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Irony Be My Shield posted:Yeah my reaction to the true ending was definitely more "huh?" than anything else. Same, I was just sort of like "okay, I guess?" Common route was very good though, and some of the side routes were also good/fun.
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Apr 20, 2023 00:39
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Re: Chaos;Child:The perspective change was such a good move, where she's oblivious, but the reader sees what's going on, and every bit of information we learn has weight, because of all the implications! That she doesn't know, and therefore won't be spelling out for us, grinding the scene to a halt each time. AND she doesn't know the role she's personally played in all of this, but what if she will? Will that be good? I dunno, maybe it's nothing special, but to me it felt like next level storytelling, compared to the normal route (and the entirety of Head, now that I've read it)
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Apr 20, 2023 09:23
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I just stopped by this thread for the first time last night, saw this tweet about this game that I never heard before, and picked it up on a whim. Played 2 and half hours so far and I'm loving this a lot more than I thought I would! I'm really digging everything so far, the art, characters, and writing all seem fun. I love the music a lot as well. I hope it stays being solid as it goes further in the plot (both in this first episode and in however many other eps there are for this).
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Apr 20, 2023 12:20
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I helped translate a VN for Dreamcast and there’s a patch out now, if anyone here likes that sort of thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB6oLyMEk94
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Jun 15, 2023 10:43
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Epoxy Bulletin posted:I helped translate a VN for Dreamcast and there’s a patch out now, if anyone here likes that sort of thing. that's awesome, congratulations
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Jun 15, 2023 14:34
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Epoxy Bulletin posted:I helped translate a VN for Dreamcast and there’s a patch out now, if anyone here likes that sort of thing. This is cool, thanks for all of your hard work!
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Jun 15, 2023 14:41
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Epoxy Bulletin posted:I helped translate a VN for Dreamcast and there’s a patch out now, if anyone here likes that sort of thing. I think that's neat so I told the romhack/fan translation thread about it.
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Jun 15, 2023 21:23
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I shoulda knowed there was a little goon magic in there! EDIT - The "magic" also includes me replying in the wrong thread, apparently.
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Jun 15, 2023 22:58
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Thanks! I estimate I translated about a third of the game text myself, but between pitching in on rounds of accuracy checks, revisions, and polish, my grubby, goony little fingers have probably touched closer to 80-90%, to varying extents. 
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Jun 16, 2023 00:36
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been playing a few different vns kinda slowly. biggest one is jinguji saburo: unfinished report, which so far is a mix of busting weed dealers, investigating mysterious corporate assassinations, and also busting corporate malpractice for polluting nature and disrupting rural communities while everyone laments rising xenophobia in japan resulting in violent mistreatment towards foreigners
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Aug 23, 2023 17:40
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I finished umineko quite a long time ago but it didn't really resonate with me like it did with a lot of people. Maybe i'm just dumb and maybe i just don't really care so much for mystery stories, but I really hate not ever knowing what actually really happened and if magic is real or not. Like I said, i'm probably just dumb and don't get it or didn't pick up on it and maybe the whole point is that you don't know, but i hate that poo poo and i don't like being repeatedly shown things that are not actually happening. I guess just feels like abuse of the unreliable narrator trope. Feel free to go off on me for being a dumb dumb or explain things though if you want. The music was dope though.
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Aug 25, 2023 23:31
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i don't think you're dumb. it's pretty wild. as i understand it (FULL rear end ENTIRE SPOILERS PLAY THE GAME OR READ THE LP) there definitely is a "real" set of events which happened (notice how this already sounds ridiculous to say when talking about a fictional story): eva solves the riddle of the treasure while battler is killing everyone else, but the island blows up because of the perhaps-understandable suicidal-homicidal impulse of a young servant (way too long pf a story to get into) with only eva surviving, but actually battler survives too with enough TBI that he's basically a different person. because no one knows he survived, an explosion destroyed all evidence, and eva refusing to say what happened (probably out of bitterness that ange is suspicious that she killed or knows who killed battler when really it was the other way around, and also maybe to spare her happy memories of her brother, more on which in my conclusion), no one knows what really happened on the island. then the next level: the stories which are "actual" published books by a mysterious author who is actually the person caring for "battler" and building on his fragmented memories, telling detailed "possible" explanations of what happened, except they involve witches and magic and furniture and all. then theres the third level where characters which are allegorical to the dilemma of the readers and ange struggle to determine the "truth" of what happened, driven by many different contradictory impulses and lines of thought, including the desire to think it's possible that people who have died are happy, somewhere, basically to remember them kindly, to have a wish that there could be a redemption of the pain they suffered and caused. oh, i think also at some point ange actually does find "Beatrice's" diary on the island, before she finds battler where hes been partially recovering and tries to free them both from the metaphorical ghosts haunting them. in a mystery novel, you're challenged to imagine an explanation of the crime which doesn't require "magic," but maybe sometimes it's a deserved kindness not to tear away that illusion. i liked it! i never really tried to figure it out by myself, i just read the LP like a book. i think it makes quite a meal out of its concept.
