I neglected to mention this back when we were talking about FGO, but... Fuck Fairies. I didn't understand the true racist spirit of the righteous Christian soldier until I met them in Fae Britain. I understand now.
Nasu wouldn't have the balls to make his own take on Dante's inferno or the rest of the divine comedy. Dante would definitely overshadow the rest of the cast because he literally went through hell, purgatory, and heaven to reunite with his love Beatrice. Dante was also a christian soldier who fought in the crusades to take Jerusalem and won. So he would be like God's most powerful saber servant.
Can't say that any magusfags would ever try doing that. The best we get is shiro crying himself to sleep because he can't live without saber carrying the franchise and magi edgelords in his other works acting like they aren't still just as mortal as the muggles they look down upon.
God damn it's already fantastic. From what I remember the first game isn't connected to the ensuing apocalypse directly, so no need to look for clues on what's going to happen.
Okay I'm doing it, I'm getting Muv Luv-pilled View attachment 6828389
God damn it's already fantastic. From what I remember the first game isn't connected to the ensuing apocalypse directly, so no need to look for clues on what's going to happen.
People sleep on EXTRA too much because of how good Alternative is. It's a very fun rom-com with a funny cast and great moments. The only issue I had when reading Extra is that it ran a bit TOO long and some of the other routes other than Chizuru's are boring. I still recommend doing all of the routes though.
Okay I'm doing it, I'm getting Muv Luv-pilled View attachment 6828389
God damn it's already fantastic. From what I remember the first game isn't connected to the ensuing apocalypse directly, so no need to look for clues on what's going to happen.
My dude... you just don't know. You just don't know. Alternative is life changing. It really cries your heart out. Probably one of the best VNs I've ever read in my life. Definitely top five. Just gonna say Takeru's name is a big hint if you know what it means in Japanese. Also, prequel came out this year for Muv Luv (translated to English) that's before all of them but set in a different universe. I was told you should read that first actually. It's called Rumbling Hearts, and it came out before even Muv Luv.
I think the translation is heavily censored though. There is work to fix it I think.
How is it? I've played Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes and to be honest, only Steins Gate hit it out of the park for me. Chaos Head was a mess, though an interesting one and Robotocs was just a slog (I also hate 3D modeos in VN so damn much).
Also, started Raging Loop and got the first ending and I'm fucking hooked. I found it meta as all hell since I played A LOT the werewolf party game and was amused at how autistically the rules were explained only for everything to go off the rails massively almpst instantly. Hoping there are more proper branches instead of immediate game overs, I like it when these games lead me on thinking everything is going all right just to hit a death. It's also surprisingly funny, Chiemi and the main character bounce of each other so well and I was laughing my ass off when Fusaishi just blew up in the cops face for no apparent reason.
And speaking of the main character, Fusaishi, he's been treat. He isn't an autist or a maladapted retard. There is obviously something more to him, first off, he's way too comfortable handling corpses and certainly has a bit of a manipulator streak, but it's refreshing controlling a likeable guy with charisna for once.
I do honestly wish the game was a bit more graphic though. Some more explicit imagery of the fucked up shit the text narrates yes, this may be edgy of me, but I do enjoy some gore in my horror here and there and the game plays it very safe with that from what I've seen.
How is it? I've played Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes and to be honest, only Steins Gate hit it out of the park for me. Chaos Head was a mess, though an interesting one and Robotocs was just a slog (I also hate 3D modeos in VN so damn much).
You are in for a treat with the next routes, one of the best things about the game is how it doesn't make you feel like going through the same motions like a lot of early branching VNs do.
I'll avoid it like the plague then, if it's anywhere near as tepid as Robotics, I give 0 shits about the Science Adventure saga anymore. I just assume they had a huge fluke with Steins;Gate and even then kind of fucked it up with Zero which honestly subtracted more than it added to the mythos.
You are in for a treat with the next routes, one of the best things about the game is how it doesn't make you feel like going through the same motions like a lot of early branching VNs do.
I'll avoid it like the plague then, if it's anywhere near as tepid as Robotics, I give 0 shits about the Science Adventure saga anymore. I just assume they had a huge fluke with Steins;Gate and even then kind of fucked it up with Zero which honestly subtracted more than it added to the mythos.
The problem with Chaos;Head is that the official localization is sloppy and simplified. The game also had a bug that wouldn't let you finish the game, but thankfully that had a fix via a patch that came out. There's a better fan translation out there, done by Committee of Zero. But I haven't played C;H, so I am not sure of how much a difference it would make.
