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Amaryllis posted:I'm glad I found this thread! My Vita is slowly becoming a little VN box. I'd get C:R over Amnesia because I didn't really like most of the routes except for Kent  C:R I liked pretty much everyone except that one guy. Lupin more or less made it worth the entry-fee too.
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Nov 8, 2015 20:48
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Asperity posted:Definitely, but visual novels can also be some of the very best at not being awful. Pretty much anything from, say, Hanako or Christine Love is only going to provide the good kind of cringing. Christine Love is a hack with only one good VN.
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Nov 8, 2015 23:11
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excuse me, pretty sure you mean TWO
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Nov 8, 2015 23:18
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LOVE LOVE SKELETON posted:excuse me, pretty sure you mean TWO What's the second.
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Nov 8, 2015 23:21
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the Hate game you weren't thinking of (cause the one you were was also a Hate game) also higurashi ch. 2 is out on steam in a few days and i'm almost as excited for that as i am for fallout 4.
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Nov 9, 2015 01:58
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LOVE LOVE SKELETON posted:also higurashi ch. 2 is out on steam in a few days and i'm almost as excited for that as i am for fallout 4. Oh hell yes. Despite being a huge R07 fan, I never sat down with the Higurashi games. His writing is way too obtuse in Japanese for someone without a mastery of the language to make it through without missing a ton of stuff, so I put reading it off until I was a bit more proficient. Before selling my Vita I finally sat down and read through Onikakushi in Japanese on the Vita version, and I've been dying to keep going. This will give me an excuse to go back through Onikakushi in English (I probably missed tons of stuff) and then I can finally move on with the story. Everybody says the anime was absolute trash compared to the original story, and since I enjoyed the hell out of the anime I can't wait to see how great the actual thing is. It helps that Umineko is my favorite VN ever so I'm super biased towards anything this guy writes.
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Nov 9, 2015 03:16
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Higurashi's anime is acceptable, unlike Umineko's. Back when it was the only way to see the story in English it was better than nothing. But yeah all things being equal the VN is heaps more entertaining and ultimately satisfying. The biggest obstacle was the sprites and that's not really a problem with these releases (though I think the new ones are kind of bad in their own way, and prefer the patch to turn it into the PS3 version). Chapter 3 is one of the bigger ones so that will probably take a while, but the 4th is very short and my hope is that 5-8 won't require as much work because the translation for them wasn't nearly as bad originally.
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Nov 9, 2015 04:01
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Recently came into possession of a Vita, what's the VN situation like on it? I've played all of the translated Nasu games, Demonbane (despite its...issues...), a bunch of throwaway nonsense BL games because I am weak, Ever17/the Zero Escape games, and Umineko (I loved it until the last chapter which kind of turned into a horrible wet fart of an author meltdown), so I'm up for a good adventure or mystery type thing, or possibly fluffy otome/BL if they're legitimately cute or funny.
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Nov 9, 2015 05:12
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Panic! at Nabisco posted:possibly fluffy otome/BL if they're legitimately cute or funny. You want Sweet Fuse. Everybody wants Sweet Fuse.
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Nov 9, 2015 06:15
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Panic! at Nabisco posted:Recently came into possession of a Vita, what's the VN situation like on it? I've played all of the translated Nasu games, Demonbane (despite its...issues...), a bunch of throwaway nonsense BL games because I am weak, Ever17/the Zero Escape games, and Umineko (I loved it until the last chapter which kind of turned into a horrible wet fart of an author meltdown), so I'm up for a good adventure or mystery type thing, or possibly fluffy otome/BL if they're legitimately cute or funny. You can get Dies Irae through the Japanese PSN and then the sequel Kajiri Kamui Kagura is on Vita. They are both very good VNs.
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Nov 9, 2015 12:44
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Wait, you loved Umineko until the final chapter? It kinda goes downhill after 4 and never recovers. Six is especially terrible in that it's both boring as gently caress and loves beating you over the head with messages you got long, long ago. You sit and listen to Ryu call you an idiot for hours (with his literal self insert character), for not "thinking" about the mystery enough when sorry but I was well aware of all aspects of the mystery at this point...because I was, in fact, thinking. Ryukishi's best friend, proofreader, and the guy he started his writing career(?) for died after the 4th chapter. Ryu stated he "forgot the joy of writing", "considered quitting", but "[he] wouldn't have wanted me to do that". I'm pretty sure that his friend's death resulted in his writing and attitude becoming so pessimistic and sullen for the entire back half of the series and it's not a good thing because I thought 1-4 were loving awesome. That all sounds pretty negative itself but I still think Umineko is worth reading. Yet it could've been so much more.
