rainsismyfav

I've been asked in the past many times, 'How can you replay VNs?' and 'Isn't that boring?'.  In fact, I get asked that a lot with my 'Random VNs' posts.  I thought I'd answer this question...
Replaying VNs is a matter of passion.  To be blunt, if it is in a genre I don't like or hits my pet peeves too hard, I can't bring myself to replay it.  The fact is, VN experiences don't change through multiple playthroughs, and in this way they are much closer to a book than to the interactivity of many games. 
Something I should make clear is that I am a story-lover above all other things.  I don't just mean that I love games, anime, and VNs for their stories... I mean that I'll do practically anything to experience a good, well-presented story.  Hell, I learned Japanese for that reason.
This is actually the reason why I have so much trouble with pure romance, mystery, and charage.  These three types of stories follow some of the most 'confined' story patterns in existence, with a very limited selection of story elements, and as a result they are far easier to predict than many fantasy, sci-fi, or even conspiracy-drama stories... at least for me.  This is particularly fatal for mysteries, since a lot of the attraction of the genre, at least to me (when I still liked them) was how much trouble figuring out 'whodunnit' or 'what is going on'. 
Now, I have become experienced enough that very little surprises me.  Particularly, in the last five years or so, this trend has become marked in my own subjective point of view when it comes to VNs.  The issue now is the subject matter... what do I enjoy enough to experience pleasure with on a second run?  The genres I can take pleasure in on a second playthrough are limited... almost entirely to the sci-fi, fantasy, and conspiracy genres.  Rare exceptions exist, but that is due to a sheer, overwhelming level of quality or due to a powerful emotional experience that doesn't fade quickly through multiple playthroughs (Uruwashi no is an example of this type). 
To be blunt, with most VNs, replaying them is impossible.  There are no new angles to explore, the feels no longer touch me, and I honestly have no interest in re-experiencing slice of life scenes, lol.
So, it comes down, as I said above, to taste.  I can replay VNs i love multiple times.  However, I will never be able to replay say... Subahibi or Aiyoku no Eustia. 

Welcome guys
 
This is a casual review of Air - standard edition, having played all 3 heroine routes plus "Summer", and "Air".
The translation I used is by Sheeta, and not Gao-gao translations (sorry).
 
I have seen the anime version a long time ago and I barely remember any details from it. I heard that the VN is better and so I tried it. After finishing the VN, I double down on that statement.
 

Some background: Air is released by KEY after Kanon, and before Clannad. I'd classify the game a Nakige, much like Clannad After Story.
The game has the theme of Summer, compared to Kanon's winter. I'm not sure if Clannad had a season theme.
 
Art: Key style. I personally like KEY style. I cannot really comment on the intricacies of the art and the CGs. I do think the number of CGs are quite few but I'm just spoiled.
 
Music/Sound: It's ok. There are a couple of memorable and catchy tunes (Minagi's theme) but nothing too bad, nothing too fantastic.
 
Story: I don't like the fact that I'm forced to play the other two heroines to unlock Summer+Air. Kano's route felt like a massive filler. Minagi's route is decent, while Mizusu's route felt just like Little Buster's Rin route is when playing it for the first time --- stopped short of the climax. Overall the heroine routes suffer from an unbearably SLOW development. I drowned on slice-of-life with what seems like 80% of the game. Literally felt like only 3 sentences out of a day in Air contributes to the advancement of the plot. It's quite anachronistic to make this comparison but, Air feels like an unrefined Clannad. If you are a KEY fan, you will see elements of KEY style in Air. The humor is hit-or-miss, not as good as Clannad or LB. Tension build-up was way too slow in Air, which is something they vastly improved in Clannad in my opinion.

 

The highlight of the whole game for me was Summer route. It contained tension from very early in the route and kept me hooked from start to finish. I'm not sure if going through two unrelated filler arcs was worth getting to Summer. But I would say this route even trumped the final route "Air", and is the main bone of the game. Summer is very impactful. Most of the final route "Air" was mostly a repeat of Misuzu's route and it's quite unpleasant to go through the slice-of-life elements again with barely any change on the narration... The story line outside of "Summer" arc only spikes in drama at the end. Tension in the mid-route is almost non-existent. The mysteries are so-so.
 

As for themes, I'm not really good at analyzing but I will try. The setting takes place on a rural town, and as such cell-phones and modern technology doesn't exist as much. By playing Air, you get a sense of the laidback countryside, with its elderly. The setting is so simple there's nothing eyecatching or interesting. But simplicity in itself seems to be what the setting conveys. Sky and flying are the main aspects of the story and there are countless references to it in-game. There are some great quotes all throughout the game, but I wasn't engaged too much with any kind of philosophical stimulation. I'm sure there are countless other themes that the game conveyed but I won't bother brainstorming at this point.
 

Scores: I'm not going to try to come up with arbitrary number for every category but I will give this VN an overall score of 6-7; meaning I will put it in the AVERAGE category. I have played or watched so much slice-of-life stories that I'm just numbed to the majority of the scenes here. Usually at that point, if there are no main plot developments happening, then humor is the only one that keeps me going. Air's humor is spotty as I mentioned before.
 
Will I recommend this?
If you like other KEY titles and its narratives, and are a fan of drama --- then yes. If you are a beginner or new to the Visual Novel scene, play this one later. There are countless numerous other better VNs than Air. Part of the reason I have survived through this game was because I was already a huge fan of KEY (having replayed Clannad like 4 times). As a standalone game it's so-so, not a bad VN, but not superb.
 
And so I leave you with a few more quotes.

I'm guessing some of those that follow my blog are wondering why I haven't started up any random VNs this month... there are a number of reasons.
1) I'm busy.  I have my work, with an addition of university, which takes up about 80% of my time, save for a few days like today when I have time to rest and relax.
2) I simply don't have an appreciation for anything in my backlog right now.  I cleared out most of the most interesting stuff over the last two years, and I'm keeping what little is left for a truly rainy day, when I'm not busy and I don't have anything better to do.
3)  This has been a very dry quarter.  July, August, and September were mostly dry of interesting releases, and I'm saving up energy for Kenseiki Alpha Ride, which I promised certain people I would play early on, rather than waiting until a later date as I commonly do with most gameplay-VNs.
4) This has been a particularly bad month irl.  I've been helping my brother get ready to move his family into our place for a few months while their old place is on the market and they are closing on their new place, I've been applying for a graduate program, and I got several major commissions that have kept me locked down a lot more than I would have liked.
5) I promised myself I wouldn't play any more moege/charage until I've played Kenseiki or the new Fortissimo. 
Now for my thoughts...  Today's post is going to be focused on what makes a good chuunige.
I should probably define the origins of chuuni as opposed to what a chuunige is.  First of all, if any of you have seen Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai, you have at least a vague idea of what chuunibyou is like.  Basically, take your average D&D nut or cosplayer and add some delusions of glory to him, and you have a chuunibyou patient.  That's simplifying matters somewhat, but it is also fairly accurate for a good portion of them, though.
Chuuni, on the other hand, is literature, games, anime, etc. that feels like it comes out of the mind of a chuunibyou patient.  Drama on a large scale, often in somewhat familiar settings, is probably the easiest and most obvious way to tell if something is chuuni.  In addition, in a good chuuni-anything, the protagonist is never a self-insert carbon copy of your average harem-building protagonist.  I say this because it is the easiest way to tell when something isn't a chuunige, as chuuni protagonists are supposed to experience and/or be something that is beyond what you can experience in your life, whether it is psychologically or physically. 
Most chuunige have action of some sort, but not all of them do.  A famous chuunige that isn't mostly action - that a lot of you will have played - is G-senjou no Maou.  In a way, Sharin no Kuni can also be considered a chuunige, for a similar reason. 
The more 'standard' type of chuunige is the 'gakuen battle' type.  The most obvious translated examples of this are Tsukihime, FSN, and Comyu.  In this type, a schoolkid somehow gets mixed up in a horrible situation that should kill him right off the bat, but he somehow survives to become central to 'the conflict'. 
A rarer type is the 'mature protagonist taking on the world' type.  This is easily my favorite type, as protagonists in these VNs tend to have more solid philosophies and are less... idiotic.  I think most people will agree that Shirou from FSN is a bit immature, though he had mature aspects.  However, protagonists in these are adults, whether they are grown up fully or not.  An example of this type that is translated would be Sharin no Kuni's protagonist.  For untranslated, Hello, Lady and Vermillion Bind of Blood (Toshiro from Vermillion reminds me of Auron from FF X, hahaha)  come to mind.  Generally speaking, the themes of these VNs will be a lot larger in scale than you usually see in the gakuen battle types.  This is because the themes are generally written to keep pace with the protagonists, lol. 
The last type is the 'poetic' type, where a writer is obviously masturbating with his keyboard.  Masada's works are the most obvious examples of this (Dies Irae, Paradise Lost, Kajiri Kamui Kagura), though Light's 'other' chuuni-crew also writes similar VNs, and Devils Devel Concept and Bradyon Veda by Akatsuki Works both fall into this category.  In this type of chuunige, the action, the story, and the visuals all exist as an excuse for the writer to try to blow you away.  Currently, the only one of this type in translation is Tokyo Babel, whose release is sometime off... though I'm tempted to include Sekien no Inganock in this crew.  For someone who loves complex, deep prose, these VNs are pure crack... but in exchange, they are also incredibly difficult to read for someone not native to the language.
Overall, reading chuunige is all about having fun.  It isn't about being moe-ed to death or being awed by the pretty pastel colors... it is about enjoying the part of you that never quite gave up that desire to be or see something more...

