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Umineko Episode 5 (very early) Hearing Lambda hype up her <cute> game, I briefly thought she might redecorate to fit with her sense of fashion, but I thought "nah, there's no way, it's going to be more of a weird tone thing than anything that direct". Nope, she's straight up inserting her magical princess Original Character huh. I'm writing this moments after said character shows up because god drat this is so loving funny. The loving music just stopping as this frilly anime child accuses someone of murder. God remember when Ryu07 seemed so excited at the end of Higurashi about fanfiction allowing endless possibilities.
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Jun 24, 2021 03:04
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yeah it rules
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Jun 24, 2021 03:57
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Umineko 5 (early, also some Higurashi spoilers I guess?) Ryu07 turns to the camera and says "I'm sorry about the solution to Higurashi, okay? I promise there's no science-magic here"
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Jun 24, 2021 06:03
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Time to bust out the windows magnifier. I've read a number of ancient, low-res VNs with that crappy tool. drat that's a good idea
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Jun 24, 2021 06:26
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Procrastine posted:Umineko 5 (early, also some Higurashi spoilers I guess?) You take that back, Purupurupikopuyo is the best
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Jun 24, 2021 06:27
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > The All-Ages Visual Novel Thread: mostly just essays about Umineko Now that I've reached the halfway point and am apparently about to get some 'answers', I thought I'd get down my thoughts on What Is Going On. I haven't read any of Gaius Marius' speculation after Episode 2 thanks to that warning upthread. The real world & meta-world: ok so this is the basic working model I’ve been using. We’re dealing with two levels of reality. The first is the “game world”, which is Japan in 1986 (and 1998), with nothing supernatural going on. The second is the “meta-world”, the world of witches and supernatural beings watching the game. It’s pointless to ask whether the meta-world is “real” with respect to the game world because the meta-world can’t interact directly with the game world. It’s a Devil’s Proof – you, the reader, might have a peanut gallery of wacky witches in another dimension mocking your incompetence but how would you ever know if they don’t reach out and touch you? Can you prove that they don’t exist? Anyway, just like in the real world, people in the game sometimes represent their internal states, aspects of their personality, or abstract concepts as people, and these personifications are our meta-characters, who exist in both the game world and the meta-world. They’re not physically ‘real’ in the game world, but they’re meaningful to the person whose mind they originate in. And because people can share feelings or understand abstract concepts in similar ways, a given personification can be valid for more than one person. Proposal: all of the meta-characters can be explained according to this model: - Virgilia is Kumasawa as she sees herself, and as the Ushiromiyas (and Beatrice 2) see her – a kindly, wise counsellor who can't be much more than a passive bystander. - Eva-Beatrice is basically spelled out for us – she’s Eva’s repressed sadism and narcissim, represented as her teenage self before marriage and motherhood helped her chill out (a bit). - Ronove:Genji::Virgilia:Kumasawa, but there’s an interesting wrinkle in that Ronove is quite different to Genji - they’re both consummate servants, but Ronove is a bit of a troll and not afraid to defy his master on occasion. Perhaps he’s Genji’s deeply repressed independent side? - The Seven Stakes are Maria’s (and later Ange’s) idealised imaginary friends, as seen by a lonely girl whose main frame of reference is age-inappropriate occult texts. But they’re also the representation of a weapon, specifically the speculative stake-firing weapon, and the terror felt by people going up against that weapon, which is why they seem like bloodthirsty monsters to everyone on the receiving end. - The Chiester sisters are also a representation of a weapon, namely the high-caliber guns that become increasingly prominent murder weapons in the later chapters. (.45, .410 and 00 are all types of ammunition, and