What are you playing?

[Funyarinpa]

some reflection on Onikakushi 

I'll go back through it sometime to find what were the missing lines from the letter at the back of the clock. Really liked it, the VA adds a lot to the game (LIES!!!) but I'm glad I didn't patch in the PS3 backgrounds or sprites.

Really liked the atmosphere! Hopefully the later chapters also have a great mood (and mood shift). From when Keiichi gets Satoshi's bat, the game gets rather saddening :c

Watanagashi is downloaded already, all I need is the proper voice patch.

[Decay]

Into Chapter 2 of Cartagra

I gave into temptation and made Shugo try to take a quick bath and so he got BJ'ed by Rin, for the record I'm gonna *try* to hook him up with Kazuna, so he must abstain from now on. A quick reload shows that outright not taking a bath results in getting some CGs with the cute but underaged Hatsune instead, dunno if these two can get together but a teenager and some near-30s dude, no ty. 

I'm going for an "all choices are absolute" playthrough though so hopefully that Rin scene doesn't lock in some future outcomes. Gotta admit though, Shugo playing hard-to-get with Rin is damn hilarious:

Hidden Content

 

Toji's cool. She's that typical badass ally type character, always feels good to have them, hopefully there won't be any future drama due to her leaking info to Shugo from the Hand of Death

Hidden Content

 

And then you get to the end of Chapter 1 + beginning of Chapter 2 and realize why Gore & Graphic Violence are the top ranked VNDB tags for Cartagra:

NSFW:

Hidden Content

 

Conflict Foreshadowing #1: Wut? Some Hand of Death leader had a girl named "Hyo" to be his mistress? Wut? She looks like exactly like Yura? Wut? Kazuna is Yura's twin sister? 

Them Hand of Death bois are totally gonna try to kidnap Kazuna to replace "Hyo" and we're gonna have lots of funtime drama about that before 'Hyo' herself pops up in the nick of time for da plot twists

Yo, don't embed NSFW images even in spoiler tags. Your browser still downloads that image to your cache. Which means if you're on a monitored workstation, you can still get in trouble. Always link NSFW images.

[Eclipsed]

Thanks for the heads up, i did just posted the link first time around but it auto embedded I guess

[Eclipsed]

Finished Chapter 2 Cartagra

 

What a tragedy. In the end, because of my unjustified need to hopefully one day pair up Shugo and Kazuna, poor ol' Rin didn't get to have any funtime before getting offed.

 

On the bright side, these circumstances are not as sad as they would be for ol' Shugo ie. in the case that he did in fact accept Rin's feelings, only to have her die moments later.

 

The detective session b/w Shugo and Nana was pretty fun, I got them all right, I just picked religious reasons cuz that seemed the best out of the three especially with the whole genital mutilation and crow-angel(?) wings, and then the next two questions I had that lightbulb "wait a minute, I remember reading about horse carriage before; add in religious yada yada and ding ding ding murder location is totally at the Kayo Academy Nana is attending!@#" 

 

Though I do plead guilty for momentarily thinking Nana was the culprit, idk, the way that scene played out with how 'Nana knows everything' certainly gave off vibes of a set up for a big ol "you know everything cuz YOU'RE THE MURDERER" but l0lnope

 

Anyways in the end I landed straight into Nurse Nana ending because I was a big dumb-dumby-dumb and made Shugo choose to "Investigate the crime AND search for Yura" and I guess by the laws of VN Choices even though the scenes play out exactly the same, Kazuna doesn't tell Toji to save his ass unless you choose to "Investigate the crime only" ('less there are multiple choices that tally up for this ending, dunno, I'm not using a walkthrough, but this was the only choice I had to change to not get this ending and progress to Chapter 3)

 

Bravo to pet-Shugo-basement-cannibal scenes though, these were right up to my liking

 

Nurse Nana taking advantage and banging a mentally broken Shugo in the hospital was uh, kinda ew. It was kinda obvious from the start that her end game goal would be to get Shugo's d, but man, I don't think I can take her character seriously going into later chapters after seeing how twisted she is.

 

Looking forward to how the murder mystery will play out, was expected that the nun Kaoru was responsible for only some(?) of the murders and not all(?), but I have absolutely no theories atm as to how she relates to the big baddy if at all and the whole grand scheme of things yada yada yada

 

~~

 

Going into Chapter 3, seems there's a major choice that determines whether Shugo will get some hawt time with Ujaku or simply some sweet time with Hatsune, and there are even follow up scenes later on based on that choice. 

