visualnovels

I kinda forgot to post it yesterday (got a lot on my plate this week) but it's here! Yay?

Some quick updates for the moment:

• The upcoming fan patch thread is (very slowly) growing, I should be able to finish a "good enough" initial draft to get us started this month.
• I played a kinetic novel called Girl of the Bakehouse ~ Withered. It's the first project by MICA Team, developers responsible for Girls' Frontline series and the first attempt at the universe shared by all their games. I'll try to write a short separate post about the title since I liked it quite a bit.
• I decided to play and then drop Amagami. I like the writing, art, characters - pretty much everything except for a single feature: event map. Specifically, game has a huge event map were you pretty much choose which event with which character you'd like to play. Sounds neat, right? My problem has to do with another part of that which is game showing off every single piece of content you got locked out of.
  It's not a huge deal but every time this happens I got a huge case of fear of missing out which in turn made me less and less inclined to continue. I can't tell you why exactly this single element stresses me out so much but it was enough to call it quits, even before I managed to finish a single route.

That's all I have for now. Have fun everyone!

Feel free to let me know if this is inappropriate, since I literally just copy/pasted it off the comment I put on the weekly what are you playing post in !otomegames@ani.social.

Went and played the Saintess of the Golden Bow demo. Haven't explored different options yet, just one playthrough.

• MC is definitely her own person, and I like how she has realistic reactions to her situation but also still refuses to just give in—she pushes herself to make sure she's taking action to get out of the situation. Has her own hangups about love which bodes very well for my drama appetite.
• Game is very pretty. Also torments me with the fact that out of all the dateable characters, I only like Noah's sprite; for literally every other character I like their sprite including MC's abusive dad. Just off looks he looks better than the LIs 😳 I like the personalities of all the guys though.
• +1 for quality of life features. I got times in the game where it's clear I can make a choice to ask for exposition, but I'm pretty sure I could also not without being penalized. I also got the game explicitly telling me about the fact that the next choice I made would lock me on one guy's route. Yay for having this information upfront for replays!
• I feel right at the beginning I was fed lots of different situations with romantic drama lurking and I am living for it.
  Noah route spoiler

  Died an extremely ho-hum death. It both felt logical, not unexpected or out of nowhere, and also like something I could not really bring myself to care about even though I liked the characters. Didn't jerk any tears from me and it's easy for me to cry at sad stuff in fiction. However we got reincarnated right after and then a "you hit the demo end!" message explaining that death isn't the end. So I am going to guess this wasn't supposed to be a hard-hitting emotional moment, and it's more a part of cool exposition/a twist. I trust the writers so far.

I'm following elevator's example and copying my comment from the otome community o/

I've finally continued my current run of Jack Jeanne (an otome game by the Tokyo Ghoul author about an all-boys theatre school)! My wired headphones broke some time ago so I put off playing until I got new ones lol

I'm still on Soshiro's route, and it's a really...different experience? so far. I'll get into it a little more detail in the spoiler, but he's really struggling with not keeping up with his peers.

I'm also challenging myself to clear all rhythm games on extreme this time around, it's not as hard as I expected \o/

Apart from that, I started watching Demily Pyro's VODs of her of The Devil playthrough after already playing through all the available episodes myself. There's quite a lot of foreshadowing for several plot points that I completely missed the first time around. Especially