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Aug 26, 2023 00:21
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Umineko is, to me, like a work of literature. It’s doing and saying a lot on multiple levels, fun to study, and I don’t personally like it. I don’t regret reading it, I enjoyed my time with it, I just don’t like it.
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Aug 26, 2023 00:42
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Doc Hawkins posted:i don't think you're dumb. it's pretty wild. I understand why you did, but it's kinda funny summarizing the technical main character of the series as "a story way too long to get in to" Also maybe a typo on your end, but Battler didnt kill anybody
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Aug 26, 2023 00:56
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Meowywitch posted:Also maybe a typo on your end, but Battler didnt kill anybody really?!  alright then huge grain of salt on everything else i said. it wasn't a typo, i must have misunderstood that part.
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Aug 26, 2023 01:17
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I guess it's theoretically up to interpretation
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Aug 26, 2023 01:20
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Doc Hawkins posted:really?! yeah, battler being a killer is just a mean trick used for the logic puzzle murder mystery in episode 8. If there IS a ‘true’ version of events, it’s probably closest to the EP7 tea party where the family winds up killing each other despite Beatrice surrendering… but, of course, the ‘truth’ ultimately doesn’t matter much in the end.
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Aug 26, 2023 01:33
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I guess that's my issue with it then. I definitely prefer to have a definitive answer like Higurashi does. But I suppose that's antithetical to the point of the work. I don't thing it's a bad game though just not for me.
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Aug 26, 2023 03:06
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There is a definitive answer, and it's in the manga for people that didn't figure it out in the game (where it is very obtuse and obscured)
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Aug 26, 2023 03:16
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I think the ep7 tea party is mostly what Eva wrote in her diary which Ange saw (the clips you see from it all seem like part of that narrative). Which isn't definitive proof of anything (Ange would have much rather it was a lie Eva constructed to cover up her own crime) but I do think given Eva's behaviour and how she's framed by the story it's likely to be substantively true. I also personally read episode 4 as Battler's confused half remembered take on what happened given it has a lot of obvious similarities to ep7 tea party. That said some aspects like Kyrie's true motives are still left up to interpretation even if you assume Eva was telling the truth in her diary. The manga does go into way more detail on "Beatrice"'s motivations and life story but I dont think it gives a definitive answer as to what ended up happening on that day (unless I just haven't read that part).
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Aug 28, 2023 17:12
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^^^ IIRC Bernkastel red texts that the events of the Episode 7 tea party are what really happened, and as mentioned below she doesn't really lie - her thing is more "choosing the truths to tell that will be most painful." The counter to the stuff Bernkastel says isn't "that's bullshit," but instead "that's ignoring many important things about all the characters involved." It basically comes back to all the "without love it can't be seen" stuff, which is just saying "it's important to have empathy and try to understand people." Bernkastel gives the unvarnished account of what happened, but that doesn't tell you the "full story" (while the fictional accounts from Beatrice's diaries and Tohya are fictional, but tell you a lot more about the actual people involved).Barent posted:I guess that's my issue with it then. I definitely prefer to have a definitive answer like Higurashi does. But I suppose that's antithetical to the point of the work. I don't thing it's a bad game though just not for me. (Full Umineko spoilers) Umineko is more about the characters than the events of how everyone died. The various "games" (with the possible exception of the one in Episode 5) all tell you things about the characters, because they're all created with the characters behaving in ways that are true to who they are (so they're basically "things that could have realistically happened"). 5 is an exception because Lambdadelta is running that game and it mentions that she has the "pieces" do some things that they wouldn't normally do. It still has useful information (namely the stuff about Natsuhi's background), but is less reliable than the first 4 episodes. So basically, though the various "games" (as well as stuff in the "meta world" where Battler and Beatrice interact, etc) you learn about the characters. The characters are the core of the story, rather than the narrative (but to the extent that a "real series of events" exists, it's almost certainly the Episode 7 tea party - this includes the events leading to Battler losing his memory, and it also fits with Bernkastel's whole thing of "selectively using the truth in ways that are hurtful" (but also misleading because you don't get the full picture - from just the Episode 7 tea party alone, you wouldn't learn much about the various characters and their motivations, like the fact that most of the Ushiromiya siblings had the capacity to commit the murders). The "core" of the story is the Beatrice character herself. The VN itself is vague about her circumstances, but once you figure out what happened a ton of stuff throughout all the episodes (and particularly 2) makes sense (and the manga basically makes everything explicit). Basically Beatrice is the daughter (and grandaughter thanks