alpacaman
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Posts posted by alpacaman
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I don't have an excel-sheet or anything like that where I stricty categorize every VN I read, but I sometimes do think about who I would recommend a title to. I don't really have strict categories, but there are a few titles you could bunch together. For example the "gateway drugs" are VNs that you can get into easily without any prior knowledge, usually with some broader mainstream appeal (in VN terms) and gameplay, like Danganronpa, Ace Attorney or Zero Escape. You could also put "mocking" titles that only require minimal previous knowledge of the genre to enjoy in there too, like Hatoful Boyfriend, DDLC or Lily's Night Off. For someone feeling a little more adventurous I would also add stuff like Ladykiller in a Bind, VA11-HALL-A, Raging Loop, 428 or Steins;Gate, depending on their taste in other media. What all these titles have in common is they are not eroge, aren't heavy on the tropes that make VNs feel toxic to outsiders and are generally rather accessible when it comes to their general mechanics.
As for SubaHibi, I'd put it on my acquired taste stack, together with something like The Silver Case (and to a lesser degree Saya no Uta, Kara no Shoujo or Umineko). VNs I wouldn't recommend even to most VN veterans, but might appeal to someone who likes Lars von Trier's movies or Serial Experiments Lain (in the Case of The Silver Case), even if they haven't had any prior exposure to VNs.
Other than that I usually go on a case by case basis. To pick one example, I would recommend Chaos;Child to people who already read a few VNs but also like stuff like Man of Steel, because I hate both for very similar reasons, and I assume this also works the other way round.
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15 hours ago, Formlose Gestalt said:
That is an interesting point.
Spoilers for Totono and DDLC:
After thinking about Totonos ending, I don't think I take much of a message out of it. But I still liked it, it made me emotional attached to Miyukis character. I felt sorry for what happened to her, but to be honest not guilty cause there was nothing the player could have done saving her from this, except for dropping the game after the first ending. But there are people that get really invested into the heroines of VN and I could see the story being a real gut punch for them. Seeing their choices cause sorrow for a character. (Even if they had no choice.) In the end respected the story enough to not read the alternative ending. Furthermore I enjoyed the aspect of the fourth wall breaking. I found that interesting. In Totono as well as in DDLC.
As said above I read DDLC after Totono and I found your interpretation interesting, and I can see how you can come to that interpretation but to be honest, if that was the point they are trying to make (Dating Sims [And VNs too?] objectify their characters), they did a poor job with it, because honestly I would have never thought about that. DDLC comes across as wanting to show some gore moments for cheap thrills. Especially after Monika alters the game. Random Eyes exploding and stuff like that. For me that undermined what ever message they wanted to send. I was more pissed of how they touched on serious problems like depression and completely devalued them by the aforementioned and the fact that you can't trust the characters since they are manipulated, so why take them serious. Also I never noticed the theme that your choices don' have any impact. I thought about that after the Daresora chapter but not here. Maybe I need to think about DDLC again. In any case thanks for you interpretations it was interesting to read.It's rare that a story straight up tells you what it's about on a thematical level, but especially sci-fi and horror tend to use their source of conflict (technology/monster) at least to some degree as metaphor. Horror only works if it invokes some deeper fear or anxiety in the audience beyond the monster simply looking menacing. For example, Godzilla isn't just some huge dinosaur, in the original movie he is also a stand-in for the potential effects of the aftermath of the nuclear bombings in post-Hiroshima Japan. As its 5000 sequels show, without this context, he is just some man in a dinosaur-suit walking through Tinytown, which isn't exactly scary.
