Fred the Barber

Must Love Words

Generally speaking, MoeNovel gets good licenses and then does a shit job with them from a translation perspective. They also remove adult content, by varying degrees, which gets a lot of people riled up, especially around here, but make no mistake: their translations range from merely bad to utterly abysmal. From what I've seen, A Sky Full of Stars is far and away their least bad release, so if you don't mind missing the adult content, and you don't mind merely kinda lousy writing, give it a try. But check out some fine screenshots from their latest masterpiece, Cross Channel (be sure to click through for more WTF): A lot of this stuff is completely incomprehensible. Don't play Cross Channel. Don't play If My Heart Had Wings. A Sky Full of Stars might be kinda okayish.

No posts here in the almost two weeks since I last posted? Oh well, so it goes. I shall double-post if I must. I was most of the way through season 1 of MariMite when I needed to find a show to watch while cooking, and I ended up with Citrus. I wrapped that up today, pleased with the choice. Very good, if not great, and very effective at manipulating my emotions, which I admit to enjoying every now and then. I was a bit tickled at first at parallels between the two shows (girls into other girls; strict all-girls school; focus on drama; banner themes notably included the importance and difficulty of reaching mutual understanding) and the places where they diverged wildly (presence of malicious characters vs. total absence of malicious characters; prurient/pandering handling of sexuality vs. much more subdued treatment). The presence of malicious people, especially, led to Citrus having a lot of outright negativity in it. It got pretty nerve-wracking for me at times, particularly during the Matsuri arc, since I don't like seeing characters I care about being put in danger, particularly danger of any kind of mental trauma. But the plot's willingness to put people in danger also makes for a more powerful story, and as Rooke pointed out elsewhere recently, as a reader, being made a little uncomfortable is often a good thing, when it broadens your experience and perspective.

Yeah, as with every other ero RPG I've played, it's rapey: defeat your enemy (stripping their clothes in the process, in this case), then "subdue" them, for "reasons" (in this case, because, to the batshit crazy main character, "seducing" his opponent is a necessary step in his plan). As these things go, it's on the lighter side (less pain described than a typical VN defloration scene; no blood in CGs; everybody involved is pretty into it within a few lines), but the lighter side of rape is still clearly rape.

Word on the street is that they tightened up the gameplay in vol. 2, both fixing some of the balance issues (you actually want to use different spells; map time actually requires some thinking since they don't just heap blocks on you) and expanding things (they added ice and electricity in vol. 2, and again, you actually want to use them). Then my work here is done!

I just finished it, and I thought it was a pretty solid game. In full disclosure, I've opted not to write a full review on it since a couple friends of mine worked on the localization, but I haven't seen anybody talking about it, so I thought I should at least start a thread here. First of all, the gameplay is pretty fun! I have only a little past experience with ero RPGs (like... three games, I guess?), and with the notable exception of Alicesoft titles, I've generally found them to be pretty thin on the gameplay. But Re;lord has pretty solid gameplay! The combat requires you to do a lot of clicking, trading off between left- and right-clicking to attack and guard, and it's all in real-time. No taking your time over a decision on a turn-based strategy game: click or be clicked. It's not the most complex system, and it does stop evolving about halfway through the game, but it's both active and challenging without feeling punishing or random (which often seems to happen to poorly designed turn-based RPGs). The leveling up of skills is fine; nothing special here, but still a decent gameplay element. And the last gameplay element is the map-conquering segment of the game, which is also pretty gratifying, though it's very easy (they didn't get the balance right here). The gameplay has various balance issues (for instance... you should probably just stick to the Wind spell most of the time and leave Fire alone), but they're only ever imbalanced in a way that makes the game easier, at least, and the game is still often challenging, all the way through the end (especially the optional hidden boss, which I eventually gave up on, because they were pretty darn difficult!). The script is pretty good. More typos than I would like, and there's some issue with line breaking around ellipses that gets annoying at times, but fortunately there just aren't that many ellipses hanging around. The writing is funny (cape jokes for miles), and also timely (right-wing nationalists, ahoy). The latter admittedly makes me a bit squeamish, but given the ending, I suspect it's not going to stay quite as hard-line on that front. The only downside to the game, really, is that, while the story reaches a reasonable stopping point at the end, it barely scratches the surface of where it wants to go. So, get out there and buy it, so we can get localized releases of volume 2 and volume 3. Do it for the cape jokes.

Studies in dystopic fiction. Read assorted classics of the genre, e.g., 1984, Brave New World, Nekopara, The Handmaid's Tale, etc. Reading aloud and/or acting out scenes from the currently-studied work. Reading the works and writing comparative analysis papers.

I finished MMO Junkie. It pushed my buttons all the way through, and ended up being extremely satisfying. I'm sure it's not for everyone, but if you 1) like sweet romances, 2) are a recovered MMO junkie, and 3) enjoyed Welcome to the NHK but maybe thought it was a bit darker than necessary at times, then have I ever got the show for you. I've since started my roughly annual re-watch of Maria-sama ga Miteru. I still enjoy it a great deal. Trying very hard not to look at subtitles this time through, which means I'm getting more enjoyment out of Yumi's goofy facial expressions than I ever have before. Otherwise, it's about the same as usual, which is to say, I still enjoy it a great deal.

I came to this thread just to offer this one. Thanks for beating me to it, Zaka.

Do you have a VNDB, just to make sure I'm not recommending things you've already played? Anyway, a selection of games I enjoyed quite a bit which I consider to have good plot: Gahkthun Deardrops Demonbane They're all very different games. Demonbane can be a little intense at times, but it's also very silly a lot of the time. Gahkthun is part of the excellent Steampunk Series. It's not my favorite, but it is the only one with an official translation (and also, not coincidentally, the only one with a decent translation). Deardrops has a fair bit of downtime, but the main plot is excellent, and it's a lot more lighthearted than the rest of these (or most of what I see other people recommending). I'll also add another plug for Saya no Uta. It's all intense, all the time, but it's beautiful and terrifying and wonderful.

11eyes is a decent chuunige with a typo-laden and occasionally borderline incomprehensible translation. The story and plot are honestly pretty good, as is the way the story is told through the narration and the Cross Whatsit system, but don't expect anything else from it, including branching plot lines, romance, etc.

Well, I called out the lack of route differentiation as a con in my review over here: https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2017/01/12/11eyes-sin-damnation-and-the-atonement-girl/ As I put it there: "Once you've seen one route, you've seen them all."

I ended up on that route, which also featured the character " ".

Most of the routes are practically identical. I would suggest saving Kukuri's route for last, and otherwise doing whatever order you feel like.