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Nov 9, 2015 13:08
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The only thing I felt Ryu got sullen about was the fact that everyone was obsessing about the mystery and missing the other major plot of the series. I was really confused when I watched that one 6-hour long Youtube thing where the guy explains his theory on what went down and when he gets to the beginning of the real main plot he dismisses it as 'not important' or a sidestory or something like that. And when I explained the plot to someone on a forum once some of the guys that had already actually played through it got all surprised and kept asking me 'wait really? THAT was the plot all along?' I think if you focus on THAT plot instead of the mystery, the latter half of the series becomes MUCH better. Just to make sure we're all on the same page, I'm going to lay out what I thought the real plot was. Obviously this spoils the whole story so don't read it if you haven't played all of Umineko: The series (minus the first two games which are just there to set up the characters) is actually about Ange from game 3. The first two games are her hearing about the message-in-bottle mysteries that set everyone to thinking of the Ushiromiyas as some kind of weird occulty family full of feuds and conspiracies. This wasn't helped by Eva acting like a bitch to everyone (understandably, because her family had just died). But, with a little help from messages from Maria and 'Beatrice' written in Maria's diary, Ange goes on a voyage of self-discovery to find out the truth behind her family. The series is her struggle to fight down the voices of the tabloids and mystery enthusiasts who try to turn her family into a bunch of murderers and monsters and instead believe that they were good people. All the talk about 'magic' and the rules that are set up for it are essentially a breakdown of that struggle. The 'poison' that prevents Ange from believing her family was good is the fact that basically everyone in the world has already decided they were bad people, so she needs to be able to create a 'magical space' for just herself where she can believe they were good. Maria's relationship with magic and her mother helps drive this point home, as we only ever seem to see Rosa treating Maria badly, but that's just what we see and interpret. We don't know Rosa like Maria does, and so Maria rejects other people's assumptions about her mother and chooses to believe she is still a good person that she loves. Reading about Maria's faith in her mother helps Ange on her journey. I think what frustrated Ryu later on, and made him turn all the mystery fans into the antagonists of the series, is that ANY theory about the mystery required one of the Ushiromiyas to be a psychotic murderer. If you ignore the mystery elements throughout the series and instead look at everyone during the quiet scenes, you should have fallen in love with the family (like I did) and should be under the impression that none of them is really capable of that. The whole thing with his self-insert character wasn't trying to get people to focus more on the mystery, but rather he wanted people to look past the mystery to the motive and to understanding why the characters act in the ways they do. In other words, ignore the mystery and look at the personalities and relationships. The last game was the final victorious moment when Ange was able to find the strength to believe that the people in her family were good, even if she's the only living person who thinks so. From beginning to end you were supposed to love the Ushiromiyas and see through the lies about how awful they were supposed to be and the whole murder mystery (which was all a big red herring). As someone who did that, I was very happy with the latter half of the series and especially the way that it ended. And I've had people tell me 'that's not what Ryu intended, you're headcanon-ing this' but see from the very beginning of the series, from the first game, the keywords 'Without love it cannot be seen' have been used over and over. Umineko was about LOVE. And it was a great story about coming to love and trust in your family even when the world tries to turn you against them. And that's why it's my favorite VN.
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Nov 9, 2015 13:49
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Basically I agree with Getsuya's interpretation and it's a big reason why as time has gone on I've grown to like Umineko as a whole even more. It also serves as a wonderful counter to Higurashi in a meta/structural sense, as (Higurashi/Umineko spoilers) it tries so hard to set up the basic premise that "Hey, this is just like Higurashi, so events/worlds will repeat until you solve the mystery and get a happy ending!" Only there are no repeating worlds at all to begin with, and there is no real mystery to actually solve as a necessity because the whole bloody thing is really just Ange coming to terms with it all. It'd be like if Higurashi boiled down to Akasaka becoming the main character post-Tatarigoroshi and simply going on with his life and never resolving the Himazawa conflict. In Higurashi's case that would've been pretty unsatisfying but it works in context quite well for Umineko, especially since you wouldn't really expect that if you go into Umineko right after Higurashi.
