Barktooth

I think I wouldn't want to move there just because of the overwhelming shock I would have from my expectations being crushed by the reality of Japan not being full of cute 2D girls On a more serious note, I'm not sure. I'm a hikikomori and rarely leave my room, so I probably wouldn't notice much difference between US and Japan anyway. I do like some aspects of the culture, and the cities seem more interesting than the place I'm living in, at least, but I don't know if it would be worth it to adapt to a new country just for those things. Then again, having to integrate into a totally different culture could be a very good way to expand one's horizons, so maybe it's worth doing for that reason alone. I'd definitely like to visit Japan for a while, though. Until I do, I can't really make an informed decision.

Started reading HoshiMemo fandisk, my first VN in Japanese. I already know most of the terminology and names from the main game so it's not too bad, but the scenes talking about astronomy and some of You-kun's commentary are a pain to read, have to look up every other word. The story is alright so far, it's tying up the loose ends so even though it's mostly slice of life it's satisfying to find out what actually happened. The feels are actually hitting me quite hard again, they all graduated Hibari-kou and had the last observation with the club

Well, Hoshizora no Memoria touches upon that I'd say. Can't really say whether it's exactly what you're looking for or not without spoilers though.

So this thread is now Re:Zero 2016 anime discussion? I basically agree with Jun on everything. 18th episode was especially good at explaining how Subaru got so conceited after the first two arcs, but in fact wasn't really a hero. (well, except to Rem. Also that rejection was pretty brutal, even though I'm an Emilia fan xD)

Episode 5 was good, a bit rushed but the story still made an impact. Must really suck hard for anime-only people though, they basically got spoiled on the best scene in the game.

Ehh, bacon is alright. I wouldn't say that I love it, though, so false. Next person prefers pork over beef.

I'd say that's probably true. Next person likes sci-fi over fantasy.

U-using it for what? Just wearing on your feet? Then true Next person has masturbated into a sock before.

Haha, yeah I think I might do **** first as well, even though her and Mare are pretty equal in my eyes. After dwelling on it a bit I think I like Mare's ending from the original game more so I'll save it for last. Yep that's what I'll do

This has, annoyingly, been stuck in my head for the past 2 days.

That's good to hear. By the way, do you know if it makes any difference which after story is played first? There are two available right off the bat, and I'm not sure if there's a recommended playing order or not.

