Seraphim

I do, but I was under the impression that the difficulty and tactical positioning were something kept from the original game. Maybe that's not the case, but that doesn't really change the fact that there are quite a few things I don't like about the gameplay parts of Mask of Deception. Too high damage, too much RNG, no EXP for non-combatants, no decent ways to farm EXP on the side, BP being borderline pointless, and so on. I hear Mask of Truth at least adds shared EXP from the battles, so that's nice. Dunno if they did any other improvements than that, but I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Currently playing Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception, after finishing Prelude to the Fallen a few days ago. Admittedly, that one was pretty easy, but what the hell is up with the enemy damage in Mask of Deception? Regular, run-of-the-mill enemies actually hit harder than the main characters of the story and can easily kill them in 1-2 hits, not to mention the AOE attacks that can wipe out several party members instantly. I imagine the developer being like: Makes it feel more cheap than genuinely challenging, really. Especially when you add all the RNG stuff and the fact that they've removed the position-based damage bonuses, which I considered one of the best parts of combat in Prelude.

Are you saying you have a Switch from another region? If so, you should be fine. It's pretty simple to change eShop locale, and I assume the same is true for accessing the Japanese one.

You might wanna put off reading those too. Haven't read them myself yet, but from what I've been told, they're connected and the first one supposedly ends on some sort of cliffhanger that isn't resolved until the final part of the series, Le Volume sur Hiver. Judging by the fact that the previous parts have been released during the summers of 2016, 2018 and 2020 respectively, I'm guessing we can expect the finale to be done in summer 2022.

You might wanna postpone reading Summer Pockets. Reflection Blue, which adds a whole bunch of new content, is at 100% translated and 88.4% edited, and considering the pace Alka's been going at so far, I imagine it won't be long until they're done.

It's Claire Courtney Claire from Mono no Aware wa Sai no Koro.

I didn't even realize until just now that Vol. 7 is the final installment and conclusion to the story. I read Vol. 1 back when it was released in 2017 and enjoyed it for the most part, but since I'm generally not a fan of episodic releases, I decided to put off reading the other volumes until they were all available. I'm kinda swamped with other games and VNs right now, but I'm definitely delving into Phantom Trigger again sometime next year!

This picture made my mind prepared for hacking. Maybe I should dial down my game time in Cyberpunk a bit.

Switch uses a unique type of cartridge, so the only way I know of is if you actually own a Switch, jailbreak it and use SX Dumper to transfer the contents of the cartridge onto an SD card, and then in turn transfer them from that to your PC. If you're not intending to buy a Switch, you might as well just buy the games to support the developers and then download them from somewhere to run them on your PC (assuming they actually run well, which I can't confirm since I haven't delved into emulation for the last 15 years or so).

You sure you aren't thinking of the Mangagamer sprites? Those and the PS3 sprites use the same backgrounds, but I think hungofhydra is referring to using the Ryuukishi07 sprites, which might change the backgrounds automatically. (I haven't tried them myself, so I can't confirm.)

http://hanepin.daa.jp/serika/kouryaku/kakyu-sei.html

Actually, I already finished Adabana a while back, by somewhat questionable means since I didn't exactly have a choice. I'm glad to see it made available on more platforms and would honestly love to buy it now just to show my appreciation for it, but the fact that ANIPLEX seem to be vehemently insistent on keeping it geoblocked on Steam doesn't sit well with me. Until that's taken care of, they won't be getting any money from me.

Well, there's the fact that it's geoblocked in Europe, meaning people over here can't even play it unless they pirate it. I imagine that might be part of the reason.

How much repeating content is there to skip through in R;N? I've heard that the skip function is broken, at times not skipping already read text while other times skipping unread text when it shouldn't, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to manually sort through all the repeating dialogue in each subsequent playthrough just to make sure I don't miss anything. It was extremely annoying in Baldr Sky, but I'm assuming it shouldn't be quite as bad here since this VN is much shorter.

Okay, so I've been reading Air on and off for a while now, but my in-game saves keep disappearing (the actual files are still on my hard drive) so I have to start over and skip through the entire game (several routes in succession at this point) every time I want to continue, and it's driving me more than a little nuts. Basically, I'm leaning towards playing the PSP version instead in order to avoid this issue for the rest of the game, but I read a comment from some dude claiming that there are some h-scenes in the PC version that are somehow relevant to the plot. Considering how Key's h-scenes usually are, I was like: Was that dude, against all odds, right or can I safely move on over to the PSP version without missing anything of worth? Also, since I'm posting in this thread anyway, I'll go ahead and make some quick comments on VNs I've finished lately. Umineko Yeah, I made a couple of posts before with theories in them, but the story and all of its parts are of such a large scale that I simply lost the energy to keep writing about it. To sum everything up, the VN was pretty great, although it didn't quite live up to my expectations. There were a lot of things that were a bit too vague for my tastes, like the fact that I expect that this and a lot of other stuff you learn over the course of the game will make me see things in a completely different light if I decide to spend another 100+ hours on rereading Umineko sometime. City of Broken Dreamers: Book One A lot more interesting and enjoyable than Depraved Awakening, both in terms of characters and story. It obviously kinda sucks that it's a work in progress and that I'll have to wait for the continuation, but I'm glad that it was a good enough experience to actually make me hyped about the next part. IxSHE Tell More or less exactly what I expected it to be; a decently fun slice of life VN with a bunch of heroines that were assertive to a satisfying extent compared to a lot of other VNs. The only thing that caught me off-guard was that

Unless I'm mistaken, I think this is the first life sign from EXTRA2 since Sprite's revival last year.

I'm excited about R;N, but the localization is apparently a bit questionable, resulting in inaccurate character portrayals and faulty terminology among other things, so I'm gonna wait for the CoZ patch that'll drop in roughly a month.

There are some parts that might be awkward from a girl's point of view, but you're likely to be impacted by the story to a decent extent no matter what your gender is.

I feel like there are way too many loose ends to just wrap everything up in Side: Below without making it seem rushed. I'm pretty sure there will be at least one more sequel, which we'll probably have to wait a long time for (though hopefully not as long, since the delays in this case mainly seem to have been caused by engine issues).

I don't think I dare click on that spoiler box, since I really want to avoid anything that can either confirm or deny any of my theories ahead of time. I'm basically not looking for any sort of discussion at this point, but rather just jotting down thoughts as they come to me. I've been jumping back and forth between a lot of different theories and have a hard time deciding exactly what to believe. Some stuff seem to hold up pretty well, but then something shows up contradicting it or leading me onto a different track every so often. It was the same with Higurashi, but Umineko's mystery feels even harder to get a grasp on.