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2 hours ago, ChaosRaven said:

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So, I finally finished Midori no Umi after having it stalled for a while. The wannabe translation taken aside, this was still a rather bizarre experience. The VN somehow tries to be a simple moege while bombarding you with bad endings non-stop. It did manage to keep things interesting for a while though, the whole idea of the lost mansion in the woods certainly had potential. Unfortunately the execution was quite lacking.

Plot based VN's take a certain responsibility to handle characters and events at least with a minimum of maturity and credibility, or the story will fall flat on its face. But at times I was just flabbergasted about the lack of common sense characters were showing. Let's take Sara for example, even if she was probably my favorite character, when thinking things through, she might even be one of the worst.

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In contrast to the other characters, she had pretty much all possibilities to change things. Not even considering that she was almost a mixture of James Bond, Ethan Hunt and Bruce Lee with tremendous physical capabilities, the simple reason that she always had a connection to the outside made me question why the heck she just didn't call the fu**ing police?! They'd have a field party to get an organization busted that literally specializes in child murder and captivity. As much as I liked her, she was certainly not the brightest light. :amane:

And the way how people go crazy at this place (including yourself) was just out of this world. Considering that they had literally everything they need for a comfortable living, including nice and helpful people around them, it was just bizarre.

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I actually thought for a good while, that the place was actually located in a meta or dream world. And I wish it would. The whole killings would have made more sense if you have to 'die' to wake up or get back. It was even hard to blame Michiru, considering that she was manipulated by that adult woman (i've forgotten her name) and the people there actually DID go crazy at a ridiculous pace. Though I'm pretty sure that Tsumugi just wanted to get rid of everyone she found annoying - speaking of 'return of the killer loli's'. :P

Overall, I think this VN would have been better if they just made it a simple moege in a unique setting. The VN has very high production values, with good visuals and some very captivating sound tracks. It's a real pity that they were wasted for such a poorly written story.

Heroine ranking: Sara > Chisha > Haina > Michiru > Tsumugi > Rikuno = Sorane

Overall rating: 5.5/10 (I would have given a 6, but I've substracted half a grade for the translation)

Spoiler

And i just wanted Michuru to be arrested after getting out. Some things are beyond forgiveness, and what she's been doing is. It was a trash vn, even though it was entertaining while everything was still a mystery.

 

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Can anyone here clarify a bit what's changed in Rewrite+ compared to the original? I know it includes Harvest Festa, new CG's, more voiced dialogue and whatnot, but the part about "direction and scenario improvements by Tanaka Romeo" doesn't really tell me much. Are there any actual changes or additions to the plot, or is this just a matter of refining the dialogue?
I'm trying to decide if it's worth rereading the entire VN when it's eventually released, or if I should just read Harvest Festa and be done with it.

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2 hours ago, Seraphim88 said:

Can anyone here clarify a bit what's changed in Rewrite+ compared to the original? I know it includes Harvest Festa, new CG's, more voiced dialogue and whatnot, but the part about "direction and scenario improvements by Tanaka Romeo" doesn't really tell me much. Are there any actual changes or additions to the plot, or is this just a matter of refining the dialogue?
I'm trying to decide if it's worth rereading the entire VN when it's eventually released, or if I should just read Harvest Festa and be done with it.

Spoiler

I think its a ending cg which gives a good ending like the anime. Original ending was a bit depressing.

 

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6 minutes ago, Seraphim88 said:

Most of the characters were either impossible to symphathize with or just flat out boring, but other than that, the ending was probably the biggest disappointment. It felt pretty hollow and unrewarding after going through so much.

Yep, felt the same about the ending. After 50+ hours i don't want to be rewarded with a crap ending. It was crap in more ways than one, but the other reason won't be fixed. Ill use age as a hint.

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Yeah, agreed. It also gave me flashbacks to the intolerable, pseudo-deep nonsense that littered the Moon route, which is quite possibly the worst route I have ever read in any VN. It was like they told the writer "Hey, here's a bunch of drugs. Try 'em all and make sure to write down anything that comes to mind."

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Yesterday I finished To Heart PSE

It was nice, but uneven. I've written my impressions from first seven routes in earlier posts.

So at first let's look at remaining three routes.

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Kotone's route was nice. Not anything spectacular, or especially romantic - for most of the time it was another of "friendship" routes - but it had some good scenes near the ending, and all in all was good and felt pretty satisfying.