I’m pretty sure they called the missing rabbit 556.) As I posted before I think they’re also linked in some sense to Maria’s toy animals but I’m not 100% sure of that – apart from anything else, we haven’t actually seen Maria interact with them yet. But of course the most important meta-character is the Golden Witch, Beatrice, aka meta-Beatrice, aka dress-wearing, pipe-holding Beatrice. Because all the Ushiromiyas and their servants (except Battler) grew up steeped in the mystery of the Golden Witch she acts as the shared personification of their hopes and fears. In Chapter 2 I posted that she seems to have variable personal significance to different characters, often in a double-edged way. To Maria, she’s a best friend and surrogate mother, but also represents her resentment and sadism. To Shannon, she’s a fairy godmother who also plays into her own internalised inferiority. To Kinzo, she’s obviously his lost love, but also his fear of a reckoning over the gold and success he lucked into. On top of this, she’s also the self-image of a specific person, who I’ll come back to in a second. So the meta-characters hang out in the meta-world, drinking tea and enjoying the games. The humans in the game world only get to join the meta-world when they die, presumably because that’s when they stop being able to affect the game world. Leaning on the Dante theme, the dead humans get to go either to Paradise (the Golden Land) or get tortured in Hell indefinitely, according to the whims of the witches. The one exception is Battler, the only person who hasn’t internalised the legend of the witch (quite possibly because he’s never actually been to Rokkenjima before). Not only does Battler deny magic (which doesn’t exist) but he denies the validity of meta-Beatrice (who does exist) and to top it all off he refuses to accept/remember his personal connection to the person who underpins meta-Beatrice. As a result, he ends up stuck in Purgatory. All of that leads to the next key question: who is Beatrice? Or more specifically, who is the real person whose mental self-representation corresponds to meta-Beatrice? The obvious place to start would seem to be the three people we know of called Beatrice: 1. Beatrice Prime, the woman who gave Kinzo the gold and became his mistress. Nanjo confirms that she was a real person, and she died. (Incidentally whoever pointed out that ¾ of the siblings share names with prominent Nazis has solidified my ‘actual Nazi gold’ speculation from Chapter 1). 2. Beatrice 2, the young woman Rosa meets in Kuwadorian, who the red text confirms was also real. Her talk about having escaped only to be trapped again in a new body points pretty clearly to her being the daughter of Beatrice Prime and (probably but not definitively) Kinzo. She died ~19 years before the game, leaving Kinzo heartbroken and starting his descent into madness. 3. Human Beatrice, the young woman wearing the suit who we see in Chapters 2 and 4. (I’m going to take a leaf out of Procrastine’s book and call her Beatrice 3). It’s plausible that she’s Beatrice 2’s daughter, but that’s not been confirmed yet. She apparently has some sort of personal connection to one of the two Battlers, which is presumably the “sin” that was forgotten. (Is it possible she doesn’t realise there are two Battlers, and therefore doesn’t realise that the one she’s speaking to isn’t the one who would remember?) I like Procrastine’s theory that protagonist-Battler is her brother, although they’d have to be twins as you can’t have two children just 4 months apart. (Maybe the second date in 07151129 is the day Beatrice 2 died?) Given that the first two are dead, Beatrice 3 is the most obvious candidate for the “source” of meta-Beatrice. But if we accept that she’s on the island in some sense (and I’m pretty sure she is, because the characters have no reason to imagine an additional, different Beatrice to the meta-Beatrice they’re all familiar with) how do we square that with the requirement for only 17 humans plus Kinzo? Option 1: Beatrice Option 2: Beatrice is a metaphor. What I mean by that is that the 18 characters we know and love are all on the island, but one of them has an alter ego which, when expressed, causes other people to see them as Beatrice 3. When Kyrie and Natsuhi see Beatrice 3 in the hall they might be seeing someone in disguise, but they also might be seeing someone they know who's nevertheless acting so differently to their usual self they perceive them as someone else entirely. (After all, we know now that a lot of the events we've seen can only be true symbolically). And I've got someone in mind: Shannon. I'll admit that the evidence is mostly circumstantial but there's one big thematic clue that makes me pretty confident: - If there is a disguise involved, Shannon (and Jessica) are best placed to pull it off since they’re both young women with similar builds. In Chapter 1, someone (Rosa iirc) makes a throwaway suggestion that Maria might have received the letter from Shannon in disguise. - Shannon knows about the game repeating, or at the very least understands the meta-situation in a way other people don’t. - Shannon knows something about the two-Battler situation, assuming I’m not reading too much into her covering for him on the beach, and therefore possibly knows about the ‘sin’. - Shannon and Beatrice 3 both have the eagle tattooed on their leg rather than on their clothes. It’s not a slam dunk because they’ve got it on opposite legs, but at the very least it suggests that they’re symbolically “property” of the Ushiromiyas in a way the other - Shannon dies in the first twilight of Chapters 1 and 3, the two games where Beatrice 3 doesn’t appear. - Most importantly, and I was kicking myself for not picking this one up earlier: Shannon is stuck in a relationship with a possessive older man who treats her as an idealized love object, which she has no realistic way of escaping. Who does that remind you of?? It’s possible this is just my own wishful thinking that the game will acknowledge how messed up George and Shannon’s relationship is rather than presenting it as a wonderful love story, but the handling of Rosa/Maria gives me hope. Plus it would explain why meta-Beatrice is particularly malicious towards Shannon when she decides to stand by George in Chapter 2. Regardless of whether it’s 1 or 2, my current theory is that the killings in every timeline are ultimately an elaborate scheme by Beatrice 3 to get revenge on the entire Ushiromiya household by making Kinzo aware of her existence and convincing him to orchestrate the deaths of at least 13 people to reunite him with his beloved Who’d have thought this where our anime murder mystery would have ended up – discussing the nature of narrative reality itself? As I said before, Kinzo being dead ends up casting a cascade of doubt over everything we’ve seen, so we need something concrete to hold onto or you can basically undermine or support any theory you want. More for my own sanity than anything else, I’m proceeding under the assumption that no author would be sadistic enough to make you sit through scenes that have literally no purpose, so everything we’re shown has to have some sort of reason for being shown in the first place, even all the ‘comedy’ about Battler being afraid of planes. So even scenes that couldn’t have happened as presented are telling us something about the relationships between characters (Kinzo interacting with Nanjo and the servants) or the characters’ internal worlds (Kinzo praising Natsuhi). Basically the same principle I’ve been applying to the anime fight scenes, but extrapolated to everything in the game world. Holy poo poo that’s a lot of words, and this isn’t even everything I planned on writing, but I think I’m best off just pushing ahead at this point
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Jun 24, 2021 13:46
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@ Snooze Cruise
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Jun 24, 2021 22:26
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Nate RFB posted:@ Snooze Cruise play it people!! its on sell!! its good!! i loved it!! please!!
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Jun 25, 2021 01:02
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Started playing Your Turn To Die. It's way better than it has any right to be? As someone who liked 999 and Danganronpa, I think it might be better than both. There's not a weak link in the cast. There wasn't a buffer of "Oh well these guys can die and I wouldn't mind" like in DR, I kinda find myself gritting my teeth at every main game. It is kinda funny how despite having no fanservice compared to say, Danganronpa, that Sara still inevitably has a miniskirt.  The amount of weird minigames is a bit perplexing but hey, it's cool. It IS a bit weird how Keiji is cast in the role of love interest. Isn't he like, 10+ years older than Sara, who is 17? Sharkitten posted:the Your Turn To Die manga also apparently got officially translated Oh good timing One thing I'm not sure if I like or not is that it has Sara being a lot more passive than in the actual game. I guess it's to stop her from being the one who always takes initiative and does everything.
