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Seraphim

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Posts posted by Seraphim

  1. 2 minutes ago, ChaosRaven said:

    But well, if it's just one bad end route you can avoid...

    Yeah, you can easily avoid it if you want to. The final choice in the game puts you on either Mikazuki's route or this one, and I'd say it's pretty obvious which one you should pick to enter Mikazuki's.
    The majority of the game is pretty lighthearted. There are obviously bits of drama and some serious topics brought up in other routes as well, but not nearly on the same scale, unless there's some heavy stuff going on in the latter parts of Mikazuki's route. (I'm guessing I'm about halfway through it at the moment.)

  2. 5 hours ago, ChaosRaven said:

    That's a VN about music and a rock band right?!

    Yeah, and that's mostly what it is, but the route I mentioned stands out from the rest. I've read all of Overdrive's other VNs, and this route is quite possibly the darkest thing they've written, even compared to Bokuten.

    If anyone here wants to know what happens in the route without having to read it themselves, I can try doing a summary. There will be heavy spoilers, obviously.
     

    Spoiler

    It starts off with the protagonist urging the band's vocalist, who was a founding member along with him, to take on a solo project that was offered to her.
    As a consequence of her leaving, the band loses momentum and the protagonist eventually decides to put the band on indefinite hiatus and start doing solo projects and collaborations of his own.
    It seems to be going somewhat fine at first, but he gradually becomes consumed with the task of creating music, isolating himself from the people around him and locking himself up in his apartment for days on end.

    One time when he happens to be outside, playing guitar by his lonesome on the street, a girl approaches him, saying she likes his music, and she soon falls in love with him and devotes herself wholeheartedly to their relationship. They move in together, but the protagonist mostly just stays by his computer, composing music of increasingly low quality while the girl takes care of all chores, works every day as the sole provider for the household and supports and encourages the protagonist throughout his creative process.
    As time progresses, the protagonist's emotions become more and more dull, making him basically not care about anything, including the girl. He never actually falls in love with her, but rather just stays with her because he finds comfort in having someone else around who takes care of everything for him.

    Eventually, the girl gets pregnant, but the protagonist feels like it's just a bother and tells her to get an abortion. She says that she wants to keep the baby and that she can take care of it on her own so he can keep focusing on his music, but he doesn't budge an inch and insists on her getting an abortion, which she then reluctantly accepts.
    Right after this, the protagonist sends her a song he just finished. She tells him that it's great and that she'll listen to it on repeat throughout the day, and then heads off to work.
    A few hours later, the protagonist gets a call from the police. The girl had left work in a depressed state of mind due to the abortion discussion, and as she was making her way back home, she was suddenly hit by a car, which she couldn't hear because she had that new song playing in her earbuds, just like she said she would.
    The protagonist goes to the hospital the police named, and we get a close-up of the girl's bruised face as her body lies lifeless on a bed.
    Her death causes the protagonist to break down with a surge of emotion, which he then decides to channel into making music.
    While credits with distorted text and music roll, we see the protagonist sitting in front of his computer, obsessively working on something until the screen eventually cuts to black.

    I doubt this summary alone does it justice, since the writing and music are what truly gives this route its dark ambience. In any case, despite how depressing this part of the game may be, I still don't feel like marking the censored version of Musicus as "adult" is the right call, considering the fact that there are other games and VNs out there that were given a pass despite their disturbing content.

  3. 11 hours ago, ChaosRaven said:

    or Musicus has way more grim themes than expected

    There's one route that's pretty damn depressing due to a bunch of bad stuff happening, but I still wouldn't really say it warrants the game being marked as "adult". That said, I have yet to finish Mikazuki's route, which I assume is supposed to be the main one, so there might still be more to come.

  4. 1 hour ago, Zalor said:

    Should Detroit: Become Human be considered a visual novel? It is mostly story driven, but not with a prose narrative. A similar argument can be made with the Metal Gear Solid series, that whole franchise is incredibly focused on story, and features many extensive cutscenes.

    Honestly, as long as the main story takes up maybe 80%-or-so of the total playtime, I'd be fine with those games being marked as VNs.

  5. Determining what a visual novel is based on how the story is presented has always seemed a bit odd to me, and I don't think it should affect whether it should be considered one or not. If you ask me, story/gameplay ratio is the only thing that should matter, and going solely by that would probably make things easier, since you wouldn't have to take all these others factors into account and do in-depth analyses on every borderline title.

  6. Too bad you don't own a Switch, or you could've picked up that version for a measly ¥3960. It's, to my knowledge, the only release that includes the story in its (current) entirety ("all 19 console arcs, the drama cd arc, Hajisarashi-hen, plus the three Hou exclusive arcs", to quote VNDb). That's some serious bang for the buck.
    (Dunno if you're at the point where you can read Japanese without a text hooker though, so maybe it wouldn't help you even if you had the console.)

    EDIT: I just noticed that the Switch version was apparently later ported to PS4, so maybe that's an option for you.

  7. 6 hours ago, adamstan said:

    BTW I think that weird character limit for protagonist's name is there because developers couldn't be bothered to properly adapt the system from the Japanese version for English release - in Japanese number of characters would be enough for almost any possible name, when writing in kanji.

    Yeah, that's what I figured as well. It'd be pretty weird to implement such a limit otherwise, when most of the other characters have names that are longer than that.
     

    6 hours ago, adamstan said:

    if I enjoyed this VN, would I be okay with Higurashi?

