Thanks for the giveaway, that was an interesting read.
I'm at lack for words to express how strongly I dislike the Cutesy chibi art style with females looking like underage dolls/girls in their early teens, but I am willing to get past that for a very good story/creative mechanics and this game certainly looks intriguing, so I am adding it to my wishlist.
I didn't play a lot of visual novels, but I had a great time with the Zero Escape games and Danganronpa and thoroughly enjoyed the story, art and characters, spent hours on each game.
Comment has been collapsed.
I passed this game over a handful of times too for that reason - it was only until a friend wrote a very flattering review and someone else gave me a copy for Christmas that this game is in my backlog.
I have a strong preference for adult stories to star adults, and for them to look like adults! I've noticed the genre getting a little better in that regard, but not by much.
If you'd like to play the Best Visual Novel Ever For All Time, please check out the House in Fata Morgana
Comment has been collapsed.
Because it's the most thoughtful, most intricate, most mature visual novel I've ever read, and it's probably one of if not THE most arresting love stories I've had the pleasure of experiencing.
It's like a perfect Swiss watch, and everything - the sublime, eerie character sprites, the haunting music (most of which has beautiful vocals), the lyricality of the masterful translation - moves together to emphasize the themes and tone of the story, which take turns I never expected.
I wrote a review about it here, if you'd like something a bit more in-depth and something a LOT more emotional because I wrote it as soon as I finished the story and got done crying.
Comment has been collapsed.
Well, that's certainly a ringing endorsement. :) I'll definitely put it on my wishlist.
I'm reading over your VN master list now. I happened to notice Everlasting Summer - I could not get into that game. I think it's the most "in need of editing" VN I've ever played. So much text that felt like filler. But the time the game started and the character arrived at the camp, I was already bored and feeling done with it.
And sad to hear that you thought Zero Time Dilmemma is awful, considering you really liked the first two. I have yet to play it, but I loved the first two Zero Escape games, and I had high hopes for the third.
Comment has been collapsed.
Ugh, god, I know, Everlasting Summer is probably my most questionable choice on there - but in a weird way it charmed me, so I kept it. I put a huge caveat up for it, though, so I feel I did my due dilligence. Also, it's free, and my bar for good free shit is lowered. (Though with it being in the company of games like Doki Doki Literature Club, AIRIS, and Cinderella Phenomenon, it does pale in comparison...)
I was really sad about that, too! I was majorly looking forward to it - I played through 999 and VLR a few years ago, then played through them both again and Zero Time Dilemma back to back to back and... it's...
There were a lot of changes made to try to get it to 'sell better' that failed spectacularly, and the writing took a turn for the ridiculous (in a bad way), culminating in the dumbest reveal of a big bad I've seen.
Go into it with bargain basement expectations and you might be pleasantly surprised (there were some sequences that were nice).
(and thank you for reading!)
Comment has been collapsed.
Yeah, I try not to be too mean to it, on account of it being free, but even at free I felt it was hardly worth it. There are other free options, like Doki Doki or Katawa Shoujo or even Juniper's Knot, which are so much better. I think if it didn't feature the allure of female breasts, it wouldn't have been nearly as well reviewed.
I haven't heard of AIRIS or Cinderella Phenomenon, I'll have to check those out.
And that's a real shame about Zero Time Dilemma. 999 and Virtues Last Reward were so good! Sigh... I don't know why they tried to get it to sell better - by the 3rd game in a trilogy, just appeal to the existing fan base.
Btw, have you played Magical Diary?
Comment has been collapsed.
Zero Time Dilemma very nearly didn't exist, so I suppose it was a blessing we got... anything? But yes, if they had stuck to the same format as 999 even it would have been LOADS better.
I have not played Magical Diary, no! I tend not to like stat-raising VNs - I feel like it's just tedium. I looked at it a handful of times but passed it by.
Comment has been collapsed.
I share your frustrations regarding stat-raising VNs, but Magical Diary is different! While it does feature raising stats, it's very flexible, and you never feel punished for whatever choice you make. It's actually fun, rather than something to endure.
