What are you playing?

[Dreamysyu]

So, I (finally) finished episode 1 of Himawari. And my reaction for it is... mixed. It's definitely too early to judge the whole VN, because basically, from what I understand, I've basically finished the common route, and I heard that it's worse in quality than the rest of the game. Still, there are some things that make me extremely cautious at this point. On the other had, there is more or less an equal number of things that make me intrigued, so I hope for the best.

The protagonist is my least favorite part of the game so far. He is just a stupid sexually insecure coward, and I wouldn't really want to follow his perspective throughout the whole game, but we get what we get. Aries is another character I really don't like, but she got me intrigued at the end of the chapter, so, I don't know, I'm giving her a chance. Ginga is fine. Well, if we forget that he is ~16, looks like he is ~25, and acts like he's 10. In a more or less realistic scenario he would probably be considered mentally ill, but for a VN such character is nothing unusual, so I don't care. Asuka is ok. Aqua is the only character introduced thus far that I liked, though she also shows some signs of being not totally ok with her head.

The sci-fi elements so far don't seem as good as I hoped before starting, but it's too early to judge that. On the other hand, it's take on the theme of space travel is quite interesting. From what I understand, this VN takes a more pessimistic approach to it, and it's a plus. Because, space travel today doesn't really seem like it's going to develop much further in the near future. <rant>I know that there are still some new project in development, like Falcon, but all of them are directed to the near surroundings of the Earth. On the other thing, people haven't been further in the space when they were in the 70's. Far space travel just doesn't have any applications as of yet, and even fully automatized stations like New Horizons require serious money investment. Manned flight to Mars would probably be too much. And nobody even knows what to do with the radiation in space, so it could also be physically impossible.</rant>

Another thing, despite all the flaws I mentioned, the first chapter still works somehow. It's nothing amazing, but it was still kind of enjoyable to read, when I tried not to notice all those flaws. So, I don't know, I hope that the 2nd episode is better.

5-6/10 so far.

[littleshogun]

Planning to play Deardrop later to joining VN Reading Club there (To be honest, I didn't read Deardrop seriously yet).

[Canicheslayer]

As I'm waiting for my copy of Persona 5, I'm trying to finish a maximum of dropped and/or short VNs.

At first, I was unsatisfied. Muv Luv is average (the second part, Unlimited, was nice...until the botched last chapters ruined it), KARAKARA is Kinetic Novel with a poor price/length ratio (too bad because the girls are cute and the post-apocalyptic setting is great) and Nekopara 2 is a disappointing sequel (only Shigure and the H-scenes were fairly interesting).

So, this sunday, It was a good time to start something really different : 

- 2 hours with Lucy -The Eternity She Wished for- : this VN will not disappoint me. I can feel it

- Already finished DraKoi (That's the power of insomnia) : Surprisingly, it was...awesome ! The dragon girl is an excellent character (the mother too...see my spoiler ), the story is great (non-stop action, full of lust, tears, silly jokes and love...perfect for me  ) and the OST is incredibly good (best point of this VN, probably).

Spoiler

 

Edited April 3, 2017 by Canicheslayer
2.0

[HotTrax]

Trinoline
Well, it is that time of year and a new Minori game is out. Obviously, it is going to hit all the characteristic I’d expect from them: excellent background music stellar production values, Kusuhara Yui, and adorable big breasted heroines. (I am sort of weird and can, and have, listened to their game’s soundtracks all day.) Anyways, I enjoyed the concepts that the game explored. As Androids that are made to mimic human characteristics are being developed in this world, it brings forth questions you’d expect to see.  What it means to be alive? What it means to be human? It also ended surpassing where I thought it would go with these ideas, which was cool to see. I personally really liked the game a lot.

Everyone's route 

Shirone: RoboImouto
I thought the turn for this route being more about the protagonist was an interesting turn. His actions felt justified as he came to terms with his mortality and choosing not to become something that he felt would not truly be him, just something resembling him. Was glad to see him stick to his guns and for the game to not take it away. It was very sad to see Shirone, well, sad. I think her gaining some sort of humanity out of this was nice to see at the end. Making her own decision to erase herself in longing to see him again. And I have got to say, that epilogue was just perfect and sad. The small allusion to her remembering. T_T
Yuuri: Friend with a disease. 
The whole VR Yuuri, living the lie, drama was fine. But, the thrust of her route came from her own personal battle with her illness and choosing to take the treatment. Was very nice to see it work out for her. She took the risk and it paid off, thankfully. Happy ending
Also, she is too adorable! 