    Hard to say since I don't know quite how sensitive you are or what type of content affects you most. I found Higurashi a lot less disturbing than SubaHibi, but it's definitely a few shades darker and more impactful than World End Syndrome. In any case, I highly recommend you give it a try, because it's quite a ride if you're up for it! Just remember to grab the 07th-Mod.

  8. Hands down one of my top 5 VN experiences last year, so I highly recommend it!
     

    4 hours ago, AngstyNarrator said:

    I hope that's not all of the major spoilers.

    You can rest easy. There are a lot of major plot points to unveil, and what you mentioned in your spoiler isn't entirely accurate anyway.

  9. Finished World End Syndrome a few moments ago. I'm a big mystery fan, but I ruined the experience for myself here to some extent by unintentionally spoiling myself.
     

    Spoiler

    See, the thing is that I have this habit of, in games with nameless protagonists (such as Persona), look up if there's a canon name for him or her. As such, I googled "<game title> protagonist name" as I usually do and was immediately met by the name "Sora Otonashi". The game had a limit of 6 letters per name though, so I settled for "Sora Otona" instead.
    Unfortunately, I soon realized, basically right at the start of the game, that this name was in fact a huge spoiler, as I was introduced to a certain "Yukino Otonashi". It didn't take a lot of brain power to deduce that this was most likely the supposedly dead sister of the protagonist. Suffice to say, this made the whole reveal at the end of the game quite anticlimactic.
    Not only that, but the game apparently wasn't expecting anyone to name the protagonist "Sora" from the getgo, because there was a bunch of dialogue towards the end about how "Sora's" name was "Sora", not "Sora". This made it all seem more like some sort of comedy skit rather than the serious scene it was supposed to be, and the same goes for the grand reveal of Sora's name itself.

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    Yeah.


    Anyway, despite this and the cliffhanger-ish ending, I found the VN quite enjoyable as a whole, and I'm looking forward to see what they do with the sequel.

  10. 48 minutes ago, TheMode911 said:

     

      Hide contents

    What did you see in the censored version? The scene was pretty harsh and brutal so I cannot imagine what they displayed instead

     

    I honestly don't even remember any specific details. I guess that in itself is proof that it impacted me far less than that other scene, which I can clearly recall to this day despite the fact that this happened several years ago.
    I've been intending to reread MLA at some point, and I'll make sure to use the 18+ patch this time around to see what it's like then.

  11. Yeah, that's the one.

    Spoiler

    She's one of my favorite characters, and that definitely served to increase the impact that scene had on me. As horrible as it was though, I actually feel like it added depth to the game in the way that it makes the player potentially suffer some PTSD symptoms themselves just as Takeru did. It somehow made it more realistic and relatable, despite all the ridiculous stuff going on in the story.

     

  12. I've heard many people say that that particular scene is so traumatizing and horrible, but it honestly didn't have nearly that big an impact on me. Is it a lot worse in the 18+ version of the game? Back when I read the VN, the 18+ patch didn't exist yet (it wasn't released until almost a year after the game), so all I know is the censored version.
    "That other scene" earlier in the VN affected me to a much greater degree, to the point where it actually triggered a panic attack. (I assume that's the kind of effect they were hoping for when they wrote it.) MLA is the only piece of media ever that has managed to do that to me.

  13. Rather than just the "being called a pervert" part, I'd say any form of unfair treatment tends to be annoying to some extent. Some occasional playful teasing is just fine, but when it gets to the point where a heroine is making some sort of derogatory statement towards the protagonist at any given opportunity, it's too much and I usually find it hard to like those characters even if they start acting all cutesy later on. (Yeah, I'm generally not a big fan of tsunderes.)

  14. Just finished 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, and, well, I'm kinda underwhelmed.

    The overarching plot was pretty decent, but the presentation; not so much. I mean, you're just dropped in the middle of things without any idea what's going on, and then you're expected to keep track of a ton of characters and their relationships while the game jumps back and forth between different timelines in basically every scene. Things obviously got clearer as the story progressed, but the hours leading up to that point weren't very enjoyable and I don't feel like the conclusion to the story was satisfying enough to make up for it.
    I found the characters completely uninteresting, in large parts due to the sheer number of them, which effectively counteracted individual character growth. This is a common problem for me in games with a large cast, and this one was no exception. I could barely keep track of their names, much less care about what happened to any of them. Now that I'm done, I can say that not a single one of them left much of a lasting impression on me, save for maybe Miwako, who wasn't even part of the main cast.

    In conclusion, I wouldn't say this is a bad game, but I had quite high expectations diving into it and that ultimately ended up making this a lackluster experience for me when it didn't live up to them.

  15. Prelude to the Fallen is just a remake of the original Utawarerumono, which was released long before (roughly 13 years) Mask of Deception/Truth. If you want the most out of your experience, you should definitely play Prelude before the others. You'll appreciate cameos and whatnot a lot more. (I sure did, at least.)

    And yeah, you can actually get some bonus items in Mask of Truth if you max out the BP and level of a character in Mask of Deception, but they don't make much of a difference if you ask me. They boost EXP and BP gain, but the bonus only affects the character the items are equipped to.

  16. @Stormwolf You should consider reading this. It's based on part of Episode 8 of the manga and explains a bunch of stuff that was left out of the story in the main game. I also disliked how they were being so vague in Umineko, but this clears up at least some of the confusion and improved my impression of it overall.

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