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What is it with VNs and dutch angles? Tilting all the art 45 degrees to either the left or the right makes sense if you're stuck with a small screen size due to hardware limitations, but modern games do it too.
16bit Sensation: it's a sort of semi-autobiographical, semi-didactic series about the bishoujo game industry in the 90s. The work feels both informed and personal, and seeing all these little trivia tips about how these things were actually made has again increased my appreciation for them greatly. I don't normally recommend things, but I really do think everyone interested in VNs should give it a read for some background on what eroge actually are.
This is a fantastic recommendation, and I can't believe I never heard of 16bit Sensation before you bringing it up. I'm really not much of a manga reader, but this is definitely one I plan to check out sometime.
Something else with very interesting history is Tsukihime. Speaking of which, @lain is here you mentioned it in Digital Seclusion, but what are your thoughts on it?
Ah, Tsukihime... It's charming, and I want to say I like it, but my having never completed it nor ever feeling a strong drive to pick it back up I think is more reflective of my actual thoughts on it. I remember getting bored with it, mostly because I felt the fight scenes were super uninteresting and drawn out. In general I think it's hard to pull off fight scenes well in the VN format (as opposed to manga and anime), and it requires genuinely talented writing. For instance, Dies Irae's fight scenes are a complete pleasure to read for me, but that's largely because the fighting is really just a medium for heated character interaction. Masada, the writer of Dies Irae is also considered to be one of the best prose writers in the industry. Tsukihime on the other hand is amateurish, which is both it's charming point but also in other ways its negative point.
Still, compared to Type Moon's later works like Fate/Stay Night, I think Tsukihime at least has that early Doujin VN charm. I also Love Love Love how ethereal the title screen music is. But as a VN as a whole, I think the premise was cool, but I couldn't get into it.
I completely agree though that the history surrounding Tsukihime is really interesting as well as it's influence on the industry. It was essentially the Kanon of action oriented "Chuunige", and we wouldn't have gotten Dies Irae if it weren't for it. So I still respect it as a title even if I wasn't super taken in by it.
I wasn't aware there was an English translation of Xenon. And god do I love it's art and character designs, peak 90's eroge. For me though, it's more the ginormous eyes rather than the huge knockers that I love
So a couple months ago I managed to find the PS2 ports for Kanon, Clannad, and Air all for under $5 a piece. Recently I finally got around to rereading Kanon, and this time decided to go for Nayuki's route, since *shocker* I've never actually read her route all the way through before. I always liked her as a character, but found other characters more interesting to pursue in my past readings of the VN.
So I guess I'll give a mini-review here. Essentially, her route can be summed up in this video:
Okay, not really, but kind of. I'm kind of glad I held off on her route for so long since I honestly, it was kind of boring for the most part. A lot of that has to do with the format of Kanon as a whole though, which doesn't really integrate all the routes and characters nearly as well as the 2006 KyoAni adaptation does. So the majority of her route is spent either at school or at home, since God forbid you talk to other girls that aren't your cousin. Since she's often busy with the Track and Field club, this means you have to avoid other bitches, which specifically means that when the choice arrives, you usually should pick to just go back home instead of doing anything interesting.
Even when you forget her notes at school and she gets upset at you, resulting in a choice where you can break into school at the middle of the night to retrieve them for her, you're not suppose to pick that option because that triggers you meeting Mai (who, incidently, is Mai waifu). Side note, but one thing that kind of pisses me off is how Mai is the only heroine you can go the entire VN having never met. If you don't choose to break into the school the one time the VN offers it as an option, to my knowledge, you will never be able to run across Mai for the rest of your playthrough. Why is best girl so hidden?
So anyway, initially Yuuichi is somewhat conflicted about pursuing Nayuki, because of well... the cousin thing. But thankfully the best friend character reassures us with the sage advice of: "Well, it's not like she's your sister." I mean, he has a point but....
Nayuki on her part never saw anything wrong to begin with regarding the whole cousin thing, which really makes you question what the incest rate is in this unnamed town. In fact, the most intersting part about Nayuki's route is realizing that she's a lowkey Yandere. Or at the very least somewhat of a menhera (translation: crazy bitch). She's really into Yuuichi, and casually under the disguise of jokes brings up spending the rest of their lives together in that town. Which I suppose is fine after they hook up, but she makes these comments practially the moment he moves back to the town.
Now the KEY conflict of her route, like with most of the Kanon girls, revolves around something that happend in the past. This is where we delve into spoilers, for those who care about that:
The last time Yuuichi visted this town, when he was around 10yo or something, Nayuki confessed her feelings to him and he rejects her. In fact he doesn't just reject her, but straight up has an outburst and destroys the gift she made for him, a snow bunny. (The source of his anger is actually the recent trauma he witnessed with Ayu, but if you haven't read her route or watched the anime beforehand, you wouldn't know this.) In anycase, she apologizes profusely and tells him that she'll be waiting for him at that exact place the next day. Yuuichi never shows up and leaves town, leaving her to freeze on a cold bench for hours before giving up and going home.