 

Goddammit, don't tell me that it's not possible to get Shugo x Kazuna and that I've been making him abstain for naught all this time , if so, I would've gone all Witcher 1 style and make Shugo bang everybody.

 

Went with Hatsune btw. Shugo's not doing anything to her (yet?) so we're making good progress on the abstain-until-Kazuna train.

 

~~

Will be busy, so there probably won't be any updates 'til this Friday+

[Decay]

There may be an enforced play order in Cartagra that limits your good ending choices a little at first. I recall it being a bit confusing. 

[Eclipsed]

Oh. And here I was thinking I was brilliant for changing only one choice and being able to progress. Bollocks

[Deep Blue]

120 yen stories, easy to read, decent stories, too many lolis for my taste. Good novel if you want to start with something easy that is not moe 

[Shinobu Nyan]

Tokeijikake no Ley Line. I'm most likely going to drop it until the patch comes out though. It's a little to slow to read using only translators.

Does anyone know what happened to that project by the way? It's like they gave up trying to get the patch to work.

[Salurian]

Royal Garden by Azarashi Soft.  Japanese only, it's been a surprisingly good game so far.

[Rainey]

Going to start Subarashiki Hibi soon. I hear it's not for everyone, like you either love it or hate it. Here's hoping it'll fit my taste 

[Chronopolis]

Going to start Subarashiki Hibi soon. I hear it's not for everyone, like you either love it or hate it. Here's hoping it'll fit my taste 

I know the feel. Have fun!

[monkeysrumble]

Finally sat my ass down and finished Kosame's route in Hoshizora no Memoria. Wasn't as good as Komomo's route but it was better then Asu-hoe's route. I've considered dropping this VN and starting G-Senjou no Maou but I'm over halfway done so I mind as well go all the way.

[Fred the Barber]

I'm waiting impatiently for the Clannad Steam release on Monday. I might try to pick Narcissu back up first, if I can summon the motivation this weekend, but otherwise I'll shelve that and go straight to Clannad; I definitely have nothing against Narcissu, but it just didn't grab me yet. By coincidence (yes, really) I'm taking two weeks of vacation starting Monday, including some long plane rides, so I'm looking forward to spending a lot of quality time with Clannad... except that I'm traveling with my parents, so I might get judged a bit if I read a VN the whole time on the plane. Well, whatever.

[kingdomcome]

Finally finished Majikoi with the agave route.

It's a feel good, light-hearted VN. 6/10. I feel I should give it a higher rating, but it didn't really affect me much emotionally, nor did it engross me completely. I like it, but it could have been more..

Spoilers regarding end (agave route):

• So am I right in understanding that everything started because of Yuki? They could have expanded on her so much more.
• Itagaki sisters could have so much more story on them.
• Finale between Yamato and Aoi was disappointing, the tactician vs a genius.  The finale should have been a battle of wits, which some may argue it was, but hardly so.. Momoyo's route was a much better battle of wits when he was commanding his army.

I suppose they could have made the agave route longer to fit all this additional stuff.

What is Majikoi S about? Does it continue everyone's story?

Edited November 20, 2015 by kingdomcome

[Eclipsed]

Got the Hatsune ending in Cartagra, gg rekt me, based on Down's walkthrough there is a Kazuna route (so yay), but I'm a just a big dumby dumb and so I'm waltzing right into these other ends

 

Hatsune was.. cute? Though, I still view Shugo x Hatsune as protective guardian & child rather than lovers. I mean, he bought her a kid's rabbit storybook

 

Didn't like how he spent 90% of the end mulling around in regret "did I make the right choice" though, should've had him commit to his choice from the start and just showed him convincing Hatsune and then pan over to their daughter Sakura rather than showing him qqing about how Toji went missing and losing contact with Kazuna, we'll get to those routes soon anyway writers, don't need to waste dialogue on that!@#

Debating on whether to go all other ends first or to make a break for Kazuna / normal end

[Deep Blue]

reading kana imouto, so far it's really good but the translations is atrocious, there are many times when they don't translate what the characters are saying others the translations is not accurate at all, they don't use the names properly, not honorifics, it's a pain to read  

[Decay]

JAST in the past was always adamant about discarding honorifics and westernizing names. I think they're still like this to an extent. Which version are you playing, btw? The "Kana Okaeri" version has a revised translation so it's probably the better one to read these days. I haven't played either version so I can't attest to how much of an improvement it was.