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Jun 26, 2021 23:51
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Acerbatus posted:Started playing Your Turn To Die. yeah it's definitely better than DR haha Is the skirt not just part of most uniforms for girls in Japan or is that just a stereotype
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Jun 26, 2021 23:56
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Stefan Prodan posted:yeah it's definitely better than DR haha With the note that I only have personal experience and haven't done like, deep research or anything: Basically every game/manga/anime these days just has really short skirts compared to what you'd actually see in school uniforms. It's not horrible or anything, it just stuck out because like I said YTTD has been otherwise very minimal on fanservice. Uniform skirts aren't always like, down the ankles or anything, but they're usually a bit above or below the knee. Acerbatus fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Jun 27, 2021 |
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Jun 27, 2021 00:00
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Acerbatus posted:With the note that I only have personal experience and haven't done like, deep research or anything: Yeah that makes sense, it's very socially conservative there as well right so they prob would have the knee length ones and poo poo
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Jun 27, 2021 00:02
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Sou alone is such a great character
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Jun 27, 2021 00:09
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Stefan Prodan posted:Yeah that makes sense, it's very socially conservative there as well right so they prob would have the knee length ones and poo poo I'll note that there are definitely places with really short skirts (don't think it's common though) so it's not even like "Wow that's an impossible break from reality", so much as it stuck out to me because of the rest of the designs. Speaking of designs, the bold colour choices are really interesting. Kinda EGA styled, I guess? It's a unique look. The music being mostly 10 second loops doesnt usually bother me but MAN there are some songs where it grates. Sharkitten posted:Sou alone is such a great character Sou is my favorite version of the Togami/Nagito/Kokichi 'slimeball that works to obstruct you' type because everything he does totally makes sense from a reasonable human being that is just trying to, you know, not die. Compared to the DR characters of that archetype who are completely moronic and self destructive and would end up getting themselves killed. Though that does work for Nagito. I suspect the game is going to punish me for (2-2) choosing Sou over Kanna because yeah, Kanna is a little kid, but Sou is just so fun to have around. Acerbatus fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Jun 27, 2021 |
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Jun 27, 2021 00:12
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but choosing Sou over Kanna make you lose out on the best scene with the best music of the game
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Jun 27, 2021 03:44
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Tired Moritz posted:but choosing Sou over Kanna make you lose out on the best scene with the best music of the game It will be very hard to top Sou growing increasingly bewildered at Sara asking him inane details about his room. Sara's a really interesting protagonist compared to like, Naegi too imo. The way she doesn't admit it but is deep down willing to screw everyone over to survive. Sometimes without even meaning to, like with accidentally getting Ranmaru to kill people to escape with her. Acerbatus fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jun 27, 2021 |
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Jun 27, 2021 05:13
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One thing I really liked about YTTD is how there actually is a short unique ending for siding with Nao I expected that to just be a game over or not let me.
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Jun 27, 2021 06:02
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I get why, but I was admittedly still a bit miffed that (2-2) Sou over Kanna is being set up as the canonically "wrong" choice, what with it (3-1B) having an extra major character death and all... especially since the game treats it as "oh I see, you made the Logical And Cold-Hearted Decision to sacrifice Kanna solely because Sou could be more useful" when that wasn't my reasoning for it at all! (oh and to keep this post from just being complaining, I'll say that all the unique dialogue for (3-1A) trying to name Midori after other characters was a cool detail, particularly how (3-1B) the seemingly disproportionate reaction to "Meister" turned out to be foreshadowing after all)
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Jun 27, 2021 06:27
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I am becoming increasingly convinced our Sara is a doll and the human Sara is a total monster. Do we ever see her bleed outside of a hallucination of Joe attacking her when she punches a mirror?Nep-Nep posted:One thing I really liked about YTTD is how there actually is a short unique ending for siding with Nao I expected that to just be a game over or not let me. It's cute how Nao took the moment to propose to Sara. If that sounds like sarcasm let me know, because I'm not sure yet. I was hoping it'd be a bit longer and shed a little light on things like YTTS but I guess that'd be too spoiler-y or something Acerbatus fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Jun 27, 2021 |
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Jun 27, 2021 18:28
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Acerbatus posted:I am becoming increasingly convinced our Sara is a doll and the human Sara is a total monster. Do we ever see her bleed outside of a hallucination of Joe attacking her when she punches a mirror? In gameovers, we do; specifically during the attractions, and failing to grab the ID card from Maple. Little trivia about the end of 2-2: Originally, it was possible to vote for Keiji in the final vote, forcing a tie between Kanna and Sou. This would result in a tie breaker vote, in which only Sara and Nao, as the only two who didn't vote for Kanna or Sou, would take part. As Nao had two votes, not only would this outcome not save her, it also forced her to decide whether Kanna or Sou should be killed.
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Jun 27, 2021 22:12
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https://twitter.com/SpikeChunsoft_e/status/1409663302783750152 https://twitter.com/treylar/status/1409673581848453120 well well
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Jun 29, 2021 01:57
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I should sit down and play Ai one of these days. Kinda got distracted a few hours in and never went back to it.
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Jun 29, 2021 02:19
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Same, I should probably get back to it. I'm a bit hesitant though, Uchikoshi's wild rides are always fun in a twisty way, but I don't think he's got the writing chops to really make an excellent game.