As for DDLC (no actual spoilers for Totono btw),
Spoilerits horror stems from the fear of losing control of a seemingly safe environment (like most denpa VNs). At first it gives you the illusion of being in charge of the game by giving you just the experience you expect from playing something called "Doki Doki Literature Club" and letting you follow the heroine of your choice. Then it gradually takes away your means to influence events until it reveals you were never in control to begin with. Even when you manage to beat the bad guy, the final scene shows you are still ultimately powerless. It starts out with the usual power dynamic in cheap dating sims (you trying to court some tropey cute girls without their own agendas just waiting to be won like trophies) and then inverts it to put you in the position the heroines normally find themselves in, being helpless prey. I'm not trying to say that the objectifying stuff is THE message of DDLC. But it's hard to deny the game is an indictment of the power dynamics at play in dating sims/VNs (at least as perceived by its author), and the objectification of heroines is an integral part of that.
As for the mental illness part, I get where you're coming from. It doesn't bother me that much, as the game is quite explicit in telling you it's not going for a realistic portrayal. It plays into the whole control-theme as it shows that mental illness is not something that you can actually cure just by picking the respective heroine's route. You can also see it as a critisism through overexaggeration of the way VNs exploit mental illness to create feels. It's still hard to expose exploitation without reproducing it and I agree DDLC doesn't really nail that part.
Anyways, it's not that I think DDLC is a perfect story. Aside from the mental illness stuff there's also the horror being to reliant on jump scares and weird eye movement, to name one more thing. What I'm trying to do is find an explanation why 1) Totono is way less controversial than DDLC in VN community, even though on the surface they share quite a few similarities, and 2) why I personally actually kind of prefer DDLC, despite Totono having way higher production values and generally operating on a much biggger scale. What it comes down to for me is DDLC handling its themes more coherently and being less edginess over substance than Totono.
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On 29.5.2020 at 11:28 PM, Dreamysyu said:
I mean, there are definitely some people who may prefer Aoi for various reasons. Some people may prefer her looks, some may like her personality... though the game kind of shows that she doesn't even have a real personality, but, well... And, actually, considering that the game didn't even give us the chance to choose Aoi in the very beginning, as her route was locked before Miyuki's, I think, as far as I understand the message of the game, it does make sense to give the players a chance to choose her, considering that a lot of them would only complete Miyuki's route not because they actually like her as a character, but only because they want to, you know, complete the game for the sake of completing the game, and that's basically what the game is trying to discourage us from doing.
Actually, is Aoi's ending even that happy? I decided not to check it out for obvious reasons, but I've seen some spoilers that said that she still disappears or something.
SpoilerThat is kind of a weak message though, isn't it? "Don't play all the routes / go for 100% completion because if heroines were self-aware and managed to keep memories between routes they would feel betrayed." Well they aren't, the content in question would exist regardless of whether I read it or not, and there are very few hints at why the behaviour condemned by the game would be harmful in normal eroge. I know there is some more or less subtle criticism in the game aimed at the general dehumanising nature of these games regarding the treatment of their heroines, but it gets pretty muddled by all the finger-pointing at the reader.
This even gets reflected in the way Totono builds up to its climax in that it gives YOU, the reader, a pretty standard eroge character arc. By learning all about Mizuki after being "trapped" by her, you have to show you learned your lesson by beating the quiz. You get rewarded with the rather typical pre-(story-)climax love confession and h-scene and then that gives you the power to overcome the final hurdle by escaping her and making your big decision (all while being constantly reminded what lesson you learned). Even in its deconstruction (or whatever you want to call it) of eroge, Totono unquestioningly reproduces a lot of the tropes of the genre and then makes a half-baked moralistic point rather than asking what makes players pick the kind of choices the game considers undesirable. The game just kind of assumes that eroge readers are sociopaths for being completionist.
I also think this combination is one of the main reasons why Totono is generally liked by the VN-community while DDLC gets quite a lot of hate. In Totono the player gets the easy way out. The game rarely criticises eroge as a genre in a substantial way, instead aiming at the reader. Yet the assumptions the game makes about its audience border on caricature to a degree that you can either assume its morals don't apply for you, or you get redeemed by the VN's climax. This results in the audience neither having to actually reflect on their gaming behavior nor having to adjust their evaluation of the genre itself. DDLC doesn't give you any of these ways out. It makes a point out of how it doesn't matter what choices you pick, while at the same time condemning the way dating-sims objectify their heroines (they are literally game files and their personality traits are just stats Monika can manipulate). It basically tells you that you are complicit just by playing these kinds of games.
