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Epic Works is a pretty unique phenomenon in the EVN scene: an African studio, developing games openly inspired by the Type-Moon visual novels and other classic chuunige. Their first release, Episicava, was something of a glorious trainwreck, launching with multiple technical problems and borderline-unbearable, edgy storytelling replicating most of the worst tropes of the chuuni game subgenre. The follow-ups included an unholy abomination of a nukige known as Analistica Academy, and a clunky and inconsistently written, but occasionally appealing RPG VN The Adventurer’s Tale. None of them proved genuinely impressive, but each showed some forms of progress, particularly in the visual department, which by the time of The Adventurer’s Tale’s release got both appealing and consistent in style and quality. As unhealthy curiosity is one of the driving forces behind my blogging endeavours, I couldn’t stop myself from being attracted by the studio’s second Kickstarter campaign, aimed at creating another chuunige-style VN in the Episicava universe (although with no direct connection to the latter’s main plot). Despite my disappointment with their debut titles, I was very interested whether this new project, Rainbow Dreams, would represent an improvement for the studio and correct the massive issues with tone and writing quality those earlier games suffered from. And despite apparent development issues and heavy delays, resulting in a January 2020 Steam release, I’m happy to say that while not all problems were remedied to an appropriate degree, when it comes to the sheer entertainment factor, Rainbow Dreams is a major step in the right direction. Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

My vision actually sucks! I need glasses as I have astigmatism and a bit of myopia. Yeah, I opened the game again and the font really is kind of blurry. My memory was faulty. Making * Lovers is supposed to run at 1280x720 or lower. Anything higher, and the text gets distorted. You're running windowed mode, right? It looks sharper at that resolution, but still not 100%. I don't know if there's anything you can do about that. Changing text box transparency could help... I don't know. There may be a way to override this by messing with your graphics card's options. Sadly, mine is integrated and the Intel control panel isn't working as it should... Good luck. And in regards to the blinking sprites, yeah, I think they're really cool. I found out that The Most Forbidden Love In The World has some animation too. (At least the 2018 re-release and the MangaGamer translation.)

Most people, even Nitroplus fans, consider Gekkou no Carnevale an acquired taste. I liked it, I liked the themes, and I even liked the fighting. I didn't like two of the four heroines (ironically, I disliked both of the main heroines, while I liked their respective sub-heroines and their endings). Like most Nitroplus games, it has sound problems (for some reason, almost all Nitroplus games have 'gaps' between the loops of their BGMs, and it can be jarring when the music cuts out for a second during an important scenes). The story in general is too much of a 'chapter in an endless saga' type thing with the beginnings mostly ignored. The main antagonist on the wolf side is boring, and the one on the doll side is unnecessarily inscrutable. As such, the game will always remain an acquired taste adored by its fans and disliked by most everyone else. Edit: to be clear about what I mean by the 'endless saga' comment, the fights between the werewolves and the doll-users.

I don't know, they skipped LOT of stuff, even an entire volume, so wouldn't really say it's a good adaptation, but it's not bad either. The reason the LN is more hyped is because it's a first person novel, so you're in Hikigaya's head, and it's awesome because his thoughts are hilarious.

You just don't like its delivery, stories, characters, nor character development. It's time to move on. Me, on the other hand, I absolutely love it and can't get enough of it. There's no poor adaptation, it's just not clicking for you; I've read most of the LNs and the anime is a very good adaptation of them. Not everything works for everyone and unfortunately that's the case here for you. There's something very Gen X about its story and characters, so perhaps that's why it resonates with me more.

And so, I'm done with The Twelve Kingdoms. Well, that was definitely something. Actually, I don't think I've seen many fantasy anime inspired by the East Asian rather than Western culture. I think, so far this anime and Yona of the Dawn are the only ones. Well, the world where it takes place is really interesting. I mean, it's the first time when I see in fiction than children aren't born from a woman's womb, but grow on a tree. Overall, the world-building is rather vast, and the plot is interesting. While some of the characters, including the main protagonist, Youko, may seem a bit off-putting at first, all of them get a chance to develop. Sure, it's a bit overly dramatic, but it fits this type of setting quite well. There are four main arcs, and while there is an overarching story, each arc is more or less standalone. I only wish that they had replaced the fourth and the third arcs, since the ending of the third arc would be the ideal place to finish the anime. Ironically, my suggested order seems to be how it was in the original novel. I don't know why they decided to change the order, but it's seems like there were some plans to continue the anime, so maybe the reason is somehow related to that. Sadly, but it didn't happen. I'd say, it is a good 9/10. I guess, I should give more older fantasy anime a try, there may be some other gems among them. And maybe I should finally watch Shiki since it's by the same original author.

