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Dec. 5th, 2022 16:47![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunartulipI'm unaccustomed to the Dreamwidth journal meme format, so perhaps I'm doing this wrong; but here's a post answering the various questions about visual novels posted by fishguts here.
In order of appearance, all the visual novels you played this year are:
Higurashi: When They Cry - Ch.2 Watanagashi, Higurashi: When They Cry - Ch.3 Tatarigoroshi, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-, World End Syndrome, Saya no Uta, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, SaDistic BlooD, Higurashi: When They Cry - Ch.4 Himatsubushi, GIRLFRIEND SIMULATOR, Soundless, Who Is The Red Queen?, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Highway Blossoms: Next Exit, Please Be Happy, Coquette Dragoon, Kagetsu Tohya
Which visual novels did you beat?
Higurashi Chapters 2-4, Saya no Uta, Danganronpa 1-2, GIRLFRIEND SIMULATOR, Soundless, and Highway Blossoms: Next Exit.
Which visual novels are you still playing?
Please Be Happy and Kagetsu Tohya, albeit with far more momentum in the latter than the former currently.
Did you drop any visual novels this year?
Two. World End Syndrome and Who Is The Red Queen?. World End Syndrome because, while it had occasional highlight-moments where it was Impactfully Atmospheric, it... largely failed to provide interesting development for its characters, as of ten hours or so in, and I finally just gave up on waiting? And then Who Is The Red Queen? much more quickly, after maybe half an hour to an hour, for reasons of "there's not a real hook here, just a bunch of stuff happening"; it didn't give me enough reason to care about what was happening, during the introductory segments, for me to continue past the introductory segments.
Have you put any visual novels aside or on hold for now?
I've got Higurashi on temporary pause pending my having a nice large block of free time; I went through the question arcs in very fragmented fashion, with months between each chapter, and it felt like it was reducing the impact somewhat, so I'm waiting to start the answer arcs until I've got time to marathon through them at a relatively-intense pace. Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is currently on pause for reasons of technical necessity, because I can't yet read Japanese at the level it'd take to read it untranslated and the second route's English fan-translation isn't yet finished. And I've got SaDistic BlooD on pause for reasons of "the last couple H-scenes I ran into in it were sufficiently not-my-kink to make me flinch away and put it down for a while, and now I'm waiting to pick it back up until I'm in a mental state with higher tolerance for scenes of that sort".
Did you replay any visual novels this year?
I made a very brief aborted attempt at a Fate/stay night replay, but it didn't go anywhere, thanks to various distractions the details of which I no longer remember; instead I'm now vicariously re-experiencing it via a Youtube Let's Play, which is going far more smoothly.
Looking back, did you play as many visual novels as you thought you would this year?
I don't remember how many I thought I'd play, but I'd guess I ended up either on-expectation or moderately over-expectation? Because VNs have been one of my central media-I've-been-focused-on, this year, and I don't remember whether or not that was expected.
Were there any visual novels you planned to play this year, but didn't get around to?
The rest of Higurashi, due to the aforementioned decision to pause it until I've got a relatively large free-time-block. Chaos;Head, due to the messiness of its official release and the delays on the Committe of Zero patch's release (although I do expect to at least start it this year, once the patch is out, assuming it doesn't get delayed again). Mahoutsukai no Yoru, due to the gap between its digital and physical release dates (I ordered the physical box, so I won't be getting it until the end of January even though it's coming out digitally this week). And the Zero Escape series, because thinking things through as I play mystery VNs turns out to be kind of exhausting, I keep on needing to take breaks in between them, and as such I couldn't bring myself to start 999 as soon as planned upon finishing Danganronpa 2.
What type of VN did you play the most? (e.g. kinetic, multiple endings, hybrid)
Looking at that list up there... if I count by hours, it'd be the Danganronpa-ish mostly-linear-with-small-explorable-branches style; if I count by number of different VNs, counting each Higurashi chapter separately, it'd be kinetic; and if I count by number of different VNs, counting Higurashi as one VN, it'd be the branching-with-multiple-endings style.
Favorite protagonist of the year?
Limiting myself to major-viewpoint-having protagonists (in order to avoid collisions with the answer after this one)... probably Tess from Highway Blossoms: Next Exit, for reasons of generally-enjoyable depth and internal conflicts. (All the viewpoint-having protagonists in that VN had those, really; but Tess's were the ones that I found most personally impactful to read about.)
Favorite antagonist or villain of the year?