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I'm soo surprised Miyuki is comfortably leading the poll considering picking Aoi is basically an admission that
Spoileryou didn't take anything away from the game in terms of the message the game tries really hard to beat into you. "Being an asshole to get all the CGs makes you a bad person, so be more responsible" the game screams at me as it wants me to choose between the girl with close to no personality to speak of who gets her power from you being an asshole getting all the CGs and the one who got fucked over by me being an asshole to get all the CGs.
I wonder if the finale of Totono is some kind of super eloborate additional meta-layer that I just don't get, constantly talking about how important it is to think about the consequences of your actions even within fiction, just to then degrade your decisions to mere narration (thus taking away all your means to influence the action) and in the end giving you a choice where there is only one correct answer based on the moral of the game, yet you get a (kind of) happy ending no matter which girl you pick.
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Finished Totono last night.
SpoilerI really wanted to like it but for how much thought went into the little details the main points the game is trying to make seem weirdly half-baked, especially when it comes to player agency.
My main issues with the NTR-scene have already been discussed by @Seraphim88 and @Dreamysyu. The scene itself even makes some sense in theory. In the first route you as the player choose to curse Miyuki to get her good ending because the protagonist is too scared to get NTRed by her otherwise. But in Aoi's route you're suddenly totally fine with getting NTRed because you want to get Aoi's ending, which of course pisses Miyuki off, to put it mildly. The problem with how the game plays this is that it isn't the player who decides to change his stance on NTR, it's the in-game protagonist. There isn't even an "Accept Aoi anyway"-choice that at least points out the player's hypocrisy to some degree.
Another thing that bugs me is that for all the game's talk about you as the player needing to take responsibility for your choices it lacks any hint of self-awareness. It never acknowledges that it basically forces you into this course of action with its enforced playing order and every choice against Aoi leading you back to an ending you already read. It trains you from the beginning to go along with Aoi's wishes (from the point you get a preliminary ending if you choose to not change the game world), yet punishes you when you do just that. To me it feels like rather lazy writing that someone as smart as Miyuki isn't able to see that it's the game's rules rather than the player's decisions that set her up for despair, despite being able to access the backlog and save states.
Anyways, there is a lot of cool stuff in Totono, I just wish they thought their premise through more thoroughly instead of trying to be as edgy as possible.
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So I just finished Totono and since buying it I can't get the Totoro theme out of my head. As for the game itself, for me i would rate it towards the better end of "meh". There is an amazing attention to detail and there are quite a few clever moments in it, but when it comes to the main narrative and the points it's trying to make it feels rather inconsistent to me.
I don't know if I agree with the general sentiment that you need to go into the experience completely blind as the very first scene (not to mention the screenshots on the JAST store page) sets up that Totono is going to be weird or more precisely
Spoilermeta.
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428 is only 10€ right now (instead of 50€) and it's one of the best VNs on Steam.
As for your wishlist, each of the VNs (except maybe Maitetsu, which I haven't read) has some aspects you might consider "long-winded". Grisaia has a very long common route (~40 hours) without an actual plot. G-Senjou no Maou has rather mediocre side routes (which you can skip without missing anything though). Baldr Sky is really long and has a section around the halfway point where you have to re-read several hours of content you already know. Muv Luv takes until the third game to actually get good. And Root Double has a habit of overexplaining its plot points and devices.