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Nov 9, 2015 14:05
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Alder posted:I'd get C:R over Amnesia because I didn't really like most of the routes except for Kent
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Nov 9, 2015 16:24
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Asperity posted:You want Sweet Fuse. Everybody wants Sweet Fuse.
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Nov 9, 2015 19:53
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Amaryllis posted:Cool, thanks! I don't know anyone IRL with the super-rare combination of a Vita and an interest in VNs whom I could ask about the game, but I got the impression from the few reviews out there that the characters--all of them, not just the protagonist--in Amnesia are kind of bland. As much as I really want to support otome game releases in NA, there's not much point in picking up a dull game even if it's on sale. Yes, I know that feeling too well. I wrote a review of C:R here: http://knightime.net/2015/10/31/code-realize-guardian-of-rebirth-review/
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Nov 9, 2015 22:45
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Asperity posted:You want Sweet Fuse. Everybody wants Sweet Fuse. Sweet Fuse is probably my favorite otome VN! My only real complaint is that the metaplot's pacing only works if you play through the routes in a very specific order. The ~secret~ route kinda sucked too, but everything else was so fantastic it doesn't even matter.
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Nov 10, 2015 01:02
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All this talk of Otome games has reminded me of the great idea I had to start an otome game review blog from the perspective of a straight guy and call it Brotome. I still may. At first I was just going to pick otome games that had gotten good reviews by the few English-language bloggers who review the untranslated Japanese ones, but then I figured it'd be more fun to just play whatever had a cover or title that caught my eye so I could give honest, unbiased impressions.
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Nov 10, 2015 01:30
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Getsuya posted:All this talk of Otome games has reminded me of the great idea I had to start an otome game review blog from the perspective of a straight guy and call it Brotome. I still may. At first I was just going to pick otome games that had gotten good reviews by the few English-language bloggers who review the untranslated Japanese ones, but then I figured it'd be more fun to just play whatever had a cover or title that caught my eye so I could give honest, unbiased impressions. There's a few mainstream sites that review otoge: http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2015/11/05/review-norn9-var-commons/175395/ other than steam reviews too. Eh, tbh there's not *that* many translated otoge unless you want to review O.E.L.V.N. titles.
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Nov 10, 2015 05:16
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I will be playing untranslated ones. I actually already started one up that seemed interesting. 'Kamigami no Asobi'. It's made by Broccoli which is a company I haven't heard or seen anything from since I was in high school, and co-produced or whatever by Nippon Ichi of all people. The plot is that you are a shrine maiden and one day you stumble on this old sword your family kept in their shrine, and it teleports you to a pocket dimension created by Zeus who, get this, created a human-style school where the deities of various religions can go to learn more about humans and love. And, of course, they can't learn about humans and love without a human being there to love them, so Zeus tells you to go make sure all the problem students, the ones who are having trouble grasping human emotion or whatever, are able to graduate. So now you've got to befriend 9 deities (Apollo, Hades, Tsukuyomi, Some other random Japanese God I haven't met yet, Baldr, Loki, Anubis and Thoth) and teach them all about human love! I'm really curious how this is going to play out since somehow I doubt I'm going to see the heroine being bossy and whipping a bunch of divine dropouts into shape. Fake Edit: Oh this had an anime adaptation already. Huh. Fake Edit 2: Wait why isn't Anubis in the anime? Did they seriously drop the only black guy in the cast? And I mean he wasn't even black, he was just like normally skin-toned next to all the pure white alabaster guys that make up the rest of the cast. What the hell anime maker people.
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Nov 10, 2015 12:45
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Bossy otome heroines are the best ones. 
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Nov 10, 2015 18:17
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One day I really want to get back around to playing KLAP!!… I don't know if the protagonist ever gets bossy, but you "discipline" some rude demon boys in that game, which involves a mini-game where you can whip them in the junk and that's really all I want out of video games nowadays.
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Nov 10, 2015 18:25
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jellycat posted:One day I really want to get back around to playing KLAP!!… I don't know if the protagonist ever gets bossy, but you "discipline" some rude demon boys in that game, which involves a mini-game where you can whip them in the junk and that's really all I want out of video games nowadays. So Criminal boys?
