alpacaman

There was a big Babymetal hype in the hipster music community when their second album came out, with it reaching No. 15 in the UK charts and even the serious magazines like Der Spiegel writing reviews.

So far I haven't read from anyone on this forum that they didn't like 428. I'd definitely recommend it.

Abhorrent might be a bit of an overstatement I mean, there is stuff like Schwarzesmarken where I had to read the synopsis to figure out what the title was even supposed to mean although it's apparently in my native language. To add something to the original topic, the premise sounds like one of those "entrapped group of people" stories with supernatural overtones that have the potential to be anything from outright amazing to total trainwrecks.

The common use of "Dei Gratia" is as an ablative case, meaning "by God's grace" and was added to the royal title of kings to specify that they weren't subject to earthly jurisdiction. The nominative is identical to the ablative case so technically you could translate the phrase the way you did. Then again, in Latin in this sentence you would use the genitive case so it would turn into "Dei Gratiae". This is probably just me being too much of a Latin nerd, but the ones choosing the title for the OP seemed to be aware of the problem as well, as they translated the title as "Dei Gratia in the 5th Day". That doesn't make much more sense than the title I'm complaining about, but at least it avoids the problem of having to connect the "Compass" with "Dei Gratia" in a way that makes grammatic sense.

Ok, then I take that part back. The Japanese title is equally bad. Still, the "of Dei Gratia" part mixes English and Latin grammar in a really weird way.

This is one of the rare cases where altering the title for the English release to accomodate a term from a foreign language actually made everything worse, at least unless Dei Gratia is the name of an ingame proper noun.

You can't force anyone to like anything (and I don't think "you just don't get it" is the most helpful line of attack), so let's just agree that there are people who love Umineko and people who are wrong

*Nuke* As for mystery VNs, I'd recommend: Zero Escape trilogy, no real detective. Danganronpa trilogy, protagonists act as detectives. 428 Shibuya Scramble. Lucid9, a free EVN. Root Double, protagonists act as detectives. Chaos;Child, protagonist acts as detective. Unlike Umineko, C;C actually is pretty terrible. It's never boring though.

80s Japanese music is even more amazing than I expected before looking it up

Or else you can always search rateyourmusic.com (basically vndb for music) by making custom charts. Here is one I made listing the best rated (non classical, non soundtrack) 80s albums by artists from Japan. Elvis Costello seems to be living in Japan right now, so his albums are in there as well, but there are still more than enough interesting artists. Right now I'm listening to this, which sounds like Scary Monsters David Bowie made an album together with Kraftwerk while on a very bad trip:

There is this genre called City Pop that was popular in the late 70s and 80s that might fit your description.

I guess I just dropped Purrfect Date after 59 minutes according to Steam. I had the hopes that, with some witty writing and good sense of humour, it could be some nice mindless fun, but it just seems kind of dull.

The VN does a lot more worldbuilding, especially when it comes to the "science" and otaku culture. The anime cuts out a big chunk of Faris' and Ruka's respective arcs but has the better soundtrack imo (adding character themes and having higher production value). The VN is the more complete experience (and I'd definitely recommend reading it at some point) but not so much that I'd say you're missing out big time if you've only watched the anime.

I know that everything you do is political. I'm just saying that most people here disagree with you about how far reaching the political dimension of using this forum for their enjoyment is, even the ones who agree with you when it comes to the dangers of certain content created or promoted by other users.

I think people have just grown tired of toxic political discussions and want to avoid them at least in the areas they engage in in their free time. Discussions about lolis and violence porn are one of the largest minefields in that regard as everyone has strong opinions on these topics while very are few are even able to properly distinguish between pedophilia and child abuse (hint: the vast majority of child abusers aren't actual pedophiles and it's mostly about power and not physical attraction, which is why I think Plk_Lesiak's point about the context and portrayal of the porn being the bigger issue than the ages of the ones depicted is pretty important).