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58 minutes ago, Silvz said:
What? What Summer Pockets has the most is plot. Each heroine has a unique story and all of them are well developed, besides the great true route. You've probably only read the prologue, which obviously would be only an introduction to the characters and the island lol
I was worried reading what you wrote about Raging Loop, as I've just started it myself a few days ago, but seeing your take on Summer Pockets makes me realize we share very different tastes
I think Raging Loop is totally fine. It has its issues, but for me none of them had to with the things ChaosRaven mentioned as it does a pretty good job explaining the game, usefulness of the roles and character motivations (and how different setups in the roles completely change the character dynamics) imo.
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I mostly agree with your opinions on the routes, except for Yukine's route which I found rather boring. Tomoyo might be my favorite heroine in Clannad but what the way they handle her route just feels like such a waste to me.
The main reason people love Clannad though is probably the true route, although I personally think its individual heroine routes are on the whole stronger than the ones in LB as well. LB has the better common route though.
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9 hours ago, Leonor said:
Oh boy... I'm finishing the novel next week and I'm so not ready for the ending. I did like the normal endings but for the theories me and my book club friends did for all those weeks of reading, the resolution is quite... disappointing, I guess. Maybe I just had too high expectations for it since one of my book club mates was getting me hyped for this one.
I thought the ending was totally fine. If you look at KnS as a horror story first and foremost and not as a much as a murder mystery the true ending works pretty well imo.
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Yeah, after reading Japan's numbers a little closer I have become a little cautious calling their response better than that of western countries, as they test very little compared to other countries and the development of their death toll can mean anything from having enforced effective measures to their containment measures being effective only for a certain amount of time and the virus now silently spreading. I think Japan is one of the countries where we really have to wait two more weeks to see how things turn out.
Another thing worth mentioning: Even comparing death tolls between countries can be misleading, as not all countries test everyone who died from pneumonia-like diseases for Covid retroactively. For example Germany doesn't, yet they apparently test more asymptomatic young people than other countries seem to do, which explains their low deaths to confirmed cases ratio.
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How? What's their secret?
Aggressive containment measures from the moment there was a chance Covid would reach Japan (or other East Asian countries for that matter), like testing anyone entering the country from a place with known cases and quarantining them until the results come back. That way they can more or less effectively isolate any source of spreading. This only works as long as you can identify every chain of infections. As soon as you reach a certain threshold of unidentified infected people that strategy is not viable anymore as tracing these chains would require hundreds of thousands of tests each day, among other problems. If Western countries wanted to contain Covid, they would have to start aggressively testing some time back in January. Now all that is left is mitigation, which means trying to slow the spread over a long enough time window that healthcare systems don't become overwhelmed. Which many countries were late for anyway.
One of the reasons many Asian countries are semmingly dealing way better with this than those in the west is that they already had to deal with SARS a couple of years ago and learned a few lessons about how to effectively fight infectious diseases.
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7 hours ago, WinterfuryZX said:
We were initially focused on people coming from China, but the virus most probaly came here indirectly from Germany, and WHO guidelines doomed us.
Anyway most countries didn't react fast enough. UK NHS is far worse than ours an I think only a stroke of luck can save them at this point, unless they are really planning to deny hospitalization to severe covid patients. A plan to obtain herd immunity from mass spreading could only be attempted by Germany, which has tons of ICU beds, not by the uk, it will be suicidal.
Even Germany wouldn't be able to handle the mass-spreading approach. They may have greater capacities in terms of hospital beds and ICU units than other European countries, but still way to few to be able to manage rates like Italy has right. Also Germany has few nurses per hospital bed when compared to other countries so risks like medical personnel getting infected are higher than elsewhere.
Also, comparing death rates between northern Italy right now and other countries isn't really helpful. Someone pointed out earlier that an overwhelmed healthcare system causes the death rate to go way up (this very long article discussing all the statistics we knew five days ago estimates a factor of around 8 compared to a proper response). A comparison to the total amount of deaths caused by the flu doesn't make a lot of sense either as infection rates for it are so low that it doesn't spread a lot and only a small fraction of the population get it at all.
