Jump to content

What are you playing?


Guest

Recommended Posts

Finished Swan Song. Minor spoilers ahead.

Unbelievably well written characters with great development, really good setting, great depressing mood, good art, great presentation, good prose, very 'fitting' ero scenes, nice music, very good voice acting, but.... Plot is a little undeveloped. I just didn't found the whole conflict with the temple as 'gripping' as first 1/3 of this game, when they were just trying to survive. I'm sure there could be something much better.
And true ending. Jesus Christ. It sucks major balls.  Voice actress is screaming 'oniichan' directly to my brain, loli tsundere is slapping protagonist for things he didn't do, happy go lucky atmosphere instead of really great bittersweet 'normal' ending, and Himawari. I have a ptsd from sharin no kuni and everytime I see a field of sunflowers, especially as a 'sign of hope' I die a little inside. Sharin no kuni is a worst VN ever and should be killed with fire.... and I detoured again.
Anyway. True ending eve nincorporates the worst thing in Grisaia - veru rushed writting, which in merely 3 sentences sumamrize whole conversqations and full scenes instead of showing those conversations and events unveiling right before readers eyes. It feels like a 'summary' and not like a proper ending to a story.

So yeah, 'only' 8.7/10.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After that I started Remember11. I read that Ukikoshi 'mastermind' behind very disappointing and mediocre Ever17 is nowhere to be seen (on vndb), and overall he didn't do much on this. Nakazawa Takumi, guy behind I/O and the best route in e17 (You's route) is main concept planner, main senario writter and director of R11, so I get hyped. I'm only after prologue, but it's gripping from the start, mysterious, creepy, and very pleasantly written, so reading is a fast process. Much closer to I/O than E17. And I'm only around 45 minutes in, so I hope this trend will continue. 
I hear that this game have a 'non ending' ending, so it's even better. Ending to E17, and abundance of deus ex machina was probably the saddest thing about that VN. Especially that they explained 'everything', but not the most mysterious and interesting little things, which were presented in first four routes. I take open ending that explains not so much, ending which you must think about to made any sense out of, over any overexplained and dissapointing ending every time.
So, as you can see, I'm pretty hyped for R11.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Vorathiel said:

Finished Swan Song. Minor spoilers ahead.

Unbelievably well written characters with great development, really good setting, great depressing mood, good art, great presentation, good prose, very 'fitting' ero scenes, nice music, very good voice acting, but.... Plot is a little undeveloped. I just didn't found the whole conflict with the temple as 'gripping' as first 1/3 of this game, when they were just trying to survive. I'm sure there could be something much better.
And true ending. Jesus Christ. It sucks major balls.  Voice actress is screaming 'oniichan' directly to my brain, loli tsundere is slapping protagonist for things he didn't do, happy go lucky atmosphere instead of really great bittersweet 'normal' ending, and Himawari. I have a ptsd from sharin no kuni and everytime I see a field of sunflowers, especially as a 'sign of hope' I die a little inside. Sharin no kuni is a worst VN ever and should be killed with fire.... and I detoured again.
Anyway. True ending eve nincorporates the worst thing in Grisaia - veru rushed writting, which in merely 3 sentences sumamrize whole conversqations and full scenes instead of showing those conversations and events unveiling right before readers eyes. It feels like a 'summary' and not like a proper ending to a story.

So yeah, 'only' 8.7/10.

lol, a review consisting of 90% ranting, but still a top rating at the end - just priceless! :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Vorathiel said:

Finished Swan Song. Minor spoilers ahead.

Unbelievably well written characters with great development, really good setting, great depressing mood, good art, great presentation, good prose, very 'fitting' ero scenes, nice music, very good voice acting, but.... Plot is a little undeveloped. I just didn't found the whole conflict with the temple as 'gripping' as first 1/3 of this game, when they were just trying to survive. I'm sure there could be something much better.
And true ending. Jesus Christ. It sucks major balls.  Voice actress is screaming 'oniichan' directly to my brain, loli tsundere is slapping protagonist for things he didn't do, happy go lucky atmosphere instead of really great bittersweet 'normal' ending, and Himawari. I have a ptsd from sharin no kuni and everytime I see a field of sunflowers, especially as a 'sign of hope' I die a little inside. Sharin no kuni is a worst VN ever and should be killed with fire.... and I detoured again.
Anyway. True ending eve nincorporates the worst thing in Grisaia - veru rushed writting, which in merely 3 sentences sumamrize whole conversqations and full scenes instead of showing those conversations and events unveiling right before readers eyes. It feels like a 'summary' and not like a proper ending to a story.

So yeah, 'only' 8.7/10.