You can study 5 schools of magic, or go to the gym, or stay home and rest, but there are few set stat requirements. It's all about what you want to do. You can study all 5 schools of magic, or specialize in one or two. You can go to the gym if you want to impress the athletic person, or skip it if you don't. The periodic "Tests" can be solved many different ways, using any of the schools of magic, so they're more a test of your wits and cunning than of good stat raising. The only way to fail is to purposefully avoid studying any magic, which is effectively you picking that specific route.
Magical Diary shines in how much there is within the game. It's not a story heavy VN, the way others are, but the writing is pretty good, and there's so much to do and discover. You can run for class office (effectively or ineptly, and both are enjoyable), you can join a secret society, you can get expelled. You can romance girls and boys, demons and professors, or no one at all. The Tests are actually pretty fun, as you get to see how different schools of magic let you approach the same problem.
I rarely replay games, and yet I've played through it at least 3 times, and each time I found something new. And yet there are whole routes that I never even noticed.
It's one of my favorite VNs, after the Zero Escape games and Analogue: A Hate Story, and I highly recommend it. There's even a demo available!
Comment has been collapsed.
You certainly are very passionate about it! I'll put it on my wishlist to give it a shot sometime, thank you c:
Comment has been collapsed.
Haha, that is true. :)
At least try the demo. I think it'll give you a decent feel for the game. Who knows, maybe you'll hate the demo, in which case it's clearly not for you.
I was impressed by the demo, bought the game, liked it even more, and since then have been advocating for it - because I think it's a really good VN, and because it's super indie. The studio, Hanako Games, is one woman and various freelance artists. I also played Black Closet by her, and that was really good - my second favorite detective / mystery game after Her Story.
Comment has been collapsed.
Gruesome end O_O is the game have gore element..? and what about steins gate..? I'm interested in both of them
Comment has been collapsed.
People will die, badly, both in Steins;Gate and Root Double. While both feature visual blood and descriptions of the events in question, I can't really recall any graphics that were too... well, graphic in detail, although I guess that might be a personal opinion.
Both are good stories, though; neither is without their flaws, but I'd recommend them both (as well as Steins;Gate 0).
Comment has been collapsed.
Thank you, vn is a genre I tends to avoid because of that stereotype...
Andd last vn I play is corpse party X_X, generally a death fest
I'm in for good stories ^^
Comment has been collapsed.
Thank you for your giveaway, FEGuy and have a bump! :D
Comment has been collapsed.
I'm a firm opponent of Sekai Project like you, to the point of getting frustrated when they get licences of visual novels that I'm (or was) interested in reading, 'A Clockwork Ley-Line' trilogy comes to mind, which had, not only big errors in programming (japanese lines, savegame errors, unedited images, you need your PC in japanesse locale to make it run, etc), but also a lot of delays in a game that was fully translated when they bought the fan-translation two years ago. And yeah, don't let me start with the whole VITA mess, that's a new level of fuckery.
But for me Sekai has another big problem: it made VNs mainstream, which is good in theory, but at what cost, now Steam is filled with subpar VN of questionable quality and not as full of good games that have zero attention because VNs became a meme synonymous of porn most of the time (well, VN had mostly always been about porn, but not as much, now the first thread when a VN pops on Steam is "Does it have porn?/A +18 patch?"). Not to mention that you can only buy their VNs through Steam, and I don't know about you, but I would rather have them away from my family sharing and friends because of their meme status (with few exeptions like Fata Morgana, which I ended buying from the Mangagamer store, Root Double, The Silver Case and Zero Time Dilemma)
And well, despite liking the Infinity series and the Zero Escape series (haven't read the third one yet, tho), Root Double didn't really resonated with me, I don't know, maybe it was the characters, or the fact that I saw the plotwist coming too soon or that it dragged out too much in a lot of details that didn't deserve it (and those neverending flashbacks). It wasn't a bad VN by any means, but I've certainly read better ones.
