Leaderboard

Continuing with HoshiOri, today I finished Natsuki's route. While "school" part of the route wasn't anything special (decent, but not outstanding), I really enjoyed her after story. It was - as it's standard with this VN - "just" a series of SoL scenes, but somehow they really clicked with me. Also, I think this was the first route that featured prominent additional "story" content as replacement for skipped h-scenes. (The console edition (+17) goes for the "off screen sex" approach, but it doesn't pretend that sex didn't happen - quite the opposite actually, it just doesn't show the act itself) In Sora's and Marika's case those were mostly afterglow/pillow talk scenes, but with Natsuki's route there was much more. Besides those, there were also other smaller story-enhancing additions sprinkled here and there - really good job I have to admit that those additional scenes heavily contributed to my enjoyment of Natsuki's route - they were really well thought out, and I was surprised to see them missing from original +18 version, since they felt like they should be there right from the beginning. So now, after 60 hours of reading, I guess I'm near the half? Now there are Misa, Rikka and Touko left.

Slowly. I've been avoiding posting an update mainly because it's mostly not good news, but I doubt it's likely to change at this point. Darklord Rooke has disappeared. The last I heard from him was before Covid and he was more or less disengaged from VNs except for this project (which he seems to have disconnected from sometime after that point). Looking back at the work I did, I did the best I could using the (limited) tools available at the time, but it's not something I'd want to release. So I've started retranslating the game from scratch (in between retranslating / editing SKM from scratch and, you know, life). I'm in the middle of chapter three. So even if DR were to pop up again, what he'd done would be of questionable usefulness anyhow. So I'm just going to fly solo. I'll finish the (re-)retranslation myself, then edit my own work. The good news is the tools programmer for SKM has given me a preliminary editor I can use to proceed with redoing the TL while he builds a toolchain.

Wow, man, I kind of envy you. I sometimes struggle to write a short review of a VN that resonated with me, while you managed to create this over what is essentially a nitpick. I need some of that energy.