In spite of the terrible "good end", I'm glad you liked Swan Song, it's one of my favorite VNs. I would honestly recommend treating the normal end as a true end. It's very clear that the good end was tacked on just because there needed to be one, while the normal end fit the tone of the rest of the VN perfectly and was satisfying and beautiful in its own way, even though it wasn't a happy ending, to say the least.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 27.11.2016 at 5:10 AM, akaritan said:

I just finished MYTH, and I liked it, though it definitely isn't for everyone to say the least. MYTH is very, very confusing, which is either a selling point or a huge turn off. I found it to be a selling point- I had a lot of fun thinking about and trying to understand the numerous interwoven plotlines (something that I can't say I've succeeded at, even now). The music is also excellent. But the thing about MYTH is that if those things don't matter to you, or you outright dislike them, you're going to dislike MYTH too, because those two things are really the only reasons you'd read it. Sadly, I found the characters to be subpar and there was a lot of slice of life in the beginning where there didn't need to be, which kept me from liking it a lot more. It also very much feels like a doujin game. There is very little voice acting (a few segments towards the very end have partial), photographic backgrounds are used, and the sprite artwork can be a bit unpleasant to look at at times *cough*. With all that said, I found it to be a very charming and even cathartic, if also flawed, experience as a whole and I sure won't forget it anytime soon. Now that my brain is fried, I'm probably going to read a few lighthearted things to recover, ahaha. Maybe I'll pick up the new Sonohana, it looks really cute even if that isn't necessarily my thing most of the time.

I was considering giving MYTH a try myself one of these days, but the fact that it has the "Graphic Violence" tag on VNDB worries me a little. How graphically explicit is the violence in it? I can handle depictions of blood or small wounds just fine, but anything beyond that makes me uncomfortable.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sexual humour may be within the field of Grisaia's expertise, and although it is not a style I much prefer, I can try to appreciate it on occasion. Unfortunately, The Leisure of Grisaia contains so very much of it, it feels like they've hardly attempted to do anything other. This is not a problem I felt I had with other titles in the series, as their humour varied wildly from absurd situations to, quite frankly, just very funny exchanges and conversations between characters.
 Here all these exchanges appear to make mention of a sexual element or other at some point. Perhaps what's lacking is Yuuto's utter immunity to such matters, as he does not pay them much heed and ensures the conversation quickly moves forward. And then gets stuck at the first mention of common sense.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, ChaosRaven said:

Playing Hanachirasu now, which I picked up during the black friday sale. Start is pretty cool with a ferocious ninja attack on a mansion in a dark and gritty setting.

Unfortunately the game already crashed on me, which made me painfully aware that I'm playing a Jast game. *sigh*

Well, I hope it doesn't happen too often... :sleep:

Didn't know JAST's VNs had a reputation for being buggy. Well, except for School Days and Shiny Days, but their Japanese versions apparently weren't any better in this regard, so those were clearly 0verflow's fault. Steins;Gate's original English PC version on the other hand was supposedly a lot more stable than its Japanese counterpart.

BTW, just to make sure, you did read my last post in the Root Double topic, right? Bit confused since you didn't respond to it and started a new VN in spite of my warning that you missed out on quite a bit of content in RD.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, kilicool64 said:

I was considering giving MYTH a try myself one of these days, but the fact that it has the "Graphic Violence" tag on VNDB worries me a little. How graphically explicit is the violence in it? I can handle depictions of blood or small wounds just fine, but anything beyond that makes me uncomfortable.

If you have to ask about that, I don't really think I'd recommend it. I didn't think it was that bad, but a lot of it came out of nowhere and there's one scene later on in particular that isn't necessarily very explicit, but man was that some weird stuff and I can easily imagine it making someone of weaker constitution feel uncomfortable. More details in spoiler, I wouldn't look if you think you'll read it but if you're not sure it might be a good idea.

Spoiler

In chapter 1, a character's head explodes out of nowhere, which wasn't all that bad, but later there's a hallucination sequence where the main character is talking to two others, one of which has a mosaiced red spot for a face and the other which has no head at all. Image in spoilers if you want to see it. From what you said, you might not, but I'm linking it just in case. There were also a few segments with cannibalism, but there weren't any images, only backgrounds. Again, tl;dr version if you're squeamish or easily made uncomfortable I probably wouldn't recommend it. 

Spoiler

08894C059CCA12172CBFFC9F777777817EE8375F

E54D8A3733FD8272EA74C1CEE32A606FD3E22AD9

And then later on... well...

Spoiler

sxs7wTd.png

 

I'm sorry if I was over or under detailed, I hope this helps!

