What VN are you playing? What do you think about it?

We don't wait translation for epic games lol.

First impressions on Material Brave Ignition. First, it seems that they've listened to the community and made some major fixes to the flaws of the game. There are also a few changes that felt unnecessary, but I won't set anything in stone until I've finished the whole game.

So first, the battle system has underwent a major overhaul. I honestly think the old one was better, but whatever, it didn't take me too long to get used to this one. So basically your weapon allows you to perform Ground and Air combos, and the number of combos you can make is decided by it (something like 3/1 would mean 3 land combos and 1 air combo possible). As you kill monsters you occasionally get Moves that you could put into these combos, and there are a tonne of them to choose and combine as early as Chapter 1.

Despite the initial confusion (and dissatisfaction honestly, the combo limitation sucks for me >_>) the gameplay remains interesting, and now instead of just whacking the enemy to death - er actually you do whack most enemy to death, BUT - you are forced to identify the weaknesses of each monster and respond accordingly. Most of the time you can just Guard Break them with a Strong attack, but that doesn't work on bosses, and you really need to get those counters going to deal some real damage.

Which comes to the biggest problem I find in MBI's gameplay. You MUST HAVE a partner or you're screwed for life. In the previous game you heal a lot more when you finish off a monster, but now the amount healed is so little that unless you equip Healing items, it's actually inadvisable to use the same character to fight over and over again as you fight through various levels in the same dungeon. Which is the point since they want you to rotate your characters, but fuuuuuck I lazy lol. And I beast through most levels without trouble anyway.

The overhauled system is unfortunately, confusing. Very confusing. Even with the tutorial I still struggle to understand exactly what the cluster fuck does Libido Store do. I just don't get what those little circles you can upgrade in weapons, skills and equips do exactly except that it's something like a requirement. I don't get half of what the new battle interface indicates as I spam X at the enemy thinking how fun it was in the past to be able to chain combos with different key combinations. Forced to. Now I just charge, -> B, B B B B B the fuck out of the enemy. Libido seems to be able to do a lot of things, except I'm not sure whether I want to do them because mostly, it's not worth it to waste these points on early game equips. Optional quests are as random and annoying as ever. Take 'Find people' 'Kill that strong NP' quests for example, I never, ever know where I'm supposed to go as there's absolutely no indicator to help on that. It's super annoying when you consider certain dungeons have a couple of different levels and the map huge as ever.

Plot wise, they brought back some - no wait, I mean ALL the old bosses to your face because 'someone' revived them from death. Wow, I am impressed in a distorted way that GIGA would do something like that. Still, they story did connect with the first game pretty well and actually has proper sex scenes, thank god, so I guess all is still fine and dandy.

Music is above average.

There are new sprites for the characters, so that's cool.

And mm, that's about it.

I have to since I don't understand Japanese. ;_;

Ah well, I guess that I'll replay Heaven's Feel or the original Kara no Shoujo to kill time. Or maybe Muv-Luv Alternative. Dunno, but definitely something good. :V

Rather than that Start learning up some Japanese, it's better for the long term.

Kara no Shoujo 2 is out. If you haven't known it yet then get it from your sources, NOW.

EDIT: Hey, anyone of you get your ultimates when playing Material Brave Ignition? I've finished an entire route and I still don't have my Material Act! Like wtf!

after hearing about the series forever. I finally decided to give the Fate series a try. I originally avoided it since many of its fans seemed way too obsessed, and that from what I had seen it didn't appear very good. I did watch the Fate/Zero anime first and after liking it I was motivated to play the VN Fate/Stay Night. As of a few hours ago I have finished the first route that I believe is called Fate. As of right not I can rate the game between a 7 and a 8 out of 10. It was enjoyable but not overly amazing. However I hear from a friend of mine who is a avid Fate fan that the other two routes are much better so I am looking forward to them

First ten minutes of Innocent Grey's most anticipated Visual Novel, Kara no Shoujo 2.

It could've been better.

So first, I'm not saying that the VN's bad. As expected, the writing immediately draws me in with the very first sentences, and I actually had a hard time trying to pull away since I'm a crazy text lover. The art is amazing - when you're staring at blood dripping onto an embryo-shaped clay, EVERYTHING is amazing - and the music was far from disappointing. The few BGMs that I've listened to beats about one third of Material Brave Ignition's already.

So they've gathered the best of all three major resources of a VN: Text, Art and Music. So why am I not really as impressed as I thought I would be? That would be entirely due to some major faults in presentation which I hope to get used to ASAP. Below are the few points that I find absolutely jarring to what should've been an epic experience:

1) Slow display of sprites (Unnecessarily long Dissolve). They make dialogues feel disjointed and awkward.
2) Sudden termination of BGM at the end of scene. They didn't even bother to make it fade out, and it just feels so... weird.
3) Super clunky default text display. I feel like I'm playing a year 2000 Visual Novel, no 2013. Like what the heck.
4) Poor Voice and BGM sound combination. On the very first 'real' scene, the BGM was so loud that it almost garbles the character's voices completely. You just can't make this kind of mistakes and expect to create the intended atmosphere, c'mon!

