Deep Blue

well that was fast this proves that re-lunching a campaign is not always a bad idea and failing a project is not the end of it. We are going to make it this time, hoping to achieve the full voice acting and the animated cutscenes

So this time I'm going to review this awesome novel, some users even consider it the best vn out there by far, a true kamige through and through .... ...sadly this is not that Dies Irae neither is Masada involved in this title in any way This DIES IRAE (all in caps, because why not?) is the work of a company called Family Soft. They mostly made games for PC-98, 88 and MSX on the 90', later on they released some for the ps1. This visual novel is your typical interactive adventure game, that hybrid between a visual novel and adventure game, just like Snatcher, YU-NO or Desire, among others. You can choose between 2 heroines from the get go and their stories, while not the same, they are in fact related and they go in parallel through out the whole game even interacting and working together at some points. (the main characters of the novel) The protagonists are Kimu/Kinbari (Kim/Kimberley) and his side partner Rii (Lee) and Kurisu (Kris) i'm not very good with translating katakana names so forgive me if they are wrong , both of them are professional detectives and they have very opposite personalities. Kimu on one hand is very cheerful and lively all the time, joking around with every single character (even with her boss), specially with his partner Rii and the receptionist Maria of the police station that she works for. On the other hand we have Kurisu, she is very serious and doesn't joke at all, very quiet too, sadly the game doesn't develop the characters practically in any way, we are just tossed into the game and in the next second we are already investigating some murder case or killing a guy, yes if you play with Kurisu you literally kill a guy 10 seconds after starting the novel xD but like I said there is no backstory whatsoever, later on we do find a bit of pieces of the relation that Kimu and his side partner and best friend Rii have but just a little.. the novel only focus on resolving the murders and nothing else. Plot In terms of plot, there isn't much to talk about, is just a regular murder investigation that ends up being a much bigger issue, revolving gang members, the mafia and later on some sci-fi elements, to be honest it wasn't anything I haven't seen so far in this types of vns or this genre in general, although it does throws you some plot twist that you wont see them coming which will leave you a bit shocked, but overall nothing really stands out. Graphics In the graphic part, you have a pretty decent art style and sometimes with some really good "drawings" and CGs, It has some pretty gruesome scenes, sadly (or lucky for you depending on your tastes) there is no eroge. The characters are portrayed inside a side box and will change depending on what the characters are saying or felling just like your typical vn, they use this instead of the whole body characters sprites, although there are a few "whole body sprites" in the game too. As the sucker I am for old school pixel art style I just love it. (the character portrait in the left side and some random violent scene at the right) Sound There isn't much to talk about here, the music is really nothing special, not bad but you won't remember the tracks after playing the novel, nothing to highlight, so yeah it does it jobs and that's what matter I guess. Gameplay Now the most important part... the gameplay, this is the biggest flaw of the visual novel. The gameplay is divided in two parts, the fighting and the way you progress in the novel using four types of commands, those are Move, Talk, Look and finally Act. Move: will make you move through out the level, which is often divided into big section, for example the police station, the city, the slums etc. Talk: will make you talk to yourself, other characters in the place you are or your partner if she is with you at that time. Look: is pretty much explanatory, you will look into the scenery and search for clues. Lastly you have Act, which will give you the option to interact with the scenery or things that are inside the scene itself, sometimes to progress by interacting with the scene and others is just for fun like harassing your partner or Maria if you are playing with Kimu. (all the location you can move in the "city" map) Now to progress you need to do every single option, exhaust all the dialogs, check every single little thing etc etc. This is a big problem because most of the time you need to do them in certain order and if you don't you won't progress. For example in one part you will have to check the same fence several times but in some specific order and then talk to a character just to gain a new action to progress, this is just a pain in the ass and holds back the story and the game. There is also an specific part of the game where you find yourself trapped in a maze inside a mine, it took me literally 1 hour to beat that part because of the combat and this is the other huge problem of the game ... the combat...it is terrible in any way you can think of, some parts or certain events have fighting scenes which are mandatory and they are hard as hell... (The mines, you will be here for a while...trust me) The fighting is turn based, but is so random and so fast that without using save states is pretty much impossible to beat, even using save states and lowering the speed of the fights(I used an emulator and cheat engine) I had so many troubles beating some fights, one fight took me 30 minutes. You have your a health bar, four commands (forward, backward, offense and defense) and some kind of stamina bar to use which is constantly moving at light speed and doesn't follow any kind of rule. The game compares how much stamina you have against your opponent and depending on that you will hit, get hit or do nothing. Now you think, offense will do some kind of attack and defense will well defense yourself but nope, sometimes defense attacks and offense does nothing and everything drains your stamina, losing your stamina means that you will get hit in that turn and probably the next 4 turns too. The enemy have almost unlimited stamina while you do 2 hits in a raw and you are done for. The only good thing about the combat is that from time to time you can do an special attack which triggers a short full animation showing your character using a gun or doing some kind of fighting pose, nothing fancy but is nice to see. (The combat) Verdict Overall I enjoyed this novel because it was dark and it wasn't afraid to do and show you what most of novels this days are and Kimu was a funny character to play with. The gameplay system is what made this novel really flawed but even with those drawbacks and flaws I still enjoyed although I can understand if someone doesn't want to play it or drop it after a few hours in because of that. Difficulty to read: In terms of how difficult it was to read, it wasn't the hardest novel I read but it wasn't 120 yen stories or sanarara either, it's full of katakana terms and names (you will read more than 20-30 names in katakana I'm not joking..) Kimu is overall fairly easy to read, because she is a bit juvenile so her speech and thoughts are fairly easy to understand while Kurisu is more depressing and mature so her thoughts and dialogues are a bit more difficult, also later on the game gets a bit hard when the sci-fi elements kick in, by no means an impossible novel to read or understand.