...oh, that's a hard one. Two candidates sit in competition with one another here: Saya from Saya no Uta, on the strength of being one of the rare fictional villains to genuinely and selflessly wield the Power of Love in a manner usually only seen among heroes, and Komaeda Nagito from Danganronpa 2, on the strength of his combination of Being Kind Of A Mess, beautifully-twisty plotting, and sufficient strength-of-will to actually go through with said plots.
Favorite route?
I haven't really... gone through multiple routes? of any route-based VNs this year. (Dropped World End Syndrome before finishing any of the routes, could only read one route of the Tsukihime remake, wouldn't really classify Saya no Uta or Kagetsu Tohya's branches as 'routes' per se, and insofar as SaDistic BlooD or Please Be Happy has a route-based structure I haven't yet gotten far enough in either to recognize that state of affairs.) I suppose probably Arcueid's route of the Tsukihime remake wins by default.
Favorite CG?
Hmm. I don't really remember CGs in a well-indexed-for-consultation-in-retrospect sort of way, so this is a very hard one. But plausibly the CG of Danganronpa 2's fifth chapter's murder victim, just on the strength of how shocking / escalatory it feels?
Longest visual novel you played this year?
Danganronpa 2, at 48 hours logged currently. It might have been beaten by Higurashi, assuming counting Higurashi as one VN rather than three, had I not spent so much time staring at the evidence and theorybuilding before each trial; but, since I did in fact spend a bunch of time on that, it's pretty solidly in the lead.
(Although, if we count Higurashi as one VN rather than three and count parts of Higurashi not played this year, then Higurashi pretty easily takes the lead.)
Shortest visual novel you played this year?
In terms of shortest time-to-complete, GIRLFRIEND SIMULATOR, at about 1 hour total. In terms of shortest personal playtime, Who Is The Red Queen?, since I dropped it relatively quickly.
The visual novel that made you cry?
Saya no Uta, in the very sad ending where a solid 5/10 of the cast members are still alive by the time everything is over. I very rarely cry at fiction! I wasn't expecting to cry at Saya no Uta, either! And yet that ending sure did manage it, nonetheless.
(I'd like to cry at fiction more than I currently do. It's a work-in-progress. But, as things stand, that ending was one of the only two times I remember crying at a work of fiction since 2019, alongside the Made In Abyss Season 1 finale.)
The visual novel that made you laugh the most?
I'm guessing Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-, although it's been long enough that I don't remember specific moments of laughter per se. But Nasu can do very good comic-relief moments when he tries, and he's refined his craft pretty substantially in the 20 years between Kagetsu Tohya and the Tsukihime remake, so it's my best guess. (Otherwise, my second guess is Kagetsu Tohya, which has definitely had its share of laughter-inducing moments too.)
A visual novel that surprised you?
Danganronpa 2, with the ultimate solution of its fifth trial! That trial was the most confidently wrong I've been about a thing in a VN for a while. It was lots of fun, having my mistake—and the implications of the true answer—slowly dawn on me as the trial went on.
A visual novel that exceeded your expectations?
Saya no Uta. I went in with expectations ranging from "dark to the point where I have no reason to care what happens" on the pessimistic end to "solid well-executed horror where everything is terrible" on the optimistic end; I was really not expecting for Saya to be as sympathetic and likable as she ended up being, and as such I ended up very invested in wanting things to go well for her and accordingly found the overall story much more emotionally impactful than I'd been expecting. (As well as more thematically interesting than I was expecting.)
A visual novel that failed to meet your expectations?
World End Syndrome would probably be the big one here. I went into it, based on the generally-positive reviews it had received, expecting it to be an engaging route-based horror VN; instead, in between its occasional moments of actually-compelling atmosphere, it really failed to have much going on? There was only one character (Miu) who came across as anything other than boringly flat, as of ten hours in; most of its runtime was devoted, not to the compelling atmosphere-building that it opened with, but to Generic Fanservice-Laden High School Life, in a way which kind of felt like it was trying to do something similar to Higurashi's slice-of-life segments while in practice pretty much completely failing; overall, it very much failed to live up to the expectations that its relatively-complimentary reviews had left me with.
(Although it did have one very cool thing going for it, namely animated backgrounds. Those were pretty impactfully pretty, even if not to the degree necessary to save the VN as a whole.)
Favorite console to play visual novels on?
Windows. I'm very much a run-everything-on-my-desktop-when-practical person, and, while I did finally cave and get a dedicated console this year (a Switch, purchased very soon after the Mahoutsukai no Yoru English translation announcement), it remains very much a backup option for me rather than a primary console.
Favorite visual novel of the year?
It's either Saya no Uta or the subsets of Higurashi I went through. It's hard to decide between those; both were pretty thoroughly excellent. Perhaps I'd be able to decide between them more definitively if they were fresher in my memory, but at things stand I think I'm going to just shrug and go "one of those, not sure which" at them.
