Clephas' VN home

Isn't it like that with most books though, and most kind of narrative fiction in general? I rarely feel the need to re-read/re-watch books or movies and the more they rely on mysteries and try to surprise you with plot twists, the less appealing they usually become by the second approach (unless you focus on re-reading certain plot points with new knowledge and look for the various details foreshadowing the twists - I think my experience with Grisaia no Kajitsu, which I started reading after watching the anime, was just as interesting if I was going in blind, because I've noticed a lot of details that I would normally ignore but were made meaningful thanks to the fact I knew the rough outline of character routes and endings). It's pretty much unavoidable.

Also, I have so many VNs to read so the lack of replayability is not a thing I would really be sad about. It's actually a positive for me - when I'm done with a VN I can move it to appropriate folder in my Steam library, write a review and can move, highly replayable games ate like 1/3 of my life.

I never seem to have this problem. If I like a game the first time, you can trust that I will replay it again. And again. And again.

For me, it's all about conditions. Even with the best anime I've ever watched, I usually won't retain information about them for very long. When I read or watch anything, I can only retain enough information to argue over it for a year. It takes somewhere between 8 to 10 years for me to forget something entirely. And see, that's the problem I had with re-reading Little Busters. Because the story is still so fresh in my memory from the 2013 anime adaption, I'm having some difficulty re-reading the whole thing from the beginning to get to the EX routes. I did want to learn the differences between the version I read way back and what I'm reading now, but I think I'll just take a pass.

I like to compare this to movies/tv shows/anime, sometimes you just happen to be reminded (through conversations or discussions) about a particular scene which will cause you to go and rewatch it in say an evening as the commitment there is only around a few hours - with tv shows and anime there's the big temptation to fast forward to the interesting scenes on rewatches.

With VNs it's much harder as I find that a majority of plot/interesting scenes seem to stick and other trivial/unimportant/uninteresting scenes fade. I definitely wouldn't want to re-read 20hours of boring stuff just to refresh myself on 2 hours of interesting scenes.

I also seem to find enjoyment in remembering the plot points/awesome scenes of how a VN went vs actually reading it again. The Engrish from Baldr sky - impression sublimes to memories - is actually pretty true as I can still clearly remember my first few VNs quite well.

Around four years is about how long after I find I'm able to comfortably replay VN's. After that long, even the trite portions I probably will experience in a different way to how I remembered.

Besides replaying for interesting scenes and details, one could also replay to enjoy the atmosphere of the VN. That'd be something I'd replay a charage for. There's also catharsis like Clephas mentioned.

Charage's lose a lot on the replay because you can never have that feeling of warm anticipation wondering what will happen next. Unconventional stories might actually gain on the replay, because you aren't disappointed when the story ended up going in different direction. Any story with lots to analyze would be a natural replay target... though those kinds of stories are more common in books than VN's.

At it is I'm barely able to finish all the routes of a VN on the first play (unless required for the true end) . And so, whatever I'm replaying for, I only go through a couple sections, which is far short of the full VN.

Edited January 10, 2018 by Chronopolis