What Visual Novel Are You Reading?

GlassMoon

I don't know if anyone else plays them regularly, but somehow this feels like it should have its own thread instead of which game are you playing.

I just finished Tsukihime and it was pretty good overall, though it didn't quite blow me away. I'd say that I liked the routes in this order: Arcueid > Hisui > Kohaku > Ciel > Akiha. The very beginning and very end of it was most interesting and it was a little unbalanced in that way, but only in a very very minor way. Overall I really liked it. The art looks more than a little amateurish, but the main sprites are actually really cute. It's a rare VN where the CGs look worse than the normal game art. What's nice about the art in Tsukihime is that all the character sprites are very expressive; they encapsulate the moods of the characters with so much spirit. My favorite is Hisui's AGNRYFAEC.

However, now, I'm playing Hanahira!, which might just be generic yuri (which I have no problem with), but I'm playing it... in Japanese! Many people have said that it's a good VN to read as your first one untranslated, because all the characters are lolis and thus the kanji level is absurdly slow. I'm reading the light novel of Welcome to the NHK! untranslated along with this and they're two nice steps towards making the full leap away from translations.

GlassMoon

水面の朧月 wrote:
[font=Verdana]I haven't read that many visual novels at all and definitely not tsukihime or hanahira (nanahira heh) so I can't really comment on the visual novels that you mentioned. Tsukihime is ony my computer but I think I won't read it until a year or two from now. I finished 18 visual novels so far and dropped deardrop because it's the worst thing I've ever read.[/font]
[font=Verdana]I heard that the translation quality of subarashiki hibi is pretty good so I picked it up and now I'm reading that and comyu.[/font]

[font=Verdana]I'm studying Japanese as well and I want to wait until I get better at it to start reading another visual novel. I don't want to spend like 30 minutes trying to decode a single page of A4. I need to study more. For now I'm content with just trying to understand what they're saying by listening and if I can't figure it out then look at the text at the bottom of the screen. My native language use chinese characters so sometimes having a lot of kanji is a good thing because if I see something like 標準正規分布 I know that it means standard normal distribution even without knowing how to say it.[/font]

[font=Verdana]Rewrite is impossible without a walkthrough lol. I kept getting bad endings until I look up for a guide on the internet. Kinda makes me want to change myself into someone that can make choices that would get me into at least a route. The common route was really funny. I mean, just watch this.[/font]
[font=Verdana]
[video=youtube][/video][/font]
[font=Verdana]Makes you really want to start playing Rewrite, right?[/font]

You're lucky about the kanji ability. If you combined my grammar knowledge with your kanji skills, we'd be unstoppable, but alas it still takes me too long to look up new words... I guess your native language is... Chinese? (don't really know what othera language would have them unless you're Vietnamese and have a very high literacy). Even then though, I do get that feeling of understanding a compound word even without knowing how to say it sometimes. Or the reverse, being able to know what a single-kanji verb means because I know the kanji from a compound.

Subarashiki Hibi is probably my favorite visual novel ever so I highly recommend it (new translation is very well done, and you get the added bonus of uncensored p()()n). But it starts slow and takes a bit to grow on you, outside of the beautiful artwork and music which I'm sure will capture you immediately. I have to warn you though that it's made a lot of VNs less impressive to me because it's just that good! Of course I love reading pretty much any VN just for the experience.

Rewrite is up there on my list to try to read. Any moege like it shouldn't be as hard as plotge to comprehend in Japanese.

GlassMoon

水面の朧月 wrote:
[font=Verdana]It[/font][font=Verdana]'s Vietnamese. Korean too use Chinese words. These two languages just write them using a different writing system. I just have to spend time learning what each character means which doesn't take more than [/font][font=Verdana]200 hours to learn 2000 kanji. I already learned 1000 kanji before I even finished N5 and stopped ever since because it was enough to get me through N3.[/font]
[font=Verdana]
Learning onyomi is really easy because Japanese doesn't have that many vowel sound (I think that's the term) and it sounds kinda similar to how we say it.[/font]
[font=Verdana]I'm going to write a bunch of Vietnamese word with Japanese and English next to them as an example because I think it's easier to show than to explain[/font]
[font=Verdana]Nguyên nhân 原因 cause[/font]
[font=Verdana]Nguyên tắc 原則 general rule[/font]
[font=Verdana]Nguyên tác 原作 original work[/font]
[font=Verdana]Nguyên tử 原子 atom[/font]
[font=Verdana]If two words sound the same in Vietnamese they also sound[/font][font=Verdana] the same in Japanese[/font][font=Verdana] (for most cases, especially if that kanji only has one onyomi) - the reverse is not true, however.[/font]