PD: What was the problem with Dies Irae's localization? I've heard a lot of horrible details about the management of the kickstarter and how Light sold the game in a messy way, but nothing about the translation quality, quite the contrary, I've heard that it's good (but with a whole lot of typos).
Comment has been collapsed.
I guess I can answer that Dies irae question.
The whole Dies irae kickstarter was a mess. The translation is fine but it's got lots of typo's which could be easily fixed with a little bit of QA and a small patch but they still didn't do anything after all these months.
The main problem that people seem to have is that Light said that the steam version of Dies irae will be the ultimate version, it will have all the extra story content and the 18+ scenes from the other version all in one. After 6 months of delays, turns out that the patch wasn't really a patch and more like a standalone game/exe which will launch the 18+ version without the extra story content, so you have to choose if you want to read the 18+ version or the version with the extra story content/epilogues (or read the game twice for everything).
The steam version also requires you to switch system locale to japanese and you have to beat at least 1 route to apply the patch as some sort of DRM.
If you want to read Dies irae I suggest to get the DRM free version from MangaGamer since it doesn't require switching system locale to japanese and it doesn't require to beat one route to apply the patch, you can choose right away which version you want to read.
I guess all of that is still better than the mess that Sekai Project did with their latest releases of Leyline and Hoshizora no Memoria, where Hoshizora especially had untranslated lines, 100's of typo's and as almost all of their releases untranslated/edited images. You can read more the mess here from this review.
Comment has been collapsed.
Yeah, that was more or less what I've heard. But when I read "localization" here I tought the translation had its problems too and I wasn't aware of that. Funnily enough, I almost backed the kickstarter, luckily I didn't and after everything Light has done, I have no intentions of paying for a copy of Dies Irae anymore.
I didn't heard about the Hoshizora situation tho (maybe because it's not my type of VN), but man, apparently the can't fuck it up enough. Weird because Hoshizora had a fan-translation too that was released ages ago, wonder how they can mess up that badly.
Thanks a lot for your detailed reply.
Comment has been collapsed.
I'd agree that in terms of the localization, the biggest issue with Dies irae is the typos; while the translators claim they submitted an updated script shortly after release, the only patch ever released for the game was last month, and only fixed an issue in applying the 18+ 'patch'. The fact that they added an online-only DRM while claiming there would be no DRM in the KickStarter was bad by itself, but made even worse by releasing a DRM-free version on another storefront without giving the backers any sort of access to it. And I've all but given up on ever getting my physical copy. But the actual localization is pretty good, it just needed another QA pass; my bad for wording it as I did.
As for the HoshiMemo thing, it's not my cup of tea and I only heard some of the story about the mess. But Sekai Project is notorious for not caring about quality as long as it seems like it works. Take another BTA game from the current bundle as an example: A Magical High-School Girl is a perfectly serviceable (if lightweight) Mystery Dungeon knockoff, but despite multiple patches over fifteen months or so on Steam, the translation quality is absolutely awful. The only reason I'm skeptical about it being a machine translation or something is that there are actually spelling errors in it. There was no QA on the script, and half the dialogue barely makes sense without rearranging or even rewriting it in your head. Add that to the standard bugs - items with no names, text overflowing boxes, etc. - and you've got a quintessential SP release.
Any time Sekai Project releases a quality title, it's because the people doing the actual work care at least as much about the project as they do the paycheck.
Comment has been collapsed.
Sincerely, after all those VNs kickstarters fucks ups (not from Sekai Project alone, now Light, Sol Press with SakuSaku poor translation and Frontwing with the Sharin no Kuni ridiculous kickstarter practices) I don't get how people keep backing those. They never learn.
Sekai Project is also famous for delaying releases to the infinitum like the VN 2236 A.D. which was delayed so much that the japanese developer decided to release the translation himself in a comiket. To this day Sekai have just said how they're bussy with the QA and has no release date and no means of buying something (that does not include importing) that is already released. Not that I would buy anything from them, I just find the whole situation funny and sad.
And well sadly, the translation quality sems the less of the problems for the buyers (and as a translator myself, that deeply hurts me). Until people stops buying those horribly translated products and demanding fixes, we will still have those problems with every japanese release. Machine translations or really poor ones everywhere.