Overall thoughts:
I've done a whole bunch of VN-consumption over the past year! And particularly the past half-year or so; the vast majority of the VN-consumption I've done at all this year has been in the second half of it. (Starting with the Tsukihime remake, whose first route's English translation patch came out in July.) Visual novels are very much among my favorite media, at this point; I expect to go through even more of them next year, assuming no other even-higher-priority things come up to distract me.
fishguts here.In order of appearance, all the visual novels you played this year are:
Higurashi: When They Cry - Ch.2 Watanagashi, Higurashi: When They Cry - Ch.3 Tatarigoroshi, Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-, World End Syndrome, Saya no Uta, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, SaDistic BlooD, Higurashi: When They Cry - Ch.4 Himatsubushi, GIRLFRIEND SIMULATOR, Soundless, Who Is The Red Queen?, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Highway Blossoms: Next Exit, Please Be Happy, Coquette Dragoon, Kagetsu Tohya
Which visual novels did you beat?
Higurashi Chapters 2-4, Saya no Uta, Danganronpa 1-2, GIRLFRIEND SIMULATOR, Soundless, and Highway Blossoms: Next Exit.
Which visual novels are you still playing?
Please Be Happy and Kagetsu Tohya, albeit with far more momentum in the latter than the former currently.
Did you drop any visual novels this year?
Two. World End Syndrome and Who Is The Red Queen?. World End Syndrome because, while it had occasional highlight-moments where it was Impactfully Atmospheric, it... largely failed to provide interesting development for its characters, as of ten hours or so in, and I finally just gave up on waiting? And then Who Is The Red Queen? much more quickly, after maybe half an hour to an hour, for reasons of "there's not a real hook here, just a bunch of stuff happening"; it didn't give me enough reason to care about what was happening, during the introductory segments, for me to continue past the introductory segments.
Have you put any visual novels aside or on hold for now?
I've got Higurashi on temporary pause pending my having a nice large block of free time; I went through the question arcs in very fragmented fashion, with months between each chapter, and it felt like it was reducing the impact somewhat, so I'm waiting to start the answer arcs until I've got time to marathon through them at a relatively-intense pace. Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon- is currently on pause for reasons of technical necessity, because I can't yet read Japanese at the level it'd take to read it untranslated and the second route's English fan-translation isn't yet finished. And I've got SaDistic BlooD on pause for reasons of "the last couple H-scenes I ran into in it were sufficiently not-my-kink to make me flinch away and put it down for a while, and now I'm waiting to pick it back up until I'm in a mental state with higher tolerance for scenes of that sort".
Did you replay any visual novels this year?
I made a very brief aborted attempt at a Fate/stay night replay, but it didn't go anywhere, thanks to various distractions the details of which I no longer remember; instead I'm now vicariously re-experiencing it via a Youtube Let's Play, which is going far more smoothly.
Looking back, did you play as many visual novels as you thought you would this year?
I don't remember how many I thought I'd play, but I'd guess I ended up either on-expectation or moderately over-expectation? Because VNs have been one of my central media-I've-been-focused-on, this year, and I don't remember whether or not that was expected.
Were there any visual novels you planned to play this year, but didn't get around to?
The rest of Higurashi, due to the aforementioned decision to pause it until I've got a relatively large free-time-block. Chaos;Head, due to the messiness of its official release and the delays on the Committe of Zero patch's release (although I do expect to at least start it this year, once the patch is out, assuming it doesn't get delayed again). Mahoutsukai no Yoru, due to the gap between its digital and physical release dates (I ordered the physical box, so I won't be getting it until the end of January even though it's coming out digitally this week). And the Zero Escape series, because thinking things through as I play mystery VNs turns out to be kind of exhausting, I keep on needing to take breaks in between them, and as such I couldn't bring myself to start 999 as soon as planned upon finishing Danganronpa 2.
What type of VN did you play the most? (e.g. kinetic, multiple endings, hybrid)
Looking at that list up there... if I count by hours, it'd be the Danganronpa-ish mostly-linear-with-small-explorable-branches style; if I count by number of different VNs, counting each Higurashi chapter separately, it'd be kinetic; and if I count by number of different VNs, counting Higurashi as one VN, it'd be the branching-with-multiple-endings style.
Favorite protagonist of the year?
Limiting myself to major-viewpoint-having protagonists (in order to avoid collisions with the answer after this one)... probably Tess from Highway Blossoms: Next Exit, for reasons of generally-enjoyable depth and internal conflicts. (All the viewpoint-having protagonists in that VN had those, really; but Tess's were the ones that I found most personally impactful to read about.)
