This is the home thread for the the visual novel ファタモルガーナの館. See the visual novel home thread if you need an explanation of visual novels themselves. Fata Morgana is a dramatic story about a person with no memories who awakes in a manor, being guided by a maid through doors that lead to different times and the tragedies that occurred within them.
Why do this?
Fata Morgana is a highly regarded visual novel, consistently ranking among the best (currently #10 on vndb). For the medium it has a highly unique presentation style in both art style and soundtrack. If you are the type of person who tires of the “anime look” and stories about modern day high schoolers, this could be the VN for you. It’s also fully texthookable. On a personal level, I read this in English years back and found the story really hit my emotions strongly. The VN also allows for easy texthooking on PC.
Fata Morgana’s Structure
There are 8 chapters. Luckily there is are only a handful of choices through the game and they lead to short bad endings that can optionally be read before getting back on the one True Route. Staying together as a group without worrying about branches will be simple. There is also some additional content that has been added over the years – the main one being a prequel (that is intended to be read after the main story) called A Requiem for Innocence. This one I haven’t read before and will definitely lead the club into at the end if there are members wanting to read along with me. jpdb doesn’t have a character count for that, but based on vndb main Fata Morgana is estimated at ~34 hours and this prequel is ~14 hours. Of course we’ll be slower, but the ratios are helpful.
Club Format
We will be reading independently at one’s own desired speed, with threads separated by in-game chapter.
Accessibility
PC - Steam PC Mod - Remaid of Dreams? - A mod for the PC version that adds support for resolutions above 800x600(!) and some console exclusive side-stories, though it does change elements of the art style. See this post for more info. Switch - JP Store - Also available on Switch with the upgrades and bonus content, but unfortunately the western release is locked to English only so you have to jump through the hoops of buying on the Japanese eshop.
Discussion rules
Please hide all spoilers.
That aside, just be nice! Feel free to ask about the language and share how you’re feeling about the characters and events as they unfold. We want to hear from you.
Are you planning to read Fata Morgana with the club?
The structure looks like it would fit well for a schedule, assuming we can find a speed that works for all!
For the speed I think I can go around 70k per week, don’t mind if it’s slower.
I do think I like the idea of reading all together with a schedule if we can make it work, just need to see how reasonable that is for people based on their speeds and time available. I don’t really have an upper bound for myself in mind because it just depends on how hard I focus this VN vs the other stuff I’m doing – I think I have pretty good reading stamina and all at this point.
jpdb makes it sound a little on the hard end by their estimates, but I remember perusing the first few hours lightly and didn’t think anything seemed too crazy, and the average sentence length isn’t all that long. If it’s mostly just going a little heavier on unusual kanji/words or something moreso than writing complexity then anyone on a texthooker shouldn’t be too bothered if that’s all it is. Just, the question of difficulty may make was want to lean a little more conservatively in plans, but we can always adjust if we start on a schedule and find it’s not working, too.
I looked at the nomination post in the old VN Book Club thread, and it looks like it was aiming for about 30.000 characters per week or lower. That means that the club will last at least 22 weeks, which may be too long? I know that reading 5000 characters per day on average is more than enough for me…
I wanna see who’s planning to join and get everyone’s thoughts, but for me personally I’m not too pressed about how long this takes. My Umineko club is gonna run like literal years while I give the people with me the space they need, haha. I’ve got a lot of projects going at any time and can allot my attention accordingly.
If I recall correctly the default club pace at that time was roughly 20k char/week, but we had a sort of arbitrarily decided number of weeks limit to try to fit the VNs into for the sake of keeping the club cycling to new picks. The latter reason, at least, will not be of any concern to us in this setting.
Personally my main consideration is simply that we’re reading enough per week that it’s a reasonably satisfying chunk; we come away feeling like we’ve got enough to think on and talk about together each week and we aren’t needing to regularly break it up in awkward, unsatisfying places. I would guess if we dropped below that old 20k or so that would be likely to happen? But anything I can say is a slightly arbitrary guess, and of course something we’ll feel out when we start and possibly adjust for, too. It’s been many years for me and this part is a question heavily tied into pacing and writing style which I definitely don’t remember clearly enough to speculate on.
By the way @Akashelia@Shannon-8@Marifly if you’re planning to get Fata Morgana on Steam, I just remembered there is a visual novel sale coming in early March (3rd to the 10th I believe) so I assume a sale is likely! I’ll update when it happens if I catch it, but I don’t want anyone to rush and buy it right before or something haha.
It would be my actual first virtual novel (or video game in JP, where In actually playing it) and I will be trying to play it on a switch without a text hooker, so I may crash and burn fairly fast …
But it seems like story sections in the different year periods is a natural dividing point… And probably each of those story lines has its own vocabulary area…
Probably not the easiest place to start, but you’ve got this! Switch version will definitely slow you down compared to having the option of texthooking, but we’ll try to work with you. Since you haven’t been playing VNs I’m guessing character counts might not mean too much to you at this stage to try to estimate? If you haven’t directly tracked them in anything it’s gonna sound meaningless to you.
They must to some degree deviate in the type of language, yeah. jpdb further divides into lengths of sections if you’re curious – they fluctuate with some around 60, 80k, with a few outliers including a very big section towards the end at a whopping 162k characters.
Oh I’ve only heard great things about this one. For whatever reason I’ve found it a lot harder to do VNs in a book club than regular novels, but I’ll probably try for this one.
Ahh I’ve always wanted to try a VN other than Umineko because it’s too long and it’ll take many many years for me to complete it (I’m sorry Daisoujou )
I may be starting with the club, but I plan on reading at my own pace, so I don’t have much to share about the weekly schedules ahah.
In case anyone plans to get Fata Morgana on Steam, it’s currently discounted in the visual novel sale! In my region (US), 35% off down from $25 to $16.
Nice to see Visual Novel clubs aren’t dead! I think I’d try to read along with this one if the pace was somewhere between 25-50k per week, but can’t say for sure since the time I can commit to anything is unpredictable lately and I’d probably be quite likely to fall behind at some point.
We could also create a thread per chapter and everybody reads at their own pace it’s pretty hard to align for pace on VNs, I can’t even align with myself haha, there will be weeks where I can read way less than others
I like the thread per chapter idea too! Knowing myself, I could probably easily get carried away and read faster. Though whatever it ends up like, I’m all for it.
I absolutely adore this game, it caught me by absolute surprise when I played it at first and I’m still not over some of the themes of this game. I’m wondering if I should join this one when it’s going to be rolling around to have a social aspect around re-experiencing the story again, so just leaving a “.” here and hope that I eventually follow through ^^
Yeah I had planned to suggest starting on the more conservative side around 20k or something if we wanted to read together at a set pace, but if others are down for that I’m totally content to just make it self-paced; that’s even easier for me.
but definitely a good point, now that the club only starts in May, people have time to wait for a sale before buying it!
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it’s pretty hard to align for pace on VNs, I can’t even align with myself haha, there will be weeks where I can read way less than others