to incest) of Kinzo and Kuwadorian Beatrice (who was herself the daughter of Kinzo and Italian Beatrice). She was "assigned male at birth," but was severely injured when Natsuhi dropped her off the cliff, which lead Nanjo/Genji to decide to instead raise her as a girl (due to said heavy physical damage and the results of Nanjo's surgery). Once she reaches puberty, this leads to significant identity issues (IIRC the manga shows this with a scene where she's confused about the other girls having their periods while she doesn't, and not developing the same as them in general). This is where Kanon comes from (and probably why Genji accepts the idea and cooperates with it, since he - correctly - feels partially responsible for this). Sayo/Shanon wanted to try living as a boy. A lot of people mistake the Shanon/Kanon thing as a "multiple personalities" situation, but that's not it - it's just the same person experimenting with different identities, but still being fully aware of what they're doing. This whole situation is also strongly hinted at with Lion in Episode 7 (as how "Beatrice" would have ended up if Natsuhi had accepted her and she hadn't been dropped off the cliff - my interpretation is that she likely would have been a sort of androgynous boy, but there's no clear answer). This is also where all the "furniture" stuff comes from, and Shanon/Kanon talking about "not being permitted to love." The most revealing scenes are the ones in Episode 2 where Beatrice berates Shannon/Kanon - it's basically expressions of self-hatred/self-disgust. Like the stuff with Beatrice mocking Kanon's manliness - it suddenly makes a lot more sense once you realize what's actually going on there! One of the biggest stressors ends up being the George situation, because she (probably correctly IMO) is extremely worried about what will happen if George finds out about her body. Scenes like the one with Shannon and George at the aquarium, where they end up deciding to have different hotel rooms, kind of take on extra significance with this in mind. This is part of why the whole bomb idea is so alluring to her - if everything is erased by the bomb, then Shannon will always be "George's perfect fiance" and Kanon will always be "the boy Jessica has a crush on," etc. Meanwhile, in the "real world," those situations would end up running into major problems due to her body (with George being the biggest issue here - note how much he talks about wanting children). Finding out that she's also a child born of incest and is related to her love interests (after solving the epitaph) is basically the straw that breaks the camel's back, and is probably what causes her to plan the murders in addition to setting up the bomb (as opposed to just committing suicide or something). Since she never actually does the murders (due to Kirie and Rudolph doing it first, after the adults quickly solve the epitaph), we never find out if that would have happened (IMO she probably wouldn't have been able to go through with it - actually directly doing violence to other people like that is a lot different from writing/daydreaming about it). Also you're not dumb for not understanding it - I didn't either when I first played, and I was just lucky enough to stumble across someone else's commentary that made everything click into place on a reread. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 19:55
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RE: Very very postgame Umineko spoiler stuff: I don't think Sayo Yasuda would have ever have killed any of her family members, she doesn't seem to actually have the heart (or "evil", if you will) to do it. Which is fair, fantasizing and writing stories is a far safer way to channel your self-hatred and generalized hatred of your mostly awful family
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Aug 29, 2023 00:36
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Umineko is weird because the payoff comes when you comes when you "solve" it and put all the pieces, not when you finish reading. The majority of people will not immediately get it after just reading, and indeed may never get it at all if they don't put in significant further effort. I certainly did not until I had gone away, discussed it a lot and thought about it myself for a while. It's a ridiculous way to construct a story (as R07 is fully aware and discusses in Our Confession) but it's part of what makes Umineko truly unique in my view.Ytlaya posted:^^^ IIRC Bernkastel red texts that the events of the Episode 7 tea party are what really happened, and as mentioned below she doesn't really lie - her thing is more "choosing the truths to tell that will be most painful." The counter to the stuff Bernkastel says isn't "that's bullshit," but instead "that's ignoring many important things about all the characters involved." It basically comes back to all the "without love it can't be seen" stuff, which is just saying "it's important to have empathy and try to understand people." Bernkastel gives the unvarnished account of what happened, but that doesn't tell you the "full story" (while the fictional accounts from Beatrice's diaries and Tohya are fictional, but tell you a lot more about the actual people involved). Meowywitch posted:RE: Very very postgame Umineko spoiler stuff:
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Aug 29, 2023 01:49
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Ytlaya posted:(Full Umineko spoilers) To pick on Episode 1 as an example: - The mechanics of the rest of the story basically requires that in Ep 1, Eva and Hideyoshi are conspirators for the initial round of planned murders, coverup, and lying convincingly directly to the kids whose parents they've just killed. There's not really a lot of later characterization to support that, it seems much more like a Kyrie/Rudolf personality kind of thing. When we see murdery Eva in Ep 3, she's initially impulsive, conflicted, and generally a mess. (Hideyoshi is more in-character, if you take his Ep 3 behavior as him being fully aware of Eva killing instead of him choosing to have faith in his wife despite the evidence.) - Then the plan to deal with Kanon/Shannon duality is Hideyoshi telling everyone "Shannon's body is just around this corner out of sight. Nobody else come over and look at it, it's too horrible". That makes sense for Sayo, who is fine if they get caught, but it doesn't make sense for cold-blooded, murder-for-money Eva & Hideyoshi, who very much don't want to be found out. - Finally, Eva & Hideyoshi go off and isolate themselves, despite the murder conspiracy (whose motives they presumably don't understand) still being around. They leave George behind with the other murderers though