[Deep Blue]

I'm playing the welcome home version, if this is the revised version I can't imagine how bad is the other one... I can let pass the honorifics but there are whole sentences untranslated and other times the character says うん(yes) and they give you a whole explanation about why she said yes, like "you want an apple?" "oh yes i love apples please peel one for me", her real answer was just "YES"

I would hate to read it on japanese... it's going to take me like a whole week to finish it (or more) but I really enjoy the story so far and the characters but I cant stand when they do this kind of stuff, yeah why translate a dialog that the father is having lets just make him say "gotta go to work" is not plot relevant after all 

EDIT: when i was buying the novel(yeah i feel a bit ripped off but oh well) I saw that Jast sells porn too that was surprising  now all they have to do is take off those damn mosaics  

 

[Decay]

Perhaps that's the kind of thing where they changed the line in the Japanese version but not in the english version since they kept the same script and only did an editing pass.

[Deep Blue]

I hope so, i will read it as it is and maybe then I will search for the jap and read it again so I can compare them.

Also everyone adress the MC as takamichi-kun or toudo except for her family but it's always taka in the translation, but this is not the first time I see something like this in translation, that they have this urge to avoid using the surname of the characters or change it backward as if someone calls him "A, B" in the translations is "B, A" or "A" being the surname you see "B". It seems that the reader will get lost or suffer from brain damage if they actually use the names as they should...

[Vokoca]

 Continuing my infinite journey through Higurashi Sui, I've  finished Tsumihoroboshi and it's new bad ends, along with the Yoigoshi arc one of the bad ends leads into. Not really much to say about Tsumihoroboshi, maybe just that Ryuukishi's amazing inability to pay attention to his own script when it comes to keeping to specific point of view narratives reaches new magical heights in this arc. Suddenly switching between first and third person narrative mid-scenes is one thing, but going out of your way to highlight a certain perspective with a different text colour and then forgetting to change the colour when switching the perspectives is another... not to mention he even managed to jump between characters this time, sometimes even for just a single sentence. The writing clumsiness is kind of funny and almost endearing at times, but damn does it feel ridiculous in a text that was re-released like 5 times. As for the Yoigoshi arc... this late in the story, it is pretty much spoiler galore, even if 95% of its characters are completely new, so the only thing I can really say about it is that it takes place in ~2007. Yeah, this is still Higurashi... somehow! That said the VN is still a lot of fun, just much easier to pick on after spending nearly 200 hours with it already.

Other than that, I'm continuing Natsukumo. Finished the first two routes, and about halfway through the third one... I don't know how Watanabe does it, but he has come up with some ridiculously cool ideas once again. If Akikuru ends up being this awesome as well, Watanabe might just as well end up being my favourite VN writer.

I'm playing the welcome home version, if this is the revised version I can't imagine how bad is the other one... I can let pass the honorifics but there are whole sentences untranslated and other times the character says うん(yes) and they give you a whole explanation about why she said yes, like "you want an apple?" "oh yes i love apples please peel one for me", her real answer was just "YES"

Oh hey, sounds just like NISA!

[Decay]

You'd think the companies that sink a lot of money into producing these heavily expanded console versions would hire a freaking editor for this kind of thing. Writers make mistakes. Writers who churn out text by the thousands of pages make even more mistakes. Surely Kaga can afford an editor for the poor man.

[Vokoca]

I suppose they just don't want to touch the writer's work and mess with it too much. To be fair, if someone was to edit Ryuukishi's writing style to make it correct, it'd have to be rewritten to the point where none of Ryuukishi's characteristics would be left. When it comes to PC VNs, any longer one will have at least a single text correction patch released later. Console releases are probably more strict with this at least, but I wouldn't be surprised if the only thing they checked was just the spelling alone. I really wonder if the position of an editor is even a thing when it comes to VNs.

[Tyr]

The "Kana Okaeri" version has a revised translation so it's probably the better one to read these days. I haven't played either version so I can't attest to how much of an improvement it was.

With the new art? Certainly not the better version! I would prefer the original voiceless version anytime over this ugly and generic moe looking piece of cancer.
I will never forgive Peter for promising that you can switch to the original art and then not delivering. Without telling anybody beforehand! I feel so lucky that I forgot to preorder the game. Will certainly never preorder anything from JAST ever again.

I'm playing the welcome home version, if this is the revised version I can't imagine how bad is the other one... I can let pass the honorifics but there are whole sentences untranslated and other times the character says うん(yes) and they give you a whole explanation about why she said yes, like "you want an apple?" "oh yes i love apples please peel one for me", her real answer was just "YES"

Don't forget that the original version didn't have any voices. The translator probably thought he could reword a little bit for better fluency in English.

[Yuuko]

ugly and generic moe looking piece of cancer.

This hurts my heart