Decay

I've seen some amateur translators screw these up pretty often. Common mistranslations include "communication" and very frequently in Wairu's Majikoi S translation, "bitch".

He's a pretty popular voice actor but he's pretty far from unattainable. He had two roles in Tsuyokiss, another VN by the same writer. He also plays Chousen in Koihime Musou, comically enough.

The only thing I can think of that fits most of your requirements is Bonnouji, but that's seinen, not josei. Still, I found it a pretty amusing take on romance post-high school. It's almost pure fluff, there is very little drama, but it was a fun read.

I kind of neglected Yumina's songs and found it more pressing that she healed every turn. Still, Shining Smile sort of trivializes that fight. That fight and the ones following it probably constitute the game's biggest difficulty spike and things get easier from then on. At least, that was the case with the Ai route. I really should play the other routes some day.

Leaving the issue of semantics aside and moving on to actually discussing the VN itself, I'll agree that some of the heroines' personalities leave a little to be desired. They're kind of shallow, you know? They don't tend to have very interesting character arcs, and instead the game focuses on external drama (mainly relying on the Headmistress to stir shit up). For a game of this length, they could have afforded to spend some of that time creating more compelling character arcs. Some of the characters with the most interesting arcs don't have routes, like Marika.

You're pretty heavily misinterpreting Sargon's statement there.

They're already doing that.

For whatever reason, in the past week the arena meta has been very soft, imo. The skill level of your average opponent went down by quite a bit. I guess BRM's release influenced a lot of returning and new players to start playing again but I didn't expect it to be like this. It's like how it was at around Naxx's time of release. So I guess get in now while the getting's good, I don't know how long this will last for.

You mean an awkward boner, I imagine. Otherwise you have a REALLY friendly coworker.

VNs I have unfinished that I intend to return to at some point: I/O (I'm on one of the last fricking routes) Symphonic Rain (I got bored and quit during the fairy route) Cannonball Utawaremeno Yumina the Ethereal If My Heart Had Wings Kamidori Demonbane Chaos Head Ayakashibito Aselia the Eternal Shikkoku no Sharnoth Dra+Koi Aoishiro Romanesque Cho Dengeki Stryker And a list of "maybes", maybe I'll drop them for good and never look back, but there's some part of me that wants to finish them: Harukoi Otome Princess Waltz Otoboku Edelweiss Duel Savior Canvas 2 Ikikoi And next up, I think I'm gonna start up another new VN. I downloaded YU-NO and booted that up, but I think I may read Swan Song next instead. I'll get back to this list eventually... Don't be me. Please finish what you start. At least I've managed to finish Princess Evangile.

"Freaking amazing JRPG" huh? That's the first time I've seen anyone describe any of the Neptunia games with those words. They are not known for their gameplay, and even a lot of fans seem to admit that the gameplay is weak. Personally, I found the combat to be really boring and I'm not a fan of its sense of humor. Overall I thought Rebirth was kinda bad. :/

The childhood arc is unlocked later on and is only important to the Koyuki route. You can read all of the routes translated by Wairu's patch without any major issues, they don't feel incomplete. So if you want to read those then yeah, I guess it's worth it.

pointless reply over

All three writers have their own style and they were very apparent in Rewrite. Lucia's route was pretty wildly different from anything else in Rewrite, it's clear Ryukishi just kind of did his own thing. The Shizuru and Chihaya routes, written by Tonokawa Yuuto, kind of felt like generic shounen camp, especially Chihaya's route. Shizuru's route had a bit of a tragic end that was a little interesting and not like the rest of his stuff but overall when it got down to it, it was pretty much just thoughtless action. Romeo's parts of Rewrite were characteristic of the themes he likes to constantly touch on. Kotarou is a very Romeo-esque protagonist (and is probably the best part of the VN). One of the main themes of the VN is building friendships and the agony that comes from isolation and the dissolution of said friendships. I felt like Tonokawa especially wasn't very concerned with this aspect and it didn't come through very well in his routes. I guess one of the things about route based games like Rewrite is that it kind of doesn't matter if there's a writer mismatch, as they're working on more or less independent stories. If they were all working on one continuous story, it would be a mess, but that didn't happen there.

It's not great, I don't know if it's worth the full retail price right now. It's good, but it has a fair amount of flaws imo. The humor falls flat more often than it doesn't, the heroine routes kind of feel a little repetitive, due to them all going through the same sequence of events (culture festival, athletic festival, the election, etc), the pacing feels a bit laborious. It kind of feels like the game could be half the length it ended up being and not lose out on almost anything. The writing just feels... bloated, I guess? Of course, when the humor doesn't fall flat it's pretty funny, the girls are cute, some of the heroine stories are interesting, and overall it's an alright game. A lot of people are lavishing praise on the game so I thought I'd highlight some of the negatives. Also: $20 would be a good price for it, wait for a sale I say. Also, as I said before, I kind wish that MangaGamer picked a different game to make their big moege stand with. Doddler said that the future of moege at MG may rest on PE's shoulders, after all. At least it seems like it's performing decently, but I'm stuck in this spot where I want it to do well so MG does more moege, but I don't really want to recommend people buy this at full price.

How I started: clean graffiti over and over again, avoiding battles at all costs. You should be able to clean floor 1 repeatedly without any battles at all, and you can build up enough money to max out your command limit and get some starter equipment after just a little bit of early grinding. From that point forward, you should be able to handle battles and can progress normally. Some tips for combat: Get a fairy, make it a priority, and eventually get a second when you can. Put points into healing for Darx, make that priority #1. With one of those bear creatures with the front row defense boost, an antman with iron column behind Darx, and plenty of defensive equipment, you can have him be the sole front-row tank in the early game and have that work out pretty well.

Everybody knows what higurashi is already. At this point in time, anyone who buys into it isn't going to think it's some random moege. I don't think MG is hiding it in their marketing material.

https://twitter.com/PrefectDango/status/584015683882586112 https://twitter.com/PrefectDango/status/584698660656513024 It would be weird to refer to a simple fan translation patch in that manner. People are speculating about a Sekai Project deal but who knows. Either way, no, it's not dead. Progress is unfortunately slow but they haven't given up.

People seem to like Euphoria's plot so you have that to look forward to when the english version (probably) comes out this summer.

Well, Clephas insists that Eustia is the worst heroine so you have that to look forward to when the late parts of the game focuses heavily on her. I found her innocuous enough but I've only read what was in the english partial patch.