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Showing content with the highest reputation on 04/21/17 in all areas

  1. Man, I am already cringing . Some of you recently gave me permission to post about my projects more often, so I am going to do it. I will do everything I can to write quality content rather than just going me me me. As advised, I have posted a blog entry on how to handle perspective shifts in VNs, using The Last Birdling as an example: I want to use this chance to ask if anyone got examples of VNs that handle perspective shifts in unique ways (visual or word wise)? Many VNs are written in first person, which can make readers stumble during viewpoint changes. I know in An Octave Higher, the game shows the new POV character standing alone on a black background first. Mind sending me some more examples? I want to use this opportunity to say The Last Birdling has been approved for publication on Steam as of a few hours ago. Really thankful for the votes guys. Thank you so much !
    3 points
  2. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39642992 HOLY FUCKING SHIT. P.S: I hope this means research into the Alcubierre Drive is viable. Wikipedia:
    3 points
  3. To put it simply... in about 70% of the story narration I've read in Japanese, there is no distinction made between first and third person. A lot of this seems to be because the philosophies that drove the development of our linguistic bases are distinct and come from two differing vectors (incidentally, the biggest reason why experienced tls will often say 'Japanese doesn't translate into English') that don't always intersect (think of the languages as two formless blobs that are attached at some points but not at others). Generally, when they teach you Japanese, the deliberately do so in a first-person manner, because that is how one converses with others. However, in Japanese narration and story-writing, the language can be taken as being third or first-person most of the time, and there might be only a single sentence in an entire scene or chapter that defines which it is (meaning that there are times when you are required to grasp the scene as a whole to understand which form it is taking). Ironically, the times when it is most likely to take on a distinct first-person perspective are when the 'alternate perspectives' come into play, since many writers deliberately alter their styles subtly to give an impression of really looking through another person's eyes. Edit: At least part of the basis for my statement lies in the fact that I've come across scenes in the past where statements that seemed to be in first person were also mixed up with clearly third-person wording. At the time, I thought this was some kind of mistake (this was fairly early on), but as I read on, I realized that it was just a part of the style. While a writer might choose to define an entire scene as first-person, he might switch back between the first and third person repeatedly in a single scene, making it confusing if you are still translating Japanese into English in your head while reading. Edit2: Perhaps the only Japanese VN I've ever run across done almost entirely in third-person is Noraneko Heart.
    2 points
  4. Remember11 is INCREDIBLE about this. It basically takes place in two different settings at once, and there are two protagonists- the driving force of the story being that THEY KEEP SWITCHING BODIES. Essentially it's a huge perspective shift, and even besides that the game incorporates two routes- one for each protagonist. Let's say that you did something you obviously shouldn't have as Satoru in Satoru's body, and died on the third day. If you start to play the Kokoro route right after, you die on the third day without warning when you shift perspectives- because Satoru died in that body on the third day! Definitely play R11 if you want to read a VN about shifts in perspective. Ever17, also of the Infinity series, plays with perspective as well. Two routes are from one perspective while two of them are from another perspective. I also agree that The House In Fata Morgana frames its story beautifully, but it isn't necessarily a perspective shift per se. Check it out anyway, 999 employs perspective in a fucking LEGENDARY way but I can't explain more.
    2 points
  5. I've been friendly with the Shin Megami Tensei series for over twenty years now, since the release of the incredibly crappy localization of the original Persona on the ps1 (believe me, it is one of the worst localizations of all time). That said, I saw the series as just a darker than normal jrpg series... until I played SMT: Nocturne for the PS2. Nocturne is frequently referred to, both seriously and derisively, as 'Pokemon with demons and a cohesive story'. Seriously. While the Persona series has some of the same atmosphere (collect all the Personas! lol), it is Nocturne that introduced me to the extreme difference between the series and the common ruck of jrpgs out there (which were almost universally swords and sorcery at the time). I was blown away when, in the first half hour of the game, the world is destroyed, turned inside-out, and the protagonist gets a centipede-like bug planted in his eye, giving him demonic powers. To say the least, this was an... unusual