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Just reached the Faris ending for Steins;Gate. Truth be told, when I saw people commenting that Suzuha's ending was the best ending out of the character endings (Faris End, Suzuha End, etc.), I found myself agreeing when I landed on the Faris' ending.

I knew immediately that I made a mistake as I realized that not sending that D-mail because I want to save everybody was actually an act of cowardice. It felt like a weird ending when I read through it, much more so than Suzuha's ending (at least the consequences Okabe faced in that ending made sense). The weirdness left me wondering just what the heck Faris sent that would have changed the worldline that drastically. And the whole "Faris becomes Okabe's girlfriend" shtick was off-putting, turning the VN into a generic dating sim of sorts, where you choose the girl you like and end up romancing her. Finally, I never felt attracted to Faris. Suzuha was a more appealing character because of her headstrong personality and her tomboyishness, so I wouldn't have minded romance elements in her ending instead. But Faris, no, I just don't feel that way about her. She's kinda cute, I guess, but way too weird (and otaku) to be girlfriend material.

That being said, when she removed her cat-ears, let her hair fall to the side and showed the real face of Rumiho for the first time, that was the first time I felt remotely attracted by her looks. She looked much more lovely that way, filled with innocence. And when I finally reached the final part of the ending, when Okabe decided to suck it up and accept his fate, that was when I really got to like this alternate timeline. That final part made the ending almost better than Suzuha's ending, because it's even more ambiguous whether if Okabe would truly be happy with Faris in that worldline. With Suzuha, according to the word of god (or at least, as stated in the wiki, as reliable as that can be), Okabe lived a happy life with her. With Faris, however, there are a lot of tragedies already confirmed for Okabe, not the least of which was the loss of friendship with his lab members, including his closest family member, Mayuri. So for Okabe to rise up above that terrible fate and deal with it, there was just something more admirable about that worldline than the other would-be outcomes. I mean, killing her dad to save Mayuri just didn't feel as selfless as this. If I'm thrust into the same fate as Okabe, losing all my friends and connection to the world, I would've had a mental breakdown rather than honor the relationship Faris had with me.

So, in conclusion, it's a mixed bag really. 80% of the ending was bad, but it was a significant build-up to that 20% of admiration at the end to really sink in just how much Okabe has lost in this new timeline. Oh well. Onto the next ending!

Edited by LemiusK
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I've finished Muv Luv Alternative and The House in Fata Morgana. Muv Luv didn't disappoint me and I enjoyed The House in Fata Morgana much more than I thought I would.

I'm not sure what to read next. I guess I have a few VNs I've downloaded in the past but never read. Let's see....uhh...it's Nekopara.

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I am currently reading Hatsukoi 1/1 (finished the Tsukishima route currently on the runa route), Everlasting Summer (only a few minutes to sample so I could try and get a description for the vn reading club), Chrono Clock (enjoying but only in the common route at the moment).

I have a ton of crap I've started a bit of and never gotten back around to hopefully I'll be able to get to those after these.

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So I recently finished Nekopara Volume 3, Maple is freaking adorable, so is Cinnamon... and man the hscenes this time around were on point (usually I m rather neutral when it comes to hscenes in general) , I've also started Hatsukoi 1/1 which I am still in the common route, but it looks to be pretty promising so far. Also finally loaded up Chrono Clock. Still really early into that one too. 

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Piece of Wonder. The disc version. I think it was rushed out 'cos the developers likely ran out of money. They tried to go for an epic story but due to inexperience and time constraints, had to cut out the backstory for some of the villains. I mean, you even get some random character who runs towards Shoko and is then forgotten(guess they didn't get time to cut him out). The slice of life was okay, nothing very great and the battles were decent: they went from too easy to too hard(not enough time for proper balancing). It was about 6 to 7, I think. At least they bothered to try and wrap up most of the story with the Extra story. Some games are just shipped out incomplete and never ever finished. 

This marks my 2nd visual novel after about 7 years hiatus. The 1st was Cartagra: it wasn't too bad and I liked quite a few of the characters. The twist at the end... hmm, took me by surprise.

 

I thought Arishima-san was delaying things 'cos of his superiors but... never did I guess the actual reason.

 Though according to some post on some site, it had more sex scenes than a lot of nukige, which kinda put me off. I'll have to replay it to understand the True Ending. 

Edited by roastedmushroom
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I just reached Luka's ending in Steins;Gate.