Sara: 
That really could have gone to some crazy places towards the end there. (The epilogue scene!) Machine are scary. But all-in-all, I really enjoyed this route. It turned the clock back and starting from before Shirone had her existential crisis and the protagonist had his memory intact, so that was good to see happen. Anyways, moving to the mountains and unplugging from everything. 

 

Edited April 3, 2017 by HotTrax

[Yuuko]

20 minutes ago, HotTrax said:

What it means to be alive? What it means to be human?

IT HURTS SO MUCH

[Canicheslayer]

Finished Lucy -The Eternity She Wished For-. A beautiful, tear-jerking heartwarming and philosophical short story. And the CGs are great (not the character design...except Lucy, of course). 8.5/10. For the time being, My best VN played in 2017.

Spoiler

I really appreciated when I discovered that Doctor's scenes were flashfowards

 

Edited April 4, 2017 by Canicheslayer

[onorub]

Played Air's common route and thought the MC not being a high-schooler really helped things. Also, the MC seems to have better chemistry with the mature ladies than with the barely-legal girls to me. I'll be kinda busy this week, so i'll go for a regular route this weekend.

[Vorathiel]

1 hour ago, onorub said:

Played Air's common route and thought the MC not being a high-schooler really helped things. Also, the MC seems to have better chemistry with the mature ladies than with the barely-legal girls to me. I'll be kinda busy this week, so i'll go for a regular route this weekend.

Oh yeah, his relation with Mizusus' mother was great!

[Adorabear]

I am currently in the middle of reading Edelweiss!  I noticed it was on sale during MangaGamer's April Fools Day sale and decided to pick it up since I am currently trying to branch out and try different kind of VNs. It's extremely different than anything that I have read before since it is a romantic comedy eroge (all of the VNs I have head previously were all-ages and either otome games or mystery/trapped VNs). So far, I am really enjoying this game! The beginning was a bit hard to get through since the idiot friends were kind of annoying, but it got better once the main characters were introduced and choices appeared. I think I am at the end of the common route, so I am looking forward to seeing what the character routes have in store for me! =) 

[Funyarinpa]

Higanbana is FUCKED UP, jesus

[Kawasumi]

4 hours ago, Funyarinpa said:

Higanbana is FUCKED UP, jesus

I still remember some of the manga  I read, at some point it just uses every kind of red thread lol

[littleshogun]

Just try Hare nochi Kitto Nanohana Biyori (I'll call it Harenochi), and it's appearence was usual moege. The premise here was like our MC was about to check out from the hospital after one month bedridden because of the unspecific accident. Along with him was his childhood friend Konomi who take care of him in the hospital (Konomi was a girl by the way). After that, he'll meet many friends and formed garden club or something like that.

PS - For more elaboration here, I played this in Indonesian language because that's the only available translation for now which to say it's quite interesting experience that I could play VN in my own language.

Edited November 3, 2018 by littleshogun

[akaritan]

Just finished The Shadows of Pygmalion. It's an absolutely gorgeously produced VN; the character designs, the CGs, and the music are all quite good, if not the best I've experienced. Furthermore, the pacing and tone were absolutely spot-on. I do so love a good utsuge, and the true end had quite the impact. However, a few things sort of spoiled the experience for me... the biggest problem I had with Pygmalion was that the characters could feel incredibly flat, and by the end I just couldn't bring myself to care deeply about them. My favorite was Yang, and that was because I liked her character design more than anything. The fact of the matter is, as a general rule I'd rather read a VN with amazing characters and a bland plot than the other way around. And sadly, I found issue with Pygmalion's plot as well. As stated above, it has fantastic pacing and the tone is just right, but many of the plot twists felt far too sudden and forced. Pygmalion introduces information that changes the nature of its story several times, and it started to feel nonsensical by the end to say the least. Sometimes these twists were executed well enough to make me more interested, but more often than not they just seemed too far out of place, and it reached a point where the VN became a tad bit difficult to keep track of... But I suppose if you expressly want something unpredictable, it could do the trick for you. And again, I seem to be in the minority as far as not loving this one, so take this with a grain of salt 

Edited April 8, 2017 by akaritan

[Vorathiel]

I'm reading Aoishiro (finished one route and halted) and 11eyes (reading hard - I want to finish this before I can fastread Deardrops for April Club).

And while I didn't liked many things about 11eyes at the beginning ('comedic duo' was awfull, cast was meh, etc) I absolutely love this title now. It's not something great, but it's really good and it 'clicked' with me so well, that even really bad ero-jokes are not destrying my mood while reading.
Lore is nice, setting is good, story is interesting, and cast...oh my god the cast. Every person is ambiguous, everybody have some interesting backstory that can shed a completly new light on this character (Yukiko FFS! I adroe her! Wven though I usually hate bubbly energetic characters), everybody is in a place that their character development can go completly different places and still be believable.