The problem with Chaos;Head is that the official localization is sloppy and simplified. The game also had a bug that wouldn't let you finish the game, but thankfully that had a fix via a patch that came out. There's a better fan translation out there, done by Committee of Zero. But I haven't played C;H, so I am not sure of how much a difference it would make.
I played the fan patched version. I got the story alright. I just think it was a bit of a mess and that the delusions thing could have been more ambitious without turning itself into a pretzel to have the big twist as much. I thought it was alright, but didn't set my world on fire like Steins Gate did. And robotics was a huge let down, which is why I'm a lot more skeptical with the Science Adventure games now.
I played the fan patched version. I got the story alright. I just think it was a bit of a mess and that the delusions thing could have been more ambitious without turning itself into a pretzel to have the big twist as much. I thought it was alright, but didn't set my world on fire like Steins Gate did. And robotics was a huge let down, which is why I'm a lot more skeptical with the Science Adventure games now.
I've had it in my wishlist for ages. I heard it was a sequel to C;H so I prioritized going through that one first. But I've been honestly kicking it back for ages.
I played the fan patched version. I got the story alright. I just think it was a bit of a mess and that the delusions thing could have been more ambitious without turning itself into a pretzel to have the big twist as much. I thought it was alright, but didn't set my world on fire like Steins Gate did. And robotics was a huge let down, which is why I'm a lot more skeptical with the Science Adventure games now.
I agree about Chaos;Child. There was kind of an overarching narrative but it's like if you watched Fringe/X-Files but skipped every other episode - you can tell kind of what's going on but there's a whole lot of nonsense being thrown around that makes no sense and you have a hard time figuring out why these characters actually care about each other.
I agree about Chaos;Child. There was kind of an overarching narrative but it's like if you watched Fringe/X-Files but skipped every other episode - you can tell kind of what's going on but there's a whole lot of nonsense being thrown around that makes no sense and you have a hard time figuring out why these characters actually care about each other.
I only went through Chaos;Head. After S;G I intended to go through Chaos;Child till I learned Head came before. Head did not impress me that much and I've been kicking the Child can for years. I can only assume how much of a confusing mess Child would be without knowing some of the crap from Head. Hell, I don't even remember how the super autists were called or the fancy names for their swords. Still giving me more reasons to remove it from my wishlist.
Robotics I think is ass, a very boring slog that takes ages to become interesting and it's choice system is just a gimmick that may cause you to read the story in a non intended order since there is no real branching narratives in it either. It also looks so incredibly ugly. Gamedevs going full retard and using 3d models instead of drawings was a horrible fad in VN which I hope is dead and buried for the most part. Somnium Files made it work, but in Robotics and Zero Escape 2, it just made everything incredibly ugly for no benefit.
And all of the Science Adventure games till now have been so losely connected that there is no reason to go through them hoping for some deepest lore references here and there. S;G works perfectly as a self contained package and I think it's how it's best experienced.
I only went through Chaos;Head. After S;G I intended to go through Chaos;Child till I learned Head came before. Head did not impress me that much and I've been kicking the Child can for years. I can only assume how much of a confusing mess Child would be without knowing some of the crap from Head. Hell, I don't even remember how the super autists were called or the fancy names for their swords. Still giving me more reasons to remove it from my wishlist.
Oh shit, how did I forget The House in Fata Morgana?! It's unfortunately excellent up until the tranny twist and you literally get a woke gender identity lecture by the tranny's brother that reads exactly like tweets by a woketard. It's the most cringe shit ever.
Finished Sumika and Meiya routes in Muv Luv, thought it will be a lot longer. 4 heroines to go, the game is great and I wonder if the other heroines branch out since the main duo are pretty much the center of the common route.
I only went through Chaos;Head. After S;G I intended to go through Chaos;Child till I learned Head came before. Head did not impress me that much and I've been kicking the Child can for years. I can only assume how much of a confusing mess Child would be without knowing some of the crap from Head. Hell, I don't even remember how the super autists were called or the fancy names for their swords. Still giving me more reasons to remove it from my wishlist.
Robotics I think is ass, a very boring slog that takes ages to become interesting and it's choice system is just a gimmick that may cause you to read the story in a non intended order since there is no real branching narratives in it either. It also looks so incredibly ugly. Gamedevs going full retard and using 3d models instead of drawings was a horrible fad in VN which I hope is dead and buried for the most part. Somnium Files made it work, but in Robotics and Zero Escape 2, it just made everything incredibly ugly for no benefit.
And all of the Science Adventure games till now have been so losely connected that there is no reason to go through them hoping for some deepest lore references here and there. S;G works perfectly as a self contained package and I think it's how it's best experienced.
