Seraphim

After a somewhat longer wait than expected, the 07th mod for chapter 8 of Higurashi finally dropped a little over a week ago, and I'm now done with that chapter as well as the main series as a whole. Higurashi was a great read with a lot of both expected and unexpected twists and turns, and now I'm, more than ever, looking forward to seeing what Umineko has in store for me. EDIT: Oh, right, I should mention that I ran into a couple of funny typos and bugs during my playthrough. At one time, they were referring to "the dam conflict" as "the damn conflict", and on a few other occasions, I saw a reappearance of the bug that randomly inserts character sprites where they aren't supposed to be. Here's one example, but the best one is when a delighted Mion forced her way into a scene she wasn't even a part of, blocking the view for several characters while they were discussing important matters. You can see what I mean here and here.

I really don't understand why they decided to make the UI cover even more of the screen. It took up too much space already in the first game, and now it's even worse. Literally half the screen is covered by the UI.

Yuuji's still the one I like most. A few other favorites are Yamato from Majikoi, Achi from 428: Shibuya Scramble, Haruaki from Raging Loop, Date from AI: Somnium Files and Tomoe from Bokuten. All in all, I have a preference for capable, assertive protagonists with established personalities. I'm not a big fan of the self-insert protagonist type.

The hard drive with all my VNs as well as various pictures and documents related to my Japanese studies crashed suddenly a while back. Couldn't salvage anything, unfortunately. After that, I got a Backblaze account. Costs me $60 a year, but it's worth it for the peace of mind I get from knowing that all my files are continuously being backed up in the background while I do other stuff. It obviously wouldn't help you in this case, since it's after the fact, but it could spare you from having to experience something like this again (or possibly something worse, like what happened to me.)

I wasn't able to find a Cruise Sign ISO anywhere, and since I don't have any way of playing disc-based games on my PC, I guess I'll have to abandon the idea of that right now. On the bright side, I finally got the PC version of Flight Diary to work. Not sure why, but it seems to run perfectly with a locale emulator. I hadn't even considered trying that before, since the computer's already set to Japanese locale and I have no trouble running other games in Japanese. Flight Diary is a special case, apparently. Anyway, I haven't had much time to try it out yet, but I've been slowly (we're talking less than a snail's pace here) moving through the beginning of Hotaru's route. I know a decent amount of kanji already, but I've realized that I really need to brush up on and improve my grammar and non-kanji vocabulary. That said, it's very satisfying to feel how certain things click into place in my mind, and I'm honestly kinda regretting not getting started with reading earlier, however slow it may be at first.

Photonmelodies apparently also includes these: "Adoration"; a prequel to the story Duty ~Lost Arcadia~ which depicts Europe during the events of Alternative. "Resurrection", a story about a European spy who is also featured in Total Eclipse If I've understood correctly, they aren't a part of Altered Fable.

Probably just got the names confused. In any case, Photonmelodies will have all the content from Altered Fable aside from the h-scenes, radio drama and strategy game.

I'm guessing RPCS3 is the way to go? I haven't done any emulation in years, so I'm not very educated about it nowadays.

Maybe I'll give Cruise Sign a go then, because this doesn't seem to be working no matter what I do.

Was planning to get started on my first VN in Japanese today. I picked KonoSora Flight Diary, because I deemed it fitting since the original was one of my first VNs and still one of my all-time favorites, but it's refusing to cooperate with me. Whenever I try to start the game, it freezes at the Pulltop logo and I have to end the process in the task manager. I've tried changing basically every setting in the launcher that appears before the game boots, but I get the same result every time. Any suggestions? (Yes, the computer is set to Japanese locale.)

It feels oddly fitting that you have to remove a head to use the USB stick.

Hard to say, I'm afraid. I have a bad habit of pausing in the middle of gaming sessions and then leaving the games on in the background for extended amounts of time while I do other stuff. As such, my playtime on Steam can usually never be trusted. In ATRI's case, the timer says "29 hours", but you could probably shave off roughly 10 hours from that.

Yeah, that kinda caught me by surprise too!

On a more positive note, the translation seems solid. The phrasing might come off as a bit overly extravagant at times, but it suits the mood of the game.

I had no issues whatsoever with Nanairo Reincarnation from what I can remember, so this must be a screw-up from either the developer or the coders in the localization team then. I could accept stuff like this if I was trying to run a VN from the 90's on a modern system, but for one released in 2020, not so much.