Favorite antagonist or villain of the year?
...oh, that's a hard one. Two candidates sit in competition with one another here: Saya from Saya no Uta, on the strength of being one of the rare fictional villains to genuinely and selflessly wield the Power of Love in a manner usually only seen among heroes, and Komaeda Nagito from Danganronpa 2, on the strength of his combination of Being Kind Of A Mess, beautifully-twisty plotting, and sufficient strength-of-will to actually go through with said plots.
Favorite route?
I haven't really... gone through multiple routes? of any route-based VNs this year. (Dropped World End Syndrome before finishing any of the routes, could only read one route of the Tsukihime remake, wouldn't really classify Saya no Uta or Kagetsu Tohya's branches as 'routes' per se, and insofar as SaDistic BlooD or Please Be Happy has a route-based structure I haven't yet gotten far enough in either to recognize that state of affairs.) I suppose probably Arcueid's route of the Tsukihime remake wins by default.
Favorite CG?
Hmm. I don't really remember CGs in a well-indexed-for-consultation-in-retrospect sort of way, so this is a very hard one. But plausibly the CG of Danganronpa 2's fifth chapter's murder victim, just on the strength of how shocking / escalatory it feels?
Longest visual novel you played this year?
Danganronpa 2, at 48 hours logged currently. It might have been beaten by Higurashi, assuming counting Higurashi as one VN rather than three, had I not spent so much time staring at the evidence and theorybuilding before each trial; but, since I did in fact spend a bunch of time on that, it's pretty solidly in the lead.
(Although, if we count Higurashi as one VN rather than three and count parts of Higurashi not played this year, then Higurashi pretty easily takes the lead.)
Shortest visual novel you played this year?
In terms of shortest time-to-complete, GIRLFRIEND SIMULATOR, at about 1 hour total. In terms of shortest personal playtime, Who Is The Red Queen?, since I dropped it relatively quickly.
The visual novel that made you cry?
Saya no Uta, in the very sad ending where a solid 5/10 of the cast members are still alive by the time everything is over. I very rarely cry at fiction! I wasn't expecting to cry at Saya no Uta, either! And yet that ending sure did manage it, nonetheless.
(I'd like to cry at fiction more than I currently do. It's a work-in-progress. But, as things stand, that ending was one of the only two times I remember crying at a work of fiction since 2019, alongside the Made In Abyss Season 1 finale.)
The visual novel that made you laugh the most?
I'm guessing Tsukihime -A piece of blue glass moon-, although it's been long enough that I don't remember specific moments of laughter per se. But Nasu can do very good comic-relief moments when he tries, and he's refined his craft pretty substantially in the 20 years between Kagetsu Tohya and the Tsukihime remake, so it's my best guess. (Otherwise, my second guess is Kagetsu Tohya, which has definitely had its share of laughter-inducing moments too.)
A visual novel that surprised you?
Danganronpa 2, with the ultimate solution of its fifth trial! That trial was the most confidently wrong I've been about a thing in a VN for a while. It was lots of fun, having my mistake—and the implications of the true answer—slowly dawn on me as the trial went on.
A visual novel that exceeded your expectations?
Saya no Uta. I went in with expectations ranging from "dark to the point where I have no reason to care what happens" on the pessimistic end to "solid well-executed horror where everything is terrible" on the optimistic end; I was really not expecting for Saya to be as sympathetic and likable as she ended up being, and as such I ended up very invested in wanting things to go well for her and accordingly found the overall story much more emotionally impactful than I'd been expecting. (As well as more thematically interesting than I was expecting.)
A visual novel that failed to meet your expectations?
World End Syndrome would probably be the big one here. I went into it, based on the generally-positive reviews it had received, expecting it to be an engaging route-based horror VN; instead, in between its occasional moments of actually-compelling atmosphere, it really failed to have much going on? There was only one character (Miu) who came across as anything other than boringly flat, as of ten hours in; most of its runtime was devoted, not to the compelling atmosphere-building that it opened with, but to Generic Fanservice-Laden High School Life, in a way which kind of felt like it was trying to do something similar to Higurashi's slice-of-life segments while in practice pretty much completely failing; overall, it very much failed to live up to the expectations that its relatively-complimentary reviews had left me with.
(Although it did have one very cool thing going for it, namely animated backgrounds. Those were pretty impactfully pretty, even if not to the degree necessary to save the VN as a whole.)
Favorite console to play visual novels on?
Windows. I'm very much a run-everything-on-my-desktop-when-practical person, and, while I did finally cave and get a dedicated console this year (a Switch, purchased very soon after the Mahoutsukai no Yoru English translation announcement), it remains very much a backup option for me rather than a primary console.