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Rio's route was much better than I expected from reading reviews. First impression wasn't great, but she grew up on me (much like she did on MC). Also, it was interesting because here whole setup was reversed - she suddenly confesses to MC right at the beginning, while he's all "Eh? But I don't know a single thing about you! Let's start as friends and get to know each other" - and so they start to slowly build their relationship. Nice

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And the last one - Serika's younger sister, Ayaka. Her mini-route is exclusive to PSE version. I'd say she's definitely one of the best girls in the game, but her route didn't live up to her character. It was nice, but something was lacking - the ending felt too rushed. Still, not bad, and I absolutely loved 膝枕(lap-pillow) scenes ;)

So, to sum it up, if I had to rank routes, it would end up something like this (I will rate them in groups):

First place - Multi, Tomoko and Lemmy
Second place - Serika, Akari and Shiho
Third place - Kotone, Rio and Ayaka
Fourth place - Aoi - the only route that felt utterly disappointing for me. I liked Aoi as a character when I met her in Akari's route, but her own route bored me to death.

Art and music were nice, as well as voice acting.

All in all - nice old high-school moege. Took me pretty long time to finish (I read it in Japanese, so it was much slower), but I don't regret it.

7.5/10

Now I'm reading Yukizakura fan-disc - Saki no LoveLove Honeymoon - and after that I think I'll try Hitotsuba.

Edited by adamstan
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On 23.03.2019 at 11:09 PM, namiultedjapanXD said:

Hey friend, I was curious to see if you finished this VN. Have you been able to find the time to finish it? I feel like its one of those VNs barely anyone has ever read. I liked the nice little it provided. If you did finish it, what did you think?

And so, today I finished Saki no Love Love Honeymoon. It was great. This fandisc for Yukizakura is exactly what it says on the tin - Yuuji's and Saki's summer trip to one southern island - in kind of "pre-honeymoon", as it is set between their engagement and Saki's route ending.

Pretty short, but sweet. Somehow, it has put me into extraordinarily good mood. It reminded me how great heroine Saki was (there were many moments where I just wanted to hug her), and her relationship with Yuuji is amazing as well. I loved how often they were totally in phase, understanding each other. Their conversations about future were nice too. Whole game is filled with love - including 2 h-scenes. 

Most of the game is narrated from Saki's point of view - interesting change. Also, it's kind of "crossover episode", as side characters (Yoshioka family) and setting (Matsukawa Island) come from another D.O. VN - Uminomichi. (which I added to my backlog ;))

I think I could rate this small side story even a bit higher than main game, and give it 8/10.

Also, I have to say that, for what it's worth, I found it much easier to read than ToHeart.

Like I said in my previous post, for my next VN I'm going to go back to the translated world, and read Hitotsuba, I think.

Edited by adamstan
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Finally completed Ef. While the continuously shifting perspectives made it rather difficult for me to root for a specific relationship, I quite liked the relationship between Amamiya Yuuko and Himura Yuu. I was spoiled by 

Spoiler

Yuuko's past and her subsequent death

but that didn't stop me from enjoying the story of Yuuko and Yuu. Well, that's as far as what I liked about Ef though, because I felt that the other relationships were kind of lacking as compared to Yuuko and Yuu. Overall, I'm gonna give it a 7.

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I started Hitotsu Yane no, Tsubasa no Shita de - Under one wing.

First impressions - I like the characters, but their design... ugh... the artist went totally overboard with those boobs. Kyonyuu high-school girls definitely aren't my thing. Well, Hikari seems to look normal. Kazusa - it depends on the pose, in CGs she's normal, but sprites also are somewhat off. But Nohoko and Saiko - come on, gimme a break! Those balloons sticked to their chests aren't sexy, they're ridiculous, as they seem just tacked on - proportions seem to be completely off. If they toned it down from current E+++ to something like D it would have been much better.

And then, at the opposite end is flat Mimarin ;)

Let's see how it turns out.

Edited by adamstan
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On 4/22/2019 at 4:22 PM, Seraphim88 said:

but the part about "direction and scenario improvements by Tanaka Romeo" doesn't really tell me much.

Sorry for the late reply.

From what I heard, they just added an extra hour of new content in the Terra route to explain

Spoiler

how exactly MC and Kagari fell in love in that route.

If I'm not mistaken, the rest of the story is the same.

As for the CGs, I looked through the CG pack for Rewrite+ and was pretty disappointed. There are several new CGs for Terra, and some CGs in the previous routes were edited to look more "fanservicey", but that's it.

And the anime is very bad. Literally one of the worst I ever watched. The type that makes the original work seem worse than it's actually is. If you didn't even liked the original game, I don't see much point in you watching it.

