What are ya reading?

Not a lot to comment on here, and we already have a favorite VN thread so how about a thread for your impressions on something while you read it (You can discuss the story but please avoid spoilers, you never know who has read what).

To start, I'm 6 hours into Key's recently translated story Rewrite. As of now, it's having less of an impact than Little Busters did but it's not bad by any means of the imagination. Also the title screen theme is Godlike.

Trying to finish DEARDROPS.

As of now, I am not playing any visual novels. I was going to play Rewrite and Little Busters... I'm a huge Key fan myself. There's a couple of other games on my list that I still need to play, though. (Surprisingly, they're all visual-novel right now!)

Earlier this week, after my save file of my first play-through got lost along with my laptop before I used my warranty on it, I decided to continue playing Kira☆Kira, having intentions to finish before the weekend. I had caught up to where my old file was, and finished getting all of the bad endings. I almost finished Kashiwara's good (and bad) route, when my external hard-drive broke on me...

After going through two game-breaking experiences, I am genuinely not up to going through the trouble to get back to where I was again, skimming text through all of the different routes I took, at least, not anytime soon. I had planned to play the sequel as well, but considering the way its predecessor had been progressing to date, I doubt it will be played for a long time too. It's rather unfortunate, considering how much I liked that story. (I thought the whole cross-dressing gimmick was adorable and hilarious, and the wit throughout the game reminded me of Clannad at times.)

I also ordered Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, the sequel to 999 (excellent story, by the way). The game is incredibly rare where I live, and had to special-order it from a local GameStop... it's been 3 weeks past the expected arrival, and if it goes another week I may have to order it online instead.. but this is the VN I'm likely to play next.

Just last night, I managed to convince a good friend of mine to check out Clannad. He'll be playing that very soon, and I'm glad he decided to. I say that because, earlier this week, another friend of mine came up to me telling me how "tremendous" the anime adaption was. (Off-topic, but I love how well the story adapted into a single-route [two brief arc episodes] show.) He is even interested in playing the visual novel now! (He's a sucker for Katawa Shoujo)

Lastly, I want to mention that I'm keeping a fine eye on the fan-translated project for the Gyakuten Kenji (Ace Attorney Investigations) sequel. I don't think the game will be translated to its entirety anytime soon; however, it seems to have a lot of potential, and I find joy in watching fan-translations progress and bloom.

(Sorry for the double-post. I guess everyone's too busy with the recent changes in the game development.)

Well I beat Virtue's Last Reward a couple of days ago, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I'll try not to spoil anything in the game, so I'll say the spoiler-free aspects on it. The game had a couple of unexpected turns, but also had some that I predicted halfway through the story. I was surprised how long the game was, and the routes made decision-making easy (besides a couple of plot-twists, anyways). There's some permanently miss-able dialogue, though, and I don't think I'll be going back through the entire game just to read the little bits of text. Either way, I enjoyed what I didn't miss out on.

The music was recycled from its predecessor 999, but I loved the music either way. I thought the graphics were pretty cool, being 3D-rendered, but because of the fact that I'm a sucker for pixel-art, 999 wins in that category. The English dub on the full-game voice acting was actually very well done. I don't usually like English dubs, but this is one of the very few games (Star Fox 64, Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear Solid) I enjoyed the dub for (I heard it had some talented people on the voicing team) over the original language.

In the end, I ended up liking 999 more than this sequel. This came very close, but I feel 999 had tons more "shitbrick'ing" moments. Regarding the translation, I'm not sure how I feel about the localized rabbit puns (I'm hopping serious), but I suppose it's better than adding "nya" to the end of the sentence. (That's a lie, I like that sometimes.) I love this game, it's definitely worth the money, will comment, rate, subscribe, etc. As of now, I'm not playing any visual novels. I might check out Ever17 eventually, but I think I'm going to focus on other things for now.

Anyone here still playing any VNs? What do you think of yours so far, if you are? (Hopefully without spoiling, but it's up to you.)

That's cool, I'm thinking of buying 999/ZE:VLR. How important is it to play 999 before Zero Escape, I probably will either way regardless but I'm curious.

As I said in my OP, I finished Rewrite a while back. I'll give a quick +/- bullet point summary comparing it to the other Key Visual Novel's I've read (Clannad/Little Busters).

+ Best OST in a Visual Novel I've ever read
+ Unique Team A vs Team B scenario with different heroines on different teams, in one route you'll be doing everything you can to help Heroine B while in another you'll be trying to kill her.
+ Going back to Team A vs Team B, that means instead of "Here's the bad guy and this is why he's bad" the reader has a more internal conflict deciding who is right and who is wrong. In addition since you end up picking a side and different people are on different sides, you can (and will to 100%) play through a route or two as a villain.

- Games final ending is less emotional than Clannads or Little Busters
- Yoshino (games 'brofriend') is less fun than Sunohara or Masato/Kengo/Kyousuke
- Routes only have one ending each, majority of which suck (Making the experience worse than it should have been)
- Kagari (canon heroine) is far worse than Nagisa and Rin, I would honestly say she was my least favorite out of the games cast.

Besides that, I'm now reading Kamidori Alchemy Meister. It's a weird case, it is heavily reliant on the gameplay and the story itself is generic as hell. Do I rate it as a video game (good and very long) as a visual novel/story (Boring and uninspired) or as an experience (Nothing great, nothing terrible, should be shorter). Besides having more (-)'s than (+)'s in my Rewrite review I would still recommend it to someone, but Kamidori I honestly probably wouldn't.

rockmanll wrote:That's cool, I'm thinking of buying 999/ZE:VLR. How important is it to play 999 before Zero Escape, I probably will either way regardless but I'm curious.

Well, it depends on what you'd consider a "spoiler". Some things are definitely revealed in VLR that occurred late into 999, but they're vague about it, and you'd only catch it if you played the first game. I'd recommend playing the first anyways so that those allusions make the game a bit more enjoyable.

rockmanll wrote:Besides that, I'm now reading Kamidori Alchemy Meister. It's a weird case, it is heavily reliant on the gameplay and the story itself is generic as hell. Do I rate it as a video game (good and very long) as a visual novel/story (Boring and uninspired) or as an experience (Nothing great, nothing terrible, should be shorter). Besides having more (-)'s than (+)'s in my Rewrite review I would still recommend it to someone, but Kamidori I honestly probably wouldn't.

I haven't played either of those games, but if you enjoyed the game, then great. As far as recommending, I think that deciding whom you should recommend the game would depend on the person whom enjoys the genre with more (+) than (-).

As of this post, I'm still not playing any visual novels.. unless you count RPGs, then I'm playing/reading Chrono Trigger: Flame of Eternity. (Fan-made rom hack sequel to Chrono Trigger, which is a revival project for its preceding project "Crimson Echoes".)