Hello, my name is Clephas, and I am/was a weaboo.  *snickers at the AA reference*  I'm mostly posting on this matter to give those otakus who aren't necessarily weaboos an idea of what it is like to be a weaboo (ignoring social problems, for the moment, haha) and just why we exist in the first place. 
First, to correct a common misconception... not all weaboos are solely obsessed with Japanese culture/history/etc.  In fact, most Western ones are or eventually become interested in all Asian cultures.  There are a number of reasons for it usually starting with an obsession with Japan, and I'll try to cover them all for you. 
The most obvious reason is that Japan's culture is so obviously different from anything in the average Westerner's personal experience (extracting those that come from first-generation Asian immigrant families).  To be blunt, the average American can at least guess at European sensibilities and the average European can do the same, with some mental effort.  We share a basic religious background, our social contracts are based on the same basic philosophy (with differences in preferences), and we tend to have similar cultural ancestors if we look back into history.  Heck, even most of Latin American can say the same.  So, for the average white-on-white Westerner (or Hispanic as the case may be), there might be numerous personal differences, but the actual cultural differences are in the details rather than the base elements. 
On the other hand, there is literally no common base between us and most Asian cultures, save that which we forcibly transplanted during the colonial days of the past two centuries.  Whereas we experienced various types of paganism and polytheism followed by Christianity, they experienced Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto... the list goes on.  Not only that, the way we developed our cultures was essentially different.  Confucianism in China (and the symbol of the Emperor in Japan) provided a sense of structure and continuity for centuries that altered greatly the way Chinese see the world even today, though most of its precepts have been altered almost beyond recognition in the millennia since their development.  This sense of continuity (in aspects other than philosophical) over such a vast period of time is perhaps one of the biggest causes of differences between Chinese culture in particular and Asian culture in general.  To be blunt, when the Chinese were already an Empire, our ancestors were mostly banging on drums in small settlements across the face of Europe, begging the elements not to starve our children or flood us out.  The 'weight' of culture is so much greater in Japan in China that Westerners in general and Americans in particular can't help but be impressed (or offended/frightened as the case may be) on first encounter with it. 
That said, whether that first impression turns to fascination or apathy is entirely based on the individual.  People that are more curious are more likely to get sucked into it, whereas those who prefer what they already have are more likely to simply set aside that first impression and move on. 
Another reason is that Japan is really really good at 'advertising' its culture... without really trying.  How many of you watched Pokemon, DBZ, or even Voltron or Robotech as kids without even knowing what it was?  I think you'd be surprised at how many otakus received an early baptism of Japanese ideas that planted the seeds for an eventual otaku and/or weaboo transformation.   For that matter, how many of you saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (new or old) or one of the more modern Batman movies?  Perhaps because of the intimate role we played in rebuilding post-war Japan, as well as the stream of Japanese who immigrated after the war, Japanese influence touches lightly on a great deal of our urban society (less so on the rural, though). 
The 'second baptism' that most Americans experience is negative... it is history class when you hit WWII.  The ferocity and apparent insanity (in the average Westerner's eyes) of the Japanese during the war causes an almost involuntary fascination in those who read about it, that frequently leads to a search for answers as to just why they acted the way they did during the war.  This inevitably leads to the samurai culture (both popular and historical), thus frequently creating new weaboos in droves, despite the fact that the WWII history is pretty horrifying the way it is presented (and even worse in reality).
No one is more mouthy and annoying than a new convert of any sort... and those weaboos that most annoy people are generally this type... the ones who haven't yet realized that their obsession can annoy others and thus can't stop themselves from chattering endlessly about some new aspect they discovered along the way, as if they were the first to find that particular fact out. 
Tips for tempering your obsession
If you are a weaboo, it is almost inevitable you will say too much to someone who isn't interested at some point.  In that way, it is a lot like standard otakuism.  However, if you want to at least limit your annoyance factors, here are a few tips.
1- Don't beautify every single aspect of Japanese culture you find.  Samurai culture led to the insane nationalism and mass suicides of WWII.  Geisha were glorified prostitutes (albeit artistically beautiful ones).  Ninja were spies descended from thieves and common murderers.  (etc. etc.)
2- Be aware that Japanese culture can take some seriously ugly turns in the modern era (the fact that police don't get involved in domestic affairs, the weak rape laws and enforcement of those laws, bullying in schools and at work, hikikomori, karoushi). 
3- Be aware that the excessive pride of some Japanese has led to a resurrection of the same nationalism that caused their involvement in WWII (modern historical revisionism focused on WWII and the events immediately preceding it is a prime example of this).
4- The Japanese really did do most of the horrible things their neighbors said they did... not to mention the POW camps where they held the Philippines US troops during the war.
5- Japanese gun control only works because they have no history of regular people possessing personal arms.
Well, that ends my lecture for the day. 

If I could give you any two pieces of advice, gentle reader, they would be: don’t eat unopened mussels, and don’t proofread anything you’ve edited. Neither will end well for you.

I always scratch my head when I see a visual novel translation project with the same person listed as Editor and Proofreader. Or worse yet, Translator, Editor, and Proofreader. Or (and I know I’ve seen this at least once) Translator, TLC, Editor, and Proofreader. I’m all for DIY, but that's a disaster waiting to happen.

Here’s the rule: If you’ve touched a piece of copy in any one of these roles, it’s tainted for you in all others. Sorry, that’s just how it is. These jobs are meant to be a series of checks and balances to help ensure the quality and accuracy of the content. If a single person takes on two or more of these roles, you’ve got problems. If one or more of these positions goes completely unfilled, you’ve got problems.

It’s not that you wouldn’t be capable — many editors are amazing at proofreading, and tons of translators are wonderful at TLC — but once you’ve worked with the text in one capacity, your familiarity with it makes you far less effective in any other role.

Our stupid, stupid brains
Like so many things in life, it all comes down our stupid brains being more helpful than we want — kind of like an overeager toddler who just handed you your iPhone. In the shower. (Thank god for Applecare+.) Whenever our brains see a gap in content, they try to fill it whether we want them to or not. “Hi, I’m your brain. Hey, is there a word missing there? Can I make a fairly good guess as to what it is? Wheee! I’ll just pretend like it was there and we read it and nothing’s wrong. Now let’s go think about boobies some more! BOO-BEES! BOO-BEES!” And the more familiar your brain is with the work in question, the easier it is for it to fill in those gaps. It already knows what to expect, and it’s just waiting to jump in and save the day.
Our brains must be stopped before they kill again.
The easiest way to do this is, at each step of the creation and revision process, have someone ready look at the content with fresh eyes and no preconceptions. Simple as that. You wouldn't go get a second opinion from the doctor who just provided your first opinion, would you? So don’t do it here. Don't double-up on jobs, and don’t leave positions unfilled. The final product will be better for it.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Easier said than done. Finding good volunteers is tough and people flake out or have RL commitments all the time. So what then?


