Fred the Barber

Being annoying is Ken's shtick. If you think he's bad now, wait until you see arrogant bishounen teenager Ken in P4AU. Related to P3: I saw a Koromaru-lookalike in the doggie day-care (yes, that's a thing, at least in Seattle) near me. So cute

The first half of season 1 of SAO is worth watching, assuming you don't mind obvious male chauvinism, and the second half is terrible. Given how the second half of season 1 went, the second season is probably garbage. Given how things tanked after the first arc, I expect the games are awful, but I have yet to hear anything at all about them, which is frankly possibly even more disturbing than a simple "yay" or "nay". So, uh... good luck? Maybe go play Senran Kagura instead or something.

I thought that was hilarious, too. It somehow makes it oddly feel like P3 is a sequel to P4 - in P4 he's a goofy telemarketer; in P3 he's a goofy telemarketer and your life coach!

There are more granular options below that, as well - you can, for instance, turn off only email notifications (so you'll still have the toast in the forum UI), and only for messages (so you'll still get emails for other things for which you may want email).

You're probably fine. It will take people a bit of time to get accustomed to the more-chibi-than-usual style, but I think it looks pretty good. The proportions look similar to Symphonic Rain's characters - I had initial reactions of "this looks weird" with that VN, but after playing for an hour or so I was fine with it, so when I glance at your art it mostly seems fine to me (just Symphonic Rain-ish). Although... looking at it closely, even aside from the chibi-ness, some of the sprites in the screenshots (especially the right one in this last screenshot, and the left one in the original post's screenshot) seem to have a slightly flatter top of their head than my brain is expecting, which I guess is actually bugging me a little... Ponytail girl on the left, right above, and arms-crossed-blushing-girl in the original post screenshot look great, though. And I love the coloring on the sprites.

I get launched for a record distance.

Kenshin, fighto! I can empathize with the interview nervousness

Previously, on Fred the Barber: I had just finished the Common Route leading up to Tsubaki's Chapter, and then I kind of dropped it for a couple weeks. After a long absence (or perhaps a kidnapping?), my motivation for reading G-Senjou reappeared tonight... I'm not using a guide, so my choices just happened to lead me to Tsubaki's good end (my default behavior is to be both straightforward and nice, so I guess that's not surprising). Spoilered thoughts on Tsubaki's Good End: Just for completeness, I did then grab a guide briefly to get Tsubaki's Bad End, before moving on to the next heroine (I'll be going back to not using a guide after this...). Brief thoughts on that one: I actually really like Tsubaki as a character. I think she could've easily ended up boring, given the premise, but she gets put in diverse situations, has diverse reactions to them, and even changes as a person. Much respect to the writer for writing someone who I would find both likeable in real life (because let's face it, in real life, most VN heroine personalities would be intolerable) and still interesting to read about.

Confession: I have yet to "read" a nukige, but Mr. Dice is making a pretty compelling sales pitch right there.

Damn. Didn't know what I was missing until I watched it.

Glad to hear you're enjoying it! I feel like P3 has a stronger overarching plot vs. P4, and this helps it make more out of its characters. I randomly found myself listening to the P3 soundtrack yesterday, and like Turnip, I was also thinking that it might have been too long since I last played P3P (or even P4G, really). But seriously, you should've named your FeMC Minako Arisato and pretended she's the twin of your initial male MC.

Survived two tech screens since yesterday. Each of those was one hour, and pretty draining. I am dreading doing four full-day interviews (which would be, like, four or five back-to-back interviews like each of those). But on the up-side, I just heard back from yesterday's company that I passed, and I'm even more confident about passing today's than I was about yesterday's, so hopefully my elective unemployment will be exactly as brief as I want it to be (two months off, of which two weeks will be spent lazing on a warm beach reading VNs, sounds just about perfect). Confession: Most of the time I don't even try to add a confession these days.

Unlike the Conjueror poll, I do feel qualified to vote in this particular popularity contest. Go, Demonbane - shake up my comfortable world. I obviously do need to play Tsukihime at some point, but I'll probably just put it off indefinitely in the hopes they actually do the remake they announced a mere 8 years ago.

Aigis is best robot girl, no question. Although I wasn't actually sold until, after finishing P3P, I read a summary of The Answer (extra section in P3FES, interesting story, but apparently grindy as hell), and then played P4A and P4AU (didn't enjoy the gameplay all that much, but I lived for every second of Aigis screentime) Couldn't find the thread, though... guess it's time for a new one My body is ready.

I never finished my FeMC playthrough of P3P, but I've heard the story changes a fair bit. Well, enjoy! FeMC is certainly the cutest character in the game, but I never get much attached to Persona main characters due to their (intentional) absence of inherent personality, so that didn't do much for me. And if you want to reopen the Persona best girl question, there's at least one forum thread on it which you could necro, complete with poll. I have a feeling it's the kind of topic you can bring up every 3 months without making anybody mad. Inexplicably, best girl Aigis wasn't winning last time I saw the poll...

