ルーパーズ ♾ Chapter 1 (Visual Novel Book Club)

Just tried it now and didn’t have any issues (Win 10, using this page for pasting into the browser in a second monitor: Texthooker)). That said, I know windows did some funky stuff with fullscreen applications/optimizations so I’m worried it might be inconvenient on older versions of the OS.

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Thanks for the help and testing! :slight_smile: I’ll make sure to set everything up next time I run it, will report back.

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Uh-oh… :open_mouth: I suspected as much.

That means next week is ~2.6 x more than this week. Meaning my 1h 45mins will turn into 4.5-5 hours. :sweat_smile: Well, I will plan my reading accordingly.

Yeah, I can totally see how it would help with being completely lost.

I don’t know your level of Japanese. I’m mid-intermediate, about halfway through N3 (formal study) and don’t tend to have any grammatical problems in manga or dialog. So for spoken language, all I lack is vocabulary. At my grammar level, I find the English translation can’t help me. Since I’m unlikely to be completely lost.

But it can probably be helpful to someone with less grammar. I just thought I should mention this. Except for missing that hospital beds have curtains around them, and therefore somehow getting confused and saying the boy closed the window curtains, I didn’t see any other outright translation errors. However, I didn’t check it for every line, only for a few.

For a beginner, I would say the English can still help, the same way DeepL or google translate can. With the knowledge that it can be wrong, and might miss nuance, etc.

Hmmm… I’m still not sure I understand, were there only CGs in the prologue when characters were on screen? Like the story book page, the girl in the hospital bed (sad and happy)? And the rest of the images were a background images (sometimes with the dinosaur on top)? Would the story book page count as CG?

I feel like I’m learning a new language, haha. I don’t have the domain knowledge for VNs. :joy:

I noticed it sounded weird when he said it but was caught up enough to just keep going and not relisten. I just assumed 病室 had another possible reading or something. Next week, I might have to start by relistening to that line a couple of times. :joy:

Oooh, good to know. I’m so close to the forties, I can taste it. (Just hit 39 today. ^^ )

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When I read VNs it’s similar for me - I understand most of the grammar patterns used, but I lack vocabulary, encountering lots of unknown words (but that’s what text-hookers are for :wink: )

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Now that you mention it, yeah, I think so. The storybook image certainly is, and the picture of the girl in the hospital bed must be with the way she’s drawn into the bed, though I didn’t think a whole lot about it at the time because the way she was placed isn’t that far from how I’d expect from a non-CG image of a sprite over a background. With most VNs you tend to spend most time outside of CGs and just get them sprinkled into big moments, but presentation varies and especially if the VN is shorter like this they might be able to use them for a large proportion of the time. Loopers being stylized the way it is, it might be a little harder to explain with what we have so far, but here are a few examples from Summer Pockets screenshots I have.

Collapsed for space

CG:

Non CG:

Fun fact, CG stands for “computer graphics,” though I’d expect quite a few people who use the term to not be aware of that. Kinda silly, but it is the accepted term for them haha.

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Ah, that really helped! Those non-CG ones made me think of Ace Attorney. Just characters on top of backgrounds. I don’t know why images made me understand it better, but it did. ^^

The terminology for VNs make no sense outside that specific domain, since in common usage they have very different meanings. But that is not uncommon for domain specific terminology. A bit like how some English loan words in Japanese have taken on a different meaning. ^^


Honestly, I thought everything in Loopers looked very good so far. I’m excited to see all other environments, characters and CGs. :smiley:

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Broaden that a little more from VNs to Japanese games, at least in the indie space. I’ve seen the term used to describe pretty much any situation where some sort of nicely rendered (as in drawing) art is used in place of what’s normal for game. Typically in context of a pixel art game like what you’d normally see from GameMaker or RPGMaker. It’s also used a lot in H-games, but nobody heard that from me.

Sometimes I just think Japanese is a little too fond of odd acronyms like that. PV and MV have always stuck out as odd to me.

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So…

Having some free time, I went to DLSite, bought the game and started reading. I just finished the prologue. It was pretty short. I don’t know if it was just easy, or if I got better, but it took me 20 minutes to read it - I’m still a little surprised :wink:

It was very nice, I’m looking forward to the rest of the game :slight_smile: :+1:

+100 :smiley:

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Oooh yeah, they were just hanging out in there uninstalled! It looks like it’s working now :tada: thank you!!