 
The nuclear option
When I got my first job in advertising, I was an idiot. Thankfully, my first creative director was not. A highly accomplished copywriter, she’d penned dozens of the brand slogans that had littered my youth. Suffice to say, she knew her stuff. (You’d probably know her stuff too, if you saw it.) And this was one of the first things she taught me: “Never, ever proofread your own work. But if you have to ...”

That’s right, she had a trick. A big red button on the wall of her brain that said, “PUSH ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.” You never want to proof your own work, but sometimes you don’t have a choice. Sometimes you’ve rewritten the copy deck five minutes before the big pitch and there’s no time to send it back for proofreading. That’s where the trick comes in.

Read it backwards.
Start at the very last word and read your way back until you hit the first. This strips away all meaning from the text — your brain isn’t leaping in with a guess as to what comes next — so you can focus on minutiae like spelling, punctuation, repeated words, etc.

This is a relatively laborious process, unfortunately, and it doesn’t scale well to an entire visual novel. But I mention it here in case you find yourself with a few lines or even a short script that needs a proofing pass and you’re the only one around to do it.

.it of habit a make don’t Just.

Full disclosure
By the way, I’ll be the first one to admit that v1.0 of the KoiRizo English patch has typos. In my role as editor, I tried to work as cleanly as possible, but over the course of 36,000+ lines — I figure that’s gotta be at least 250,000 words — a few foxes got into the henhouse. The team didn’t have any proofreaders, and the QC process wasn’t nearly as robust as had initially been hoped. (Zakamutt touches on that here.) But you know what? For all of that, I think the launch product came out comparatively clean. I still want to drink bleach and die every time I see a typo report, of course, but that comes with the territory.

And with any luck, there will be patch updates forthcoming that address some of these lingering issues. Which is good, since I’m running low on bleach. And lives.

Introduction:
 
When it comes to reading VN's in Japanese, required skills can be grouped into four areas: Vocab, grammar, basic parsing skill, and kanji skill. In this post, for each area I'm going to explain:
-what knowing skills in the area are good for
-how you might study them
-how much you'll need to start reading.
I'll also give some related tips.
 
The requirements mentioned below are a conservative estimate. I've known people who've jumped in to playing VN's with less or much less, but I'm giving a safe estimate. A level which at most people, without any special knack for learning languages through immersion, should be able to gain traction. If you learn this much before starting an easyish VN, the amount you are completely lost should be significantly less than the percentage you are able to pick up and improve from.
 
This is not a comprehensive how-to guide by any means. Just an informative post.
 
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1. Vocab
 
Knowing enough vocab to study your grammar resource without being bogged down by vocab:
-About 30 verbs and 50 other words for Genki 1/ Tae kim Basic.
-By the time you get to Genki 2/Tae Kim Essential you'll want a good set of verbs (about 100), and maybe about 300 total vocabulary.
-~600 words about how much you'll want to be able to study N3 grammar without getting bogged down in vocab.
 
Having enough vocab to start your first VN:
-I recommend over 1000, but anywhere from 800-1300 is good. I remember trying Clannad with only 800, and I felt like ramming my head into a wall. It's also important to pick an easy title. It will still feel hard no matter what, but an easy title will be much more helpful and rewarding to play. You also must just translation aggregator and ITH. They are the reason why Visual Novels are the best medium for learning Japanese out of anime/books/movies/drama/etc.
 
Vocab Lists:
There's a dedicated verb list here: http://nihongoichiban.com/2012/08/13/list-of-all-verbs-for-the-jlpt-n4/
Verbs are helpful to learn, because they are often the most important part of the sentence AND you need to to have stuff to conjugate.
In general JLPT-based vocab list is here: http://www.tanos.co.uk/jlpt/jlpt5/vocab/
 
Regarding English definitions:
Be mentally open and flexible. If the english definition doesn't quite add up, don't try and think about it too hard. Focus instead on associating the word with the situations where you see it.
For example, you might be confused by the word 都合 and it's unhelpful definition J-E definition, but if you seen 都合がいい used in a situation where you know it means "is convenient for me" from context then remember that occurence. There might be (there are, in fact), other usages of the word 都合, but that doesn't hurt you in anyway. The next time you see 都合 you can pair it against this meaning and see if that makes any sense.
 
2. Grammar Skills
 
With N5+N4 grammar you will be barely able to start making your way through a VN. Without N4, you will have quite limited gains in the long term from reading visual novels. (Equivalent to Genki 1+2.)
-Required to be able to play VN's
 
With N3 grammar, everything will feel a lot clearer, the amount of grammar you'll understand will exceed 60%. (Equiv. to Intermediate approach to Integrated Japanese). Highly recommended to study this before or soon after you start your first VN.
 
N2 grammar further cuts the amount of unknown grammar you face in three.
 
N1 is kind of like a bonus that gives you a lot of uncommon or formal expressions. It's NOT comprehensive at all, in terms of covered all Japanese phrases. From my experience, some of the phrases you learn in here show up often in novels (ばかり、んばかり), others quite less. Good to know, though
 
Expressions not covered in JLPT
There are a lot of patterns and phrases not covered in JLPT that you will see in typical native reading material. Examples (社長に議長, phrases like なんだと！？ Xってなんだ？　ですって！？　～てくれないかな。 オレって、なんてバカなんだ ) Not to worry, many of them can be picked up as you go. For the rest, once you get settled into reading, you can start noting down those phrases you don't get and google them or ask other people.
 
Imabi for grammar
You can also try studying from http://www.imabi.net/. It's a phenomenal reference, it's just goes into tons of depth, too much. I think there's 2 or 3 times as much information there is covered by JLPT up to JLPT 1. As such it's going to be overwhelming for a beginner and is much better suited as a reference for intermediate or advanced learners.
 
3. Basic Parsing Skill
 
Knowing the different types of words (Covered by doing a vocab list of about 100 verbs, and then the JLPT 5 list. You also have to have done or be doing Tae Kim's Basic Guide, since he explains what na-adj's, i-adj's, and other word types are, etc.).
-(nouns, suru-verbs/nouns, verbs, na-adj's, i-adj's, adverbs, temporal adverbs)
-Required to be able to play VN's.
 
Knowing the basic sentence structure and how words can modify each other and fit in a sentence.: (adjectives modifying nouns, verbs).
The knowledge is covered by Tae Kim Basic + a mix of Essential Grammar and Genki 1/2. I personally find Tae Kim's explanation good even though the learning curve is steep and his lessons aren't good for review like Genki books are. He tries to convey to you the big picture.
-Required to be able to play VN's.
 
Being able to breakdown sentences and spot the different types of words based on their position.
-you can practice this by reading bits of text in your genki textbook, but more likely, the first time you really gain this skill is going to be the first month in which you read a visual novel with TA. Heavily practiced during your first month or two of reading VN's.
 
4. Kanji Skill:
 
Learning to spots radicals in kanji (could be covered by doing the 214 radicals, about 1 month. You could also do this ongoing basis, learning how to spot the radicals that make up a kanji, for the words you learn.)
-not needed to read VN's with TL aggregator, but extremely helpful for learning new words which have new kanji.
 
Learning to remember kanji, ie. start recognizing when words share the same kanji. (it is a long ongoing gradual process. You can start doing this with the vocab you learn once you are comfortable learning vocab. You can also pick out words you see in vn's and check whether they use the same kanji by typing them out (example 朝（あさ）　and　朝食（ちょうしょく）　use the same kanji.). Oh course, to be able to easily produce the kanji you want to compare you need to remember how to spell a word that contains it (in this case 朝). So, as your vocab expands, you'll be able to compare more kanji. Note that to be able to do this comparing you must be able to spot radicals in kanji (previous level skill).
-moderately helpful for learning vocabs. The same way remembering radicals helps learning with kanji: if you know the kanji clearly, you can remember a word just by the two kanji it uses, which is very precise and doesn't take a lot of mental bandwidth. It also means that you will much more rarely confuse words which have similiar looking kanji.
 
