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:

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.

No.

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

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.

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.

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

Last edited by FooSoft (2010 September 19, 2:42 pm)

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...

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.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 September 21, 7:34 pm)

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).

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 September 21, 9:29 pm)

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.