Finally here, Himawari -The Sunflower- released

[littleshogun]

The title says it all, and we'll get it in at least 28 days more. Here's the news for the proof. So, anyone looking forward to this? If so then we could started the discussion now and what's your thought on this VN. Have fun, and I'll add more info in this post later.

PS (12/10) - Now that this VN was released, I'll change the thread title to reflect on this situation.

Edited December 10, 2016 by littleshogun

[Vorathiel]

I'm affraid of ConjuMemes, but overall I'm very, very hyped. But I don't even know why.

[Infernoplex]

I've heard good stuff about this VN, including that it was well recieved by the Japanese too. So it should be one of those kamige-tier VNs I guess?

[Narcosis]

This is the only Tl'ed vn since Romanesque I've been rooting for. It's finally getting released, hopefully with no more delays

Garejei, son. I'm so proud!

[Soulless Watcher]

Interesting, going to have to see where my budget stands before I get a copy. I think Stiens;gate 0 is going to kill the last of my entertainment money for the year though .

[Infernoplex]

41 minutes ago, Soulless Watcher said:

Interesting, going to have to see where my budget stands before I get a copy. I think Stiens;gate 0 is going to kill the last of my entertainment money for the year though .

And hope that this time your bank will not give you problems on the transaction with MG (I remember you talked about issues with buying from MG)

[Soulless Watcher]

1 hour ago, Infernoplex said:

And hope that this time your bank will not give you problems on the transaction with MG (I remember you talked about issues with buying from MG)

Oh fuck, I forgot about that (shockingly). I guess I should probably make another paypal account in preparation.

[solidbatman]

At last

[BookwormOtaku]

Preordered

[exaccuss]

I notice on vndb, it says it has alot of bad endings.. Does it have ANY happy/romance routes?

[ShinRaikdou]

1 hour ago, exaccuss said:

I notice on vndb, it says it has alot of bad endings.. Does it have ANY happy/romance routes?

Also intrested in this.

Is that nakige/utsuge ? Or my favorite moe blob with happy ever after?

[Suzu Fanatic]

It does. There's a difference on Vndb of "only bad endings" vs. "high amount of bad endings".

[Fred the Barber]

One of the only two comments on the blog right now is one saying they're "not comfortable with buying re-makes without having tried the original", and that someone should fan translate the original so they can play that first.

I can't even.

 

At any rate, I preordered, yay for what should be a good game, hope it hasn't been too over-hyped.

[Nier]

Physical Mangagamer!

[Narcosis]

To be honest, I've been waiting for this so long, but there's a number of questions MG still failed to answer. My biggest concern is with the art - 960x544 isn't really a lot, even by older standards. I have no idea, what route they went in, since I didn't had a chance to see the game yet, but 960x544 art assets do not look that good on 720p, not to mention 1080p and higher resolutions. Not everyone likes to play their games windowed, either. It's even more questionable MG doesn't provide a DEMO, nor a gameplay preview of sorts; we're literally in the dark & back to early 2000's, where playing the game fullscreen resulted in gloriously pixel-artsy graphics no one complained about, because those were the early 2000's. They are not anymore, though.

TL&DR Such low resolution butchers the game's art, which is tremendously good.

I've seen a lot of people complaining about the lack of h-content. From what I know, it's been removed for a reason, mostly because Vita does not allow 18+ content. The doujin version had two h-scenes or so, they actually progress the story and bear significance towards character development, but it's not like the all-ages remake removes it completely; supposedly it's implied, not shown and a lot of the dialogue has been made into the story in one way or another. In other words, it was rewritten to fit the all-ages version, but carry the original meaning.

Will they release an 18+ patch? Doubtful, hence the Vita remake didn't took it into account, the game's missing the required assets, which would have to be specially made for the PC version. In the future? Maybe, but definitely not anytime soon. To be honest, we're not really missing much and the remake is far superior in regards to the original. It has gorgeous art and voice acting, story was rewritten and there's a lot of new content in. What else could you ask for? As much as I'm against game censorship, this isn't really a case and I can't understand people, who plan to deliberately drop it and cease their support just because of the very small portion of removed h-content.

edit:

Regarding the art, I saw an ingame screenshot from the english release, played natively on a 1080p screen. Can't share, since it's NDA, but it doesn't look half-bad. A bit blurry, as far as it goes for 960x544 assets rescaled to match 1080p, might propably look better on smaller screens running native 720p. Preety basic rescaling. I guess it's fine, considering they propably couldn't obtain high-res assets eitherway. At least, I can live with that.

Edited November 13, 2016 by Narcosis

[Nandemonai]

8 hours ago, Narcosis said:

I've seen a lot of people complaining about the lack of h-content. From what I know, it's been removed for a reason, mostly because Vita does not allow 18+ content. The doujin version had two h-scenes or so, they actually progress the story and bear significance towards character development, but it's not like the all-ages remake removes it completely; supposedly it's implied, not shown and a lot of the dialogue has been made into the story in one way or another. In other words, it was rewritten to fit the all-ages version, but carry the original meaning.