[font=Verdana]Nguyên [/font][font=Verdana]原
Nguyên tố 元素 chemical element[/font]
[font=Verdana]Nguyên khí 元気 healthy[/font]
[font=Verdana]Korean people as well, have this advantage if they decide to learn Japanese.[/font][font=Verdana]

I was actually pleasantly surprised when I looked subarashiki hibi up on nyaa and saw the name of the patch lol. I don't get into visual novels for porn but I would be lying if I say I wasn't interested after seeing that. I didn't find the artwork very beautiful, well it's not like I care much about how beautiful it is, but every character's mouth is really cute. The sound track is really nice. I'm listening to it as I'm writing this actually, vey pleasant. Thanks, my friend told me "I think the story was on crack" and spent time showing me an excerpt(?[/font][font=Verdana]) from the game and to say I was interested would be underselling it a bit.

P.S I really like Zakuro's voice.
[/font]

I see. I knew classical Korean used Chinese characters but I always thought Vietnamese people studied them more actively than Koreans? Not sure. I live in Japan as a student and there are a LOT of Vietnamese here doing the same as me. I see how that can be handy, you have jukugo in your language basically. It makes a lot of individual words easy to apprehend probably. Therefore my biggest weakpoint (jukugo) probably would be easier for you.

I like Zakuro's voice too! She's definitely my type of girl, though Yuki was a great character too. It would be awesome if you played it. It's very long and some parts are more slow-going than others, but I can absolutely promise that it all comes together in the end. A lot of it is also hard to understand but becomes easier as you go through it. I don't want to hype it too much so I won't say much more about the specifics but if you have any interest I can't recommend it highly enough.

Backlash

"Should I, or shouldn't I". That's the question.

GlassMoon

Steam often censors their visual novels (even meme ones), always do your research in advance!

I made this thread because I hoped to keep updating it as I went but reading VNs in raw Japanese is so hard that I haven't finished the one I started playing after Hanahira! in my first post there... this VN, Swan Song, which has soooo much narration, like more than half of it is big paragraphs instead of dialogues. Great art and style as well as a deeply moving story though... I'm curious to see how it ends!

Backlash

Four decades ago, my mother would while away the hours reading saucy romance novels she bought at the five-and-dime. Meanwhile today, her daughter spent an entire long weekend with indie otome games. We often resemble our forebears in ways we'd least expect.

GlassMoon wrote:
Steam often censors their visual novels (even meme ones), always do your research in advance!

I made this thread because I hoped to keep updating it as I went but reading VNs in raw Japanese is so hard that I haven't finished the one I started playing after Hanahira! in my first post there... this VN, Swan Song, which has soooo much narration, like more than half of it is big paragraphs instead of dialogues. Great art and style as well as a deeply moving story though... I'm curious to see how it ends!

I'll keep that in mind, hun. ^^ One of my primary drives for learning Japanese is to enjoy media that hasn't been translated, though I'd imagine many books would be difficult till one's mastered the language. It's kind of like how I wouldn't expect my foreign co-workers to immediately grasp, say, Faulkner or Dickens.

GlassMoon

FINISHED SWAN SONG

jeez that took waaay too long to read (in 日本語)

Currently reading Period. It's just a moege so the vocabulary better be easier. Ooyari Ashito is the best artist (even if he can't make a non-flat character to save his life... ZUN disease, but who can complain when the lolis are this delicious!!!)

Backlash

GlassMoon wrote:
FINISHED SWAN SONG

jeez that took waaay too long to read (in 日本語)

Currently reading Period. It's just a moege so the vocabulary better be easier. Ooyari Ashito is the best artist (even if he can't make a non-flat character to save his life... ZUN disease, but who can complain when the lolis are this delicious!!!)

Hehehehe. You're funny, Glass-kun. <3

So tell us hun, how was Swan Song? Was the True Ending worth it? ^^

GlassMoon

Swan Song was great! Amazing art, setting, etc. The True Ending felt a little short but for the most part it was fitting.

Swan Song was interesting in that it doesn't really use the "sprites on a background" style of VN art in favor of this:

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I definitely recommend it if you want something a bit heavy and dramatic but ultimately very human. I can guarantee it won't take nearly as long if you don't read it in Japanese like I did.

mnl

Lawly wrote:
[size=small]My experience reading Umineko so far:[/size]
-snip-

Ohh, I remember watching the anime. Never finished it, but the setting was intriguing, I still think about it sometimes. Maybe I should give it another chance~