Maybe your eyes are better than mine I mean, I can read it, but I feel like I'm straining my eyes. The problem I have is with the border/shade around the letters. It should be black and crisp/sharp, but somehow it always looks like there was some kind of interpolation/scaling applied to it, even though I'm playing the game in the window mode in its native resolution. The edges are somewhat blurry and the contrast is poor. The rest of the screen (background, sprites, menu text) looks okay. I'll post screenshot once I get back to it. I have a really soft spot for those - a VN gets easy bonus points from me for that

The Recluce Saga, despite being a somewhat niche 'high fantasy' novel series, is perhaps one of the largest and most monolithic such series to have been written in the last forty years. Beginning back in the eighties and spanning more than twenty books now, it is LE Modesitt Jr.'s signature series, the series that propelled him from a somewhat eccentric author of varying science fantasy and science fiction novels and series to one of the quiet dominators of high fantasy as a genre. The Recluce Saga setting is defined by wars, conflicts, and clashes between normal society and the mages of the two forces known as chaos and order. Chaos is energy, change, destruction, and entropy, whereas order is structure, reinforcement, defense, and healing/restoration. It is very easy, if you read the early books, to regard users of chaos as 'evil', and it is true that a disproportionate number of them are evil. Order users find it extremely difficult (painful and sometimes deadly) to be dishonest in any fashion, to kill, and even to touch edged weapons at times. Chaos users fling firebolts, break down the structure of objects, and corrupt/corrode the people and world around them. Chaos users and those who are touched by chaos are natural liars and deceivers, often selfish and ambitious, and they generally can't be trusted at all. However, later books, regarding the foundation of Hamor and the Cyador era (both in the past) show that there are chaos users who escape the fate of those who not only use chaos but let it into their souls. Lorn'alte is a man who has the passion and ambition of a chaos user, combined with the idealism and sense of what is right that one who can also touch order possesses. In a nation built on the use of chaos, he sees what is best about his nation and strives to make it stronger, even as the forces of those whose ambitions are entirely selfish and those driven by irrational fears try to destroy him again and again. Lerial, the second son of the Duke of Cigoerne, has a journey from a somewhat petulant child of a chaos wizard to a mature adult who understands the costs and necessities of protecting the fledgling nation his grandmother formed. Perhaps the greatest gift these two series granted me, as a long-time reader of the series, was transforming white mages from faceless schemers and destroyers to people with cares and woes not so different from the average person, just enhanced by their power. The earlier books primarily focus on events around Recluce and the order users. Recluce is a nation formed by one of the most powerful weather mages (weather magic being born of order) in history and a gray mage who was bound to him. Recluce is a nation born as a refuge of order users, who are often disliked by those in power because their benefits are subtle and their ability to see truth (and the knowledge they don't lie) is well-known to the average person. However, by the time of the first book (Magic of Recluce) Recluce is one of the greatest powers in the world (a defensive-isolationist power but still a power), with steam ships made out of black iron and mage-engineers forging weapons that no chaos mage can stand against. Most of the protagonists of the various arcs of the early series are young men who are idealistic order mages, who don't learn until after many painful trials and tribulations that the world is what it is and what is right is not necessarily what is. This is an issue for many young order mages, apparently, because of their tendency to view what is right as what should be (order mages have a tendency toward rational morality that is somewhat rigid). Moreover, as a result of their journeys through life, they experience suffering on enormous scales, as they must deal with the world's backlash to their attempts to make it better. Many end up unleashing terrible destruction and change upon the world, ironically creating the very chaos they themselves sought to reduce. And that comes to the nature of the Balance. In the world of the Recluce saga, the two forces are always, no matter what, evenly matched. For every iota of order energy in the world, whether bound in objects or free in the world, there will always be an equal amount of chaos present. As Recluce builds itself up, chaos mages become more plentiful and powerful, and it becomes possible for Recluce and artificers in general to make better and more effective weapons from iron and steel, thus also incrementally increasing the amount of free chaos in the world. Most of the protagonists in the Recluce saga are good people at heart, often forced into situations where they have no choice but to kill, destroy, and bring about change in order to make things better for the future. They are people who can see beyond the immediate, who often see generations and centuries into the future, and they possess the inner steel necessary to change things... even as their actual desires are often more humble in origin, to have a family, to be able to work a forge without fear of caprice from the powerful, to see that their female children not be used as chattels, etc. This is a theme throughout most of Modesitt's fantasy, as the basic motivations of his characters are humble while resulting in great change, because of the expanded viewpoint they gain as a result of their journeys through life.