This is where things connect with the very begining of the VN. Without realizing it Yuuichi is actually waiting at that exact same spot: the bench by the train station. Nayuki shows up 2 hours late, forcing him to wait outside in the cold for that whole time. When he tells the time to her, she notes that she thought it was actually an hour early, to which he replies: "Even then, you'd still be a whole hour late." Nayuki was intentionally late as a means to get back at Yuuichi for 7 years ago, when she was waiting for hours at the bench. Only, he never came, well not until 7 years later that is. This passive-aggressive move on Nayuki for something that happened 7 years ago is exactly what I mean when I say she's lowkey menhera.
Anyway, since Yuuichi has moved in with her and her aunt in order to finish HS, they now live and go to school together. At the midpoint of their route, their homeroom teacher announces that in a week's time there will be a bunch of exams, and Yuuichi begins to study in Nayuki's room with her until late into the night. He starts to develop serious feelings for her, he confesses, and they eventually fuck (well, not in the PS2 version, but it's contexually obvious given how they cut the scene). Then Nayuki's mom gets hit by a car and Nayuki goes full hiki-mode as a response. Yuuichi tries to get through to her, but to no avail. He then tells her that he will wait for her at that place, and he spends the entire day paying his karmic debt to Nayuki and sitting on a cold bench for like 12 straight hours. At midnight Nayuki arrives, they have a tearjerking moment and then we cut to the Epilogue where it time skips a couple months and everyting is fine. Why is everything fine, because the last wish was used to resolve everything, which only makes sense if you read Ayu's route (or watched the anime).
All that said, I'm only taking the piss out of Kanon and Nayuki's route specifically because it's a VN I adore. In the grand scheme of things, Nayuki's route fits in really well in the context of the overall story, better than some other routes. That said, it was a bit on the boring side imo. Despite that, I love Nayuki's design. Of all the Kanon girls I actually think her design is my favorite. Also, these CGs were just beautiful. Classic Girls in Snow vibe:
So yeah, I guess it's true, when your cousin grows up hot what other choice do you have? After all, they're only first cousins, besides, at least she's not his sister.
Ah, Tsukihime... It's charming, and I want to say I like it, but my having never completed it nor ever feeling a strong drive to pick it back up I think is more reflective of my actual thoughts on it. I remember getting bored with it, mostly because I felt the fight scenes were super uninteresting and drawn out. In general I think it's hard to pull off fight scenes well in the VN format (as opposed to manga and anime), and it requires genuinely talented writing. For instance, Dies Irae's fight scenes are a complete pleasure to read for me, but that's largely because the fighting is really just a medium for heated character interaction. Masada, the writer of Dies Irae is also considered to be one of the best prose writers in the industry. Tsukihime on the other hand is amateurish, which is both it's charming point but also in other ways its negative point.
>its another fight scene immediately followed by a sex scene immediately followed by an overly long exposition dump
I agree that it's a really difficult read, and formulaic, too. I remember finishing Arc's route first and then putting it down for like three months because it was one of the few things I've read that I had absolutely no interest in whatsoever; everything afterwards was me forcing myself to finish it. The good parts are few and far between, with I think the most interesting parts being locked behind Kohaku's route, which is basically the final one. It's definitely an "it gets good 40 hours in" situation, except the VN itself is only 40 hours long. That's my overall stance: it's one of the few things that I didn't like but ended up changing my mind on eventually.
I wasn't aware there was an English translation of Xenon. And god do I love it's art and character designs, peak 90's eroge. For me though, it's more the ginormous eyes rather than the huge knockers that I love
Yeah, I was searching for the guy who posted a WIP YU-NO translation In 4chan to see if he had any other presence online and I find a forum where he posted an archive.org link with a bunch of translations, including Xenon's.
It's really weird to finally play a game when I've listened to the OST so many times. I found myself thinking "ah, this is that great track" for every song that started playing...
My review:
While I'm a fantasy buff, I happen to not be a big sci-fi fan, and I've read very little fiction of any kind in that genre... So all I can say is that I like the space setting.
You think they'd have solved air conditioning in the year 6000, though
I was expecting a 50+ hour adventure, since the only other PC-98 game I've played is YU-NO, but a short and sweet story is fine, too. It's better than forcing the base idea into a massive storyline, just because.
Art: 5/5
Music: 10/5 (Anything that Umemoto touched became gold just because of the music)
Story: 4/5
So on a scale of 1 to 10, if we add them up we have 19, and as we all know, 19/10 = 1.9
So the final rating is 1.9 stars - all in all, pretty good
I have liked VN's, but never really played good ones like in this thread. I was a little young when I played alot of them on newgrounds, sadly forgot all names. I would play these everyday though, no matter how short it was, or bad, it was just very nice for me as struggling with loneliness. I do remember one where there was a guy, who had a long tiring work day (i believe) and went on the bus on winter, slowly fell asleep and woke up in this different bus OTW to a summercamp. It was such a nice one, I wish I could find that one again, I think I replayed it 2-3 times.
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