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Aug 29, 2023 05:12
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Foxfire_ posted:I think one of the weaknesses in the story is that this isn't that true (or at least not well supported) for a lot of the less central characters and early plots. A bunch of the mystery stuff needs people to be acting in ways that are physically possible, but they never really do otherwise. Isn't it the case that in most of the scenarios Sayo lies and says they're doing a pretend murder mystery to welcome Battler back to the island?
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Aug 29, 2023 05:46
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Meowywitch posted:Isn't it the case that in most of the scenarios
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Aug 29, 2023 06:07
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Everything we see is still murder mystery fiction, a genre that requires its characters to act like absolute psychos in order to work. Umineko may use that narrative framework to say something about its characters, but everyone is still subject to the framework and Umineko is equally a commentary on the genre as it is a character study. If some person is theoretically capable of an act, then the narrator is free to depict the act as being carried out with complete conviction, for maximum narrative convenience.
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Aug 29, 2023 08:07
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Every act is a part or the sum of Tohya/Battler's memories, the confession bottles, Ange's memories, Eva's diary/memories, the memories of the people who knew the families and the people who read the theories. Trying to say that any character has a consistant characterization between acts feels a bit fruitless since even Act 8 tries to make scum of the earth Kinzo less of a monster because someone out in the world remembers him giving candy to a child once upon a time. It's partly why when people say the characters are weak in Umineko I get a little frustrated because the characters have so much potential for good and evil and I love that.  Irony Be My Shield posted:Yeah I think that's a very reasonable interpretation, although Bernkastel's attempt to red text is interrupted in episode 7 and she walks back to it being "one possibility" in episode 8. Thematically it makes sense we can't 100% know the real truth of what happened because Eva very deliberately buried it. I see it as Eva's truth, that for whatever reason she may have needed to lie about the situation to protect someone, herself, George or Hideyoshi's reputations, from the truth even if it could drat Ange or she just is unaware of all of the circumstances. She may have shot Natsuhi first and made the truth in her mind to be an accident. It also comes down to how much of Sayo's truth is coming from Eva out to the story or from Tohya/Battler to me because an Eva that knows George is in love with Sayo with all that entails is a different situation than just 'he was in love with a common servant named Shannon'. It's not so simple as to say that there is one reason or answer or that it's all right or wrong, it's a truth of some kind but how it's understood is complex. I also consider that the red truth is still equally valid for each act it's used in despite the fact they could contradict each other between acts. It's always used in context of the game played. Weird BIAS fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Aug 29, 2023 |
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Aug 29, 2023 08:12
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The real cause of death is heavy metal exposure. An unnaturally large amount of heavy metals were present on the island, with smaller exposures resulting in erratic behavior and larger amounts proving fatal. The symptoms displayed are consistent with tetraethyllead exposure. Pictured: Kinzo, a man who looked normal, burst out in insane fury, and apparently was the type of guy who would randomly jump out windows.  More than that, TEL has a very specific symptom which was present on the island. It causes hallucinations. And what kind? Well, because of what the workers were seeing, the factory that made it got nicknamed the house of butterflies. Ryukishi did it again, this was another actually-a-medical-mystery story like Higurashi, just with a real poison instead of a conveniently fictional parasite. But if you have to blame someone, they had to get lead exposure somehow, so it's that one minor guy with a portrait who shows up early on, seems unimportant, but turns out to be the true killer. Boat Captain Kawabata  (The rest of the wacky stuff in the story, like there being secret child-raping tunnels under the mansion or fake deaths from crisis actors is all speculation from the in-universe q-anon chan board 'witch hunter', and can be safely disregarded) Tunicate fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Aug 29, 2023 |
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Aug 29, 2023 15:49
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Foxfire_ posted:Krauss in Ep 1 is one of the "Half his face was blown apart by a shotgun so you can both 100% identify it's him and 100% know he is not faking dead" ones. Rudolf, Kyrie, Rosa, and Gohda's bodies all have pulped faces so identity isn't certain, but I don't think there's ever much thrown towards "These are just convincing mannequins"
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Aug 29, 2023 16:00
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Has anyone in here read ‘even if tempest’ for the switch?