The following two skills are for more advanced, they won't be particularly useful until much later. You might not notice the problems they solve until later as well. I include them mainly for completeness.
Learning on-yomi for many of the Jyouyou kanji (start when you are intermediate-advanced, a medium-long process)
-helpful for exactly what it is, reading kanji words and compounds correctly.
-don't need to worry about this. From learning vocab you might pick up some of the common ones, but there's no need to pursue this actively for a while.
 
Learning kanji meaning: (start when you are advanced, and can use a J-J dictionary)
-suffixes like 府、省、性、症, as well normal kanji whose different meanings apply to clusters of words.
-helpful for kanji compounds which won't directly show up in dictionaries
-helpful for developing a native level understanding of vocabulary (not everything can be learned by exposure). A lot of literary words are fairly influenced by their kanji meanings, though sometimes consulting the word differentiation explanations can be more helpful.
 
 
 
One last topic...
 
On learning enough grammar and jumping into works too difficult for you.
Reading a VN isn't the best way to learn basic sentence structure. However, it's a great way to reinforce grammar points you've learned. It's also a great way to get an understanding of conversational patterns you won't find in textbooks or JLPT. But you won't have the presence of mind to pay attention to that if you are bogged down by not knowing basic grammar.
There are benefits for venturing early into native material or difficult vn's, but you wouldn't give a grade two student Tolkien, or even Harry Potter to improve their English. All the fancy prose and unusual concept would distract you from the more immediately useful things like, say: basic sentence structure.
There are works which are the right level, and there are VN's which you really want to read. For the best experience, it's best to find some combination of the two.
 
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Ok that's all for now. Feel free to ask any questions: I didn't really go into the details of how to study, instead focusing on the, well, skills involved. But it's also hard to remember what it's like for someone just starting out. I remember parts of studying very clearly, but I forget the thousands of things I used to be puzzled through varying stages of understanding but now take for granted.
The process was all I could think about for the longest time. Now I don't give it much thought, it's just a regular part of my life, reading and a bit of studying. It's not bad idea, to just find a type of study that you know is helpful, stop thinking about all the right ways and wrong ways and magic tricks which don't exist, and just do it, for a while. Regularly. For a month or three.

Hi hi Fuwa. My name is rains.
 
I'd like to start this blog for my personal casual anime and VN reviews. Of course I have preferences and specific biases for certain aspects of anime and VN. I'd like to explain myself so that you guys know from what perspective my reviews are coming from.
 
I have played I'd say quite a decent amount of Visual novels, mostly translated and some untranslated here and there.
My list is: https://vndb.org/u46648/list
Having been in the scene for at least 7 years now, barely anything is new to me anymore. Cliches and archetypes are easily visible to me and it takes a game or anime a great bit to entertain me nowadays.
 
I have great biases for Romance, Drama, and Mystery. Anything chuuni is a hit-or-miss for me. Some of my top ones are Muv-luv, Clannad, Ever17, Kanata Yori, and Shinsekai Yori. But at the same time I can enjoy moeges/kyara-ge like Flyable hearts, Yosuga no Sora, or Edelweiss. I'm tolerant for the most part when it comes to anything bizarre (like Saya no Uta).
 
My reviews will be very basic and I won't really delve too much into analysis or breakdowns. It will be mostly based on how entertained I was playing or watching.
 
Enjoy my future reviews~
 
Thanks for reading.

Hi hi Fuwa. My name is rains.
 
I'd like to start this blog for my personal casual anime and VN reviews. Of course I have preferences and specific biases for certain aspects of anime and VN. I'd like to explain myself so that you guys know from what perspective my reviews are coming from.
 
I have played I'd say quite a decent amount of Visual novels, mostly translated and some untranslated here and there.
My list is: https://vndb.org/u46648/list
Having been in the scene for at least 7 years now, barely anything is new to me anymore. Cliches and archetypes are easily visible to me and it takes a game or anime a great bit to entertain me nowadays.
 
I have great biases for Romance, Drama, and Mystery. Anything chuuni is a hit-or-miss for me. Some of my top ones are Muv-luv, Clannad, Ever17, Kanata Yori, and Shinsekai Yori. But at the same time I can enjoy moeges/kyara-ge like Flyable hearts, Yosuga no Sora, or Edelweiss. I'm tolerant for the most part when it comes to anything bizarre (like Saya no Uta).
 
My reviews will be very basic and I won't really delve too much into analysis or breakdowns. It will be mostly based on how entertained I was playing or watching.
 
Enjoy my future reviews~
 
Thanks for reading.

Hi hi Fuwa. My name is rains.
 
I'd like to start this blog for my personal casual anime and VN reviews. Of course I have preferences and specific biases for certain aspects of anime and VN. I'd like to explain myself so that you guys know from what perspective my reviews are coming from.
 
I have played I'd say quite a decent amount of Visual novels, mostly translated and some untranslated here and there.
My list is: https://vndb.org/u46648/list
Having been in the scene for at least 7 years now, barely anything is new to me anymore. Cliches and archetypes are easily visible to me and it takes a game or anime a great bit to entertain me nowadays.
 
I have great biases for Romance, Drama, and Mystery. Anything chuuni is a hit-or-miss for me. Some of my top ones are Muv-luv, Clannad, Ever17, Kanata Yori, and Shinsekai Yori. But at the same time I can enjoy moeges/kyara-ge like Flyable hearts, Yosuga no Sora, or Edelweiss. I'm tolerant for the most part when it comes to anything bizarre (like Saya no Uta).
 
My reviews will be very basic and I won't really delve too much into analysis or breakdowns. It will be mostly based on how entertained I was playing or watching.
 
Enjoy my future reviews~
 
Thanks for reading.

Welcome guys
 
This is a casual review of Air - standard edition, having played all 3 heroine routes plus "Summer", and "Air".
The translation I used is by Sheeta, and not Gao-gao translations (sorry).
 
I have seen the anime version a long time ago and I barely remember any details from it. I heard that the VN is better and so I tried it. After finishing the VN, I double down on that statement.
 

Some background: Air is released by KEY after Kanon, and before Clannad. I'd classify the game a Nakige, much like Clannad After Story.
The game has the theme of Summer, compared to Kanon's winter. I'm not sure if Clannad had a season theme.
 
Art: Key style. I personally like KEY style. I cannot really comment on the intricacies of the art and the CGs. I do think the number of CGs are quite few but I'm just spoiled.
 
Music/Sound: It's ok. There are a couple of memorable and catchy tunes (Minagi's theme) but nothing too bad, nothing too fantastic.
 
Story: I don't like the fact that I'm forced to play the other two heroines to unlock Summer+Air. Kano's route felt like a massive filler. Minagi's route is decent, while Mizusu's route felt just like Little Buster's Rin route is when playing it for the first time --- stopped short of the climax. Overall the heroine routes suffer from an unbearably SLOW development. I drowned on slice-of-life with what seems like 80% of the game. Literally felt like only 3 sentences out of a day in Air contributes to the advancement of the plot. It's quite anachronistic to make this comparison but, Air feels like an unrefined Clannad. If you are a KEY fan, you will see elements of KEY style in Air. The humor is hit-or-miss, not as good as Clannad or LB. Tension build-up was way too slow in Air, which is something they vastly improved in Clannad in my opinion.

 

The highlight of the whole game for me was Summer route. It contained tension from very early in the route and kept me hooked from start to finish. I'm not sure if going through two unrelated filler arcs was worth getting to Summer. But I would say this route even trumped the final route "Air", and is the main bone of the game. Summer is very impactful. Most of the final route "Air" was mostly a repeat of Misuzu's route and it's quite unpleasant to go through the slice-of-life elements again with barely any change on the narration... The story line outside of "Summer" arc only spikes in drama at the end. Tension in the mid-route is almost non-existent. The mysteries are so-so.
 

As for themes, I'm not really good at analyzing but I will try. The setting takes place on a rural town, and as such cell-phones and modern technology doesn't exist as much. By playing Air, you get a sense of the laidback countryside, with its elderly. The setting is so simple there's nothing eyecatching or interesting. But simplicity in itself seems to be what the setting conveys. Sky and flying are the main aspects of the story and there are countless references to it in-game. There are some great quotes all throughout the game, but I wasn't engaged too much with any kind of philosophical stimulation. I'm sure there are countless other themes that the game conveyed but I won't bother brainstorming at this point.
 