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Nov 10, 2015 18:37
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Junpei Hyde posted:So Criminal boys? Criminal Boys, but funny instead of pervy.
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Nov 10, 2015 20:40
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Have any of you played this? A supernatural investigation Phoenix Wright-eqsue game sounds potentially fantastic.
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Nov 10, 2015 22:22
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Getsuya posted:Fake Edit 2: Wait why isn't Anubis in the anime? Did they seriously drop the only black guy in the cast? And I mean he wasn't even black, he was just like normally skin-toned next to all the pure white alabaster guys that make up the rest of the cast. What the hell anime maker people. I wish I could read JPN I'd play all the random unlocalized ones  Welp, mostly since he doesn't speak at all throughout the entire series. Yes, they hired a technically famous CV to make barking noises in the game.
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Nov 10, 2015 23:46
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Panic! at Nabisco posted:Bossy otome heroines are the best ones. If you can read Japanese you should play Beast Master and Prince. You play as a beast tamer girl who stumbles upon some princes who have been turned into animals. They end up crashing with you while you help them find a way to cure their animal-ness. While they do boss her around a lot, she also gets the chance to boss them around as their 'tamer' and there are petting scenes where you can scratch their ears or rub their bellies if they're good and smack them on the nose (or butt) if they have been bad. If that sentence sounds fetishy it really isn't, it's more of a fluffy cuddly kind of thing, and it's backed up by a pretty decent story too (especially if you play the fandisk/sorta sequel). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujk7wxptCx4
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Nov 11, 2015 03:27
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jellycat posted:but I've heard good things about Akai Ito as well. I played this an eternity ago, and liked it a lot. It was really good. It's a ps2 title so you can probably play it on a phone these days?
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Nov 12, 2015 16:43
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Truga posted:I played this an eternity ago, and liked it a lot. It was really good. It's a ps2 title so you can probably play it on a phone these days? This just reminded me of Aoi Shiro, which is in the same series! It looks like that one has a PC download version on DLsite, so I guess I need to add that to my list, too…
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Nov 12, 2015 18:28
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I'm really enjoying Kamigami no Asobi as my first ever full-completion otome game, but I'm also glad I'm getting my least favorite guy's route out of the way first. Apollon is the first route they have in the guide I'm using and he also seems to be the most forward so I guess it's natural they'd expect you to go for him first. He's handsome and nice, I guess, but I don't think the main character realizes that he's treating her more like a cute pet than anything else. She takes his constant (unwanted) skinship as him just being affectionate and he's constantly really interested in her expression and mood which makes her think he's really friendly but to an outside observer it seems to me like he's acting like a guy who just bought a new dog or something. He's not constantly calling her cute and staring at her because he's smitten, he's doing it because he thinks she's some adorable talking animal (he is, after all, a god and she is a human) he gets to play with now. It doesn't help that he refuses to call her by her actual name and instead calls her pet names like 'Fairy' and 'Squirrel'. Also he has the personality of a little kid. Whatever I'm going to steamroll his story and move on to someone more interesting. Like anybody else in the whole cast.
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Nov 13, 2015 03:12
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Getsuya posted:I'm really enjoying Kamigami no Asobi as my first ever full-completion otome game, but I'm also glad I'm getting my least favorite guy's route out of the way first. Apollon is the first route they have in the guide I'm using and he also seems to be the most forward so I guess it's natural they'd expect you to go for him first. He's handsome and nice, I guess, but I don't think the main character realizes that he's treating her more like a cute pet than anything else. She takes his constant (unwanted) skinship as him just being affectionate and he's constantly really interested in her expression and mood which makes her think he's really friendly but to an outside observer it seems to me like he's acting like a guy who just bought a new dog or something. He's not constantly calling her cute and staring at her because he's smitten, he's doing it because he thinks she's some adorable talking animal (he is, after all, a god and she is a human) he gets to play with now. It doesn't help that he refuses to call her by her actual name and instead calls her pet names like 'Fairy' and 'Squirrel'. So wait is this blog of yours a thing?
