ルーパーズ ♾ Chapter 2 (Visual Novel Book Club)

About spoiler thingy -you’re right :+1:I won’t say more for now since it’s too early :wink:

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They do look surprisingly alike though. Same hair color, as far as I noticed. I did notice Hilda’s eyes have some purple to them, while the hospital girl seem to have pure gray.

I gotta admit this was a spoiler I would have rather been without. I don’t wanna know if my guesses or predictions are right. I’d rather discover it; or make new guesses as more info is given. Not a big deal, but maybe hide it with some intro text saying you’re confirm or deny predictions. Thanks. ^^

Also, maybe spoiler that message.

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I’m really sorry :bowing_man: Blurred it out.

As for girl in the hospital - if memory serves, I haven’t thought that she’s Hilda, at least not for long. Their personalities are too different :wink:

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You know more than me, then! I saw very nice artwork and decided I was going to try the demo. I didn’t even read the summary to see if it was up my alley, figuring the demo would answer that for me. :laughing:

Same! She is very lively, and seems like she will be a great source of comic relief. Her attitude reminds me of a friend I grew up with, as well, so that elevates her a bit for me ( not so much the 暴力, but the “tries to be tough but is very much not” personality . :stuck_out_tongue:

Don’t know if I need to spoiler this since it doesn’t deal with the actual plot, but it might inadvertently tip off someone to a plot point, so I shall err on the side of caution. :laughing:

Sure is! Usually you just leave items that don’t really have much financial value – little toys/trinkets and such. When I did it, I tended to leave unique quarters (limited runs, not just a generic quarter)/dollar coins, or something small like an old-school PEZ Dispenser, or something along those lines. If you took something from the cache, it’s expected for you to leave something. Not all of them have items, though, especially if they are a smaller container that can only really fit the pen and the log.

I still have an adorable jade whale-tail trinket that I kept from one of the caches. :grin:

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As I said, not a big deal. :slight_smile: I’m actually one of those that don’t care too much about spoilers, but I’m having too much fun speculating to want to know what is right and what is wrong.

True, although personalities change and hormones in teenage years can make you crazy. And/or temporarily angry at the world. Like it did me. :sweat_smile:

I don’t remember the summery though. :laughing: Only the plot device of looping which you get from the title.

Hey, no fair! :joy:

Cool! Thanks for letting me know. :smiley:

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You’re just being a looper :sunglasses:

I relate to that feeling hard cause eventually the Summer Pocket music drove me a bit insane haha. As for speed, I probably did it a little faster? Still took me a few hours I think though. I feel like I CAN read faster (something between the writing style and/or vocabulary is fairly familiar after a few VNs now) but I have to really force myself and tend to default to carefully going over each line.

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Oh wait I made that last post prior to reading all the way through the thread and I really need to know how to stop being angry at the world :wink:. I didn’t know it was meant to only be temporary! I might just be a 30 year old teenager.

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It’s a me, :infinity: MissDagger Looper! :infinity:

Well, keeping a young mind is a good thing. Isn’t that the kind of thing people say as you get older? :joy:

Honestly though, (going into my personal history) I’ve never been an angry person except for those few months in my teens. Anger as a mode of operandi was something I chose I didn’t want. At the time, I had someone in my life who couldn’t control their anger and who would blow up in my face at unexpected moments. That kinda thing made me very averse to anger. As soon as I realized anger was making me stupidly kick my friends’ shins, I just stopped being angry. So much so that as an adult I’ve struggled to have a healthy relationship with anger, because anger (like most emotions) are not inherently bad. And eh, that got real…

Anyway, so to me, it isn’t impossible to get angry and mildly violent for a few months or so as a teen; and then realize it is stupid and stop doing that kind of idiotic thing.

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Done with the chapter.

I’m really enjoying this thing, not sure if because I’m new to the medium and finding it great, or the story/character interactions keep me really engaged, or both!

About the time needed to read this, I’m reeeeeally taking my time trying to understand each sentence entirely. We have a whole week so I thought I would go as slow as I wanted just enjoying the thing and that’s exactly what I’m doing. I don’t trust the numbers because I spend a ton of time researching vocabulary, fighting definitions in J-J dictionaries and making anki cards :joy: . My HTML textractor thingy for this chapter marks 2h 45m and 2629 characters per hour but… yeah, possibly wildly inaccurate. I’m adding almost anything unknown and I’m loving every second of it.