Scores: I'm not going to try to come up with arbitrary number for every category but I will give this VN an overall score of 6-7; meaning I will put it in the AVERAGE category. I have played or watched so much slice-of-life stories that I'm just numbed to the majority of the scenes here. Usually at that point, if there are no main plot developments happening, then humor is the only one that keeps me going. Air's humor is spotty as I mentioned before.
 
Will I recommend this?
If you like other KEY titles and its narratives, and are a fan of drama --- then yes. If you are a beginner or new to the Visual Novel scene, play this one later. There are countless numerous other better VNs than Air. Part of the reason I have survived through this game was because I was already a huge fan of KEY (having replayed Clannad like 4 times). As a standalone game it's so-so, not a bad VN, but not superb.
 
And so I leave you with a few more quotes.

I'm not going to go into detail like I did with Sumi's path, if only because my love for youkai isn't fulfilled to the same degree in Alice's or Natsuha's paths as it was in that one. Also, another reason is that the progression for both is far less dramatic than it is with Sumi's path.

In Alice's case, the actual events leading up to the end of the main story are really dark and sad, and the path itself tends to be quite a bit more gloomy than the other two. In exchange, there is a lot more focus on the romantic aspects and the 'living together' parts. This is, in many ways, inevitable due to the fact that the bond between Sumi and Tohru was so strong from the beginning that the romance was pretty much predetermined in vector once they got over a few small issues. This is opposed to Alice's path, where both sides have a lot off growing to do... which is done mostly in the after story, rather than the main path. Similar to Sumi's path, this one had a few extra characters added in (whom I will not name in order to avoid spoilers), and as a result, the after story felt a lot like its own VN.

In Natsuha's case... you can probably predict the main path from the original game based entirely off what you experienced in the others (the different regrets the protag has in both cases), as in many ways it is like a bringing together of the ideal elements from the other two in order to create a more complete whole. It does have the predictable incest issue, but once you are past that, you are into the after story. Natsuha's after story has the least number of ups and downs of the three, at least in part because there is none of the tension about 'what needs to be done' leftover from the main path, save for the obvious. I did find Natsuha's dreams for the future interesting, and I would have liked to see them achieved as part of the after story... but that is because the after story pretty much felt like a VN in and of itself, lol.

Overall, my thoughts on this VN are positive, save for the fact that there are a huge number of H-scenes (something like seventy) - though most are optional ones that can only be seen through scene jumps - and the fact that the makers were so obviously indulging their disease. I also was a bit exasperated that all three heroines are such... perverts once the protag gets them behind closed doors (just how weird do these guys want their lolis to be?). The VN itself is huge... about the same or maybe a bit longer than Grisaia no Kajitsu. Also, I wish the protagonist had Emi with Sumi regardless of the path (lol)... a little girl that adorable deserves to be born.

WARNING: This VN is unapologetically a lolige, as I said above. I am not a loli fan, so I found that to be one of the biggest barriers to enjoying this VN. I would have been a lot happier with no h-scenes being present in this particular VN.

First, I should state that Monobeno is an unapologetic lolige. The extent the writers went to to make this game a lolige (even in Alice's path) is so ridiculous I had to sigh in exasperation. Sadly, it also has one of the best plots and some of the best characters you can see in a VN. Like this company's previous VN, Gothderi, dismissing it because it is a lolige is a huge mistake.



I played the original version of Monobeno, where all the endings were extremely bittersweet and vague, and what I can say about this is that the after-stories provided give closure and really do remake this into a VN with happy endings, as promised. The actual original story hasn't changed significantly, and thus I'll mostly just note that the events in each path tended to be hectic, and almost universally it ended sadly/badly for certain characters.

This also adds the story of Hishakaku and Tsumi, which was a huge benefit. Hishakaku (also known as Buppougataki Daisannyou Hishakaku) is the umbrella youkai that helped raise the protagonist and Sumi (the akashaguma youkai who is one of the heroines), and he is a natural protector, who reminds me of Auron from FFX, if you added thirty years, grandfatherly love, and a sense of humor. This story is unbelievably beautiful and sad, and it adds a lot of background to Hishakaku, while also leading you into the after stories of the various routes. (I cried a lot for the end of Sumi's after story because of this)

Sumi's route focuses on the youkai/supernatural approach to the main conflict of the story, and as a result it varies greatly from Alice's (who is the other side, which focuses on the scientific approach). The romance, which comes to flower amidst the search for the truth of what is going on, is made more interesting by the fact of the protagonist and Sumi's intense interdependence before their parting years before the story began. The main route's ending is bittersweet, causing tears to fall in abundance before you move on to the after story.

Sumi's after-story is actually about the same length as her original story, with just as many interesting events. Sumi and the protagonist's daughter, Emi, is an adorable little girl who has a nose for trouble and a tendency to run straight toward it... but she also inherited her mother's ability to bless with good luck and it is all directed to herself, so she generally survives it well. The progression of this story is focused on the interactions of humans and youkai, their differences, and why not all youkai can live with humans. A lot of the issues you might not have been able to come to terms with through the original path are much easier to do so here. Most importantly, this brings a full conclusion to the conflict of the original story... and Hishakaku is showed off at his best in a dramatic scene toward the end that had me in tears of mixed happiness and sorrow.

The idea of a harem is a very old one. In fact, there is literally no culture (prior to Christianity) that, sometime in its past, did not accept the idea of a harem in one form or another.

However, it was never a simple system of one man simply marrying as many women as he wanted. In some places, it was a mark of familial wealth. In order to avoid long-term difficulties, a wealthy individual would take numerous wives, produce numerous sons, and split that wealth amongst those sons in order to prevent his fellow villagers or townsmen from turning on his family at some future point. In others, it was a mark of political power. An Emperor would take numerous wives, both to form alliances with his nobles and foreign countries and in order to ensure the continuance of his dynasty (in most Imperial dynasties, it was accepted that there would be vicious palace politics that would kill off numerous potential heirs). In old China, it was accepted that a man would take a primary wife and many concubines if he had the wealth to do so. The primary wife would be the mistress of the family, whereas the others would help administer the husband's estates under her direction.

So why did the harem system go out of fashion? It didn't, really. Most men of power and wealth have mistresses, even today, and the attitude of most 'old money' families is one of resignation toward this kind of behavior. Of course, religiously and legally those living in the mostly Christian west can only have a single wife, but the tacit approval of wealthy and powerful men taking mistresses is a work-around common to almost all monogamist cultures.

Now, for the morality of it... extract religion and hypocritical social mores from the mix, and you basically have three golden standards by which the idea of a harem might be condemned or approved:

1. Are the men/women involved satisfied with the situation and well-treated?

2. Does the male or female holder of the harem have the wealth to support his/her spouses and any resulting children?

3. Are the resulting children happy and healthy?




That's real life. VNs do it a bit differently. Because VNs tend to avoid dirty details (no, I don't mean H, I mean real-life style drama) and ignore inconvenient realities, the average VN probably wouldn't be able to fulfill those standards in the long run. This is because most VN protagonists don't have the capability or strength of will to both manage the inevitable internal conflicts of a harem (herding cats) and bring in enough money to support a large family. For this reason, most VN harems just don't qualify in my eyes as being a realistic idea.

That said, there are VNs that actually consider the realities and make it seem like a realistic choice... but most don't manage it, lol. I especially have to rofl at harem nukige and moege.

Now, for my personal viewpoint... I basically think that if you can manage to fulfill the 'golden rules' above, there is no reason why I should care if you have multiple wives/lovers. On the other hand, if you can't afford to have a wife and kids, you shouldn't. I hate optimists.

So I just spent 50 minutes of my day watching this. Trying to process what I just watched is hard, there's just so much information to take in. I watched it alongside OriginalRen, SuikaShoujo and The Major, yet despite our best efforts, our brains simply were no match for the depth and intricacy this anime provides.

I'll try to give you a feel, a small sample of what it feels like to watch "Issho ni Sleeping: Sleeping with Hinako", but I truly believe that the only real way to appreciate this show is to just watch it yourself.

So first off we have our heroine Hinako. Hinako really likes to sleep. Her main trait as a character is not being able to fix the strap on her shirt.