To put it mildly, they could use a PATCH specifically used to reconfigure all of the said settings. This is really unexpected from a company that has produced such quality works...

EDIT: There's also one more thing that I want to make sure: Is this Kara no Shoujo 2 based on one of the other endings of Kara no Shoujo and NOT the true end? Because that's the impression I got from the first few minutes of explanation, and if so, WHY?? NAZEDA??? KUSOOOOOOOOOOO

Then it's a gud thing I already downloaded it thanks 4 the advice.

Pastel Chime 3 super short first impressions.

The revamp of the system is awesome. No more dreaded System40 or, god forsake, System39! A PROPER TITLE FOR THE EXECUTABLE! HURAAAAAAAHHHHH!

The attempt at being more story-centric (only 1 type of gameplay) with minimum tediousness is also refreshing. Of course even I think they took away too much of the Pastel Chime series core gameplay, but SLG is my kind of game so whatever.

Working on toughing out the rest of Rewrite, finished Shizuru, Lucia, Chihaya, and Kotori's route, currently in Akane's.

Also reading Kanon at the same time, and for a VN that came out in '98, it's still pretty good despite how short it is.

Sadly, I think Little Busters has the best artwork still. Clannad is the best for storyline by a hair vs Little busters.

They brought diferrent artist too in LB, so, yeah.

Just finished Rewrite. pretty good, albeit not a maasterpiece.

Final impression:


And of course, in regards to the funniest mini game in rewrite:
Sc-sc-sc-sc-sc-sc-sc-sc-reww youu!!!

Finished Rewrite a few days ago. Overall, it was pretty good although some scenes could use some more impact to us readers. I don't feel like writing much so I'll be a bit brief.

The common route was enjoyable and amused me many times but I guess my sense of humor wasn't capable of dealing with some jokes. I just couldn't understand where the funny parts were lol

The interaction between characters were usually nice. Not much to complain about it.

Regarding the mappie segments, I've done all I could find on my first playthrough but after it I just skipped to the objective on all of them. Those segments can be a bit time-consuming and I just wanted to keep reading. Also, I didn't have that much time to be having fun with it.

Now as for the routes:

Kotori 7/10 - When the drama and the real stuff kicked in, the execution could be better IMO. On this route I really felt it could be more impactful. Still, it has some nice scenes.

Chihaya 8/10 - This route was more to my liking since it was more intense and we weren't left out of the action.

Lucia 8.5/10 - Now this is the route where it's very obvious that it was written by other writer. It was great with lot's of drama.

Chizuru 7/10 - Well, Chizuru is pretty cute and all but I guess her cuteness just wasn't enough. This route is similar to Kotori's in the aspect that it needed a better execution and more impact. I guess that Chizuru's route objective was another that I won't mention for spoiler reasons.

Akane 8.5/10 - Also great. For some reason, I couldn't totally get in the mood after (spoilers) happen but all the build up along with the final resolution for her route left me kind of satisfied.

Moon 9.5/10 - Fucking fantastic. Best thing I read in months. I was completely captivated on the first few minutes and I almost cursed when I had to stop reading for a while because I needed to go out lol This route will clear lot's of things up.

Terra 9/10 - It's obvious right from the beginning of this route that it'll be pretty different from the others. All the build up that lead up to certain events along with the way the story finished was pretty good.

Taking also into account the soundtrack (damn, I really love some of the tracks) and other aspects like the visuals and voices, currently my final rating to Rewrite will be about an 9/10.

Just finished Swan Song. That VN did not turn out the way I thought it would. It was very depressing and filled with twists. That's what I loved though because it had me at the edge of my seat. Just shows what people are capable of doing in a hardcore situation. Anyway, my next VN will be Tomoyo After since its been sitting in my folder for months. Looking forward to that one.

It's a little late now so let's do this quick. This is an extensive review on Alicesoft's latest product 'Pastel Chime 3 Bind Seeker'.

So first, the plot. Overall the storyline is nothing special - basically the heroes building themselves up, conquering one obstacle after another, take down the final boss and save the world. It's a little different than usual at the end, but yeah.

Still, this reads very impressive considering that it's - ahem! - Alicesoft after all, even though the Pastel Chime series has one of the best storylines out of all Alicesoft products. I could still recall how amazed I was at the predecessor game 'Pastel Chime Continue' who managed to tell a compelling story with short, simple but absolutely effective setup and narrative. But I'm derailing myself here.