Welp, it's over. I've been stalling it for a month because I didn't want it to end, but I finally finished the last route in HoshiMemo. This is, without a doubt, my favorite VN so far (although I haven't read many yet). Giving it a 10/10; it's not an objective rating by any means - there are definitely some things I didn't like about it and objectively speaking it doesn't deserve this rating, but the emotions I felt in certain scenes simply don't let me give it anything lower. I love most of the characters, I seriously can't even pick the best one. Mare, Mystery girl, Asuho, Isuzu are all too damn good. I'm even more greedy than You-kun, need to have a harem with the four of them xD Mare is cute but I liked her more in the beginning of the game, when she acted a bit cold towards You. She was a mysterious character, since she looked like You's childhood friend and was supposedly a grim reaper. Made me always look forward to those meetings at the lookout. I did enjoy her slowly getting accustomed to You and eventually opening up to him more, though I feel it could have been executed a bit better (she really needs a longer route). Asuho is just a nice person to be around, but her route made me really fall in love; I'm a sucker for osananajimi, after all. Aoi's personality is one of my favorites (along with Setsuna's - who, BTW, NEEDS a route. FAVORITE, get on it naooo!), I like how blunt she is and the sharp remarks were always entertaining. Mystery girl - obviously also an osananajimi, and the backstory is much better developed in her case, so it's no surprise I cared about her a lot. Also, it's not something I think about often since he isn't a kawaii girl, but I am quite fond of the protagonist, Kogasaka You, as well. I couldn't relate to him in some respects, but overall he was a very respectable character and I could easily put myself in his shoes. I fancy the way he reasons things out in his internal monologues; I appreciated every scene in the game where he was in "thinking mode". Actually, all the internal monologue of his was fairly solid. The game would most definitely not be the same if not for him. Now that's not to say I liked all the characters... Chinami. Please, get star cancer and die. Mayaka, screw off with your "yah-hoo". Kosame, Now, as for the routes... Common route was great, it had a nice mysterious atmosphere and I enjoyed the way more and more of the story was slowly revealed. The scene right before the opening really took me by surprise, it was very well done. It did have too many slice of life scenes for my taste, though, and the days where You and Chinami were unpacking stuff after they moved houses seriously got on my nerves. Asuho's route was probably my favorite. Komomo's route was entertaining, it had a good story to it concerning all the shrine maiden stuff. It also had a very satisfying ending IMO. Kosame's route was okay. Personally, I didn't really like the drama in this one and the ending was subpar. We got to see more shrine maiden stuff and the loose ends were tied up, however, so I didn't mind it. Additionally, for some reason, I actually enjoyed the way Kosame teased You-kun. Aoi's route was favorable as well. The drama could have been done better, For all that, I didn't really appreciate just how full on dere she went in the route. I would have much preferred her to stay cool even after falling in love with You. Something like kuukuu instead of kuudere? I guess that's not really a thing. But she went too lovey-dovey for my taste. Chinami route... I don't know, man. I think it was supposed to have a good story but I didn't enjoy it at all. Partly it was because of Chinami, and in part because it dealt with the Kogasaka family's affairs, which, frankly, I didn't care much about. Mysterious girl route. My second favorite, I'd say. There are some things I'm confused about though. Honestly, the story of this route was the best in the game, and it really should be my favorite route... But it didn't have that very moving moment like Asuho's route did. It had some good drama, and definitely gave me lots of feels, and it was the apex of the whole story of the VN. But nothing in this route made quite the same impact as that scene in Asuho's route, so even though nearly everything else about it was better, I'm still relegating it to second place. Mare's route... way too short. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, and I'm still not entirely sure if I prefer this or Mysterious Girl route's ending as the "true" ending. I never thought I'd say this, but I actually wish it had more slice of life. More stuff like the day they spent together at the end. I figure that is what Eternal Heart is for, though, in which case I will withhold my judgement for now. On that note, one criticism of the game I had is the distribution of resources. Did we really need a sprite for a nurse who LITERALLY appears what, twice during the WHOLE game? Some of the backgrounds felt pretty underused too, we only see the docks one or two times in Aoi's route; there is a background for the fucking orgel shop we see once; the school cafeteria is basically never shown after the first few days. Instead of the nurse, I think Komomo/Kosame's father really needed a sprite - and he could fulfill the same role as the nurse anyway since he works at the hospital. Instead of the backgrounds, the game needed more CGs for Mysterious Girl and Mare routes, badly so - although, I suppose they probably had different artists for CGs and backgrounds so one couldn't fill the other's role... but this is the only VN I've read where some backgrounds are used this rarely, so they could have definitely distributed their resources better. Anyways, I'm really sad after finishing this game. I know there's still Eternal Heart, which I will hopefully read (unless I get raped by it being in Japanese), but nonetheless, I already miss the setting and characters. I decided to listen to Mysterious Dream, Chiisaku mo Tsuyoki Kokoro, and Onaji Hoshi ni Umarete - the top 3 OST from this VN - while messing around with the sprite viewer, and FUCK I wailed like a bitch to the point of not being able to breathe, seriously, this game broke me. Took me an hour of sobbing into my pillow to calm down, I just love these characters so much, all the struggles they've gone through and everything that's happened to them, good and bad, and now it feels like I'm leaving them all behind and it's just so lonely, I knew they weren't real in the first place but they definitely felt like they really existed and I want to be with them so much.... This is why this is a 10/10 game, I don't care if it has flaws, it made me cry during that scene with Asuho, and that's not even close to the only time, I cried probably around 10 more times after that too, and it's just indescribable how much I care for these characters, I don't even know if I want to read Eternal Heart because it feels like it will ruin the journey that we went through to get to the end. Haaa... sorry for that run-on sentence, I'm still kind of emotionally unstable lol. I don't cry often, but you know, sometimes it's nice to let it all out, just like how Mysterious Girl says, "if it's painful, don't hold it in, just let it all out". I'll probably start Eternal Heart in a few days, gotta give it some time before that but I'm sure I'll calm down in a while and will want to read it. Damn, I just looked over this thing and I wrote a book; if anyone read until the end, yoku dekimashita - here's Mysterious Girl making a cute face:

Ah, you didn't quote me so I saw this post only now. Thanks for answering the questions. I can see that girl speaking to Kotarou's mind being Shimako, I guess. I'm still not sure about the underground space though. I don't remember well anymore, but wasn't it supposed to only have resources to sustain life for like 1000 or 10,000 years? I don't think it was for eternity, though maybe the space itself would exist for that long. So why would they not try to go back to the surface after things settled down? Is it because Earth's resources would still deplete quicker than in 1000 years since Salvation wasn't fully completed? Well, at this point I don't care that much anymore, I forgot most of the details of what happened already anyway. I understand your feelings though, I felt pretty depressed especially reading Akane's route and now every time I listen to Sorrowless I feel the same emotions again. Rewrite really left me with a lot of attachment to the characters and the world, I honestly didn't realize just how much I liked the VN until a week passed after me finishing it and I already wanted to re-read it.

Wow this looks really interesting, the premise, characters, and setting. I think I'm hyped too

The pacing for the episode itself wasn't that bad, but are they seriously doing backstories for each character? Next episode will be Lucia, apparently.. Grisaia all over again, huh.

lol, my monitor is a free CRT I picked up at my school, and it supports up to 160Hz But seriously, there's no point in running VNs at over 60FPS since there's basically no moving scenes or any kind of motion. My previous comment was sarcastic, I mean, I guess the transitions would be smoother but... who cares?

60FPS isn't enough, I want to see that smooth text fade-in effect in glorious 120FPS Well, this about explains it. The third point is interesting, they seriously still use uncompressed bitmaps? No wonder these games are so big. Grisaia is over 6GB, Rewrite 7GB... I suppose they tried to keep things under 4.2GB for all this time, but with those outdated standards that meant no HD assets. Thank god for digital distribution, or we'd still have games coming out with 800x600 resolutions

Haha yeah, I guess my powerlevel will really skyrocket when I turn 30, but only 19 for now so I'm just an apprentice

That's an interesting take on it. In that case it would make sense for them to downscale them for the game, though I don't know why they'd go as low as 800x600. I'm not an artist but I wonder if it's really any harder to draw things at higher resolution though. I doubt they need to add any extra detail, after all, the image itself isn't any bigger, each part of it just has more pixels. And why do they draw at higher resolutions anyway? I'm guessing either to hide some of the small artefacts when they downscale it.. or maybe they just want to work zoomed in on the smaller details without it turning into pixel art? If it's the former, it would make sense to work at a proportionally higher resolution to what the final game assets will use, but if it's the latter, there's no point in increasing the resolution beyond what the artist feels comfortable with.

That's probably true, even in the west lots of people aren't using traditional desktops anymore. But why not just have the game auto-detect the desktop resolution and scale things down to that? I'm not entirely certain, but as far as I know, scaling a higher resolution image down to fit on a less capable monitor should not result in any loss of quality. I guess it is probably due to costs, as you said. It's a bit baffling, though, considering how much time some higher-profile VNs put into implementing fringe features in the UI that are likely to benefit almost no one. With how customizable some games are, it's hard to see why they wouldn't spend a bit more time to implement a resolution selector. I'm also still skeptical that they actually draw CGs in low resolutions.. looking up Grisaia CGs online, some seem to be 2560x1440. Interesting, didn't know they still used 4:3. I actually do have a 4:3 monitor though, and while it does look better since the image fully fills the screen, the pixilation is still pretty bad. I always play in fullscreen so I didn't realize so many people use windowed mode. Even then, looking at the images Eclipsed posted, some of the low-res games are too small to read in windowed mode. Yeah, scaling generally seems to be poorly done no matter where you look.. Maybe it's harder to implement than I thought. Even Windows' native scaling looks like crap. I wonder how all the mobile OSs manage to do it so well. Enjoy having all your desktop icons re-arranged after changing your resolution.