As you can see from this cleverly crafted angle, this entire anime is told in first person perspective. But we're just scratching the surface of how thick the plot really gets.

After Hinako changes clothes, covering your face so you don't see her changing, even though she just ends up sleeping in her underwear anyway, she goes to sleep.

And thus, our sleep adventure begins!





That is the face of pure bliss.



Here we have some amazing shots that truly depict the wonders of a 2D girl sleeping.





A real good close up of the heroine, it's almost like she's breathing on you





In this shot here, you can see Hinako's breasts changing sizes, giving us a clear reason why Hinako just can not get the left strap of her shirt to stay in place, her left breast simply doesn't have as much mass.






This shot here is a classic. The subtle twitch Hinako's leg makes each time really provides livelyness to her sleep, making you feel like you're sleeping right next to her.







10 minutes in and the anime really ramps it up by having Hinako turn to the other side. In my opinion this was one of their best moves yet.







Here we get a first glimpse of Hinako's windowsill which displays a clock and a vase with a plant. This is a very intringuing as the clock displays no numbers, a fact that will become really important later on so make sure you keep it in mind.







Another very rare shot of Hinako's armpit, one of my personal favorites if I daresay so myself. The disproportionally sized breasts really help elevate that armpit.







18 minutes in and the biggest game changer yet, Hinako makes use of one of her pillows! We can neither confirm nor deny if there's any significance behind this pose and the pillow's peculiar shape.







And just 30 seconds later we are shown Hinako's sleep eating abilities.







This is one of the rarest shots in the whole story, at the 22:22 minute mark, Hinako dangles her arm from the bed. What a delightful display of character.







And this 24 minute mark is the crucial turning point where we have a clear view of Hinako's room and lo and behold, nobody is sleeping next side her, even though we're supposed to be there, what could this possibly mean!?







At the 26 minute mark, Hinako has a dream about the moment we confessed to her and she gladly accepted our feelings. While the dream itself lasted a mere 10 seconds, I could really feel a deep emotional connection with Hinako's character just from watching her sleep for the past 26 minutes.







And in the next minute, Hinako wakes up. I'm sure we were thinking the same thing, and that is how much we love each other. Hinako, being the amazing girlfriend she is, sings us a lullaby with really inspiring lyrics such as "Go to sleep, go to sleep on Hinako's chest" which have the result of making her fall asleep.







At the 30 minute mark, Hinako has yet another dream, this time about when she was training hard to lose weight, she even gives us advice on how to be BIG like Hinako.







And now, the biggest game changer yet, Hinako falls off her bed! My heart could barely take it, seeing Hinako fall on the floor after 30 minutes of sleeping really came out of nowhere, this anime sure knows how to tug on your heart strings.







And now starts the most romantic scene in an anime I have ever seen.








What a straightforward approach. Hinako tops all those tsunderes in generic romcoms, you don't get this level of romance too often.








Of course we have a really deep connection with Hinako, and she reassures us of that by returning our feelings (even though we didn't really say anything, I'm sure our feelings got acress).



I had to hold back my emotions over how realistic everything got, the intense urge to kiss my screen really started to come out.








*doki doki*





Hinako wastes no time though, she knows what her main goal is, this woman has her priorities set straights, that's why right after this she once again heads to bed and instantly falls asleep. Pro sleepers really are something else.







But the thrilling ride isn't over yet, can you believe they still have more in store? This time, Hinako invites us to sleep on the same bed as her. My heart almost jumped out of my chest. The anime really makes this a realistic experience by tilting the camera 90 degrees. It truly felt like I was right next to Hinako.







[immersion intensifies]








35 minutes in, Hinako does yet another unpredictable thing, she decides to get a night snack. Gosh, this anime really doesn't hold back on the plot twists.







Brushing your teeth is important too. Even if you didn't eat anything. Deep.







Once again, after falling asleep, Hinako falls on the floor. This time facing the other way, I liked that change of pace, this anime really knows when to spice it up.







She doesn't forget her girlfriend duties though and reminds us we are also an entity, a sentient being, and thus we need sleep as well. Notice how her strap keeps sagging lower and lower, symbolizing we're reaching the end of our journey.







After she falls asleep, Hinako has one last dream. In this one though, she ended up getting fat due to eating so many snacks. I'm sure she'll resume her training the next day!







And now, after a whole 40 minutes of Hinako sleeping, morning comes, and this is where the plot really thickens!




You see, after this, Hinako sleeps with us again, twice, do you not see what this means!?




This whole time, we've actually been trapped in a dream world, but not just that, we were trapped in a dream world, inside a dream world, inside a dream world, inside a dream world, and we weren't a human being either, we were a ghost that posessed random objects around Hinako's room in order to try to wake her from the dream by looking at her body from several different angles. Remember the clock I mentioned at the beginning? What was missing? Pointers! That's because in this dream world, there's no time flow! We've been stuck sleeping with Hinako over and over, that's why she always wears the same outfit when she sleeps.







I could barely see this coming, it came by so fast my brain just had no time to process it.




This anime is a deconstruction of the human psyche, one that if you're not paying attention to, you will miss its profound message, the 50 minute length time really manages to portray to intricacies of the brain by having the same still shots over and over again across the timeline, you really feel like you're diving into Hinaki's profound sleepiness and tracing its patterns.




The emotional bonds you manage to form with Hinako as you watch her sleep from every possible angle really make this a standout from the crowd. You can not get this deep level of characterization anywhere else.



It brought me to tears as my eyes were strained while I wtched 50 minutes of a girl sleeping on a bed, making me empathize with her.




The story sucks you in, almost making you fall asleep just like Hinako.



This 16 year old girl who can't put on a shirt strap properly is the apogee of all female characters. If you haven't used the term "waifu" now, I'm sure this anime will change your mind.




Issho ni Sleeping: Sleeping with Hinako is, without a doubt, the best anime ever made.

Attention Fuwanovel! This is a very important announcement!
MOE MOE MOE MOE MOE MOE MOE MOE

Time to head off to AX! Maybe I'll see some of you there

P.S. - If I don't make it back, you can blame Tay. taypls

The Blurb
Flowers: Le volume sur printemps (AKA Flowers: Spring Volume) is a yuri game set in an all-girls catholic school. You play as Shirahane Suou, a shy girl who has come to the school seeking friendship. You see, she has heard that at this school a certain system exists that pairs up girls who are in the same year. With a system such as this, even an introvert like Suou can surely make at least one true friend! Or, so she hopes...

The Brood
Let's introduce our three main characters:


Suou is an introverted bookworm who has been homeschooled most of her life. Her lack of interaction with others her age has crippled her socially, and her one experience attempting to attend a normal school was a disaster. On the plus side, she has striking good looks that earn her easy praise from all around her, and when it comes to anything nerdy, including such things as fantasy novels and horror movies, she is quite knowledgeable. She's also got the mind of a detective, but we'll get to that bizarrely out-of-place addition later on.


Mayuri is a cool beauty whose laid-back attitude makes her an instant hit in the classroom. She is a bit of a tomboy, and sometimes she takes things perhaps a bit TOO easy, but it's also clear that there are times when her sunny smile is just for show...


Rika is the class president, and has a very mature, lady-like personality. She is very concerned with making sure everyone obeys the school rules, but even more concerned with making sure everyone in the class gets along. She is a mediator and defuser of situations, though perhaps she is too quick to help others, and not quick enough to find help for herself...

I am only covering characters here who have routes in the game, though I will say that the supporting cast is full of great characters who I hope to see more of in later games in this series.

Anywho, on with the review.

The Good
The writing in this game is very good. The feels are for reals. As you watch Suou change and grow through her experiences, and as you see the many, many layers of each character being peeled away, revealing lifelike complexity and multi-faceted personalities, you can't help but feel that you are one of these girls, going through these things with your dear friends. The emotional scenes strike home very hard, and I found myself teary-eyed multiple times on both of the routes.

The music, though sparse, is very good. Especially during the opening scenes, music is used in an almost sound-novel like manner to emphasize the scenes. One song blends into another in a kind of crescendo that really sends a thrill through you as you go through the prologue. While I wish there would have been more tracks and a few more cases where music was used to great effect like in the prologue, what is there is effective (though you will get tired of the one or two 'everyday' tracks that play almost constantly when there isn't another special song to play).