turn of events in my experience. The game wasn't about saving the world... it was about determining what came afterward... and everyone in that world wanted you to jump on their bandwagon. The game also introduced me to the staple scenario of the series... ****WARNING, the following is offensive to some of the more sensitive religious types out there**** To say the least, I was shocked. I mean, as I dug deeper into the optional dungeon (which is how you access the true ending), I was forced to a realization of just where things were going... and it was more than a bit of a shock to the system. The game itself was enjoyable, and it was the very first game I literally leveled up to the max... and still had trouble with the final boss (lol). It also introduced me to the harsher battle mechanics of the main series, which was the main reason why the 'in-crowd' tended to refer to the Persona series as 'Kiddy-Tensei', both for the less mature themes and the more brutal difficulty levels. The next two shocks to my system were Persona 3 and Digital Devil Saga... Persona 3 hit me just as I began to take an interest in VNs on the periphery of my vision, so it is no surprise, in retrospect, that I enjoyed it so much. However, it is Digital Devil Saga which, in my eyes, still represents the best qualities of both sides of the SMT series. It had the high difficulty levels of the main-series games, along with a story that still, even after I just finished P5, leaves every other game in the series in the dust. It was dark, interesting, and brutal in the extreme. Persona 4 was kind of a letdown after that high... though it was still good. To be blunt, when the original version of P4 came out, my basic standard for SMT was DDS, period. P3 was, to my mind, an interesting game in its own right but inferior in comparison, despite its social links. The somewhat goofy nature of some of the characters (the party members) only emphasized that attitude on my part. Persona is the only SMT sub-series that tends to make me feel like I'm playing a 'normal' jrpg, albeit one on a tight schedule. Understand, it is all relative, in the end. Last but not least, we come to my most recent experience (SMT IV was something of a dud in comparison to Nocturne, so I'm ignoring it), Persona 5. Persona 5 embodies both the best and the worst of the last three Persona games. It allows you to form deep personal bonds with various interesting characters (ironically, the non-party ones are much more interesting than the ones you fight with, for the most part), and it also manages to combine imagery of rebellion and imprisonment with deep themes of self-determination and personal justice. In addition... it shows rather blatantly the worst aspects of the Japanese legal system (for those who played the game... yes, Japan's police and judicial system really can be that messed up, if you get on its bad side). Japan is a country where almost all convictions come from confessions and plea deals... that should tell you a lot about what it is like behind the scenes. Not to mention that it is a country where it is extremely hard to argue self-defense (if you give someone a defensive wound, you can be sued), insanity defenses earn you permanent social stigmatization, and even a single smear on one's record can lead to a permanent inability to get any job that pays above minimum wage outside of day labor. As a game, it makes some improvements on the Persona formula as defined by Persona 3... in particular, the benefits of a social link are more clearly defined and useful in the game. The Tower Confidant, especially, has an ability you'll be extremely happy to have when hunting rare personas. Story-wise, it is at its strongest near the end. It is sadly predictable throughout much of its length, in comparison to 3 and 4, and the last boss was not that hard to predict given the tendencies of the series. That said, I honestly felt a much larger emotional connection to even the most annoying characters (all of whom were party members, incidentally... which is probably the worst aspect of the Persona series) than I did in 3 and 4. I played the game without using walkthroughs, and as a result it consumed ninety hours of my time to finish and I missed finishing three of the Confidants. However, I find myself feeling rather satisfied, over all. The way the last part is done, however, gives me definite feelings they'll probably do an FES-style sequel. They simply left too many openings for it, and, while the big bad dude is no longer around, it isn't like the SMT universe is the kind of place for pure happily-ever-afters...lol
    1 point
  6. Some VNs use perspective change really effectively to enhance the experience, even when using the first-person (though the distinction between first-person and third-person in Japanese is far less distinct than it is in English). Light and Akatsuki Works, in particular, tend to use this to give vital perspectives at key moments of the story. However, some games spend too much time in alternate perspectives (Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart), and the results can be... unpleasant.
    1 point
  7. This reminds me of Fata Morgana. If I recall correctly, it handled perspective shifts in a similar way.
    1 point
  8. Jade