Favorite visual novel of the year?
It's either Saya no Uta or the subsets of Higurashi I went through. It's hard to decide between those; both were pretty thoroughly excellent. Perhaps I'd be able to decide between them more definitively if they were fresher in my memory, but at things stand I think I'm going to just shrug and go "one of those, not sure which" at them.
Overall thoughts:
I've done a whole bunch of VN-consumption over the past year! And particularly the past half-year or so; the vast majority of the VN-consumption I've done at all this year has been in the second half of it. (Starting with the Tsukihime remake, whose first route's English translation patch came out in July.) Visual novels are very much among my favorite media, at this point; I expect to go through even more of them next year, assuming no other even-higher-priority things come up to distract me.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-08 00:36 (UTC)I think it's wise to put the rest of Higurashi aside until a wider expanse of free time comes along. I'd be so curious to hear your thoughts on the later chapters, once you've played them. Of all the chapters of Higurashi you played this year, which did you enjoy the most?
I suspected that the fifth trial of Danganronpa 2 was the thing you said (back in the
Saya no Uta/Song of Saya is a fantastic visual novel, I agree. And I think you might really enjoy, if you haven't played it already, You And Me And Her, also by Nitro+. It runs on Windows! (and Windows alone, if I remember correctly - I don't think it was ever ported to or released on anything else!)
no subject
Date: 2022-12-08 18:04 (UTC)But, with that said: the one I enjoyed most, this year, was probably Watanagashi. (With a moderately-large remaining chance that it was actually Tatarigoroshi, but I think Watanagashi is in the lead.) Pretty much everything about its character-building, the slow buildup of tension over time, Keiichi's sense of guilt around everything, and so forth were all just beautiful. The Higurashi adaptations... do a decent job of capturing the horror of the things that happen, but don't really manage to capture the sadness of them? But it exists, and it's very well-executed.
(Of course, most of this could be said about both of those chapters. Thus my uncertainty regarding which I enjoyed more. :p)
I'm curious what your stubbornly-held idea of what happened was, in the Danganronpa 2 trial! For my part, I went into the trial with the amusing-in-retrospect mix of things-figured-out and things-very-much-not-figured-out of "had successfully identified the traitor, thought the traitor was likely the culprit (due to being one of the only people in a position to know about the bombs, where I figured the murder would have been done differently had the killer not known about the bombs), but almost completely failed to see through the layers of deception at the murder scene". (I'd considered suicide as an alternate hypothesis, but put it aside for reasons of "I'm not seeing how a suicide-arranged-to-look-like-a-murder in this style would advance the victim's goals", and I had no other plausible alternate hypotheses.) But then the person I thought was the culprit didn't take the win, in the trial, given the chance; and at that point I became Confused until relatively near the end of things, when the truth became clear.
And yeah, I've heard very good things about You and Me and Her and it's on my shortlist of VNs to get next time I notice it on sale. Whenever I get around to playing it, I will report my thoughts in the
no subject
Date: 2022-12-10 03:22 (UTC)Watanagashi is beautiful, I could not agree more. I go back and forth on whether it's my favorite instalment, but I always hold it in high regard regardless of how I rank it. As for Tatarigoroshi, it took me, er, a little while to fully appreciate what that instalment was doing (my immediate response to it was sheer distress, so troubled was I by the final act) but after sleeping on it some, I realized this distress was the intended response and I couldn't help but respect the instalment for just how much of this feeling it had wrung from me. TL;DR I agree with you! Both instalments are fantastic.
If I remember correctly (and bear with me, this is going to get a little confusing) my strongly-held belief of what happened in the fifth chapter of Danganronpa 2 was as follows: I firm-as-cemently believed all throughout the fifth chapter that the dead body wasn't a real body, but rather one of those bizarre robots we were shown in one of the warehouses on the fifth island (the showing of which seemed very pointed to me; I couldn't imagine why else the humanlike robots would be there or why the game would spend enough time showing them to us). As such, it was my stubborn belief that the entirety of Chapter Five's murder was faked, so as to give everyone the impression that the victim had died and cause them to go on operating under that assumption. (Even when the trial went on to thoroughly disprove my theory, I felt validated when the following chapter immediately opened to the victim sitting very much alive on board a boat! I was like, look, I was right, they did fake their death! I must have ignored the part where the chapter following Chapter Five was titled Ch. 0 and was therefore most likely a flashback.) In hindsight, my theory held just as much water as a colander would, but at the time I was convinced, darnit!
I do look forward to hearing your thoughts on You And Me And Her, once you get around to playing it!