The CG is... excellent. Absolutely amazing. I've seen good CG in VNs before, but I've never felt as much like I really wanted to collect each one as I have in this game. Normally in non-H games CG seems to serve very little purpose except emphasizing certain scenes, but in this game the CGs are definitely rewards worth striving for.



Just... AHH! And they're all like that!

The Bad
This game appears to be low budget. There are a few reasons why I feel this way. First, there are maybe like 10 music tracks. It's seriously hilariously bad how often they force you to listen to the 'everyday' music. I mean yeah I realize it's the theme meant to represent your everyday life at the school but it plays for 90% of the game, I kid you not. No matter how much you like it at first you will get sick and tired of it before you pass the halfway point. Second, every character has all of two poses and maybe 2 changes of clothing (with the same poses for the changes). It's bad. Especially when the text describes a character doing something they are obviously not doing. Also, for certain characters (who I will get to in a moment) the poses given them are good for basically none of the emotions they actually want to show. Now, I realize we're probably going to get more costumes in later games and that this is meant to be the first of probably 4 games (one for each season, the 2nd one is already out), but that's still no excuse to only have 2 poses. That's just sad.

But a low budget can be forgiven. What can't be forgiven is the absolutely bizarrely bad character design. I want you take a look at these two characters:

When I first met these two I was convinced they were going to be the villains; bullies that spread bad rumors about me or something. They don't look like friendly, puppy-like little sister characters who act in huggable adorable ways. Except that's the role they actually play in the game. Their voices are also adorable and don't fit the images they were given at all. In fact, even in CG they look completely different from their normal sprites:

See? HERE they look like cute little kids, which is what they act like. If they had expressions like these on their sprites I could probably forgive the narrow necks and angular faces, but they have all of 2 expressions they can give and neither of them are cute! I don't know what the sprite artist thought he was drawing, but he and the CG artist (I can only assume for my own sanity that they were different people) obviously got mixed signals.

Also, the writer gets hung up on his own cliches way too often. This is mainly targeted at two characters, one of whom we are constantly told has a 'smile like a patch of spring sunlight' and another has a 'teasing, catty smile'. Which, I mean yeah that works for description, but we are literally told this about those two characters CONSTANTLY. There are seriously times with the latter character in which she has the cat smile multiple times in the same scene. If you take a drink every time that character is likened to a cat you will be drunk by the end of your first meeting with her in the story. It's ridiculous and a small failing on the part of the writer.

And, my final complaint (well, for the Bad section... I've got one or two for the Ugly) is that one of the two endings is a horrible sequel-baiting cliffhanger. I mean I should have expected that from a game that appears to be the first in a series of possibly 4 games, but it was still a low blow. A serious punch in the gut, especially because I was so emotionally invested in the characters.

The Sad
I've got to say the saddest thing for me (besides the stupid cliffhanger sequel-bait ending for one of the routes) was honestly the character design fail I mentioned above. I really loved those two characters and I feel that the designers really dropped the ball on making their sprites, and now they're just going to re-use those sprites for every subsequent game in the series so it's never going to get better. If this was a novel, without visuals, I never would have pictured those two looking like they do, not in a million years. All I can do is look forward to the CG, in which they are actually drawn correctly.

The Mad
The mysteries in this game made me mad, but we'll get to why and how in The Ugly, because they were that bad.

The Fad
Gahh! Everyone's wearing the same thing all the time! Even in their pajamas everyone looks fairly similar. Happily there is at least one costume that stands out during the game:

Just. Yeah. You can feel the power of the prayer. I wonder what's going on in this scene? Guess you'd better read the VN and find out!

The Rad
There is a scene where Suou and two other girls are up at night in the library of the school and they decide to tell ghost stories to each other. The stories are great chillers and, even though they're not meant to be terrifying or horrific, they hit just the right notes to send some shivers up your spine. There are even special CG just for that scene to add to the spookiness with images. It's a great scene and it felt like a kind of bonus, since the plot of the game itself has basically nothing to do with the paranormal. Definitely my pick for the raddest scene.

The Snuggly
The two girls mentioned earlier could have been this if their character designs had been handled a bit better. I still liked them in the CG, but it just wasn't enough. Sadly I must say that this game really does not have a sufficient level of cuteness, so moe fans should stay far away.

The Whaaaa-gly
The mysteries, again, were bizarre and stupid and horrible but again we'll get to that in a bit.

The Pugly
There were neither animals nor pet-like characters in this title so there's nothing to discuss.

The Smugly
Also, no villains. Skip!

The Ugly
The mysteries in this game are stupid.
Bizarrely so.
I thought Innocent Grey was sort of known for making psychological thriller stories, so you'd think they would know their way around writing a good mystery, but in Flowers it is quite the opposite. Firstly, I don't think this game even needed the shoehorned-in mysteries that mainly just act as barriers during the story. Failing one causes you to get a bad ending and, in fact, that's basically the only way to get a bad ending. I won't even say I didn't like them because of how difficult they were. I think if you carefully read all the text leading up to the mysteries (and by this I mean ALL the text, on both routes leading up to the mystery) you would probably have a good chance at guessing the correct answer. Even failing that, you can save and just guess and check easily enough.

The problem is that the mysteries make no sense IN CONTEXT. While it's simple for you as the player to pick from the small selection of answers given to you, there are several moments when I felt like there was no possible way the characters in the game could have made the logical leaps necessary to arrive at the conclusions they do. Not only that, but the ways in which the mysteries are set up are incredibly contrived and make it clear that the mysteries were apparently added in either as an afterthought, or because Innocent Grey felt they couldn't write a story without having some element of mystery in it.

Characters say or do things no one in their position would say or do, people jump to bizarre conclusions based on little to no evidence, events line up perfectly so that some obscure bit of knowledge the characters just happen to be talking about ends up being the key point to solving a mystery that happens a few days later that, for all intents and purposes, should have absolutely nothing to do with that obscure bit of knowledge.

The only mystery that felt like it actually fit into the plot and was well made was also the most idiotically obvious one, with the answer being painfully clear almost before the mystery even begins.

When I first heard about this game a lot of the rumors said it would have mystery elements or might have a darker side due to Innocent Grey's influence. Instead what I found is that it was an amazingly emotionally complex yuri story with the most out of place, dumb obscure-fact riddles thrust in as checkpoints that made no sense in-universe.

The Verdict
It's easy to set aside the stupid mysteries and the low-budget quality hiccups in light of the amazing, emotional writing. This is a great yuri story, and the start of a great yuri series. The experience isn't too long, and it will leave any player hungry for the next game. I think it may be early to give a final verdict before the whole series is available to look at as a whole, but as a beginning it definitely has me sold on wanting to know more about these characters and what's in store next for them. Avoid it if you're not into yuri or games that are severely lacking in moe, but anyone else should pick this up and enjoy this short, bitter-sweet tale.

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I wrote previously about a display bug in Dual Tail's strategy eroge Venus Blood -Hypno- that prevented interface text from displaying correctly in non-Japanese Windows. Fan hacker binaryfail generously donated a patch that fixes the issue. I sent this patch to Ninetail (parent company of Dual Tail) via Twitter, requesting that they include the fix on their official support page. Project manager and game designer Keimaru responded to me in broken English. His response, edited by me, is as follows.

Original:




I thanked him and went my way. A commentator on Reddit later informed me that Keimaru had posted a much longer comment in Japanese. This comment showed such sincere and thoughtful consideration of the issue, from a Japanese developer's standpoint, that I decided it needed to be relayed to the English audience.

Japanese eroge developers are well known for their reluctance to get involved with the Western market. Packaging and splash screens prominently declare "For sale in Japan only". Westerners tend to dismiss this policy as apathy for foreign fans, even regarding the practice with contempt as just another manifestation of Japanese isolationism and xenophobia. When eroge companies block foreign IPs, they automatically assume that the company has closed its doors to Western release (despite abundant evidence to the contrary). "The companies are just being xenophobic," they say with bitter contempt. "Might as well just fan translate their titles, since they'll never officially release their games in English. They don't want dirty gaijin playing their games."