Basically, PS3 did not disappoint. With the exception of most sub characters - though Muscle Man did get his own background told in a most satisfying way in one of Mari's relationship events - every one of your playable characters can be explored extensively through event selection, and honestly if the game wasn't kinda short I could even see glimpses of Majikoi's epicness radiating from all their stories. Call me an Otaku (Ain' you all), but man was the Otaku priest goddamn motherfucking hilarious and super cool at many times. And it's not just him; for example Riki's wasn't relegated to simply playing the fool in the team as we see him in a more personal light near the end of the story. The VN actually (somehow; I had thought it very hard) managed to make me see Riki the clown as a serious, dedicated rocker who have feelings and well, not a stupid clown, and that's great. That's very great.

Besides when a game make a loli their main (and most likely true) heroine you just KNOW they're awesome. :P

About the system. Apparently Alicesoft did a complete revamp to it and we're finally free from the demon that is System40, and FINALLY EXECUTABLES AREN'T JUST NAMED GODDAMN SYSTEM40.EXE. YAY. Anyway the interface are obviously a heck lot more smoother and easier to use than before (though the more complicated system options still leaves even me with tonnes of headache), with innovative sprite displays and animations to boot too. Really not much to say except that after this I'll never be able to go back to those terrible days of Rance Quest without screaming bloody murder and tearing out my own scalp. I hate that game even when we exclude the system though so whatever.

Gameplay-wise, they've replaced the core setups for the Pastel Chime series and replaced it with a chessboard style SLG game. It was a necessary change because if the old style had remained it would've constrained the storytelling too much, but still I believed they could've kept the stat training from Pastel Chime Continue, but never mind. It wasn't really challenging as most of the time, if you get your characters up to the recommended level to fight a quest you'll most likely beast through everything with Lilium and Eiji easily slaughtering the horde like they're made out of paper. If you go for Lilium's route you'll easily see the numbers jump to 2k or even 3 (depends on your equip, level, bind etc) since you get an epic 10% Magic Damage + passive from relationship events. That's a LOT considering Alicesoft's history of being an ass to every single gamer ever, especially the Rance series (Though Rance 6 remains fun even though it's the single most tedious dungeon crawler game I've ever played).

Also, I was never really forced to utilize Binds effectively until the final boss (which, mild spoilers, was a little bit of a surprise and anti-climatic) one-shotted some of my characters and deal 1k damage every time with his Double Action. Perhaps things would be better with Hard Mode, but I'm never going to play that since there's no change to the storyline and hence no replay value for me, so that's a food for thought.

PS3 is also one of those games where the main storyline does not branch out with the heroines. Usually it would make the game a complete disaster (Ex: Material Brave), but the 8 relationship events of each playable character (and an extra 5 for chosen heroines) are so well done and detailed and diverse that there is NO NEED to branch it. Certainly it reduces the game's replayability, but the storyline can't quite accommodate that - to forcibly branch it would only serve to make bad experiences - and it still remains as a quality read that I did not regret one bit.

In short, an 8.5 for this game, with points taken because it could be longer, removed too much of its core gameplay, can get repetitive with little battle map diversification, does not force clever Bind utilization and finally poor exploration of sub (gag) characters. Otherwise, it is definitely a good game that continues the unbroken quality of the Pastel Chime series.

Another wall of text from Zolnir lol

--Replaying Big Bang Age with Hard difficulty for extra characters. Didn't expect they break the 4th wall so many times lol.

Gonna try この大空に、翼をひろげて 通常版 from Pulltop, looks cool recalling they got 3rd on Getchu best 2012 galge. But it reminds me of Abhar VN since its about Aeroplane and stuff like that.

I just finished G-Senjou no Maou and came away impressed, really had to scrutinize the novel to find flaws, which of course are all my opinion.

Revelations, Nitpicks, and more.


I feel like playing something more light-hearted and old fashioned, anyone care to tell me about the game Edelweiss?

Well it's more of an eroge but i just finished playing boob wars. It was total garbage.

Well with a name like that expectations couldn't have been that high in the first place.

Even for a nukige Boob Wars is pretty weak. I don't even remember the last time I read a nukige so bad (wait, now I remember -_- ) but whatever.
I only found one scene amusing. It was when


I give it a 3/10.

Just finished Moon, from Rewrite; as usual Key and its hidden/unlocked routes always invoke a myriad of emotions. At the same time they get to tie up some loose ends, although there's just a tiny bit unclear which will probably get cleared up in Terra, Moon was incredibly good.

Although this doesn't make it in my top 5, or maybe even top 10, Rewrite is still a fantastic VN from Key that's worth a read. If only I didn't find the protag in this to be such a pest.

Also, I feel like Yoshino's character was far more developed in the Moon and Akane's route the most. He felt so bland in all the others, even Kotori's.

Edelweiss Fantasia's short hair girl's route has a most wonderful CG in her route and is definitely worth a read just for it btw; the romantic level is over 9000.