    Fate/Grand Order

    BB is Cute, BB! Welfare is BB!
    1 point
  9. I'd say Clannad is a good game when you start VNs, and it's by key so it is obviously overrated. Actually, this was my first VN, and i enjoyed it back then, it wasn't bad, just a little boring here and there. Comedy with sunohara was nice, as well as Kotomi, fuuko and Kyou. /!\ RANT MODE ON /!\ I never understood why so much people liked tomoyo back then, and i don't even remember the name of the girl with the "delinquant" thing. And why did they pick nagisa as a main heroine , THAT was a shame imo. /!\ RANT MODE OFF /!\ In the end, it's not a bad game, but i prefer little busters over it, while LB had problems (heroine routes were trash), the common route / mood of the game was great. As for the next key game, Summers pocket might be good, Nijima yuu is the writer.
    1 point
  10. Soulless Watcher

    Persona

    I'm a P4G fanboy so of course I will recommend playing P4G, but by distancing myself from my fanboyism I would probably say just don't bother with the series. If you picked up P4G and didn't get absorbed enough to finish playing it, the persona series is probably just not for you. Otherwise the game-play is incredibly similar, but each is a self contained story with pretty much zero reference to each other so it doesn't really matter.
    1 point
  11. Currently watching Haikyuu!! I usually don't watch sports anime, but I still enjoy them. Haikyuu!! is something else though. It's absolutely amazing. Everything is done so well and it's an emotional roller coaster for me. It's not overly predictable, and even if I did know what was going to happen next I think with this show it's the how you get there that matters not so much where you really end up. It's also really motivational for me since I feel like I was in a slump. Couldn't be better. Basically it's a great show, I see why it's one of (if not THE) top sports show.
    1 point
  12. Sorry I've fallen off the radar for the past week, despite facilitating this month. All I can say is, it's been a busy past week for me. I'm currently in the middle of Rimu's route (which presumably means I'm close to my first ending, since I understand Rimu and Yayoi have pretty short routes). I liked the common route, but the transition to Rimu's route felt pretty jarring, and I'm not really feeling the drama that's building up right now. Looking forward more to Yayoi's route, which I plan to do next. The standout element for me in this game so far is the cast. I liked most of the main cast at first sight (all but Kanade), and they've all been growing on me ever since (especially Kanade). By the time I finish the game, I suspect I'm going to be looking back fondly on the lot of them and feeling very happy to have met them. But time will tell! I should have a lot of time over this weekend to read, so hopefully I'll be back to say more over the next few days as I start finishing routes.
    1 point
  13. I hate perpective changes when we have a first person character, although only when frequent. The worst case for me was a book series with 12 - gasp! - books and they only started to shift in the middle of the series. Taking it to VNs, Kindred Spirits on the Roof did it perfectly. It was designed to work with its changes, it was there from the beggining, and most characters actually improved the story by having their POV shown. Another great instance is the Infinity series - Ever 17 was the best, even - where all the story was connected to the character's point of view. Umineko (Ryukishi in general) has a terrible shift, as you NEVER know when it will happen, and it seems more lazy than relevant. If you are doing a first person narrator, I really recommend you to stick to it and use it the best you can. Sometimes, not having a character describing its fall (your image) could be better without shifting if the author is good.
    1 point
  14. I checked it out for reference. Firstly in the line just before it, she keeps calling herself a faillen angel rather than just a fallen angel, and there's no actual fail in the Japanese, just fallen. The divine retribution line is お仕置き設けてしまう oshioki moukete shimau which in literal translation is simply "she'll provide me a punishment", and after sanitising for less literal translation most would probably have translated it to no more than "she'll punish me." Now turn that into "pop a can of divine retribution" and see how well it fits with the angelic context of the show, sounds very much like modern English, and yet is completely different from the original without actually missing the nuance... just wow. I'd go so far as to say the translation is a better script than the original Japanese. Masamune-kun ends up sucking dicks by the end. Just when it looks like it's going to turn in a direction you don't like, it just keeps meandering around aimlessly in unexpected directions that don't advance the plot and by the end achieves... nothing. I started out liking it and by the end I was left scratching my head.
    1 point
  15. Molipa