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What a cute little intro. :blush: I love the presentation! Everything looks so stylish and sleek~ I was afraid full screen was going to look a bit blurry, but I guess i’m using a small screen anyway.

One thing: so apparently I’m supposed to be able to tell the chapter I’m in from the menu. Which menu is that? I only have a quick menu as far as I can tell, and I’m not seeing a chapter title. Am I just missing something obvious? Wouldn’t be the first time, haha. I’m using the DLsite version of the game.

Luckily this week we have a very in your face chapter end what with the opening video happening, but it might be good to know for next week.

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Once you complete the chapter, it becomes unlocked in the “CHAPTER” menu on title screen.
Also, when playing in window mode, there is current scene’s/chapter’s title displayed on the window title bar (next to the “LOOPERS”).
loopers_bar

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Ooh, that menu! Thank you! I guess that explains why I didn’t find it yet, since I quit from in game instead of going back to the title screen. :slight_smile:

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At least in the Switch version, I can get to the chapter menu while playing. It is available on the normal menu page with save, load, options/settings, etc.

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Since I just completed next chapter, I can confirm that the title displayed on the title bar is chapter’s title. Also, game does autosave on chapter transition.

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Well, let’s make it official, I’ll be reading along with this for the time being. I went ahead and downloaded the demo first to see if I would like it, and the first chapter was very sweet and engaging.

It also didn’t take much time, at all, maybe 20 minutes total of actual play time (I got a call in the middle of it, so I stopped playing for a while then came back to it, so I’m guessing there) so unless the next chapters spike in difficulty randomly, I’m confident about being able to keep up each week, especially since SPY x FAMILY has ended, and I will likely shelve that series for now (cute and entertaining, but I have other things I want to prioritize, at the moment) (like probably joining the 狼と香辛料 club. I really should avoid adding more to my plate, since I also just started another light novel series on my own time, but that’s a series I’ve always wanted to read… :face_holding_back_tears:)

I look forward to the discussion here! Seeing that some people are having a hard time putting it down has me excited to see what’s to come! :stuck_out_tongue:

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It seems we’re of similar speed then :wink: I haven’t noticed any significant spike of difficulty in the following 5 chapters. Of course, since after the prologue characters are teenagers, their speech becomes less childish, and there are some usual features of very casual/slangy speech - like turning あい into えー etc etc - but nothing extraordinary.

The one that tripped me up for a moment (I don’t think it’s spoilerous) was レオナ’s first person pronoun - she used あーし, which seems to be slurred あたし :wink:

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Luckily, I’ve seen that once before! Thanks for giving me a heads up to expect it again, though. It’s likely it would have tripped me up for a moment until I remembered it, as well. :rofl:

Glad to hear there is no real difficulty spike! Seems like it should be easy enough to keep up with, then, and I won’t be kicking myself for biting off more than I could chew yet again!

楽しみです!

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Well I wasn’t sure if I would join this time, but here I am! :joy:
This will be my first visual novel in Japanese (and only my second if including English language ones!).

I really like how things are going so far. The prologue story and art were super cute.
I have no idea how things will go from here or what kind of story it’ll be, but I’m excited to find out.

The language and amount of text was also super understandable for me, but like others have mentioned above, I’m sure it’ll get a bit more difficult in the following chapters.

I’m going to sentence mine words I don’t know yet, as it is so much more helpful when there is voice acting also available! So this looks like it’ll be a good contribution to my vocab study time as well! :smile:

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Nice! Yeah I’m doing the same, I love how you can set up a procedure to do that with VNs pretty smoothly. For most of this year I’ve been mining from VNs as I read, and already grabbed a few things from the prologue.

Of course I do that thing everyone emphatically argues against where instead of only grabbing the most useful words, I go “there’s a specific word for buried treasure? that’s so cool, gotta mine that!” and then I have a card for 埋蔵金 at my Japanese level haha. I’ll just make the excuse that I didn’t know the まい reading for 埋 so the card is dual purpose :wink:

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Three more levels, and you’ll come across that reading in WK, also! :stuck_out_tongue:

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