Edited by akaritan
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, kilicool64 said:

Didn't know JAST's VNs had a reputation for being buggy. Well, except for School Days and Shiny Days, but their Japanese versions apparently weren't any better in this regard, so those were clearly 0verflow's fault. Steins;Gate's original English PC version on the other hand was supposedly a lot more stable than its Japanese counterpart.

They have a reputation for little quality assurance, causing all kinds of problems from being buggy to lacking translation. But apparently their releases have improved, at least I didn't hear much complaints about Seinarukana or Flowers.

1 hour ago, kilicool64 said:

BTW, just to make sure, you did read my last post in the Root Double topic, right? Bit confused since you didn't respond to it and started a new VN in spite of my warning that you missed out on quite a bit of content in RD.

Yeah sorry, I almost missed it and saw it just recently. Thing with Root Double is, that I wanted to get finally finished with it since it's such a long title that I was reading almost half a year on it. I'm not really a completionist that has to read everything, and just reading left over puzzle pieces with lots of redundant text isn't that fun. It would be different if it was a complete route. But the way it is, I think I'm fine with what I got so far.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

24 minutes ago, akaritan said:

If you have to ask about that, I don't really think I'd recommend it. I didn't think it was that bad, but a lot of it came out of nowhere and there's one scene later on in particular that isn't necessarily very explicit, but man was that some weird stuff and I can easily imagine it making someone of weaker constitution feel uncomfortable. More details in spoiler, I wouldn't look if you think you'll read it but if you're not sure/leaning on not it.

  Reveal hidden contents

In chapter 1, a character's head explodes out of nowhere, which wasn't all that bad, but later there's a hallucination sequence where the main character is talking to two others, one of which has a mosaiced red spot for a face and the other which has no head at all. Image in spoilers if you want to see it. From what you said, you might not, but I'm linking it just in case. There were also a few segments with cannibalism, but there weren't any images, only backgrounds. Again, tl;dr version if you're squeamish or easily made uncomfortable I probably wouldn't recommend it. 

  Reveal hidden contents

08894C059CCA12172CBFFC9F777777817EE8375F

E54D8A3733FD8272EA74C1CEE32A606FD3E22AD9

And then later on... well...

  Reveal hidden contents

sxs7wTd.png

 

I'm sorry if I was over or under detailed, I hope this helps!

That's not too extreme. I can handle that kind of stuff as long as it's pixelated. And I'm generally far less sensitive to text than to visuals. Thanks for the information.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Currently I'm stalled Flyable Heart again here (Hopefully I'll be able to continue this), although I could tell a little about Yui's route for now. What I want to said is that the first part of Yui's route was just alike Amane's route, two girls were had feeling for Shou so not much new content there (There's also fake fiancee plot). And of course instead of Amane, Shou choose Yui as his lover if some people want to nitpick. That's all for now that I could shared here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Finished all Dracu-Riot routes. Good time waster overall, but nothing i'd beat myself over for not reading.

Spoiler

I feel a wasted opportunity was not having an harem route where the MC could go up against the big mastermind behind the whole "lychantrope manufaturing" organization.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Eh, Eden took me around seven-ish hours.

The VNDB playtime system isn't meant to be based on firm hour counts, it's meant to be comparative. Saya no Uta being one of the listed examples for "Short," I feel Eden was roughly on par with that, maybe just a little bit longer. Basically think about what VNs it's equivalent to length to and look at what those are rated at on VNDB.

Edited by Decay
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Finished Feena's route in Yoake Mae yori Ruri Iro na now and as much as it hurts to say, but it was horribly generic. Considering that Feena is supposed be a moon princess you might at least expect a visit in a moon city, but there was nothing like that. Just ultra simplistic school life moege. Presentation wise it's still quite decent despite it's age and it also has some surprisingly good soundtracks, but besides that it has very little to offer. It's neither particularly funny nor dramatic, the romance wasn't particularly engaging with little to no chemistry between Feena and the rather bland protagonist and there's no interesting story either. And by removing the H scenes you can't even play it for fan service anymore.

Overall, I'm thinking about dropping this completely and just ignore all the other routes. I always wanted to play Feena's route since she kind of stood out with her moon princess charme, but the rest of the cast simply lacks that appeal. So I think I move on to Dracu Riot now besides the Hanachirasu I'm also currently playing. It's supposed to be pretty good, and considering Noble Works was already a quite decent moege it at least shouldn't disappoint.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, ChaosRaven said:

Finished Feena's route in Yoake Mae yori Ruri Iro na now and as much as it hurts to say, but it was horribly generic. Considering that Feena is supposed be a moon princess you might at least expect a visit in a moon city, but there was nothing like that. Just ultra simplistic school life moege. Presentation wise it's still quite decent despite it's age and it also has some surprisingly good soundtracks, but besides that it has very little to offer. It's neither particularly funny nor dramatic, the romance wasn't particularly engaging with little to no chemistry between Feena and the rather bland protagonist and there's no interesting story either. And by removing the H scenes you can't even play it for fan service anymore.