    Fuwanovel Confessions

    I missed this place.
    1 point
  16. Not my research topic so I'm not an expert, but you're right. The negative mass we're talking about here is an "effective negative mass" which is a result of the numerous strange behaviours that exotic states of matter like Bose-Einstein condensates display. Transposing classical concepts like mass to these purely quantum states of matter where even the notion of a substantial, individual particle breaks down would be misleading, it's quite different from what's involved in the speculative "negative mass" in general relativity. But both are still cool. That's why we read sci-fi.
    1 point
  17. Paging @Down because he smurt But I feel like these are different kinds of "negative mass", focusing on negating different properties of regular mass. The one the researchers discovered seems like an exotic property of matter at specific circumstances, while the kind of negative mass you need for the Alcubierre Drive (if memory serves) is the kind that you can only get by warping spacetime in a specific way to create negative density.
    1 point
  18. I've watched or started watching quite a few things lately. Mostly catching up on Winter season. Contains generally light spoilers up to the episode listed or the whole show (not much) if a score is presented instead. Little Witch Academia - EP 5 Gabriel Dropout - EP 4 Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid - EP 10 Youjo Senki - 9/10 ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept. - 9/10 Seitokai Yakuindomo - 9/10 Gi(a)rlish Number - 9/10 Kiss Him Not Me - EP 3 It took me three and a half hours to write this? God, I'm slow.
    1 point
  19. Hey, I want to start of by paraphrasing that my intention is not to mock your hobby or to stir the pot in a niche discussion board, I've come here simply to understand more about visual novels as a medium and why people enjoy them. So I'm a longtime albeit casual anime fan and after watching the White Allbum 2 anime adaptation, decided to check out what these so-called visual novels were. My prejudices of VNs being little more than otaku fap material were rebutted by this anime, and after some googling and Wikipedia-research, I though that VNs sounded quite cool and I might actually enjoy them. I decided to give visual novels a shot. I actually didn't begin my journey with Katawa Shoujo, I thought trying an "original" Japanese visual novel would be more appropriate as it might give a better representation of the medium. I started off with Kanon and soon after that read Fate/stay night and Grisaia no Kajitsu, and was thoroughly disappointed. My main gripe was the writing. It was pretty obvious from the get-go that these stories were written by amateurs, and I found the writing no better than in some of those trashy harem light novels I tried before. The pacing was awful and the plot dragged out way too much. For instance, you don't need rows upon rows of mind-numbing dialogue to flesh out the personality of your characters or have the reader develop a connection with them, that is simply bad writing. Not to mention that the dialogue in these situations often felt forced and unnatural. The VNs I read lacked any sort of literary merit or narrative quality, from start to finish there was no subtext to anything of what I read. Everything was presented to the reader carefully arranged on a platter with little room left for individual interpretation. I felt like your average Hollywood flick or live-action TV series has more depth to it than the stories and their presentation in visual novels. When written text is the center of the medium, lacking any stand-alone narrative quality is a huge problem. I felt like the visuals and music simply encouraged this lackluster writing, but didn't add enough substance compensate of it. When an emotional scene hits, you don't need to use any fancy prose when you can rely on a recycled song and change the facial expression of your sprites, right? These audiovisual characteristics weren't developed well enough in my opinion. It's just some static background images on top of which you throw a sprite with a couple of different poses and facial expressions. Done. It felt like the visual, the audial, and the written parts were developed completely separately from each other with little connection to the overarching story which would incorporate all three, and at the end just mashed together with all departments expecting the other one to do all the hard work to capture the essence of the moment. I realize I've only read very few visual novels, but considering that these seem to be some of the most highly-acclaimed ones out there (at least among the translated ones) and that all three of them exhibited the same flaws, I believe it would be safe to assume these flaws were rampant in the medium as a whole. Again, I don't want to offend anyone with this, these are simply my personal experiences and observations with visual novels and why I didn't find them enjoyable. I ventured to visual novels with a positive attitude, I believed I would find enjoyment in them. I might have looked at things the wrong way or my analysis may simply be completely off the track, which is why I decided to post this here to hear the opinions of more experienced VN enthusiasts, and I'm ready to give visual novels another chance. But from what I've seen so far, I don't know why anyone would find this medium even remotely interesting. If you enjoy reading, why not read books which handle the writing much better and more imaginatively? If you like the tropes or audiovisual characteristics, why not watch anime or read manga which handle those aspects way better? I hope we can have a constructive discussion on the ideas presented here and the nature of visual novels as a medium. Cheers!
    1 point
  20. I have flashbacks
    1 point
  21. Hey, hey. Beside that one, they're great at every other thing. You should buy your VNs you like to support the scene.
    1 point
  22. Our new member, Skeith, has posted an AMAZING walkthrough. Thank you so much for the hard work/time, and for helping out with the Great Walkthrough Quest! +788 XP +346 XP Bonus +100 XP Chain Bonus Oh, man. For those that missed it, Down just Down'd me with his sword of eternal justice. Then, to make matters worse, the post above (which I quoted just now) made me laugh out loud and further convince the people in the library around me that I'm crazy. Thanks a lot, Down. (lol, really, thanks!) +723 XP +345 XP Bonus
    1 point
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