Given how Clannad went, I won't be surprised at all if in 4 months (or whatever) we see another flood of "WTF, I paid them $50, the game came out, and I have to wait another year to play it? Where's my Steam key?!". Granted, granted, things are a little different this time: it's at least clear already that there's going to be a huge time gap. But... well, I guess we'll see.

Thanks for the encouragement - my storytelling aesthetic is quite a bit different from Taco's (I pretty much always aim for gentle self-mockery), so it's reassuring to hear that at least one person out there is appreciating it. I mean, I could try to change that, maybe go all out and tell you about something awesome I did. Like today! I've been doing interview prep (it's been a long time since college, and I felt like I was super rusty on standard software engineer interview questions, so I've been working through http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-6th-Edition/dp/0984782850), and a couple times today I came up with a better answer than the author! ... That should serve as an excellent microcosm to illustrate why I don't tell many victory stories.

Finished Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun today. Damn that was good. I found the two main characters to be a little bit bland (mostly just by comparison, though), but all the side characters aside from Wakamatsu were crazy fun to watch. I really liked the show's vibe of having a stable but mostly-unremarkable central pair of characters, around which lots of crazy, fascinating satellites were playing out their dramas. But of course something had to happen with that central pair, so here are some brief, vague but nonetheless spoilered thoughts on the ending:

Confession: I had half a lime leftover from making dinner, and of course the only thing to do with half a lime (other than making dinner, naturally) is to make a cocktail. Unfortunately, the resulting cocktail was stronger than I realized, so following James Thurber, I've firmly already landed in "not enough" territory and am thinking I should make another. I have my first first-round job interview (since quitting my old job 10 days ago) tomorrow, but I'm sure it'll be fine, right? brb, making another drink...

I seem to be trapped in a prison of my own making. Please send help.

Some two pages into this thread I decided I wasn't qualified to vote in these polls. Some five pages in, Down is basically talking about how he, of all people, isn't qualified to vote in these polls (fair enough, because after all, even if you have the ability to do so, who actually reads everything?). My current conclusion is that, given that you should only want something to be translated either if you don't already have a good grasp of it (through whatever means), probably nobody is really qualified to vote in these polls. Unless you're voting based on having read all the works in a poll and based on what you think other people ought to read, I guess? In which case, sure, vote, but it somehow seems a little bit like an empty gesture...

Alienation by art style is a real potential problem, but people will get over it quickly as long as the art is good. In short, your art looks good, so don't worry about it. Good example of alienating art style within a Japanese VN would be the Steampunk series in general, or particularly from my experience Sekien no Inganock. I found the style off-putting for a couple of hours, but after building some familiarity, I really enjoyed the art. And even that initial unfamiliarity didn't make me negatively judge any of the rest of VN the experience along the way, since I could tell it was good, but just unfamiliar. I probably would've taken a more negative attitude if the art had been both unfamiliar and bad, though. Also, Rooke's point is pretty valid - people tend to like current VN art simply because it's in a familiar style, much more so than because of any objective quality, so, please, save us from ourselves: bring us better art.

Ok, fair enough. Somehow that hurried delivery of Mitsuki's bad end was actually an effective storytelling mechanism for me. I got a fair bit of an emotional rush from it, which in turn helped me enjoy the good end more as well.

You're welcome to say "I don't like Rewrite" all day long. I respect differences of opinion and taste, and I frequently unironically refer to myself as having shit taste. But the moment you want to try to make some objective claim, specifically in this case asserting that its protagonist isn't a force with some influence and agency (which is, once again, the thing we're arguing here, since it's, you know, the actual topic of the thread...), you better bring some evidence and an argument. So far, you've got nothing in the way of evidence or argument for that one small claim which Babiker put forth and which I'm defending. It's very telling that your response is a combination of an appeal to authority (and a weak one at that), a red herring claim about your "rights" (true but irrelevant; and it turns out I also have the right to call you out on giving a shit argument when you're trying to pass yourself off as being objective), a pure statement of opinion, and an ad hominem attempt to damage my credibility (which I frankly don't recall, but I'm pretty sure never happened in the first place, since I've literally never even read any of solidbatman's reviews). Your entire post (except that random-as-hell statement about Charlotte, which could be anything really) consists of logical fallacies, and quite an impressive number of them for such a short post. I don't get upset about differences of opinion; I call them out as such and move on. But I will go to the wall against purportedly objective claims with no basis in reality. Edit (didn't see the posts on the next page until after I'd posted): Decay's point is totally fair. I agree that Kotarou is really only defensible as a protagonist with influence and agency in a single route.