A few days ago I watched an anime about a series of child murders. The show was pretty solid except for the fact that I was able to correctly guess the culprit the moment the show established that they were going to be more than just a minor character. Was it because the show was really bad at foreshadowing? No, except for one scene where the protagonist casually mentions that the culprit could be someone he knows. Was the character behaving suspiciously? No, they were cooperative to the point of actively sabotaging the murder attempts. Then what did they do wrong to earn my suspicions right from the beginning? Be a grown male authority figure with a more or less friendly relationship to the young protagonist without being related to them by blood. I'm relatively new to anime and visual novels*, and I've already seen characters fitting this description turn out to be villainous to varying degrees in about ten different titles (in one of them even twice within a few chapters).** Some of these guys are just being forced into doing something shady because of unfortunate circumstances while some them are psychopathic monsters because the writers liked themselves some shock value. Sometimes they are only minor villains or even red herrings, sometimes they are the big bad. What most of them have in common is that they at least pretend to be helping the protagonist out to the best of their abilities while secretly using the information they get from their conversations against them. I found only one example where the character in question is female, and even then the same twist happens another time with the male one being the major villain (#feminism I guess?). I get why this trope is popular with writers. The culprit should be someone who has been introduced early on and appeared in a reasonable amount of scenes for their reveal not to come out of nowhere. They should be an adult to have the necessary physical, mental and financial capabilities to properly commit and cover up a crime. Having a close relationship with the protagonist is a good justification for giving them enough scenes in a story that mostly revolves around younger characters. Add to that the betrayal of the protagonist's trust and you have everything for a good dark twist. So in theory "the nice adult is actually a murderer" can be a very effective trope if well implemented, it's just so overused it lost most of its its element of surprise, at least to me. I suspect that the writers of some of the titles I consumed were aware of this, but instead of not utilizing the trope they took the "let's add shock value by making the bad guy psychopatically evil" route, which is something that rarely turns out well, even if you add in discussions about the nature of psychopathy. I would really love to give examples of cases where I either really liked or really hated the implementation of this trope to add a bit more substance to my rambling. But I have no idea how to discuss plot twists when even mentioning the title of the game means spoiling them, so this will have to do. *This twist isn't exclusive to Japanese media. For example two of the first four Harry Potter books utilize it and I played one well known western storytelling game that does as well. **I even went through my vndb profile and made a list to confirm this. The reason I don't share it here is obviously spoilers.

The German subtitles on Crunchyroll are like that way too often. With Mob Psycho it was so annoying I switched to the English ones.

You haven't seen anything yet.

I still don't get how there are people who don't love the ESC. The mixture of trash, kitsch, camp, weirdness, lots of (not very subtle) gay overtones and patriotism really is something to behold. I'm a little bit sad that power ballads including weird costumes and extensive use of wind machines seem to be going out of fashion, but seeing that even Croatia's erupting volcanoes and golden angel wings aren't enough to reach the final, it's not that surprising.