- Fiddle and Plk_Lesiak
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1 hour ago, sanahtlig said:
COVID-19, the infection, is a systems-level threat. Unless you fall in one of the susceptible populations for pneumonia, you're not personally at high risk. The main risks here are:
- The infection spreading rapidly through susceptible populations and overwhelming healthcare systems: Critically-ill patients with COVID-19 who would have survived with proper care end up dying. People with other conditions also end up dying because they couldn't get proper care.
- The response itself causing as much harm (or more) than the disease: Every response has an opportunity cost--often, a human cost. Quarantines and other commercial restrictions (voluntary or government-imposed) cause people to lose their jobs. Panic-buying of surgical masks create shortages where they're actually needed. Financial markets crashing causes people at or near retirement to potentially lose their livelihoods. Anything that creates or exacerbates poverty could have long-term consequences on human health.
At this point in the spread of the infection, there is no silver bullet. Under-respond and you get 1. Over-respond and you get 2. We can't know in advance exactly what the appropriate response is, but even the hypothetical optimal response will incur some degree of harm. All we can do is listen to experts and hope our respective public health systems know what they're doing. Since most of the risk most individuals will face is not from infection, but from systems-level effects, what we can each do personally is limited.
Most of the things you mention in 2. are things governments can in turn respond to by providing sensible relief for employees and economic stimuli and guarantees. People who die because of 1. don't come back and an overwhelmed healthcare system isn't too great for the economy or public trust in institutions either.
As an individual you can be careful without panicking. Should you buy rations for a few days in case become sick and can't leave your home? Probably (at least unless you usually buy a week's worth of groceries anyway). Should you buy all the toilet paper your local grocery has in stock? Of course not. Should you wash your hands more often and regularly disinfect surfaces several people might touch? Yes. Should you steal disinfectant from a children's cancer ward (which actually happened in Germany a few days ago)? Hell no! Avoid crowded spaces like bars or public transportation as far as possible, cough and sneeze into tissues or the crook of your arm, wash your hands regularly, avoid touching your face, stay at home when you're feeling sick, and maybe postpone the visit to your grandparents for a few weeks.
The institute in Germany responsible for disease control advises people not to use protective masks unless the are required to for professional reasons. The protection they provide is relatively low compared to the measures I mentioned above and it's suspected they can give a false sense of security leading to people letting the other stuff slide. Also places like hospitals and pharmacies need them more urgently than private citizens and their stocks are usually not big enough for a lasting epidemic.
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On 20.2.2020 at 7:31 PM, alpacaman said:
And lastly, yesterday I started reading SubaHibi. So far it seems nice enough. Yeah, I know of its notoriety and expect things to get way darker over time. I feel like this this VN could be either a thought provoking masterpiece or pretentious bullshit. I'm pretty excited because I love passionately hating stuff, so either way it's going to be a win for me.
Just finished SubaHibi and yeah, I liked it a lot. What surprised me a little was how "normal" the VN is in the sense that there is a coherent plot and way less artsy posing than I expected after what I read about the game beforehand. Occasionally there is an overly long tangent or some pretentious symbolism, but never to a degree that it hurts the overall experience. Also SubaHibi is one of the rare cases in Japanese media I consumed so far where I felt like the author actually did some research on the mental illnesses they wanted to portray. And it has one of the best soundtracks of any non-Key VN I've read so far, including one of the greatest stupid shenanigans songs ever, which is close to the last thing I expected to get out of it all:
SpoilerSo after having finished almost every long VN on my must-read list, I decided to go for a change of pace and purchased a total of 14 promising looking short EVNs (plus one JVN) for a total of ~33€ in the recent VN-sale on Steam and which I'm probably going to read all over next few weeks.
- Mr Poltroon, Dreamysyu, Plk_Lesiak and 1 other
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15 minutes ago, GXOALMD said:
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Going by how much I liked the heroines I'd go Chinatsu>Rain=Aki>Sora>(don't remember the name of Sora's sister)>Nanoha.
