Down

Arh, I don't know when was that but I missed it. Late Happy Birthday to you, Ryoji!

That's a question I've been asking myself lately. Does anyone know what's the average number of lines in a medium-sized (20-30 hours long) VN? How does it compare with a regular 500 pages book?

When used as the topic particle, は is always read wa and you can never write わ. Same with を which is pronounced 'o'. You'll understand that in the first few chapters of Tae Kim's don't be hasty I have to agree that I prefer going on all fronts at the same time: grammar, kanji and sometimes vocab/practice. Although retaining 90% of 500 kanjis in a week is a shitton lot. I feel like I retained only half of the kanjis I've seen so far and there are only like 300

Use the vndb search, select the platforms you want.

Don't worry, i'm not gonna badmouth about a show I didn't see Just telling I really don't like the chara-design. Some day I'll have the time to actually watch it and then i'll have a real opinion about it. I heard a lot of bad about it, but I usually like slice of life, we'll see.

Just in to say that Tay's F/SN walkthrough is great. Very complete. Excellent job B)

This. Hopefully my Japanese will be good enough when Mahouyo 2 will come out. I trust Type-Moon's legendary delays for that.

It's not. Although it seemed like they cloned the horrible K-On chara-design, it's not that much apparent in the anime itself. Of course the characters are all cute girls to please the otaku, but they're not 'just' moeblob. Story-wise, it's essentially slice of life but it's pretty good. Actually the synopsis reminds me a bit of what you typically can find in a Ghibli movie. Just go for it if you liked Chuu2 it's still KyoAni doing its thing. (Oh btw Joshiraku was Summer 2012, even though the last subs only came out during Fall)

I dropped it before I even started because I can't stand autistic girls (one of the reasons I dropped sasami-san in fact). Might give it a shot now. Although my backlog is suffering.

I dropped it after the first episode, but I heard then that it wasn't THAT bad and actually rather close to 'competition'-oriented anime which I like a lot. Japan likes it, it was one of the best-sellers of Fall 2012. Not through-the-roof sales but pretty good.

Otaku stuff is usually ultra-expensive, so it could take a toll on your wallet. If you can read japanese, mangas and doujins are not much more expensive than in western countries. Be careful about sensitive H-stuff though (loli, etc...). And, well obviously, visual novels. Expensive too but easy to bring back. You could also ask for artbooks and fanbooks of games/animes you like and that can't be found in the West. Or figs if you like them. Well that's what I can think about for otaku stuff. That's what i'd try to bring back essentially. I'm thinking about taking an empty second bag with me when i'll have that internship in Japan. But you might want something else than this kind of stuff, for those, uh, dunno, sorry. Typical presents and souvenirs, I guess, but I don't have any particular knowledge about that.

Type-Moon fanbase also has its bad elements too. Can't be helped. That reminds me of something I read about Fate/Extra, in an official interview or something: "Red Saber has the same face because they wanted to trick people into thinking that she was Arturia, and then surprise them when they played the game." which is the most half-assed excuse i've ever heard. Urobuchi likes to make his characters suffer. He always crushes the dreams of upright justice or strong ideals. Sometimes it turns out great (I'm thinking about Lancer) but sometimes it's really frustrating because it's just going to the full opposite of "shonen ideals" without balance. Here i'm thinking about the Rider/Gilgamesh fight, that was seriously underwhelming. I'm also thinking about how Kariya and Tokiomi both ended up doing nothing. And about Kiritsugu, because his development started great but ended up disappointing (as you pointed out, the end is, well...inconclusive). I like his works, I like this type of writing for stuff like Madoka or Saya no Uta, but that's not what I would have expected of Fate/Zero. I'm not sure I told what I wanted to convey correctly. I did some thinking about how Urobuchi's writing after some rather violent debates about Madoka and Fate/Zero, but i'm not sure yet of how to explain what I think. I'd like to read more of his works, actually. I think he wrote some VNs, i'm going to look that up.

Nah, don't worry, there are lots of Saber fans out there. Way more than Sakura fans at least. Hell, it's the cash cow of Type-Moon after all. You just made me realize this is true. Both the whole Tsukihime cast and the KnK cast are definitely superior to the Fate heroins. It's because the premise of Fate/Zero is so amazing. A Holy Grail War, but without dumb characters doing shit in the way (Shirou...) and with actual tricks. Sadly I think Urobuchi took things a little too far and there are things I didn't really like in the second half. For reference, I think Heaven's Feel is definitely better than F/Z.