Let's talk a bit about Postmodernism. I don't have the time nor expertise to properly explain the term and its origins, so if you don't know the term, I'll just recommend reading the TVTropes article on it. The gist is that Postmodernism in fiction “question on the nature of narrative and plot and characterization.” This can take different forms, from deconstruction to meta-commentary, self-awareness, fourth-wall breaking, not resolving narratives, putting existing fictional elements into a new context, subverting tropes, mixing media, and many more. This sounds rather intellectual, but there are lots of examples in popular culture with varying degrees of artsy-ness, like remixing in music, more or less every Quentin Tarrantino movie, most superhero movies or comics these days (as they are either heavily self-aware or deconstructing the inherent archetypes), and even two of the most highly rated VNs on vndb are pretty postmodern: The Muv Luv trilogy deconstructs the Mecha genre by looking at how throwing a stereotypical harem protagonist into a post-apocalyptic world with giant robots would impact his psyche (you could argue that Steins;Gate does something quite similar, only using a different setting end set of archetypes), while Umineko takes a pretty basic whodunnit setup and then just keeps pouring on unending layers of meta, deconstructing the very genre it pretends to be at first in the process. For a postmodern element to work for the recipient, they have to understand the context of it to some degree, not necessarily intellectually, but in the form of certain expectations not being met or a reference putting something known into a new context and a feeling that the subversion or reference is happening with a purpose. For example, when the aliens attack for the first time in Muv Luv Alternative, you expect a fight scene, with some sort heroic moment towards the climax. Without spoiling too much, that's not what happens, and the reason why is to show that there are actual stakes that are too high for some random guy who thinks he's the hero. If the recipient can't see any indication of an apparent purpose to a subversion of expectations, it just feels random to them. Anyway, how is your sex life? I really didn't expect a The Room reference to appear in some Japanese art game. Which brings us to The Silver Case, the first game the notorious experimental game developer Suda Goichi (better known as Suda 51) wrote and directed for his own company Grasshopper Manufacture. Originally released in 1999 for the original Playstation, it was only localized and remastered for the West as a PC release as recently as 2016. It's an interactive adventure game consisting of two story threads that sometimes intertwine to some degree. In one (called “Transmitter”) the protagonist becomes part of a special police unit after his original unit becomes exterminated by a serial killer and walks around crime scenes and in the other (“Placebo”) you're a journalist investigating the same cases. As for visuals, you're constantly watching a background on which windows pop up that contain the 3D environments, painted CGs and character portraits, written and spoken text, and sometimes even full motion video. According to Suda 51 this system was implemented due to the newly founded studio not having enough manpower to animate the complete screens in 3D, but it looks pretty stylish and unique. There is gameplay that consists of you moving through grids in the aforementioned environments and occasionally interacting with someone or something and solving a few puzzles, but more on that later. There is an overarching plot about a serial killer, I guess, but the game is really vague about it and there already is a very good Eurogamer.net article on its themes, which makes the game sound way more accessible than it is though. It's a game that takes a postmodern approach to everything, not caring if it makes the experience less enjoyable in the process, be it gameplay, visuals, characterization or storytelling. The Silver Case constantly forces you to figure out of you're supposed to take what's on the screen for its face value or on some kind of meta or thematic layer, willingly breaking the rules of what makes games and stories good by traditional standards, making you connect the dots yourself and even question certain game and storytelling mechanics itself. Going by some of the reviews, not everyone who played it was aware they were supposed to do that*, and it's easy to see why: The game never explicitly tells you to read some deeper meaning into anything, not even implicitly. It just assumes you read it as art, something video games nearly never do. Take the protagonist of the Transmitter sections as an example. He is nameable and completely silent, so he basically is your run-of-the-mill self-insert MC. After the incident exterminating his unit, he just gets taken along by two detectives of a different unit investigating said incident without any explanation and is just assumed to be part of the team from then on. His colleagues treat him like he knows what is going on or don't care about leaving him out of the loop, but either way the player never gets any necessary exposition. The MC is only ever given footwork tasks instead of actual detective work, but still gets the nickname “Big Dick” and of course it turns out he is the Chosen One (spoilers, I guess, not that it matters in this case). Now you could either say that this is bad writing, or see it as a deconstruction of the silent protagonist trope, showcasing how nonsensical it would be for a troupe of badass cops to take someone like this along and turning a character like this into the hero of your story. I'm not advocating for reading deep meaning into every mundane thing or excusing every bad decision as “terrible on purpose”, but in this case I have more evidence. For example in one of the chapters about cyber crime your unit decides that you should infiltrate the crime ring. The rest of the chapter basically consists of you waking up in your apartment every morning, reading a new mail about how it's just going to take a little while longer until you become an official member, and then going to work, where you and your colleagues just sit around and do nothing. When you finally become a member of the internet group, you go to their quarters, where someone tells you you're late to the party and the leaders are already gone, and then there is a citywide power blackout and the chapter ends. I just can't imagine the writers just couldn't think of a better way to include the MC into the plot, so I assume they did this on purpose. Of course there is fourth-wall breaking in a throwaway line. Even though it may seem different going by my screenshots, The Silver Case is not a comedy. At least I think it isn't. The gameplay is basically the same. You often get interrupted while moving around by not really necessary dialogues (although these often imply that the other characters are actually doing something), you never actually see anything in the 3D environments which consist of samey looking rooms, and places you can interact with are even marked by symbols and if there is something of note, you just get a dialogue, a CG or a short FMV sequence. There are a few riddles, but they have nothing to do with the plot and are way to easy (in the remastered version the game there even is a button giving you the solution). Often you just have to look through several identical rooms until you find the place that advances the plot. Again, on its own, the gameplay sections are pretty tedious, especially as the controls are just incredibly counterintuitive. It's repetitive, wastes a lot of time, and does nothing to advance the plot. If you look at the MC's role in the story it becomes clear that this actually serves a narrative function in purposefully disconnecting the MC and thus the player from the actual action which you can also read as meta-commentary on how the gameplay in interactive adventure games often has little to do with their plots. In the Placebo chapters you even only walk between your sleeping couch and your working space, where can either read E-Mails (important ones even get opened automatically, so the game even robs you of the interactivity of clicking them, and the MC answers them without any input from you as well and occasionally writes Memos to himself), answer your phone whenever it happens to ring, or talk to your pet turtle, which you sometimes actually have to do to advance in the story. If you read the Eurogamer article you can probably figure out what function this serves on your own**. I mostly talked about game mechanics in this blog entry but you can dissect the plot, storytelling techniques, characters, pop culture references and the scene direction in the same way (I included two examples in the screenshots). For instance there is the fact that the Big Bad and the McGuffin don't get established until the short cliffhanger epilogue. Or that the short titlecard at the end of each episode shows a full moon and the title of a song by either Joy Division or New Order (maybe somehow playing into the whole “Kill the Past” theme Suda 51 has going on, with the band not only changing their name but also their musical style after their lead singer Ian Curtis' suicide). I could go on, but the whole experience is just to long and confusing to talk about everything. So is it worth reading? Probably, as long as you're not allergic to artsy-ness (at points even pretentiousness) or and okay with a game challenging your intellect as well as your patience. Is it actually good? The answer is the same as the one to the question of why I spent quite some time writing an essay on a game nobody actually played: No f*cking clue. Did I mention that there is a lot of swearing in TSC? *Which isn't to say that everyone not liking The Silver Case “just didn't get it”, just that some of the negative criticism in these reviews was about aspects that were most probably deliberately "bad" without acknowledging the not that hard-to-spot meta aspect. A lot of the criticism is still valid as The Silver Case definitely has its major flaws. **The most interactive scene in the entire game funnily enough is also the most pointless one. At one point during the third case in the Transmitter section, the chief of your police unit and one of its members decide to test if you're qualified for the job by making you take a 100 question pop quiz, including questions about everything from Japanese geography to jazz music (and even implying the cop testing you already cracked the case you're currently working on, but he still sends you do more footwork later on). You pass no matter how well you perform and you don't even get to know your score because "there are no points to be gained in policework", as the chief says. At some points I just can't help but admire how much The Silver Case hates its readers.