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Nov 13, 2015 04:37
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Artificer posted:So wait is this blog of yours a thing? Yeah I'm actually planning to do it. I'll probably create it once I've finished a route or two of Kamigami no Asobi. One thing I want to do is provide reviews that don't have any spoilers. A lot of otome review blogs I've seen do in-depth analysis of each route and spoil everything since I guess they're assuming readers are never going to play through the Japanese games they're reviewing. I'm just going to review them like I did the normal VNs I reviewed for Fuwanovel and maybe include running commentary on my thoughts on the characters as I play through the routes before posting up my final review.
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Nov 13, 2015 04:47
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Getsuya posted:Yeah I'm actually planning to do it. I'll probably create it once I've finished a route or two of Kamigami no Asobi. I haven't tried many otome games so I'll check them when you recommend some I guess!
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Nov 13, 2015 05:08
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Getsuya posted:I'm just going to review them like I did the normal VNs I reviewed for Fuwanovel and maybe include running commentary on my thoughts on the characters as I play through the routes before posting up my final review. I will read this and add to my reader. I used to read long reviews but they got tiring over time. Also, I skip routes of chara I dislike because screw completism.
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Nov 13, 2015 07:19
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So I'm playing Norn9. For the most part the bad ends in this game are on another level of trash. Especially Ron and Masamune, holy crap. At least Akito's was bittersweet. Honestly he's probably one of the best around. But the lows in this game feel more frequent than the highs. And now it's also getting a show to boot? This game releasing soon after C;R puts into perspective how much more solidly the latter is written. Also seemingly way more typos? HGH fucked around with this message at 11:48 on Nov 13, 2015 |
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Nov 13, 2015 11:44
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HGH posted:So I'm playing Norn9. Yeah, I think I already said that it has its moments but you are right. The bad endings are BAD murder/suicide what??? and the good endings are just ok for the most part. Akito was probably my favorite followed by maybe Natsuhiko. A lot of them were just forgettable. Also the epilogue makes no sense. So many plot holes in this game.
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Nov 13, 2015 14:37
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HGH posted:So I'm playing Norn9. I noticed more typos than C:R. So far I've cleared Mikako's story and now on Nanami. Eh, still not sure if I want to stop then as Koharu feels really bland and I don't really like any of the guys on her team. Oh god as VN adaptations never go well except for S;G and maybe UtaPri.
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Nov 13, 2015 16:20
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I decided to play the Steins;Gate visual novel. I've already seen the anime and haven't played the VN until now because I usually don't like reading/watching things when I already know all the plot twists. Fortunately I've forgotten a bunch of the story (though I still remember the most major plot twists). It's really neat, and the cell phone stuff gives you a lot of content unique to the VN that wasn't in the anime. I've also never played a VN with such high production quality. The only thing I didn't like about Steins;Gate is that Mayuri and the girly boy I forget the name of aren't very interesting characters. The boy doesn't have much personality beyond being shy and having a crush of sorts on the main character, and Mayuri usually acts like a child with brain damage, despite being 16 years old. All the other elements of the story/characters more than make up for the downsides, though.
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Nov 13, 2015 18:02
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Huh, apparently I missed this thread for eight months. That'll teach me to assume that threads die when they are killed.jellycat posted:This just reminded me of Aoi Shiro, which is in the same series! It looks like that one has a PC download version on DLsite, so I guess I need to add that to my list, too… I think I said this in the last thread too, but I really enjoyed Aoi Shiro. While the story is a little generic, the characters are likable and proactive, the action is stylish and fun, and the music is great. I don't think it's as good as Akai Ito but the complete English patch means that it's the one I tend to recommend. edit: Apparently my view of them is now rather rosier-tinted than it was a year and a half ago: NRVNQSR posted:I enjoyed both Akai Ito and Aoishiro, but I wouldn't say either of them were amazing. Also, as Blhue says, they're not dedicated romance stories; more like action stories in which the romance subplots happen to be between two girls. NRVNQSR fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Nov 13, 2015 |
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Nov 13, 2015 21:40
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Cannot wait for part 2 of Higurashi coming out tonight. Part 1 was excellent, and I can't wait to see how they deal with the time loop situation happening. I'm glad I can go into it blind, because the mystery has been interesting. I bet It's got nothing to do with the main question being asked, supernatural powers or the acts of people, but on the other hand if it didn't have anything to do with it then maybe it'd come off as a bit cheap. Just a few more hours left though!
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Nov 13, 2015 22:07
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