From Key, there's also Planetarian ~Chiisana Hoshi no Yume~. It's a lot shorter than Clannad, by which I mean you might be able to finish it even if your reading speed is on the slower side. On the other hand, I haven't heard of anyone finishing Clannad who wasn't already very good at Japanese.

FooSoft Wrote:Visual novels aren't well... as visual as manga, but you still get hints as to what people are saying based on their reactions. And at least you always know who is talking. You also usually get ideas about your surroundings.

So maybe "cheating" isn't the correct word, it's not necessarily negative, as long as you don't use the additional context as an excuse to not make a full effort to understand what's written

The most important thing by far though is just to have fun though. Light novels would have been too big of a jump for me from when I was just finishing KO and Smart.fm sentences - frustrating even. So I think it's all about just about slowly ramping up difficulty while keeping yourself entertained!

Yes, fun is definitely important! And with that in mind, I remembered that I had heard that Clannad was quite sad. I'm too easily moved by sad scenes, so I ended up ordering an apparently related game, Air.

Mushi Wrote:Yes, fun is definitely important! And with that in mind, I remembered that I had heard that Clannad was quite sad. I'm too easily moved by sad scenes, so I ended up ordering an apparently related game, Air.

Air's just as sad

Mushi Wrote:I'm too easily moved by sad scenes, so I ended up ordering an apparently related game, Air.

I couldn't help but laugh at this. Air and Clannad both fall under a genre known as 泣きゲ, so I hope you ordered some tissue with that game.

Has Key even made any games that weren't 泣きゲー?

No.

I bet Mushi changed his mind because he saw Clannad was all ages.

Hmm, well ok, so should I get something else, or maybe I can just get a walkthrough and play correctly so as not make any tragedy-inducing mistakes?

The game will be sad no matter what, a guide won't help. I actually can't think of any pc ones that aren't sad. You could play 街 on an emulator.

Mushi Wrote:Hmm, well ok, so should I get something else, or maybe I can just get a walkthrough and play correctly so as not make any tragedy-inducing mistakes?

Nah, it's fine. A lot of the game is actually very funny, and I don't feel like either game is burdened by sadness at all. If you've seen the anime, you can probably avoid making the "bad choices" too.

Getting a fan-translation from some place like baka tsuki might be a good idea, but then again their translations are kind of bad. I've run into sentences which were complete opposites of their translations.

You will probably also want to get AGTH (Anime Game Text Hooker), it allows you to dump text from games so you can copy/paste it as you play. It was quite useful for when I was mining entire sentences, you can see it on this old cluttered screenshot Looks like this.

Ok, so they're all sad anyway. Well, as long as all the sad events occur on villains and such, and not on say, kawaii characters, I think it'll still be all right.

Thanks, BTW, for bringing up a helpful sounding tool, AGTH. I thought that I'd either have to write my own window text capturing program, try to decipher their data files, or else spend lots of time looking up kanji by radicals.

FooSoft Wrote:You will probably also want to get AGTH (Anime Game Text Hooker), it allows you to dump text from games so you can copy/paste it as you play. It was quite useful for when I was mining entire sentences, you can see it on this old cluttered screenshot Looks like this.

hey how did you get agth to work in wine? I couldn`t figure it out and ended up making my own thing to do it.

quincy Wrote:I actually can't think of any pc ones that aren't sad.

OMGWTFOTL comes to mind.

Haha, it was pretty dumb. You have to run it from a batch file so that it runs it from the windows command prompt.

clannad.sh:
#!/bin/sh
LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 wine ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/cmd.exe /c play.bat

play.bat:
c:\agth\agth.exe REALLIVE.EXE

Mushi Wrote:Ok, so they're all sad anyway..

Come, now... they're not ALL sad...

hereticalrants Wrote:

Mushi Wrote:Ok, so they're all sad anyway..

Come, now... they're not ALL sad...

there does seem to be quite a lot with the comedy tag. no idea about the quality of any of the titles listed.

and then theres this tag...

ToasterMage Wrote:

hereticalrants Wrote:

Mushi Wrote:Ok, so they're all sad anyway..

Come, now... they're not ALL sad...

there does seem to be quite a lot with the comedy tag. no idea about the quality of any of the titles listed.

and then theres this tag...

these are the types of novels I wouldn't be able to read out in public...

ひぐらし is interesting in that it's fairly sad and surprisingly violent at the beginning (although in the VN version most of the violence is only described, not shown like in the anime). But it ends up being a fairly positive story about trust and friendship. Actually the beginning part is very なつかしい and does a good job of portraying small-town rural life in Japan, which is one of the best parts about it.

If you get the version for the PS2 all the dialogue is voiced, which helps a lot if you don't know the kanji so well, although the narration is not voiced. (The DS versions have additional scenarios but not as much voicing due to the smaller space).

Probably the most forbidding thing about it, though, is that it's very long.

yudantaiteki Wrote:If you get the version for the PS2 all the dialogue is voiced, which helps a lot if you don't know the kanji so well, although the narration is not voiced. (The DS versions have additional scenarios but not as much voicing due to the smaller space).

I'm pretty excited, since Alchemist is giving うみねこ the same treatment they gave to ひぐらし, except this time for the PS3 in full HD. The screens they've released so far look gorgeous. Well, as gorgeous as a visual novel can be, anyway. No Ryukishi potato hands, in any case. Plus they got the voice cast from the anime for all the dialogue, which is nice, since the voice cast is about the only thing the anime got right.

The first four episodes should be out sometime this December. I wish I could give a difficulty review for the PC versions, but unfortunately I haven't read them yet since I still have to read through ひぐらし first, and that's still a struggle for me. I imagine it's similar to ひぐらし, though, since it's the same writer and covers similar themes.

That's good to hear; I was hoping they would release a console version of umineko as well -- I can't deal with Ryuukishi's art. (Looking at the cast list, it seems like a lot of the seiyuu are duplicated from Higurashi. I can't imagine the enormous amount of time it must have taken for the seiyuu to do the full voicing for Higurashi, especially Hoshi, and Yukino Satsuki who had to play 2 characters.)

The only problem might be the price, and if they keep coming out with successively better versions of it (like the カケラ遊び and arguably the DS version for Higurashi).

sorry for necromancy
er, that is for recovering such an old thread - but could anyone rate these games in terms of difficulty?

* White Album 2
* Little Busters Ex
* Kud Wafter
* Koi to senkyo to chocolate
* Kimi ga nozomu eien
* Phantom: integration (or just "Phantom of inferno")
* Yami to boushi to hon no tabibito
* Air

I didn't read much of WA2 (I just jumped on the HYPE TRAIN then realized it is not something I would want to read and dropped it), but from what I did read it was fairly simple.
Koichoco is really easy.

And the others I don't know.