So much love for Ilya. Too bad her route was cut. Being homonculus+grail vector is suffering. Besides, I don't understand why so much people hate Sakura. She has great character development, interesting sides, boobs. I just don't get why she's so much hated, she has nowhere near irritated me as much as Saber sometimes has. That might be because I like twisted characters, but well. Agreed B) That's Fate/Prototype for you sir. Go watch the 10 minutes long trailer and cry because it will never ever get beyond the stage of a 10-minute trailer. By theorycrafting I meant stuff like 'can shiki kill servants' although this one includes Tsukihime. (He canonnically can't btw).

I started a bunch of things but dropped a lot of them. From this season i'm watching Chihayafuru S2 (my fanboyism exceeds 9000 on Friday evenings), Kotoura-san, Maoyuu Maou Yuusha and Tamako Market. Oh and also Senran Kagura and Vividred Operation for the lulz. Still have stuff running from last season though. It's not a great season but it's better than everyone was whining about. I'm finding what I want. (Well it would be poor without Chihayafuru though ^^)

Ok, it's high time we have a topic to discuss all kind of matters around F/SN. Warning: Free-range spoil is highly probable inside this topic and F/SN is a rather spoiler-sensitive game. Here is a link if you didn't play the game and want to know what is F/SN, now you should better skedaddle out of here. This guy will be monitoring the thread: What do we do here? We discuss anything related to F/SN (hurr). Like who's the most badass character, what's your favorite route, various theorycrafting, who's best girl, Tohsaka's anus... We wait for F/HA to finally be translated (...) Let's start with this: what is your favorite route and why? I think even Saberfags will agree that Fate is not the best route, but there's still quite a debate over UBW vs. HF. Hardcore TM fans tend to prefer HF but there are still people out there going for UBW. As for me, it goes HF>UBW>Fate. It's not about the heroins at all - but the amount of epicness and plot revelations in HF is just THAT much outstanding. Even some of the bad ends are great.

Finished the first chapter of Higurashi. It's good. Very good. Obviously, it's better than the anime because of an excellent narration, but it still lacks some impact because the CGs are so cheap (well actually they don't exist). The visual impact the anime had because of violent scenes was good. Anyway, i'm gonna take a break from VNs because of IRL exams and because my anime backlog just exploded with some downloads that just finished and some DVDs I bought this week-end. And I'd like to work on it. I'll get back to VNs in a week or two.

The most useful device when trying to make sense of a sentence are the particles. Here I noticed the very noticeable presence of ’から’ and ’は’、both particles you can find all the time in your typical sentence. 'の' could very well be a particle here too. From there the compounds of such a small sentence is now determined and I can proceed to try to recognize the words before the particles and see what they mean. Once you have the basic grammar done, breaking down a sentence into words is much easier. It's even easier when there are kanjis in.

I think it's rather something like 'itsu kara itanoka wa, wakaranai' which would translate as 'I don't know since when xxx' (dunno what would ita no ka or itanoka means). The kanas can be done in a matter of days, it's really nothing compared with kanjis because they are way simpler and you get to practice every single time you see a sentence, because hiragana are necessary to grammar and katakanas are everywhere. Considering your rythm of work you can learn them in a day and be done with it, since you can't do anything without it anyway.

The only VN I played where there was enforced order were F/SN and Tsukihime. And in this case it's entirely necessary for the plot. Playing Heaven's Feel before F/SN or Kohaku's route before Akiha's would not be good story-wise.

Didn't want to create a new topic just for that: I suggest that we make a thread among the lines of "Walkthrough planning" open where people can announce they're working on a walkthrough. Because it can be a rather long task and it would be a waste of time if we had 2 people working on the same thing without knowing it. Or maybe we can just post in the VN discussion as soon as we start working on it:

I had an answer typed but hit the wrong key and it disappeared. I hate my life. Sorry for the useless post, i'll post something again when i'll be done insulting my computer.

Adaptations usually are underwhelming, and there seems to be a general rule that VN adaptations into anime have to be bad. (Higurashi is the only exception I have). So i'm not really craving for any anime. Except maybe a Tsukihime remake. By Ufotable. They could even adapt the Far Side of the Moon routes. Silly dream.

Welcome aboard! Reading the threads helps motivation, you'll see. Two months seems optimistic, if you can do it congrats' Don't worry, the author doesn't know either Kagaku Adventures VNs are typically the kind of story written by people who love science but obviously didn't make science studies, it's all science generic culture put rather randomly inside. (Not that i'm blaming them, the result is awesome )

I think there was a thread about that in VN Talk, you might want to read it. Should not be hard to find, the forum is like, 4 page deep. For me, basically, VNs add up the immersive elements of animation/games (CG, sounds) and the narrative/plots of fiction books. Plus the amount of character development and its quality is awesome, which gives a lot of impact to the later scenes.