Will they release an 18+ patch? Doubtful, hence the Vita remake didn't took it into account, the game's missing the required assets, which would have to be specially made for the PC version. In the future? Maybe, but definitely not anytime soon. To be honest, we're not really missing much and the remake is far superior in regards to the original. It has gorgeous art and voice acting, story was rewritten and there's a lot of new content in. What else could you ask for? As much as I'm against game censorship, this isn't really a case and I can't understand people, who plan to deliberately drop it and cease their support just because of the very small portion of removed h-content.

I have to agree, and I'm pretty far on the "release the 18+ version" side of things.  This is the kind of 18-plus to all-ages transition that I don't have a problem with.  (The upcoming localization of Dies Irae is the same way.)  It doesn't mangle the story, there isn't much being cut anyway, and it's a better version all around.

The problem is I have a very hard time trusting companies that say this about their own releases, since obviously nobody is going to say that they had to undermine the writers' vision in order to make money (whether it's true or not).

[Nier]

Himawari -Pebble in the Sky- is a PS Vita remake, no 18+.

[littleshogun]

It's almost the time for the release (Tomorrow), so I'd decide to bump this thread.

For seiyuu info here, Himawari was definirtely had some good seiyuu like Kawasumi Ayako (Saber from Fate, Nodame from Nodame Cantabile) and Tamura Yukari (Furude Rika from Higurashi, Nanoha from Nanoha franchise) and who voicing Asuka and Aqua respectively. As for MC seiyuu, he was Soichiro Hoshi who Gundam fan knew as Kira's seiyuu (I'd like to remember him as Keichi from Higurashi though). Other seiyuu such as Fujiwara Keiji and Mitsuaki Madono was good addition as well imo. Overall, I think the cast of seiyuu were quite good.

There is no demo unfortunately, but if you need some of earlier 'review copy' (I knew the term was wrong) there's some review for Himawari out there. There's one from MDZ (Translator for Koi Resort) and another from Garejel who also the editor for this VN. As for the spoiler, the first one was had the least compared to Garejel's. Actually there's one more review, but it was full of spoiler so I won't post it here (But if some people here curious maybe I'll add it here).

For last note here, once again eufonius song was good there.

Edited December 8, 2016 by littleshogun

[Nandemonai]

Conjeuror's blog post on MangaGamer was all I needed to hear to know that I'm interested in this game.  It reminds me of the creation of Type-Moon; Tsukihime was originally a doujin title that kicked so much ass it turned them into a proper company.

[Formlose Gestalt]

3 hours ago, littleshogun said:

 There's one from MDZ (Translator for Koi Resort) and another from Garejel who also the editor for this VN.

Just as a correction. Gare(jei) translated Himawari together with Conjueror.

You can read about the background of the project on Mangagamers blog, where both wrote a bit about Himawari.

Links:

Gare's post

Conjueror's post

[littleshogun]

Thank for the correction there, Formlose. Looks like I mixed the data there. Okay, now that I reread the Mangagamer blogpost and apparently Conjueror there was helping Garejei (I though his name was ended with L instead of I) for TLC of Garejei script. As for Mangagamer post, yes I already read those two and I just add those 2 more reviews in case some of you need more info. Looks like there's nobody want spoiler there, so I decided to not add the link to spoiler filled review there. As for the story here, I think good or not would be to each people of their own there. Look forward to tomorrow once again there.

[Narcosis]

IT'S HERE.

Grab it while it's hot

[Decay]

The PC port is unfortunately pretty awful. Limited options, BGM looping issues, and an awful built-in software scaler for fullscreen mode that artifacts the text. Your options is to play in a tiny window or with annoyingly crappy looking text.

I'm guessing this is the same engine as Grisaia because that had the same issue. But the way to work around that issue in Grisaia doesn't work here. Even when I go into the config file and have it do actual fullscreen at 960x544, the artifacting still happens, bafflingly. I'll try to see if there's any filters being applied that can be turned off but I didn't see anything like that. Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

edit: One of these options might hold the solution. I've been toggling them on and off to no avail, though:

Spoiler

Edit 2: Success! See two posts below for how I fixed the issue.

Edited December 10, 2016 by Decay

[bigfatround0]

37 minutes ago, Decay said:

 BGM looping issues

 

Someone released a patch for this http://www.memecartel.org/

Edited December 10, 2016 by bigfatround0

[Decay]

I've solved the text artifacting issue.

Step 1: Add 960x544 as a custom resolution to your GPU Driver's control program. For NVIDIA, you go into the "Change Resolution" screen, click on "Customize...", then "Create custom resolution." Input 960x544, click test, hit yes, then accept. 960x544 should appear as a custom resolution in your resolution list. It will look something like this. At this point, you should also make sure that in the "Adjust Desktop Size and Position" screen you have it set to "Aspect Ratio," "GPU," and to Override program settings. It should look like this. (edit: If you have AMD, I have no idea how to do this, sorry.)

Step 2: Go into C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Frontwing\Himawari -The Sunflower-\. From there, edit config.xml with a text editor, and find the "no_full_res" option, set it to 0. Then scroll down and find "full_height" and "full_width", set those to 544 and 960 respectively. If you don't set that resolution correctly, it will display at 960x544, but it will still apply weird filtering causing artifacts.

With that, you should have a proper full screen rendered at 960x544 with no crappy artifacting.

Edited December 10, 2016 by Decay