Clephas Guide to a fun untranslated chuunige life
Entry posted by Clephas
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For the hell of it, I decided to make up a 'suggested playlist' for people who like/are interested in chuunige who have just begun to play untranslated VNs.
There are two variations on this guide. One is a 'test the waters, gradually take a dip, then dive into the depths' guide. The other is a 'Spartan Guide', which starts out with medium difficulty VNs and moves into harder and harder ones at the top tiers. Each VN list will have four tiers, based on a combination of my estimation of difficulty in reading.
For those unfamiliar with the term 'chuunige', some examples of chuunige that are translated are Fate/Stay Night, Tsukihime, Sorcery Jokers, and Tokyo Babel. I believe you can get the drift from those four examples, lol.
Soft Landing
Tier 1 suggestions (difficulty ranges from a 4-7 on a scale of 10)- Tiny Dungeon series, Draculius, Hyper→Highspeed→Genius (main path only), Ryuukishi Bloody Saga, ExE
Tier 2 suggestions (difficulty ranges from a 5-7.5 on a scale of 10)- Bloody Rondo, Shinigami no Testament, Gensou no Idea, Sinclient, Innocent Bullet. Yurikago yori Tenshi Made
Tier 3 Suggestions (note: VNs on this list range in difficulty from 6-8 on a scale of 10)- Evolimit, Bullet Butlers, Hello, Lady, Izuna Zanshinken, Devils Devel concept
Tier 4 Suggestions (note: VNs on this list range from 6-10 on a scale of 10)- Jingai Makyou, Soukou Akki Muramasa, Silverio Vendetta, Zero Infinity, Vermilion Bind of Blood, Tokyo Necro, Bradyon Veda
Spartan
Tier 1 Suggestions- Evolimit, Yurikago Yori Tenshi Made, Izuna Zanshinken(starts at the high end of 'soft landing' tier 2 up through the middle of tier 3)
Tier 2 Suggestions- Hello, Lady, Bullet Butlers, Devils Devel Concept
Tier 3 Suggestions- Vermilion Bind of Blood, Jingai Makyou
Tier 4 Suggestions- Silverio Vendetta, Zero Infinity, Tokyo Necro, Muramasa, Bradyon Veda
Some Last thoughts
Understand, I know people who are just fine with conversational Japanese and even a number of native speakers who can't handle Bradyon Veda or Muramasa. I honestly suggest you leave those two to last, no matter what. Bullet Butlers is slightly harder than Evolimit due to fantasy terminology. Vermilion is the easiest of the Tier 4 from 'soft landing'. I honestly suggest that anyone just beginning with this list do ExE or Draculius first, because if you can't understand what is going on in either of those even giving yourself time to do so, then you won't be able to play anything else on the list.
Suggestions
Toss aside stupid pride when playing chuunige and use a text hooker and kanji parsing engine (Mecab or jparser in TA will do fine). Chuunige often use kanji in ways almost unique to the individual writer or that are so archaic that even a native speaker won't grasp them immediately. This is a bad habit of chuunige writers in general. Some writers even revive kanji that have been out of common use since the middle of the twentieth century.
Don't feel like you are a traitor for looking up verbs or nouns you haven't encountered before. Almost all chuunige writers use 'literary Japanese', which is almost never seen in anime or manga. Literary Japanese, just like literary English, still uses terms that went out of use in the verbal part of the language decades or even centuries ago. Still, the verbs and nouns themselves are most likely in the dict on your parser, so it should be easy to look up their meanings.
- Dreamysyu, Kenshin_sama and fun2novel
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