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Jun 29, 2021 02:42
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Ai was a lot better than the previous games of his I've played
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Jun 29, 2021 02:53
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I loved ai, it was a neat concept
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Jun 29, 2021 02:57
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I couldn't stick with AI, went for many hours, but was still in the first 'file', I'm guessing, with nothing intriguing going on and not a single likeable character in sight. The fact that it required you to actively 'play' it, as opposed to just clicking like in a proper VN didn't help.
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Jun 29, 2021 12:16
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Umineko 5 early(?) speculation (just got to the first twilight) I'm going to stop doing the big effortposts because the game just loves messing with my theories. On the one hand, comatose meta-Beatrice is clearly a different entity in some sense from the Golden Witch, but on the other hand the latter is at least confirmed as a shared cognitive construct. Swings and roundabouts. We're told even if two people see Beatrice we can't be sure she exists because they might be sharing the same conspiracy/delusion, but flip that around = if two people who aren't collaborating see something we can be reasonably sure that it's real in some sense. Which means Beatrice 3 was physically in the mansion in Part 2, because Natsuhi and Kyrie see her at the same time. - Speaking of which, Erika is terrible, and amazing. I love how at the same time as the story is telling you repeatedly to stop thinking about the minutiae of the murders and actually try to understand the characters Ryukishi throws in a character who's the literal embodiment of obsessing exclusively about the perfect mystery and doesn't give a poo poo about actual people. I love how she's written like a fanfic self-insert - she's exempt from all suspicion, everyone instantly loves her, she can literally bend reality to make everyone listen to her even when they have no logical reason to, she effortlessly solves a decades-old puzzle for shits and giggles etc. I love the setup of one witch inserting a detective vs another witch making Natsuhi paint herself as prime suspect. I do not love Erika calling herself an "intellectual rapist" but whatever, maybe it works better in Japanese. - Something weird is definitely going on with Natsuhi's would-be adopted son dying via cliff at right about the same time Rosa would be seeing Beatrice 2 dying via cliff, even though we're told Rosa isn't on the island. Kinzo reacts to the news as if it's Beatrice who died. We're getting lots of hints that Natsuhi's memory is particularly untrustworthy. And the red text from Part 3 is "It's definitely dead!" which struck me as weird phrasing even at the time. wtf is going on - also holy poo poo Krauss is so dumb, it's making me rethink my Part 4 theory purely because I can't see him orchestrating his way out of a paper bag though I suppose it's plausible this was a kamikaze attempt to take the heat off Natsuhi... though in that case why would he kill Jessica? Along those lines, Eva's reaction to George's death makes me even more sure she didn't kill him in Part 3. Gato fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Jun 30, 2021 |
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Jun 30, 2021 21:56
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Doki doki literature club 2.0 How much more 2.0 is it, really
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Jun 30, 2021 22:31
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Maybe Natsuki actually has content now
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Jun 30, 2021 22:49
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Gato posted:Umineko 5 early(?) speculation (just got to the first twilight)
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Jun 30, 2021 23:16
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Gato posted:Umineko 5 early(?) speculation (just got to the first twilight) 
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Jun 30, 2021 23:21
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https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1410387750059130885?s=20 AI Sequel confirmed
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Jul 1, 2021 01:07
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Gato posted:whatever, maybe it works better in Japanese. No other comments I wish to make at this time, but that's straight from the Japanese, to the point where it's the name of their image song.
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Jul 1, 2021 01:15
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Mix. posted:https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1410387750059130885?s=20 Mizuki is back and she's had enough
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Jul 1, 2021 01:16
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This is the best possible outcome a sequel to AI could have been I am loving hyped
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Jul 1, 2021 01:20
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It's gonna be Mizuki + Aiba which could be a different dynamic. Neat. Is Uchikoshi confirmed to still be the writer?
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Jul 1, 2021 01:21
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gerfrf3qo9I
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Jul 1, 2021 01:27
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Sharkitten posted:This is the best possible outcome a sequel to AI could have been 
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Jul 1, 2021 01:32
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Holy poo poo hell yes.
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Jul 1, 2021 01:40
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Irony Be My Shield posted:It's gonna be Mizuki + Aiba which could be a different dynamic. Neat. Yep! https://twitter.com/stealth40k/status/1410396147051597828?s=21
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Jul 1, 2021 02:51
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