I think, with each ending reached, I'm beginning to respect these conclusions more than the original True End. They are all very well-written resolutions that felt satisfying rather than without a proper pay-off.

 

And this makes me want to talk more about Faris' ending. I realized that the last time I talked about it, it sounded like I really disliked Faris' ending except the final part, but I feel that is both inaccurate and unfair to that ending. Now that I've taken a few days to really soak in that ending, I feel like I could accept it better now. Okabe cutting off all his friendships to be Faris' husbando was hard to swallow at first, but I feel that's just part of Steins;Gate's charm in showing how life isn't something you could wrap up neatly with a perfect ending, and that there are consequences to bear. If as a reader, having Mayuri and Daru not remember Okabe was too shocking to accept at first, then it must've been doubly difficult for Okabe in the story. And yet, Okabe chose to take responsibility at the end and ensure Faris lives a happy life with him in this new worldline. It was a very satisfying conclusion in that respect.

As for Luka's ending, it has the similar vibe of Okabe taking responsibility for his actions (albeit only after Kurisu's encouragement this time). At first, I thought it was just going to heavily focus on Mayuri for the entire ending, but I like how it ended up and handled Luka's grieve for her friend. This time, she's the one who takes the same stance that I admired Okabe for, to accept her actions of sending that D-mail to become a girl, and to bear the burden and grief and keep living on anyway in a new life with Okabe. As I said, these endings are all very well-written, and I wouldn't have minded if any of these endings were the last episode of the anime (though maybe not Suzuha's ending, as that might have been too open-ended for some audiences). They give Suzuha, Faris, and Luka a very satisfying closure that we could accept, and they have such a realistic perspective on what happiness is, and how to rise above painful grief and other sadness and to keep on living.

It's little wonder why a lot of people encourage others to read the VN even if they have seen the anime, because there's a lot of life lessons and values you can take from these endings you'll not see outside of the anime.

Edited by LemiusK
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21 minutes ago, LemiusK said:

 

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The anime's censor of Psycho-Nae was stupid, not to mention having Braun killing Moeka.

This is probably the only major flaw I could find, albeit one that really affects the quality of the anime.

I'm not sure you can call that "censorship." It didn't strike me as such. To be honest, I felt that little side plot felt very out of place and I'm glad the anime version didn't include it.

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I finished Sachi's route in Grisaia yesterday.

Spoiler

Blowing up the school was certainly too much. I didn't like how they handled the good and bad endings. IMO, they could have just removed the whole bad end, since it's pretty useless. I sometimes look for a meaning even in bad endings and try to get a grasp on what are they like, but Sachi's bad end was certainly stupid and brought nothing whatsoever (maybe anger towards the writer at most). But it would be probably hard to be satisfied with an ending when i did not even intend to go for Sachi first

 

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15 hours ago, Decay said:

I'm not sure you can call that "censorship." It didn't strike me as such. To be honest, I felt that little side plot felt very out of place and I'm glad the anime version didn't include it.

It strike me as such because it felt like they didn't want to show a child going through such a f-ed up thing. In addition, on a related note, they also censored Mayuri's fate, the fate of a child (pre-teen?) in episode 12, so there's that. But I could certainly understand why it felt out of place. On the other hand, I felt it lessened the impact of Steins;Gate dark message: don't f*** with forces you don't know about, including time itself. The whole thing with Nae was meant to show the consequences of time travel, and I felt like that scene with Nae really hit home the point even more than before. If anything else, I'm just curious what could've driven Nae into such a fate, and the writing in the VN certainly left me intrigued. It felt like an interesting sub-plot they wasted by not including in it at least an OVA or something.

On a side note, Nae's sub-plot was also interesting because it showed the possibility of

 

someone being able to time leap 15 years into the past, let alone into the body of a child. Kurisu has mentioned that leaping into your younger mind can have drastic side effects, so it was nice to see that insanity seems to be one of them, or whatever circumstances that convinced Nae's f-ed up mind to time-leap as many times as she did.

Anyway, I agree in part that it did feel a bit unnecessary, and that it could've been done more tactfully. I did feel a bit put off by

 

Nae's description of Okabe's torture.

It made sense, but it was off-putting all the same. That said, the real change I had a problem with was Braun's personality, and what he chose to do with Moeka. That was butchered characterization if I've ever seen one. I felt he became a less likable character than his VN counterpart. It made no sense at all and is the real out-of-place plot element IMO. I know they needed to change it because of what happened with Nae, but that's just lazy writing.