there is, it was in the what are you playing section (I think xd ) i talked it a bit with xreaper and other user if im not mistaken

well you need to try with cheat engine then if you don't know how just follow this steps (do the same but replacing ppsspp and second novel with the ps3 emu and steins;gate ) i forgot to say, if it finds something (dont worry i didnt find anything in my tutorial) then it means you can hook the text, try with sis and utf16

i'm just gonna leave this quote here from max payne "The way I see it.. there're two types of people: those who spend their lives trying to build a future. And those who spend their lives trying to rebuild the past."

is there any way to run it on dx11?

you gotta love that engrish xD , btw did you try using vnrith? if is use the same engine as the rest of the games (at least the psp ones) maybe it could work without the need of anything else ...

well hat is a plugin for cheat engine to auto convert the hexa code but you need to find the address memory first

maybe with cheat engine, i would love to try it myself but i dont want and wont install win 10 specially if im not sure that i can even hook the text still thanks for the effort

mmm if you can read without any help (dictionary or parser) you have niconico, a guy there is uploading the entire novel, also win 10 is a no no for me. Still is nice to see a ps3 emulator working, I though that this day would never come btw is there a way to hook the text?(i assume the answer is no D: )

I think a lot of the people who vote in this polls just look at the covers of the vns, the score (which doesnt tell you much about a vn because tastes are not the same for everyone most of the vns I really really like have a really low or average score.) or the titles and if it sounds familiar or is a popular series (baldr force is the perfect example of this) they vote it, granted there is no way to know how good a vn is if there is no translation available in the first place but voting for those reasons is just a waste imo. I'm still amazed on how everyone voted sakura no uta when probably nobody yet played subarashiki "sca-ji's masterpiece"(many many of the people who read it said that they didnt understand a lot of the plot but because scaji is a genius is a 10/10 vn, so yeah is masterpiece just because..or going as far to say "SCA-Ji is far more intelligent than anyone reading this blog entry, including myself." lol) or any of the sca-ji's vns in that matter and the only fully translated vn available that can tell you a bit of his writing is ikikoi which i dare you to say is a masterpiece... Im just venting a bit ignore my entire post xD

There is no point in lamenting about the past, the important thing is that they took in consideration many suggestion and the campaign is doing better and right now is probably that it'll get funded , I'm sure it will, almost 110k and 5 days left. I'm not sure about reaching any of the stretch goals since they are kinda meh (at least they are for me)

I can't breath lmao

Done and thank you for changing some questions. Are you going to share the results in the future? (I'm interested to see them )

you should definitely need to read sanarara-r then

inside, why is this even a question

anal sex requieres a lot of preparation beforehand and still during the act itself, I mean anal sex is not just simply putting your dick in... is not like in porn movies. So she is either a porn star or something weird is going on

6 days and a few hours left and it's almost 100k, this looks promising.

why exactly 120 yen? from all the vns that i read that one is the weakest that Kataoka wrote imo (to be fair it wasnt even a game itself at the beginning)

3 days in and they are already funded, How the heck did this get approved by Kickstarter?! The current connotation of pornography is to intend their audience with sexual stimulation. That is all. No type of literary value is focused. Hentai is considered as 'erotica,' it's main purpose is to tell a story with sexual arousal as a second thought and that is what gives this title a chance to be on kickstarter. How did I know? I didn't until I contacted Kickstarter about it and explained it to them what kind of project we planned to do. Their response was 'As long as it is not distasteful and offensive then your project is fine.' What is distasteful and offensive you say? We don't know until we find out. For this title, I know for a fact this will not be distasteful since this book is plain casual 'Vanilla'. =D Other good examples of these types of projects are 'Smut Peddler,' Tezuka's Swallowing the Earth and our yaoi Kickstarter "Finder restock" was able to pass due to the positive message and artistic value they carry.

http://www.techinsider.io/russian-cleaning-trucks-spray-water-microclimates-2015-9 we have the same trucks here too in argentina, so yeah lowering the temperatures with water is a common thing in many countries, is not exactly the same as uchimizu but is the same concept. the peeing thing is just a fetish like nosebleed said, which many many people enjoy and I don't see it often just in nukige or novels with a very high amount of sexual content ( like fan-disc )

well dengeki for example and kira kira have .arc files which you can extract with AE but they don't have any extension (the files that are compressed inside the .arc files) maybe you need an specific tool to view them I don't know

what game is it?

you can always ask for help in this thread