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14 hours ago, Dreamysyu said:

If you didn't even liked the original game

I actually did, but not nearly as much as I hoped I would. My expectations were pretty high since Rewrite is ranked #15 on VNDb with a rating of 8.56, so I guess I was pretty much set up for disappointment from the getgo. It's a decent VN, but I don't think it's one that I'll get the urge to reread. I was considering doing it in Rewrite+, but if the only addition to the story is what you mentioned, I can live without it (since I think that character is kinda boring).
Anyway, thanks for the elaborate answer! I'll probably just read Harvest Festa and ignore the rest.

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On 4/24/2019 at 4:19 PM, adamstan said:

Pretty short, but sweet. Somehow, it has put me into extraordinarily good mood.

That sums up how I felt about the original. There isn't really anything that special about it but for some reason it left me warm and fuzzy. I thought it would be something that I wouldn't end up finishing but it was the opposite.

Edited by namiultedjapanXD
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I finished Planetarian today. I'm amazed that I didn't like it, so many people do. That is probably because I haven't played short VNs for a long time and I have become accustomed to longer VNs.

The best part is that it's short, so I didn't lose valuable time on it.

After more than 2 years of trying and failing to get Cross†Channel to work on my PC. I was on the verge of buying a second PC just for playing it, because I'm in love with the description on VNDB.

I'm very happy now, because I just got it to work on my PC and I'll probably spend all my time (when I'm not working) on that and finishing Rewrite.

 

Edited by Mago Ivo
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6 minutes ago, Mago Ivo said:

After more than 2 years of trying and failing to get Cross†Channel to work on my PC. I was on the verge of buying a second PC just for playing it, because I'm in love with the description on VNDB.

I've been wanting to read that as well, but I've been continuously put off because all the translations are supposed to be pretty awful. From what I've heard, one is by an insane person who writes whatever he feels like, one is way too literal, and one is from one of the most infamous localization companies out there.
I would love to know why people seem to be having so much trouble translating this particular VN.

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23 minutes ago, Seraphim88 said:

From what I've heard, one is by an insane person who writes whatever he feels like, one is way too literal, and one is from one of the most infamous localization companies out there.

The insane dude also wrote a book titled "On Cross Channel" which is more than 400 pages long.

I don't know which translation did I get. I like to gamble. When I opened the "readme" file I was greeted by that :

Quote

CROSS†CHANNEL is an extremely hard visual novel to read in any language. Anything that looks like a mistake is most likely intentional, and is probably based directly on a similar intentional mistake in the original Japanese.

In fact, the original author included a variety of helpful and entertaining explanatory notes, in addition to the ones we've added. To avoid confusion, we always added explanations in the form of explicit translation notes, designated by "TL note:" within parentheses. Any other uses of asterisks or parenthesis should be interpreted as part of the original text.

Due to this VN's extraordinary need for translation notes, we've divided our translation notes into two levels.  You will be asked which level you want (or if you want no notes at all) when you start a new game.  No other aspect of or text in the game will be affected by this decision. There are a total of 219 translation notes, 193 of which remain in the intermediate level.

 

Edited by Mago Ivo
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I'm pretty sure you've got the Amaterasu translation, then. It's supposed to be the least awful one, as far as I know. It's most likely the version I'll end up reading when I'm done with all the VNs that interest me more, unless a fourth, better translation is released for whatever reason. Either that, or I'll wait until my Japanese is at a good enough level to read it in the original language, but that'll probably take quite a while if Cross Channel is actually as hard to read as they say in the text you quoted.

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Bought The Silver Case in the Steam Golden Week sale. I'm about halfway in and, well, it feels more like some postmodern experimental game than a straight-up visual novel or detective game (which explains why, at least according to vndb, close to no one has played it although Steam tried to advertise it to me a lot). I wouldn't really say I love it so far but it's defintively and I can see why the reviews of it range from masterpiece to incoherent mess. Which I don't agree with, but I can see why anyone just looking for a suspenseful thriller-game might be annoyed by all the stuff that's seemingly just there to piss off the player, like the tedious controls in the gameplay sections and scenes that go nowhere, both most certainly by design. I'll probably write more about it once I'm finished, as there is a lot to unpack.

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Not the greatest example of a vn, but it's still on vndb so i might as well post about it-Corpse Party BloodCovered, currently on chapter 2. i'd say it's a pretty cool game.

Spoiler

so far, that asshole black apparition thing in the infirmary in chap1 was the most annoying part of the game. although most of it comes from the fact that the game makes you click the door twice before you can get the rubbing alcohol. at least its ai was really stupid. it was easy to trick and i got it caught by its own traps many times. the next thing i'm worrying about for chap2 is the asshole ghost kid that patrols the school, mostly due to him appearing right after you pull the second lever and are forced to get around him in a narrow area.

 

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