Anyways, about the chapter! I think I’ll join team Hilda as well :joy: . She’s loud but also quite funny, and there’s a certain intonation she gives to the end of her sentences sometimes that I love. I also really like Taira as well, made me laugh when he gets super excited and yelling when Leona asks about geohunting :joy: . He’s pretty goofy, cheery and passionate. I like the vibe between him and Hilda. And I like Leona too, but someone has to take the third place unfortunately :slight_smile: . I was actually turned off by Hilda at the very start of the chapter and ended up being my favourite character so far.

So, the story (spoilers for the whole chapter ahead)

I did not expect at all that it would go that way :joy: but to be completely fair, I didn’t have any specific expectations because I knew nothing about the VN. I bought it for the same reason as some of you: art looked great, wanikani club starting and a potential great opportunity to socialise and keep learning, and the demo was fun, that’s it. But anyways I like the direction it’s been given, a lot. I usually read this VN at night and got me off-guard. It’s nothing crazy or anything but I did not expect 探し女 actually appearing and changing the whole mood of the scene with a blurred, eerie appearance and uneasy BGM. I’m so so curious about how that’s going to develop, because technically Hilda wasn’t specifically asked to help look for the heart, BUT the ghost still talked to her and mumbled something not too far from that either. Something is definitely up. Definitely. There’s no way that ends just like that :joy: . She even made fun of her…

Ahhh so many questions suddenly. Since there’s a lot of time until next Friday, I thought of doing two runs per chapter: the first one that I mentioned going through dictionaries and cards and all that, and a fast second one just going through it without pause as a way to refresh details and catch anything I might have missed, maybe on Thursday. Second run shouldn’t take long so it doesn’t feel like a burden, supposing the characters per chapter don’t suddenly explode in the next ones. I’d like to think of it as a way of further assimilating the new words too, perhaps. It’s also a way of stopping myself from reading ahead :smiling_face_with_tear: . I actually don’t mind the wait, reading with you all makes it even more fun. It’s like when a new anime episode releases and you have to wait a week to watch the next one. It kinda sucks a bit, but also gives you time to obsess about it and think of what may happen, check details, and so on. And it’s great because meanwhile we can post here.

I try not to open these threads too much until I’m done with the chapter just so I don’t eat any kind of spoiler, so don’t mind me too much if I usually take a couple days to update in the coming ones :slight_smile: .

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You know, maybe ヒルダ and タイラ vs レオナ is separating us by our preferences for or against the very outspoken excitable types haha. I don’t dislike any of the characters but I’ll take my slight sarcastic detachment (when not taken too far) over this level of earnestness, haha. Doubly so since レオナ starting to enjoy herself with the geohunting felt like it kept her from being too one note.

I was going to wait a little longer to get another week behind us before saying anything about the schedule, but I’m getting the impression people are pretty content with our current pace? Beyond a person or two already finishing it haha (which is totally cool, glad you liked it!), it feels like we’ve had various incidental positive comments in relation to being able to either take this slowly, or knock it out to make room for other projects alongside it.

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I don’t think I’d call that “explosion”, but chapters certainly aren’t of the same length. I remember there being some longer ones in the latter half. I think the longest one was somewhat like three or four times longer than this. (But I’m relying on my perception only, since I didn’t do any word/character counting)

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I’m good with this pace for now. And if later chapters are longer (from @adamstan), this VN will naturally force us to speed up. :joy:

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But don’t worry - I think the week still should be sufficient to read those longer chapters even for very slow readers :slight_smile:

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I think the pacing is good. I wouldn’t mind going a little faster for later visual novels but with the way Loopers is setup, I think a chapter a week works out well for everyone.

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Agree with you all on the audio. Made me regret playing at night - perfect for the atmosphere, in theory. Not so much when you’re thinking about you’re neighbors everytime ヒルダ freaks out, haha.

Love everyone so far, especially タイラ. He hasn’t changed at all and I’m here for it.

Really looking forward to finding out more about this world.

Also, so far it seems the chapter breaks are really natural break points. That’s great, I hope it continues like this. I was afraid the chapter breaks wouldn’t feel right at first. :slight_smile:

I feel like another case of it is if there’'s no way to know yet - say, if no one has mentioned a name yet, they won’t be named. Then, as names drop in conversation or writing (in the story, that is), the name will start to show up in narration as well.