With both Robotics and Child I watched the anime. The former was probably better since it was slow burn, but the latter was shit that spoiled the game. The only other thing in the series I care about is Occultic Nine for.... reasons
Oh shit, how did I forget The House in Fata Morgana?! It's unfortunately excellent up until the tranny twist and you literally get a woke gender identity lecture by the tranny's brother that reads exactly like tweets by a woketard. It's the most cringe shit ever.
To expand on Fata Morgana:
there are 10 (9) main characters. I'll pair them up:
Michel the dickless male albino French nobleman (YOU) and Giselle the French maid
Rhodes Brother and Rhodes Sister
Jap Captain and his Bride, a merchant's daughter
Jacopo the mafioso and Maria his best friend forever and house slave (lol)
Morgana the witch (VILLAIN) and Albino Girl, who is Morgana's good side that she cast away in rage, so as to never get bored of torturing her victims
The characters on the cover are Giselle and Albino Girl. This is not a scene that happens in the game. They hardly ever interact. This is just a picture drawn for the purpose of lezbaiting coomers. Importantly, Michel (YOU) is not in it. Albino Girl is not Michel. If you need super extra official proof, in the interview that's sold as DLC on some stores, the developers specifically say "we made an unusual choice to not portray the protagonist on the cover".
Brother and Sister are young noblebabbies living in the McMansion. They're happy and love each other very much and are always together.
Time passes. Brother, being male, is made to study for a career. Sister, being female, is left to be an airhead (she didn't have a choice). She is bored and annoyed at the brother for not spending time with her.
Albino Girl, a beautiful hobo, begs for shelter at the McMansion. She is forced to work as a maid. Brother falls in love with her and they start dating.
Meanwhile, Sister gets the bad news: upon coming of age, she's going to be forcibly married to some ancient syphilitic penis, while her brother is free to travel the world and fuck if not marry maids, by virtue of his sex.
Sister goes insane, attacks Albino Girl and sexually assaults Brother.
Albino Girl flees the house, never to be found. Brother is unhappy. I don't remember what happens to Sister.
During all that time, Giselle the zombie maid lives in the house and clinically observes everything. She gives no fucks.
Jap Captain, who exiled himself from Japan to travel the world, courts his merchant partner's daughter.
Unfortunately, Jap Captain is a bit of a ragepig, he ragepigs out on his ship and crashes it. He survives, and awakens without memory and having forgotten foreign languages, on an inhabited island. He ragepigs some more and the locals chase him away into the McMansion.
Albino Girl inexplicably shows up and starts living there, too.
He lives in the McMansion until Bride finds him. He does not recognize her and immediately kills her.
The people, enraged, attack the McMansion and kill Albino Girl. Jap Captain kills them.
During all that time, Giselle the zombie maid lives at the house and clinically observes everything. She gives no fucks. Jap Captain is sad because he's now alone. Giselle is not a person.
Jacopo and his best friend in the whole world Maria are children living in Sicily. They swear to be best friends forever, yadda yadda. I'm sneeding here, but it's really very touching, and the music is beautiful.
Time passes, they immigrate to the US. Jacopo becomes a rich mafioso and buys the McMansion. Because the world is oh so sexist and has no place for women, he graciously allows Maria to be his house slave. Maria grows to hate him.
Jacopo gets himself Albino Girl as a trophy wife. He neglects her but actually loves her.
Maria entertains Albino Girl, almost roleplaying an attentive male admirer. She doesn't quite hit on her, however. This is the in-universe lez bait.
Maria tells Jacopo that Albino Girl cheats on him. Pretending to be a friend to both of them, she becomes the intermediary for their messages to each other, and lies her ass off.
Nevertheless, Jacopo is willing to be a cuck as long as he gets to watch or something.
Seeing that her plan to figuratively break Jacopo's heart failed, Maria tries to do it literally and shoots him. He kills her instead but is wounded.
He survives, but the Albino Girl has fled. He never finds her again.
During all that time, Giselle the zombie maid lives at the house and clinically observes everything. She gives no fucks.
---
You'd think Maria was in love with Jacopo. She wasn't, and did this purely to get revenge on him for his sexism.
In a more realistic story, I'd condemn Maria for being a retard (she was!), but the game is female-focused misery porn chicklit, you're supposed to read her as stronk and capable.
Michel Boulanger the dickless albino baby boy is born to some French nobles. Because he's dickless, they assume he's a girl and raise him as a girl, which he resents but tolerates, because it's what girls are supposed to do.
When puberty hits, he starts masculinizing. They lock him in a room, and a female character viciously abuses him. Eventually they ship him away to the McMansion.