But what this VN really did great, that almost no other VN has EVER did (yeah, trully - give me even one example)
Mild spoiler about charatcers ahead, nothing about story, or setting. Just in case, spoiler tag.

Spoiler

Yukiko and Takahisa. They have such an amazing chemistry. Incredibly funny comedic duo right from the start. Their relationship is believable, their chemistry is great, there is a foundation for their pairing, it's almost...reall. Both have strange dark past, both have vulgar type of humour, both have loud attitude. They match each other. And it's so good. No VN I read ever have such a great, believable chemistry between characters, that you just can't help yourself and root for them (I'm going for Kukuri ending, but I'm incredibly interested about how Yukiko end will turn out. Probably shitty, cause she and protag are completly not fit to each other).
And I'm not taking about relationship between two of protags friends, which is almost not existent in VNs.
This relationship has much, much better writting, foundations and chemistry than many, many protag x heroine relationships in VNs. It's that great.

So yeah, I'm enchanted and lastly spending almost every damn free hour to read that. And it's great.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Oh, and Kindred spirits on the roof is utter, frustrating shit, with hollow characters, dumb, kindergarden-level relationships, 'raburabu till the end of their lives' from first sight, even if they do not know each other names and have nothing in common (no interests, completly different personalities, etc. See spoiler above to how it should have been written), and really cringeworthy writting - like that "rock god" poser girl, which is really terrible, it's like it was written by 55yo white guy in a suit, trying to be hip and cool. (It's probably equally the fault of shitty localisation). VN premise is disgusting with that whole interffering with strangers lives. Homosexuality is presented really hollow. Bam, suddenly girl loves a girl, but ... nothing follows that, even if she's surprised. And protag - she's fine, butt obviously her silent, independent, intelligent and responsible character is going to be broken, because how can she be so mature, there must have been some drama in her life, why she's so silent and why she eats alone, we must fix her! We can't have independent, responsible characters in our VNs (Hoshizora no Memoria comes to mind, and this is really not a good sign). So yeah - avoid that shit, Flowers, or Lesbian Nurses are much, much better yuri vns.

Edited April 11, 2017 by Vorathiel

[Fred the Barber]

@Vorathiel I always like reading what you have to say about stuff since it seems like I'll reliably feel the exact opposite about pretty much everything

Of course, that also makes it doubly interesting to see where we agree. In this case (seriously, this is like the only thing I agree with you on for the whole post, lol), I really liked:

Spoiler

the Yukiko and Takahisa relationship in 11eyes. I have a personal preference for seeing pairings emerge in a VN which don't involve the main character, and like you said, that particular one was really well done: they really seem to fit each other.

 

[littleshogun]

@Vorathiel Hope you ready for enduring three routes then, because if you want to play Kukuri's end you must get three ending before got that. Yes, three endings which consist of Yukiko's, Misuzu's and Yuka's. Good luck.

Interesting that you interested with Hakuai (aka Lesbian Nurses) there. To each of their own I suppose if we talk about opinion in regard of Yurirei, although I'd found that it was quite relaxing VN.

[Vorathiel]

2 hours ago, littleshogun said:

@Vorathiel Hope you ready for enduring three routes then, because if you want to play Kukuri's end you must get three ending before got that. Yes, three endings which consist of Yukiko's, Misuzu's and Yuka's. Good luck.

Interesting that you interested with Hakuai (aka Lesbian Nurses) there. To each of their own I suppose if we talk about opinion in regard of Yurirei, although I'd found that it was quite relaxing VN.

Oh shit, really? Thanks for heads up, gonna change my 'route' to Misuzu then.

 

And rooftoplesbians is far from relaxing, those kindergarden like ''''romances'''' are infuriating in their stupidity.

Edited April 11, 2017 by Vorathiel

[ChaosRaven]

I've just finished Charles' route in Da Capo 3 and to be honest, it was a rather underwhelming experience so far. I think it would have been a great thing if DC3's six (!!!) different writers would have maybe just once sit together and agree on what they actually want to write. Because, the writer of the prologue seems to have thought that they are going to make another remake of Da Capo 1 centered around a big magical tree. The writer of the common route however, seems to have thought that they are going to write the Japanese VN interpretation of Harry Potter, centered around pseudo Hogwarts. And the writer of Charles' route seems to have thought that they are making a fluffy Christmas story for little kids.