Edited by LemiusK
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Haha, that flowchart just makes it needlessly complicated, YU-NO isn't that difficult at all. Once you get onto a route it is mostly linear, and the game does let you know when you can cross onto a different world-line, so you at least know when to look out for what you pick.

As for me, I've took the plunge and re-read Cross Channel in Japanese some time back. I've always wanted to do this, considering its reputation and the... embarrassing TL it has in English. hoping I'd find much more enjoyment in the VN this time around. And I did - the writing was playful and funny, a lot of the laughs I had while reading came from the writing alone. The nuances themselves were also fun for sure - but my overall issues I had with the VN my first time throuh remained. That is, the entire true route is just incredibly boring, and it explicitly hand-waves a lot of the plot details away, since they (usually) don't even matter that much to the VN's plot. Now, I'm not saying every story should explain everything in minute detail - I am a big fan of works that leave certain things to interpretation - but there is a big difference between details that were purposefully omitted, and details that didn't even exist in the first place. I feel like Cross Channel falls into the second category, as in one point the author almost directly tells you that he doesn't have to explain shit because nothing of it even matters anyway - and while I can agree with him to a certain point, it did kind of leave bad taste in my mouth. It's also baffling how incredibly bad the voice acting is even after all these re-releases, and how none of the pacing issues are fixed either (I was reading the Final Complete version, that essentially ended up being the exact same as the original, just with a bunch of worthless stuff on top no one asked for),  but I suppose I can't blame the writer for that too much.

Overall a very enjoyable read with some great comedy and intriguing characters, but I feel like there was room to improve. But hey... maybe I just don't get it:wahaha:

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I finally finished all of Chrono Clock. I'd finished all the actual story stuff quite a while back, but after that I still had five H scenes left (one Makoto, two for each of the last two routes), which I'd been putting off because, well, I just don't typically care for marathoning H scenes. But I got the last remaining three finished today and was actually somehow delighted to see that doing so unlocked the ability to select the title screen splash image for myself, even though I'm pretty unlikely to ever open the game again, simply because I thought the second splash screen that unlocked after finishing the first four routes was actually super lame boring compared to the original splash screen. Of course, since I was suddenly presented with even more choices than I expected, I promptly switched to the one with just Misaki on it, because she's best girl.

After spending some time away from the actual game, I think this is probably the second-best moege I've read, behind KonoSora (ignoring the MoeNovel translation issues and just assessing the game on other elements...). Chrono Clock has hardly got any plot (which is what puts KonoSora firmly above it), but it's a masterpiece when it comes to characters, and as I realized when I started playing this game, that really can be good enough to make a VN a delight to play.

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I seem to lack any desire to continue reading the Nekopara I downloaded ages ago. It's not that I hate it, it's just that I'm not interested enough to start reading it again. For that reason and some others I decided to just get a new VN to read and downloaded Dies Iraes.

I've read it until about chapter 4 and so far it's quite enjoyable. The soundtrack and art aren't really to my taste for some reason, but imo they aren't bad by any means, just not exactly to my taste. My opinion may change as I keep reading it tho, and I'm enjoying the experience.

I'm also downloading Majikoi. I'll probably start reading it after finishing Dies Iraes's Common Route because I'm too broke right now to buy the DLCs right away.

Edited by RadicalCarenChan
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Finished Kanon. It was a beautiful (retro) experience despite a perfectible writing (for example, some endings were bad/botched and the H-scenes were horrible). Similarly, it was refreshing to follow a good and likeable protagonist (for once, he's not a stupid donkan).

Girl Ranking : Akiko (she's like a summer ray of sunshine just in the middle of Winter) > Nayuki (sweet sleepyhead) = Shiori = Kaori (but no route for her :wafuu: ) = Sayuri > Makoto (funny but too childish) = Ayu (funny but too much uguu kills the uguu) = Mai (a mysterious coodere...but a bit too quiet)

Route Ranking : Shiori (the classic moving story but with a truly satisfying closure)> Makoto (surprisingly touching) > Mai (the ending left me slightly puzzled...otherwise it was pretty, mysterious and poetic > Ayu (nice but too predictable) = Nayuki (interesting until we discover a rushed ending) > Sayuri (she deserved better)

Edited by Canicheslayer
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