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Aug 29, 2023 16:07
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kinzo could get lead poisoning from all that alchemy, but i don't know who else would have been affected by it
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Aug 29, 2023 16:08
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Genji maybe
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Aug 29, 2023 16:17
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Doc Hawkins posted:kinzo could get lead poisoning from all that alchemy, but i don't know who else would have been affected by it Everyone had provable levels of lead poisoning back then, but also they start the VN cruising around in a small private plane which is using leaded avgas. The killer shows up in the first act hohohoho. But yeah the red text statement early on that there are exactly five servants ruins the intended puzzle for me. Any attempt to weasel or rationalize out of it ends up being so contrived that you can knock out any other part of the story with the same level of bs and the whole thing collapses Tunicate fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Aug 29, 2023 |
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Aug 29, 2023 16:23
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I got about halfway through Even if Tempest before I uninstalled it because it is a visual novel that has the gall, the utter audacity, to crash constantly. You are a $30 application whose only job is to load PNGs, how very dare you. Never had an issue with any other title and my Switch is basically just my VN delivery system now. Besides that, it was alright? The trials were kind of fun. Leans really heavy into misery porn, but I can't say whether or not the writing is good enough to make it work since I only got so far.
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Aug 29, 2023 18:42
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Epoxy Bulletin posted:I helped translate a VN for Dreamcast and there’s a patch out now, if anyone here likes that sort of thing. So glad I saw this, thank you. Works great on RetroDeck and makes me realize Steam Deck is perfect for Dreamcast games. Oh and coincidentally you all released v1.2 the same day I saw this, congrats
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Aug 31, 2023 00:17
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Tunicate posted:But yeah the red text statement early on that there are exactly five servants ruins the intended puzzle for me. Any attempt to weasel or rationalize out of it ends up being so contrived that you can knock out any other part of the story with the same level of bs and the whole thing collapses But you're explicitly told that the red text is deliberately used in misleading ways, and it's still technically true - Shanon and Kanon are separate servants with their own schedules. Basically if you go the route of trying to solve the mystery like a logic puzzle using red text, you're going to get really confused and bewildered at the explanation for what's happening. This is why the story goes out of its way to repeatedly point out why the "seeking the solution through just logic" stuff is bad and won't lead to an accurate understanding (via Erika). The red text can be used to attempt to double-check ideas, but with an understanding that it's often going to be deliberately misleading (it depends on who's using it and what their motivations are). In Beatrice's case, this is because it's used in a context where someone is trying to simultaneously hide and hint at the truth; Beatrice uses these misleading red texts both to mislead, but also in the hope that Battler will figure out the core of the "trick" (which is itself core to Beatrice's identity and circumstances). IMO the writing is partially at fault for readers going the "red text logic puzzle" route (due to all the Battler/Beatrice debates centered around it), and Ryukishi likely deliberately did the Erika stuff in the second part to try and correct this (since there's a gap between releases and he could see where readers were going "off course" and try to correct it).
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Sep 1, 2023 01:27
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I don't think I'm going to finish Robotics;Notes DaSH before Anonymous;Code comes out in a week. I might just save it for after I finish the latter, because I'm not really enjoying it so far.
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Sep 1, 2023 18:33
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DaSH has some good bits, a couple of the character routes and the true ending are great, but maaaaaaan there is so much bullshit packed in that game anyway looking forward to reading to anonymous code every night before bed for the next month or so
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Sep 1, 2023 20:48
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What has the response to Anonymous;Code been like for people who have played it in Japanese? Also was I hallucinating some news from a while back about the company who makes those games closing shop or going bankrupt or something? Is this the last Science Adventure game? Regardless, it's kinda sad that higher-budget VNs don't seem to have a big audience. I feel like there used to be more of them.
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Sep 1, 2023 23:34
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