Overall, I'm thinking about dropping this completely and just ignore all the other routes. I always wanted to play Feena's route since she kind of stood out with her moon princess charme, but the rest of the cast simply lacks that appeal. So I think I move on to Dracu Riot now besides the Hanachirasu I'm also currently playing. It's supposed to be pretty good, and considering Noble Works was already a quite decent moege it at least shouldn't disappoint.

You just finished her initial route, right? I'd at least recommend going through her second route that unlocks after you clear all the routes. It's a lot better than anything in her initial route. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

33 minutes ago, Chuee said:

You just finished her initial route, right? I'd at least recommend going through her second route that unlocks after you clear all the routes. It's a lot better than anything in her initial route. 

Yes, just her introduction route that unlocks the other heroines, I didn't know that there's also an after route so to say. Hm, yeah I still liked Feena so why not. I probably give it a short break for now to get motivated again and pick it up sometime later.

Thanks for the info.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In an effort to revive my fried brain, I read a few shorter VNs over the past week. The first one was Sakura no Ki no Shita ni wa. I saw it on vnts a few weeks ago, and was a bit curious. I didn't hear anyone talking about it and it was short and free, so I decided to give it a shot. Sadly, I was sorely disappointed. It's basically an adaptation of a poem, so it's very short and only took me a few minutes to finish. I guess all I can say in its favor is that the visual/sound presentation isn't bad... it's probably much better in Japanese, but the English translation is grating and difficult to read, which really is a game breaker for a poem. It wasn't good, but at least not much of my time was wasted.

Then I went on to Harmonia, which I didn't love, per se, but I most certainly didn't hate. The soundtrack was quite gorgeous and although I don't like Key's art style at all, the costume design itself was really nice. I generally had a good time with it, but the pacing could be a bit slow in places where it shouldn't have been and I found a few plot twists towards the end to be pretty predicable. It could be pretty hard to get attached to the characters as well, which made the tearjerks towards the end far weaker than they are in key's other works. My other main issue with the story was just that I felt like I had seen similar worlds and premises, and Harmonia didn't necessarily do anything for me that made it special. In spite of all that, it was generally quite nice as a whole and seeing as it's short anyway, I would definitely recommend it to the sort of person who likes that kind of story.

After that, I read Highway Blossoms, and it was a real breath of fresh air in a lot of ways. The art is absolutely gorgeous and it probably has the best production values I've ever seen in an OELVN. And contrary to many OELVNs that go out of their way to imitate Japanese VNs in storytelling, Highway Blossoms was a road trip story set in the southwest. The characters were all really charming and even if they weren't necessarily deep, they were still a lot of fun to watch. The romance arc was really standard formula, but I thought it was executed fairly well. It was definitely a worthwhile way to spend my Saturday afternoon.

And then, just a few minutes ago, I finished Sonohana Remembering How we Met. Honestly, I don't have much to say about it other than you probably know if you'll like it before you play it. It gave me diabetes and I'm not sure why I even picked it up but I like to think that it will make Himawari all the more satisfying in a few days, ahaha. 

Now I'm going to play the newly released Sonohana. By the time I'm done I'm not even sure if I'll ever be able to read yuri again. :notlikemiya: I really need something to distract me from the imminent Himawari release or else I'll go insane. Thanks to anyone who actually put up with and read this entire text wall :sachi:

Edited by akaritan
Link to comment
Share on other sites

40 minutes ago, akaritan said:

Thanks to anyone who actually put up with and read this entire text wall :sachi:

You're welcome :miyako:

I'm still slowly going through Koihime Musou. I'm probably somewhere over halfway done now? At first, it felt like I had too many turns during the home base phase; now it feels like I don't have enough. When Chouryou/Shia joined and I got spend more time with her, I realized that I apparently had grown quite fond of Kansai-ben when editing the twins' route in TH2, so I had a lot of fun with her. Unfortunately, I think she only got three home base events total, so I won't get to see much more of her now :komari:. Still enjoying this VN's approach of throwing a ridiculous number of heroines at the player, and how surprisingly deep its commitment is to most/all of them. In spite of the aforementioned shortage of Chouryou events, even with her I feel like they did her justice as a character.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...