After coming from ATRI, Adabana seems to be a major step down in terms of playability. The game engine is glitchy as hell, judging by my first minutes with it. I can't toggle fullscreen in the options (it's greyed out) and if I do it by using Alt+Enter, the stuff on-screen becomes somewhat blurry (as if you've just taken an image at a low resolution and increased the size by dragging). UI icons are highlighted with an annoyingly long delay, and some of them are highlighted even when you're not targeting them. There doesn't seem to be any hotkey for switching between English/Japanese either, like you could in ATRI. (At the very least, nothing I've tried has worked and there's no mention of any way to do it in the options.) It's apparently also one of those VNs where you have to keep the mouse cursor visible on-screen at all times to progress text. I sure hope the story is good enough to warrant enduring this crapfest.

It's not much of a spoiler, but yeah, better safe than sorry! I'd also love to read Asta's earlier works, but I haven't gotten started on reading VNs in Japanese yet, not even with text-hooking. I guess it's probably about time I do that!

Just finished ATRI. All in all, I had a great time reading it; more so than I expected, even though I'm already a fan of Konno Asta. I'd say this isn't far from becoming one of my all-time favorites, but I have one gripe with it that makes it not reach quite all the way, and that's the true ending, which I have some mixed feelings about. It's not bad; in fact, it's both well written and suits the plot, but at the same time, it was a bit too clear-cut to make it satisfying for me. To clarify, while moving into minor spoiler territory: Now, time to move on to Adabana. (Sorry, Aniplex, you won't be getting any money for this.)

I'm not sure if you're referring to the sea levels rising, details about diving or something else, but none of that stuff really bothered me. I can imagine it might if you were hoping for something completely realistic, but that wasn't really my expectation in the first place so it hasn't affected my opinion in a bad way. If anything, I actually enjoy the writing in ATRI a lot and the translation feels very vivid and fluent. (especially compared to something like Forgotten Trace: Thanatos in Nostalgia, which just released) I saw the bad ending yesterday and have been playing a couple of hours more since then. I thought I was on track to the true ending now, but I guess I'll need to view another one before unlocking that then. In any case, I hope it ends on a positive note, but I know how these stories about robots tend to go so my mind is kinda getting prepared for having its hopes crushed.

Yeah, I'm reading it, and I think I'm nearing the end now and expect to be done pretty shortly. Great read so far, and yes, while I haven't compared it to the original Japanese, the English translation is definitely solid, although it contains a ton of typos and misplaced words (to the point where I'm questioning if the script was proofread at all).

Here are a few, off the top of my head: "Person X used to be passionate about activity Y but stopped doing it because of reason Z" Just by adding that piece of information, you can be more or less certain that the route is at some point going to kick off some sort of redemption quest revolving around reigniting that former passion. It's usually the protagonist doing it for the heroines, but it can be the other way around too. That said, it's well done and not really an issue in many cases, but there are also times when it feels really forced and the person in question isn't allowed to move on with their life even if they're completely fine with the current situation. I mean, it's not strange to give up on something in real life in favor for something else, but that rarely happens in these stories from what I've seen. Forced drama. It seems many developers feel like they, to spice things up, have to add some drama to their routes no matter what, which quite often leads to events that feel unnatural or downright stupid. Chiho's route in Princess Evangile is an excellent example. Not only did they already pull the doesn't happen in any of the other routes, although it should (since the choices and events in other routes couldn't possibly affect his behavior). The "start ghosting the person you like in order to keep a secret or make them long for you" stunt. The most recent one I remember is from SakuSaku, where Technically, I guess this could fall under the previous "forced drama" category.

Yeah, a big part of the problem is that some games seem to be exempt from censorship rules while others are not. It reminds me a lot of the wishy washy, inconsistent censoring on Steam (for VNs in particular) which they have received a lot of flak for.

At the same time, they have no problems with, say, approving bikini DLC in Persona 5, where the purpose isn't to act as bathing suits, but rather only to let players check out the bodies of confirmed 15-17-year-olds.

Yeah, they're having some sort of weird crusade against anime-style content for the western market. It wouldn't be as upsetting if they at least were consistent about censorship, but western studios seem to be free to do more or less whatever they want, including showing nudity as long as it's not downright pornographic.