It's about time that we get the other side of this story. And who better to deliver it than a prominent and well-loved Japanese developer--one puzzling over how to respond to a bug that prevents foreign fans from playing his games? I provide my translation of Keimaru's Twitter comments below. I regret that my translation skills could not fully convey the honest simplicity of the original message, but I did my best to at least get across the ideas and intent.
I don't know about you, but Ninetail just earned one new (very loud) fan. For an example of one of Ninetail's outstanding games, see my Venus Blood -Gaia- review! (NSFW version, SFW mirror)

Special thanks to those of the Fuwanovel community who provided feedback on the translation, especially Majikoi fan translator dowolf.

This was a really tough thing for me to witness because I really like the original Pupa manga. It's not a masterpiece by any means, but it had some decent dark and psychological themes and an interesting pair of siblings as main characters. It's a horror story about some of the more grotesque things you could write about, a story about a sister who's forced to literally eat her brother in order to survive and they cope with it as well as the mad experiments going on in the background.

But this anime... this anime managed to suck every ounce of life out of Pupa. This is not just a "bad" adaptation, it wasn't just your typical "oh it left out some important bits" or "the pacing was kind of bad", this adaptation, can not even be considered an adaptation of the original Pupa manga. This anime right here is an insult to all adaptations in existence.

I was really excited when this was first annouced, but that excitement didn't last long as it dawned on me that the anime would have an episode length of 3 minutes. At this point is where essentially all of my red flags went off and the prospect of Pupa having a successful adaptation was basically already ruined. I tried to think of any possible way they could successfully pull it off, but I just couldn't think of any. And sure enough, as soon as the first episode of Pupa aired, I knew that I was in for one of the worst rides of my life.

Anime isn't famous for having good horror shows. The amount of really good horror anime in existence can likely be counted by the amount of fingers one has, and Pupa already started off with the wrong foot by censoring the living hell out of every single meaningful shot. I'm not one to advocate that gore and violence is what makes horror, it's definitely not, but in the case of Pupa, the core of the story lies in the grotesque and brutal violence of a lot of scenes, and by censoring all of them with huge black bars, you're already taking away any "wow" factor the show might have had.
And if you're wondering how ridiculous the censoring got at points, just look at this:








A man holding a knife!? That's heinous! Censor this madness right now!


But don't worry, I re-watched the series in blu-ray just for the sake of getting the most out of it, and even then, it still utterly fails to transmit all the grotesque scenes and all the violence the original manga had.
All the entrails are sloppily drawn, nothing feels vivid or impactful, the "gore" consists mostly of ludicrous amounts of blood gushing out of people for no apparent reason.
So even in the gore department, this series fails.
The one thing they could have at least gotten right, they utterly fail at, and after a horrid 2 first episodes, watching the rest of Pupa was like dragging my dead body across a floor made out of sand paper.

Let's quickly go over how the show adapted the story:

Yume and Utsutsu go home together one day and Yume is turned into a monster and it's revealed she has been infected with the Pupa virus. This virus grants the host with regenerative abilities, but in return, they cause insatiable hunger.
Yume kills her brother by stabbing him but in a sudden twist he comes back and we discover he also has been infected by the virus and can regenerate himself. Though for some reason he doesn't have the hunger thing.

Our Onii-chan vows to protect Yume by letting her eat him whenever she's hungry and the anime turns these scenes into laughable moments by having random cheerful music play in the background as Yume eats away Utsutsu's body. This does nothing good for the show and just removes any and all kind of meaningful impact the scenes might have otherwise have.

We have some flashbacks to the siblings' past where it's revealed Yume's mother had the virus inside her and that's supposedly how Yume got it. We see Yume as a child eating a bird and being stabbed by her own mother, only to then be revived by the virus, this in turn caused her mother to lose most of her sanity.
We also learn that the siblings had a rough past with a really abusive dad, but the show really fails at portraying what is one of the most important plot points of the manga, and that is Utsutsu's dad and his tendency to be violent towards him. Not to mention his role in the story development itself. But I wouldn't expect anything less from such a crappy show.

Our siblings get taken away by some random organization we never heard of (10/10 context!) and Utsutsu gets experimented on for some reason. Yume manages to break free using her monster powers and Utsutsu escapes with her, leaving behind a trail of dead bodies.

After this, the anime pretty much ends with Yume once again eating away at her brother and the credits rolling.

Sounded fun right? No? Hmm, I wonder what might have been missing... Oh wait, every fucking thing was missing.
This show provides absolutely zero context for why most of the events are happening.

One of the main villains, a scientist called Maria is introduced early on as some sort of mastermind behind things, and at one point they even mention she's going to impregnate herself using Utsutsu's sperm and Yume's egg cells in an attempt to give birth to another monster, and we even see her with a pregnant belly! But what happens after that? NOTHING. Absolutely fucking nothing.
We never see or hear from this lady again, we're just supposed to accept she disappears I guess. But if you're going to make her disappear, why introduce her in the first place??

But that's not all, Utsutsu's father, who even appears on the very first manga chapter, is rarely shown in the anime, and he has a very present role as he's the motivation behind a lot of Utsutsu's reasoning and he's also the one who gave him all his scars, but the anime doesn't even bother to explain anything related to it.

In the episode where we learn about Yume's backstory, her mother seems to be an important character and we even see her in the present day talking to their father. And then they never appear again! Ever!
Why are you showing your viewers things that won't matter later on?

Lastly, when Utsutsu and Yume get kidnapped, not only do they make everything look ridiculously stupid by having Yume and Utsutsu, two people who have regenerative abilities, lose in a fight against one single guy with a pocket knife.
I mean, who looked at this show and thought "let's make a series about two siblings with a weird virus in them and then never utilize the virus in any of the scenes where it could have been useful".
We also never know who the organization that kidnapped them is or why they're doing what they're doing, we're just shown, and very briefly so, some of the torture they're performing on Utsutsu, but most of the actual gorey scenes are never actually shown.

It's like they decided to make a horror and then strip it of any scenes that might make a horror show good in the first place.
Couplethis with terrible and incosistent writing and you got yourself a big pile of crap. Or in Pupa's case, a small pile of crap, because this anime only lasts for a whole 30 minutes if you combine all the episodes, so at least it's not like your eyes will be subject to the atrocities this show has for long.

And after all the completely random nonsensical events I just described above, this anime has the audacity to have one extra episode at the end with absolutely no connection to the previous episodes whatsoever. This last episode is just a cheerful scene with Yume and Utsutsu going shopping for a new teddy bear for Yume. What's the point of it? Give me consolation after all the shit I've had to deal with when watching the show? Because if that was the intention, I'm sorry to say it only prolongued the suffering.
It's like the final nail in the coffin before this series is buried for eternity to never be seen again.
And let's not forget the god awful product placement, because don't think I didn't see that, then again it was hard to miss given how out of place it looks compared to the rest of the shot:







Yeah, letting a child read Pupa, a manga full of gore and violence.



10/10 product placement


To wrap this up and so people stop asking me to watch this show, Pupa is a complete and utter mess with no sense of direction, no writing consistency, bad dialogue, bad art direction, bad gore, bad story, bad everything.

This show does not have a sole redeeming factor, not even for the lovers of pure gore, I do not think it is physically possible for someone to watch Pupa and think "huh, that was cool". You would have to stretch it, and I mean really stretch it, just to call Pupa "average".

The other shows I've ranted about before this don't even come close to the level of garbage that is Pupa.

Do not watch this. I repeat, do not watch this, you will lose brain cells at a 10 times faster ratio in the 30 minutes you'll spend watching this show. Please, I'm caring for your health here, do not dare to touch this show with a 10 ft pole.

If you're curious about Pupa in the slightest, at least do yourself a huge favor and read the manga, because at least that's tolerable and knows what it's doing, but for the love of everything, do not lay eyes upon this monstrosity of an "anime".

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spray lemon juice in my eyes and pretend Pupa, just like the Tsukihime anime, never existed.

In honour of this being the 25th Moeblog post, I've written a little poem. Ahem...

There once was a man named Moe
He had a lot of moe
So he posted the moe
Something-something the moe
Moe moe moe moe moe moe moe