Comment has been collapsed.
Their CEO openly said that doing proper QA and TL check would waste time and money and they don't care about that since their main target audience are the uninformed casual buyers on steam.
All those ''quality'' titles with proper translations were fan translations which they bought cheaply and kickstarted to make even more money, Grisaia and Root Double are the biggest and most known ones.
Comment has been collapsed.
Sekai Project will always hesitate to bring their most popular title to HB, even when the game is full SFW
because the original dev for said games is very strict about licensing (yeah, VisArtKey's and Frontwing, I'm pointing at You)
but thankfully their games is cheaper here, tho I have to buy the patch re-enact my memories for some of them
Comment has been collapsed.
73 Comments - Last post 39 seconds ago by adam1224
825 Comments - Last post 5 minutes ago by InSpec
2,182 Comments - Last post 23 minutes ago by Almostn33t
72 Comments - Last post 27 minutes ago by SaruTabby
5 Comments - Last post 1 hour ago by hallak65
21 Comments - Last post 2 hours ago by coleypollockfilet
574 Comments - Last post 2 hours ago by UltraMaster
152 Comments - Last post 5 minutes ago by f300
176 Comments - Last post 18 minutes ago by star4you
67 Comments - Last post 23 minutes ago by Tucs
2,779 Comments - Last post 38 minutes ago by Chris76de
26,741 Comments - Last post 59 minutes ago by ViddaX
16,246 Comments - Last post 1 hour ago by Carenard
80 Comments - Last post 1 hour ago by pingu23
Anyone who looks through my comment and GA history knows that I'm a vocal proponent of good visual novels. Largely, this excludes most of what Sekai Project releases for a number of reasons, but Root Double's an exception for a handful of reasons. Despite its flaws, it's a good VN despite Sekai Project's efforts, not because of them.
Root Double's a sci-fi/mystery VN by one of the creators of the classic Infinity series, Takumi Nakazawa. If you're familiar with those games (or the Zero Escape series, headed by the other lead of the Infinity series, Kotaro Uchikoshi), its premise is already pretty familiar: an unlikely group unexpectedly finds themselves in a disastrous situation, with certain death looming if the victims can't cooperate. Bad ends and gruesome deaths abound, and the path to the 'true' ending can be frustrating to predict.
What sets it apart is that it doesn't really use a standard dialogue-choice screen to propel you through decisions. Instead, you'll use a screen to gauge your 'feelings' about certain characters at certain moments. It's a bit of a frustrating design choice, as it's intentionally vague, and some outcomes are less than rationally explained, but it's certainly different. It also leans a bit more into supernatural/sci-fi elements right from the beginning, in comparison to the other works mentioned, but it helps establish the setting a bit more concretely.
The game was translated by Lemnisca LLC, who'd worked on fan translations previously, including I/O, another great (if overly complex) Nakazawa VN. I don't believe they've done anything else officially, although their leader was involved to some degree in the relatively disastrous Dies irae localization, though the issues there largely lie with whoever's in charge of Western publishing and communications.
Sekai Project is to thank as far as actually getting the Xtend Edition officially translated; previously, the game's base edition would've been fan-translated otherwise. Up until last week I'd have said it was one of the few projects Sekai Project didn't mishandle, aside from promising a Vita release that they'd never deliver. However, they screwed it up in announcing a Vita release for next month. Despite having accepted money from international backers on KickStarter, and having two years to say as much, everyone who backed for the Vita version will receive a North American copy, with no plans for publishing it anywhere else. As only one account can be active on a Vita, and the process for switching between accounts is arduous, you can understand how the problem could've been at least mitigated with some degree of communication.
Despite all that, I do have a certain affinity for the game, even if a lot of the Xtend content seems superfluous. If anyone's interested in checking it out, I've got a private GA here. Requirements are pretty simple, but you do have to at least be level 1.
Giveaway ends in about a week; I'll try to keep the thread afloat until then.
Comment has been collapsed.