The Japanese title has the double entendre though, maybe even literally.

Bought The Silver Case in the Steam Golden Week sale. I'm about halfway in and, well, it feels more like some postmodern experimental game than a straight-up visual novel or detective game (which explains why, at least according to vndb, close to no one has played it although Steam tried to advertise it to me a lot). I wouldn't really say I love it so far but it's defintively and I can see why the reviews of it range from masterpiece to incoherent mess. Which I don't agree with, but I can see why anyone just looking for a suspenseful thriller-game might be annoyed by all the stuff that's seemingly just there to piss off the player, like the tedious controls in the gameplay sections and scenes that go nowhere, both most certainly by design. I'll probably write more about it once I'm finished, as there is a lot to unpack.

This is the one to read inbetween two longer titles, as it takes only about 120 hours to finish.

These two topics look like they belong together. Just like our local social democrats and the easter eggs they gave away as presents in their European Parliament election campaign. There probably is some hidden ironic layer in there that went over my head, but spiders are way more interesting, so let's keep talking about those. My arachnophobic girlfriend once found one like the one in the lower picture in a drawer in our apartment. That was a fun experience for her. At least we could get rid of the spider by just carrying the drawer outside. Spiders are good for eating flies and moscitos, but the way they look and move is creepy. So on a scale from 1 to 10 I give them a 4.5.

Haven't read any of these, but Steam Prison's main villain (?) is called Sachsen Brandenburg, which is the German equivalent of calling a character Wyoming Nebraska, making it the obvious choice.