Here, I feel it might have been a device to create a bit more mystery in the prologue, to help set the focus on the treasure and the wish thing rather than the character introduction. Of course there may yet be more to it! But I wouldn’t have looked for a deeper meaning if none of you had mentioned it. It didn’t strike me as very unusual. :see_no_evil: (I am not an analytical reader, haha)

Ooh, yes. What a lovely idea. :heart_eyes: Or the zero escape games or really any number of puzzle mechanic/interactive vn. :slight_smile:

Yeap, me too, haha. I set it before even starting the vn usually and rarely need to change it again.

Oh, I’ve a bit of a favor to ask of you text-extractor-wizards. If you don’t mind, it would be really interesting for me if you shared the character count for each week going forward. I think last week you mentioned the counts for week 1 and 2, and I thought that was some really nice info to have. :slight_smile:

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Funny, I wouldn’t call myself an analytical reader either, but after reading hundreds of novels, there are certain patterns that I just picked up. However, my brain is literally built to figure out patterns, when I notice there is a pattern to something I want to figure it out.

For example: first time I was in Japan, was also the first time I came to a crosswalk that had diagonal crosswalks. So I just had to figure out how the signals worked for walkers and cars. Also I think that was the first time I noticed an intersection with a diagonal road hitting a cross (aka a diagonal road bisecting a cross intersection), or something very like it. And I was so curious about the turn order for red and green, and whether there were turning signs that differed and… I might have stopped for a couple of minutes just watching how it worked. :sweat_smile:

So my brain is primed to notice patterns, and then as a fiction writer, I’ve also had to make the decision a lot whether to name a character or not. And honestly, coming up with names are a pain, especially since I almost always write fantasy so I literally have to make them up and can’t just pick from common names in a certain country/area.

But while I’m reading, I don’t analyze what I read and if I wasn’t in the club, I wouldn’t be thinking and speculating. I’d just be reading the next chapter to find out what happens next. ^^ However, I am enjoying it a lot and it’ll be fun if we do a mystery VN in the future. (Although this one isn’t a mystery/crime story, it sure isn’t putting its cards on the table.)

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Yeah, that’s how I ended up finishing the whole VN in a week :sweat_smile:

I saw some reviewers quite disappointed by that. Seeing the premise and R07 (famous for Higurashi and Umineko series) as scenario writer, they were expecting horror/mystery/sci-fi story while it turned out to be “just” classic KEY story. In hindsight I think that the very beginning of the prologue - the fairy tale sequence - sets the mood perfectly, and allows to set the expectations accordingly :wink:

For mild horror/mystery, I really loved World End Syndrome, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be too suitable for book club, unless everyone followed exactly the same walkthrough, since the map movement segments, where you have to pick up a location to go each day to either see some short scene or forward the plot, give too much randomness. Also, it’s console-only (I played English Switch version on emulator), and releases are single-language - either English or Japanese.

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You know, it is a real shame those are both absurdly lengthy, because they invite the audience to speculate along so fantastically. But they’d be a big commitment for a club of readers even at native-level reading speeds. I’m sure we’ll find more good stuff anyway.

World End Syndrome looks pretty neat, but yeah, the console-only part makes it a fairly hard sell for me, personally. A “club-recommended” reading order for discussion is fine with me, though I know preferences were mixed on that subject. We’ll sort out what we’re open to next time around the end of Loopers I hope :slightly_smiling_face:

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Yeah, that length is what scares me. I’m telling myself that I’ll read Higurashi one day (I already bought it on Steam), but I cannot decide, if I should go with English or Japanese, since even in English it would be sooo long - but at the same time I’d have a feeling I’m missing out on an opportunity to read in Japanese…

At least it has option for switching languages :wink:

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And done! This time I read it in two short sessions. I forgot to time it unfortunately but I’m guessing it took around an hour total? I’ll try to remember for next chapter.

So far it’s been really not what I expected (but not in a bad way?). I guess with the loop thing I was expecting more sci-fi vibes and definitely didn’t expect the horror vibes from this chapter. It was interesting, though. I have no idea what’s going to happen now but probably something bad? Looking forward to reading more.

Agreed that the audio is kinda all over the place. So. Much. Screaming.

Btw, love that the 方向音痴 is the one constantly going around looking for things. At night. Also what’s up with these kids’ sleeping schedule?

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