The whole thing would be still okay if the individual parts would be decently written at least. However, the prologue was mostly a cheap ripoff of Da Capo 2, that presented the heroines as so devoted and obedient to the protagonist that they almost appeared like brainwashed. The common route did at least improve on the latter part and presented the heroines with more personality. However, it didn't even try to make anything of the huge potential of a magical school. The short missions could have been interesting but there was no effort invested in them whatsover, neither on the writing nor the artistic part. Nothing was drawn and the missions lacked even the most basic signs of common sense. Example?!

Spoiler

Imagine an IS terrorist (IS = Ill-disposed Sorcerer) layed a magical bomb, so what to do now? You might think they evacuate the area and then put together a small special unit of selected adult mages who then try to disarm the whole thing.

But no, let's present you Da Capo 3's way of anti terror fighting: Let's treat the whole thing as an excercise and send the students of all classes into the house where the bomb is located and let them 'try their best' with the elders watching from the side lines for 'maximum impact' so to say. The concept has an almost brilliant simplicity. There are only two grades, either passed the test or passed away - you can't have a better motivation than that. 

And then you have Charles' route which was immensly childish even for eroge standards. The whole writing also lacked a certain maturity Da Capo 2 still had and a central theme. And what's the point with those pointless radio broadcastings? Production values also seemed pretty low considering only the main heroines and a few of the more prominent side characters got sprites and there were almost no event CG's. Overall it's certainly at least a class below Da Capo 2 so far and even Da Capo 1 had a more consistent plot line.

Anyway, I guess I still give Sara's route a try since I kind of liked her, and then call it a day.

[Fred the Barber]

15 hours ago, ChaosRaven said:

I've just finished Charles' route in Da Capo 3

I read your whole post, and I expect the points you make are valid (though I've yet to play a Da Capo game of any sort), but can we pause a moment over the fact that one of the heroines is named Charles? And, moreoever, that the explanation for her name is that she's half-English?

[ChaosRaven]

6 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

but can we pause a moment over the fact that one of the heroines is named Charles? And, moreoever, that the explanation for her name is that she's half-English?

I don't understand what's your point? Nothing wrong with the name and I didn't complain about it either.

[Darklord Rooke]

22 minutes ago, ChaosRaven said:

I don't understand what's your point? Nothing wrong with the name and I didn't complain about it either.

Only a selfish and horrid parent would name their daughter “Charles”. “Charlie” is a boy’s name that’s more acceptable for a girl to use (because it could be short for Charlotte or Charlene,) same with Sam, but a girl named “Charles” will probably be teased, picked on, and/or laughed at for her entire childhood.

[littleshogun]

Interesting discussion about Charles name I guess. Although if I may say something about that, the staff probably want to make someone who is half English and also want MC called one of heroines 'Lulu'. So we had Charles here as heroine's name, and keep in mind that Circus made Da Capo 3 with Japanese player as the main costumer (I'd already saw some anime characters with Charles name, so it's not that surprising to me).

Edited April 14, 2017 by littleshogun

[Fred the Barber]

2 hours ago, littleshogun said:

(I'd already saw some anime character with Charles name, so it's not that surprising to me).

 

Well, sure, but were they girls? Charles is pretty strictly a boy's name. It's almost as bad a choice as the name Asino for that guy in Symphonic Rain. Names are important; if they're going to use foreign names, they should at least research whether their naming choice is batshit insane.

[littleshogun]

On 4/14/2017 at 10:18 PM, Fred the Barber said:

Well, sure, but were they girls?

Of course they were, although I must admit it was very rare choice for a woman's name (Less than 10 characters). As for the characters there's one from Fairy Tail, also in one of PreCure series (Doki Doki), and another from Freezing (I knew the former two weren't human, although one of them (PreCure one) was able to transform into human).

As for the naming, according to another thread at Gamefaqs, it was said that for Charles name they use the French one (It's 'sharla' instead of usual 'charles', and the reason for that was quite complicated to say the least).

Edited April 15, 2017 by littleshogun

[Darklord Rooke]

4 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

if they're going to use foreign names, they should at least research whether their naming choice is batshit insane.

It probably should be changed during localisation. If few people in Japan would know that Charles is a boy's name that a girl shouldn't have, the name wouldn't sound weird to them. If that's the case then to keep the spirit of the original during translation and allow audiences in English the same experience as the Japanese audience (aka to not feel weirded the hell out,) there's an argument (that I'd be making) that it should be changed in the English localisation whether Charles is the "correct romanisation" or not.