The routes I'd rank Sora's sister>Chinatsu>the rest>Nanoha.
Each heroine actually had some interesting aspects to them (even Nanoha, who I really hated), but the game never really cared enough about its characters to explore them properly.
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14 hours ago, Silvz said:
Well, it wasn't Maeda Jun who wrote his route :v
Didn't he have most of the creative control though?
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Was thinking back to Clannad and I just can't wrap my head around what purpose Kappei is supposed to serve narratively. He isn't in any scenes outside of his route (at least I don't remember any), his route itself doesn't add anything to the overarching family theme as the whole family-giving-you-a-purpose-to-live-on-in-hard-times thing is already done in Yuusuke's subplot and tbh neither his route nor he himself as a character are that great to begin with. Even the most basic "one more girl/boy to date" explanation doesn't work as he isn't dateable. Not to mention that Clannad is already more than long enough without him. Is it because Maeda thought the "I want you to keep on living because I'm pregnant!" - "Who's the father?" - "You!"- "But we haven't even had sex yet!"-joke was too funny too pass up? Was it that?
No wonder he was cut from the anime.
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Maybe it's supposed to show her indigestion?
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C;C spoils the ending of C;H, but as long as you don't plan on reading the latter you should be fine. I only read C;C and I don't think knowing C;H would have improved the experience. In regards to S;G it's the other way round for me: C;C is so bad I would probably never pick up another title by the same developers ever again if I hadn't read S;G first. So I voted for 428.
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I'm currently trying to clear my backlog, especially the titles I paid more than 20€ for. First up was AI: The Somnium Files and well, it is probably what happens when Uchikoshi is trying to do something a little more lighthearted than usual. Despite still getting rather dark at times and the overarching mystery being quite complicated, there are several wacky characters and a lot of silly humour (one of the recurring locations is a mermaid café, sigh). What I really like in general about Uchikoshi's writing style though is that his stories - despite employing complicated supernatural concepts and plots - still at their core explore themes that feel deeply human without ever getting too clichéd, with his favourite seemingly being about the importance of meaningful relationships while growing up in an otherwise unloving environment. AI is no different in that regard, making for an overall satisfying experience. 8/10
I also wanted to mention that, although AI is not as heavy on characters explaining unintuitive concepts through metaphor as other Uchikoshi titles, it still manages to have the uchikoshiest of uchikoshiisms:
Spoiler
Next up was Raging Loop. Being based on Werewolf/Mafia (games I really like) and receiving pretty positive reviews, I went into it with high hopes. After finishing it, I'm torn about if I liked it or not. For about 80% of the reading time it was just as I hoped it would be, but there are two major aspects I don't like. The first one is the third act. The explanation for what is going on feels like the writers were trying too hard to be clever and the order in which the remaining conflicts are resolved seemes backwards, with the emotional arcs of the characters being concluded first and the lore discussion with the big bad at the end. The other thing that annoys me is the way the protagonist is developed. I get why a story like this needs a protagonist who is so level-headed to degree that borders on cynical and sometimes even sociopathic. What I don't like is when this way of thinking doesn't ever really get challenged.
Other than that it was an entertaining read, with enough suspense for three VNs and an intriguing mixture of occult stuff and psychological thrills. 8/10
And lastly, yesterday I started reading SubaHibi. So far it seems nice enough. Yeah, I know of its notoriety and expect things to get way darker over time. I feel like this this VN could be either a thought provoking masterpiece or pretentious bullshit. I'm pretty excited because I love passionately hating stuff, so either way it's going to be a win for me.
- Plk_Lesiak and Dreamysyu
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Do you Categorize VN Recommendations?
in Recommendations
Posted
They both to some degree share this kind of late 90s Japan postmodernist asthetic and experimentation with storytelling techniques, there even is at least some overlap in themes. So I'm kind of surprised no one ever makes this comparison. But maybe just too few people know both, as they are rather niche even in their respective genres.