lots of loose ends, but none strong enough that I care enough about to follow up on. I have to add, though, that Natsume is approximately the cutest character I've ever seen. The main characters are probably more interesting to watch, but from the moment she appeared, there was a big part of me that would've been ecstatic if the entire premise had been chucked over the wall in favor of a show about Natsume. So cute.

Well, the thing is, from what I've heard, The Answer is kind of a grindfest. So just reading a summary is probably a better bet. I can't fault you for that decision on P4A/AU - they're not great. But it's still a decent dose of fanservice, particularly for the P3 cast, since their characters change a fair bit in the intervening time (none more so than Aigis).

The text of that update was pretty unusual - I felt a bit like I was reading an open letter to sanahtlig. The way everybody possible specifically introduced themselves as a "native speaker" of English was a little weird. I suppose it's possible they've had other people expressing doubts about the translation quality, but at the least, I don't recall seeing anything remotely like this kind of communication from other licensed translations. Transparency is good, though, especially in a world as small as VN translation, and I agree that I find having a name like Koestl in the project, in whatever facility, to be pretty reassuring. Reflecting a bit on that, this probably says something about the VN English translation scene - there are actually people with a modicum of name recognition. Hopefully those people who have garnered well-deserved respect for their work, be it largely in official translations or fan translations, will be able to parlay that for both their own benefit and ours.