Then Giselle, the human maid with the huge bazoonkers, who was raped by her owner, is sent there, too. She is TRAUMATIZED.
Michel, who is dickless and oh so feminist due to having been raised as a girl for a while, is therefore the perfect "safe" partner for her. They fall in love and have some sort of sex. She shows her bazoonkers.
He still dilates hard about having been robbed of his deserved boyhood -- girls are worthless sluts who deserved to be locked in houses to do embroidery, but he's a man!!!!
Then the McMansion is attacked and Michel is killed for being an albino.
Back in the McMansion, Michel reaffirms his love for Giselle and she becomes human again. However, out pops MORGANA THE WITCH and says she'll torture them forever.
Morgana the witch is an underage witch in timey-wimey Jerusalem (but I remember seeing a wiki that said it was France). She is allegedly variously wronged by the real versions of three male npcs, is tortured to death, and curses them (and the women, for whatever reason, because fuck the women, the women don't matter) with her dying breath to miserable reincarnations.
Michel uses the magic of the McMansion to go back in time and rescue Morgana, and by that rescue Giselle and himself.
He finds that:
- Rhodes Brother and Sister are dirt poor, much younger than in their chapter, and the sister is deathly sick.
Michel tells her to stop being such a whiny bitch who's a shitty worthless burden to her brother. Note: she couldn't work even if she were healthy XOR an adult, the only thing she can do to be less of a burden is commit suicide.
- Jap Captain is a professional murderer (in his chapter, he was a normal man, albeit prone to ragepigging out) and Bride is a goody goody nun who nevertheless wants to ride the professional murderer's mast (in her chapter, she was a dutiful daughter and bride who went on a dangerous journey to try to rescue her husband-to-be).
Michel (IIRC) tells her to put out already.
- Then Michel approaches Maria the ambitious mafiosa about resolving the situation with Jacopo, but it turns out that Maria in reality is a gross professional whore who sucks dick for cock and wants to catch them all and doesn't even know Jacopo. Zero lez bait, zero anything to possibly read as strength. It turns out that Jacopo (an adult) was an item with Morgana herself (severely underage).
Michel tries to rescue Morgana but for some contrived reason fails. She dies.
Michel is back at the McMansion. Being the only decent man in the universe due to not having a dick, he merges the Albino Girl into Morgana, finds the three toxic bepenised shitlords, and makes them record apologetic tiktoks. Morgana lifts the curse, the McMansion starts falling apart, they all escape in time and reincarnate into modern Parisians. The last frame of the game is Michel and Giselle embracing. They both really hope he has a dick now.
NEW
I'm playing 文字化化 | Homicipher, which is a girly romance game about linguistics. Originally Japanese and written by a woman, with an English and two Chinese translations.
The protagonist, a ditzy girl, falls into the underworld and meets various monsters. Some of them are reasonably friendly or at least graciously speak (their own language) while they dismember and eat her. The goal is to learn the language and, I assume, shack up with one of the monster guys. I don't know, I haven't won yet.
This is a typical example of gameplay. The girl lit a lantern, then Mr Crawling, a friendly monster accompanying her for the moment, warns her about danger approaching.
"you", "should", and "not" are words I translated; there's an in-game dictionary which records each word you heard than you can add notes to. These notes are then displayed alongside the underworld words, as seen here.
(Actually, all three were given for free, but I did translate a bunch by conjecture, before I was "supposed to". The game doesn't seem to be able to check that I correctly translated a word, rather, I think progressing the plot further would give me hidden "word knowledge" flags, upon getting which I'd be able to reload from an earlier scene and actually participate in conversations I personally understand but can't yet make the protagonist join. The two question marks stand for the character count in the correct Japanese translation.)
So here she is in mortal danger, what shouldn't she do to survive, what is this last word?
oh easy, it's whatever gets her killed.
In this case, there's a scary visual effect, a slider/timer sliding away, and a movement arrow to turn. Sure enough, if she turns, she's immediately ripped apart by ghosts. Yay, a new word!
It's not just a word game, the character movitation gameplay level is still in place. There's mysterious shit going on, and the monsters aren't going to be doing whatever the girl tells them to just because she knows the words. And to close the feedback loop, a lot of words can be translated by following character interactions, relationships, and the flow of dialogue.
The game is very funny and very clever. For now (I haven't won yet), I'd recommend it to both sexes, the game doesn't encourage self-insertion either mechanically or textually; mechanically, you're supposed to sometimes get her killed for the new words, textually, the girl is intentionally written as stupid at first (but she's going to woman up).