62. I'm glad that I at least have potential to become a wizard

That's a bit surprising... HoshiMemo for sure has higher resolution CGs since you can zoom into them. I don't know about other games, but I was under the impression that most artists draw in much higher resolutions, at least, I would think, they would use 1920x1080 or more. Do they really draw CGs in 800x600 for the games that use that resolution? As for me, I use an old CRT monitor where any resolution is technically native, so it still looks sharp even in full screen at 800x600. I guess you LCD plebs have to run it in a window though Huh.. time flies fast I guess, I didn't realize it has already been 6 years since 2010 And yeah, Grisaia runs at any resolution you can set in the System Options, but the CGs are still rendered at 1024x576 so there's no benefit (besides running at native res on an LCD) to use a higher res.

This has been bothering me for a while now. There are many VNs released in 2010 and later that are still using resolutions from a decade ago. Grisaia was released in 2011 and uses 1024x576 (WTF is this? Some weird widescreen variant of 1024x768?), HoshiMemo was released in 2009 and still uses 800x600, SubaHibi is 2010 and ALSO uses 800x600... My question is, why? Compatibility reasons? I doubt more than 1% of the population still has a screen that doesn't run at least at 1024x768, and even then, why not just make the game support changing the resolution like most video games do? Actually, I think you even CAN change the resolution in Grisaia, but the game content itself is still 1024x576. Do they not want to draw CGs in higher resolutions? I'm not an artist but I'm pretty sure most work with much higher resolutions anyway, and then scale them down when releasing their work. And HoshiMemo definitely has higher resolution CGs than the game can display since you're able to zoom 2x on them. Do they not think there's a benefit to higher resolutions? Personally, I am quite tired of the pixelated mess that the beautiful sprites in HoshiMemo are when displayed at 800x600. I suppose most VNs released now are at least 1280x720 after which it's mostly redundant to go any higher, but even so, most people use LCDs nowadays. LCDs only have one native resolution, generally the highest, so most VNs likely appear blurry when they are run at a non-native resolution. Am I missing something here? What's up with this?

"gr8 b8 m8 I r8 8/8" -Albert Einstein On a more serious note, Houzuki Masaomi from Sharin no Kuni had some really great quotes IMO: "You people are always like that. As soon as you uncover a comprehensible source of evil, you dive upon it. You yearn continually to find something to push responsibility onto. 'The country,' 'I'm not qualified for that,' 'I don't have permission,' 'my parents,' 'because my best friend said so'... You are always so eager to find comfort in something and cease your thought processes. And then, as soon as your expectations are betrayed, you squeal like pigs." "Those who have assumed a position of leadership, such as myself, often speak as if they know others' thoughts in advance. This is not actually the case, however. You see, we do not predict the thoughts of others. We designate them."

You could try Kuuchuu Buranko, it's a bit of a weird one but deals a fair amount with psychological issues which could be your cup of tea? Dunno, I enjoyed it. The mood isn't particularly serious though so maybe it's not what you're looking for. How about Gankutsuou? It's based on The Count of Monte Cristo and personally, was a bit too confusing for me to enjoy, but fits your criteria decently. Another one would be Gosick. This one, again, I wasn't a fan of, but it was entertaining enough and even though I haven't watched Baccano I think it might have a similar feel to it. Off topic, but, your signature made me laugh way more than it should have.