Everyone is welcome to read at their own pace and post any impressions, theories, or questions at any time within this thread. Those of us starting together may loosely informally stick together, but please feel free to chime in any time!
Guidelines
Please use spoiler tags or collapse where needed and describe, indirectly, what point in the chapter they are a spoiler for!
When asking for help, do your best to provide context. Pasted text, screenshots, descriptions, etc. Unlike book clubs we can’t flip to relevant pages, so we may need a little help identifying exactly what is being discussed.
Feel totally at ease to ask questions or give your thoughts, any time! Clubs live and die by participation, and asking whatever question you have, no matter how silly it may seem, helps others who are reading it and even the answerer themselves.
Have fun, and do your best to interpret anything said with as much good faith as possible
Read one hour and then started feeling that I was losing focus, time for a break! 3k and I’m just past the first scene, onto the second one (in the garden, first door)
I just got started and hit the first door now. Will continue for a bit but the prologue – it’s nothing crazy, but it does use some fancy words I haven’t come across before, 漆喰 and 黒壇 and the like. Can tell it likes to reach for the kanji forms all the time too. This is good descriptive, novel-like reading practice if anyone with us hasn’t done enough of that before yet. I suspect the opening might be a little tougher than what’s to come in door 1 because it’s all tone setting and kind of vague, abstract musing, but I’ll see when I read a little more of it.
I spent some time fighting with text hookers – I thought it was easier when I tested, so modding might have made it harder on myself? With some filtering add on help I’ve got it working, but it wants to repeat lines when they add more to the same line, and it kinda freaks out and duplicates stuff when 「あなた」 is said, so exact character counting isn’t gonna work too well for me.
Could be because of the mods that you experience problems, I had 0 problem with the text hooking. Are you using Textractor or something else?
About the story, I’m not completely sure of what’s the timeline we’re given, maybe you can help me there
Timeline
So first it says “First door, 1603”.
Then the servant says
ですが、時を……そうですね、八年ばかり戻しましょう。
Does that mean that 1603 is 8 years before present time when we wake up in the house? Or we go back 8 years before 1603? (also just in case, just want to understand what we are being told now, if there are more things related to the period that will be explained later then I prefer to not know them now )
Haha yep I think it’s going to be very useful here that you can figure out what’s the kanji even at low res! I saw a couple that I would really have had trouble looking up, so many lines that you couldn’t really tell them apart on my screen, for example 囀る
The Switch version seems to use a proper high dpi font so that shouldn’t be an issue for me, but given that I usually play PlayStation 1 games, I certainly sympathize.
Apparently an ancient Chinese scribe was like “ok, I need a character for ‘chirping’. Mmmh, I guess 口 is always a decent semantic radical for that. Now what do I use for the phonetics? Oh, I know, 轉, obviously.”
I tried Texttractor and wasn’t quite getting a proper hook, but switching to Luna has it working now. It’s totally fine for me this way – I’ve been arduously deleting lines that repeat to get a more accurate character count for the beginning but soon I’m going to stop bothering haha, it works for my purposes anyway. I definitely think it’s the mod’s fault, but things are fine enough. I also get clear fonts now heh.
It becomes more clear at the end of the first scene there too, but the events of the door are centered on 1603. The very first scene is an introduction to 2 characters 8 years earlier than that year, though.
Having read ahead far enough to finish the first scene in Door 1 (maybe 5k characters?), where I’ll stop for the moment for pacing purposes as we get started – I was wrong about the difficulty going down at first haha, the intro to the first door is probably the hardest bit so far, the way she describes everything setting the scene for that time period. If you push through that you reach a point where it’s primarily characters talking and that was the difficulty ease I was expecting.
I’m enjoying the way this is written, but I can see this narrative style causing some difficulties for some people for sure. Just gotta hang in there for a bit
That said, there’s one single line I’m kinda puzzled over. It’s scene setting for door 1, not really a spoiler, but I’ll collapse it here
I included more for context, but it’s the bolded しらべ I’m kinda puzzled by. I basically know what the sentence is getting at, but that doesn’t feel like it fits any way that I’m familiar with that word? I mean if it’s in the melody sense being kinda poetic… I guess that kinda makes sense? It’s all I’ve got anyway.
Yeah I expect this kind of difficulty spike at the start, same as most novels. I had it in Danganronpa too to some extent. Once everything is setup and the story starts going it usually gets a bit easier.
Oh I also forgot to add, having voiced music as often as Fata Morgana does is unusual in VNs and while most of it’s quite nice, getting distracted by the music when you’re struggling to read something is a complaint people already have so I would not be surprised if people need occasionally breaks to concentrate
Fun fact, the lyrics are primarily in Portuguese! I’ve heard it’s not particularly natural Portuguese at times, though, haha.
I speak Portuguese well enough to catch song lyrics even if I’m not focusing on them, is going to be the issue. That wouldn’t be a problem in Japanese.
Oh! I was taking it as more of a joke but that’s cool! Honestly if I were to learn another language ever after Japanese that’s pretty high on my list – I’m assuming you mean the kind from Portugal, though I’d probably lean into Brazilian. Either way I think they’re mutually intelligible at least.
In case you want to give it another try with Texttractor, here’s how I do it (you have to be past the opening scene that you can’t pause but otherwise I could hook 100% perfect from the first line)
Summary
Spoiler tags for the other readers please but thanks!
I enjoy the music, but I didn’t enjoy the sound effect of “walking around”. Seeing as it takes me a while to read the sentences, it was really annoying that it lasted so long -_-
Thankfully I understand zero Portuguese, only understood that it wasn’t gibberish when I recognized “fata morgana” x)
It’s pretty much like Australian English and US English. Maybe slightly more different. Brasilian is easier to understand at first I think, the phonology is a bit more Spanish-like.
)
but thanks!