徒花異譚 🖌 (Visual Novel Book Club) // Now Reading!

Japanese Language Book Clubs
1

徒花異譚

image

Start date: December 22, 2023

What is this?

We are going to be reading Adabana Odd Tales as part of the Visual Novel Book Club!
From steam’s description: “This is a tale of ‘flowers’ that never bloom.” Shirohime, a girl who has lost her memory, and Kurofude, a mysterious boy, traverse through classic Japanese fairy tales within the land of Adabana, a realm of illustrated books. What awaits them after they mend the distorted tales?

Pace

We will be reading at our own pace and posting in this thread whenever we want to talk about something related to this VN. The plan is for everyone to finish within 12 weeks (March 15, 2024).
We will be using choices as a reference point. You don’t need to wait until you hit a choice to discuss the game of course, but it would be a good idea to note in your post where you are so people don’t accidentally get spoiled (can say something like after choice 1/before choice 2 + character count if you have that available to you).

Guide for choices

メイン

【はじめから】
◆セーブ01
「…………」○
本来の物語を見届けたい○
━
「おとひめさまが心配なのです」○
諦めを感じた○
━
割って入る○
耳を傾けた○
━
◆セーブ02
現
TRUE END(徒花異譚・現)

回収

◆セーブ01から
「シロが戻ってきてよかった」
おじいさんの望む結末を知りたい
━
「うらしまさんのその後が心配なのです」
喜びを感じた
━
思いとどまる
耳を塞いだ
━
夢
END(徒花異譚・夢)

Guide can be found here for reference (warning NSFW ads on the website) https://galge.seiya-saiga.com/game/aniplex/adabana.html

Suggested route order

It is recommended to follow the choices that lead to the 夢 ending first and save the true end (choices that lead to 現 ending) last. The bad end can be done in the middle of those two.

Discussion Guidelines

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
  • 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 :slightly_smiling_face:

Participants

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m reading but will start later
0 voters
3 Likes
2

I’ll read it in english with the japanese voices because I don’t think I’m good enough to go with the japanese text. Is it ok for me to participate in the club in this way ?

3 Likes
3

Yes, that is fine! We’ve had people participate before in these clubs that were reading in English and that’s no problem at all.

3 Likes
4

I made it to the first choice in the game, happens at the 24,752 character count point for anyone that is interested.

Thoughts up to the first choice

So far I’m really liking this VN. The art and music are amazing so far. I really like Shirohime’s voice too. I thought it sounded incredibly familiar and saw its the same voice actor for Tsumugi Shiraishi from Idolmaster Million Live. The VA does like the same voice in both series which is kind of funny but it sounds very nice and is fitting.

I’ve only read a couple of jp fairy tales and that was a super long time ago when I was first getting into jp and reading graded readers. I never read the first story here 「花さかじいさん」so all of that was new to me. I was not expecting the story to take such a dark turn with the dog. I thought the VN was doing its own take at first and making things darker but I looked up the original fairy tale and the same events play out, just told in a different way. It seems like the story is trending towards a happy ending after they planted the tree at least.

The few CGs we’ve gotten so far have been beautiful too

image
image1423×800 120 KB

The only complaint I have so far is that I wish all of the fairy tale reading sections were voiced. Shirohime read the opening lines of the fairy tale in the beginning but as they keep advancing in the tale, it turned into all narration without her voicing it which kind of sucks. Outside of that though, I am enjoying this VN a lot so far!

Also a funny bug I ran into. Somehow the background got replaced by the Aniplex logo and wouldn’t go away no matter what anytime I loaded that save, so I had to start over. Thankfully it was in the beginning so it didn’t take long to skip back to where I was but it was funny to run into.

image
image1600×900 109 KB

Also, I looked around and it seems like the suggested route order was to start with the 夢 end and finish with 現 (true end). The bad end seems optional and can do it in the middle if interested. Since we’re reading at our own pace without weekly threads, not sure if it matters if everyone follows the same choices or not. I will follow the suggest order, not sure what everyone else wants to do regarding that?

3 Likes
5

I’ll go with suggested order as well just to have some kind of structure to our discussions but yeah, if anyone wants to follow something else it’s probably alright. The worst that could happen is make discussion a bit messy. I thought that with a clearly defined order it would be easy to check if you have passed a certain spot or not and drive discussion in a linear way, but if someone feels strongly against that then it’s fine to read freely. If apart from the choice layout there are certain other markers we could use that aren’t spoilery, e.g. the end of a tale or something, we can use that as well to zoom in a bit more.

Starting it soon one of these coming days myself :> difficult language so far?

I just noticed, super silly thing! Since we’ve always had an emoji in the title to spot it quickly in the sea of threads (though tbh I use bookmarks for the club xD), do you want to pick one for this thread as well? Not that we have to :joy: only if you want to. No emoji is fine too.

3 Likes
6

Sounds good to me. I’ll update the OP later to clarify the suggested order. We can use the end of each tale as a marker too, although it’d be good to mention which route we’re on when we post since from what I’ve heard there are a decent amount of changes based off your choices.

It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve read in the VN club so far but nothing too extreme. Shirohime’s lines use a lot of hiragana which can be kind of annoying for me at times. The narration lines can be quite long though and takes me some time to parse & get through. So it is challenging but manageable I think

I’m fine with adding one but not sure what would be a good fit :sweat_smile: Any suggestions?

2 Likes
7

I haven’t started yet so I’m not sure how relevant it is, but since one of the characters wields a brush, how about :paintbrush: ? The wilted flower :wilted_flower: might be nice too, for 徒花, although not quite the same concept. But if none of them fit much don’t worry too much, really.

3 Likes
8

The brush looks good to me! I added it to the title.

3 Likes
9

I finished the first tale. It finishes around the 43,891 character count. There is a small eyecatch loading screen after the end of the first tale to indicate that it is over. It will look like this

image
image1327×746 34.6 KB

Thoughts so far - following 夢 route choices

That fairy tale ended up being a lot darker than expected. The greedy neighbors are just awful people for what they did to Shiro.

The flashback we had with (who I assume is Kurofude and Shirohime) as kids was interesting. Back then it was Kurofude who didn’t like the story/wanted to change it while present day had their roles kind of reversed. Guess we’ll get more info on their background later and how they ended up here mending these books.

I wonder how much the choices effected the story here. If we went with 本来の物語を見届けたい I assume the old man wouldn’t have gone crazy then? Doing the second route later should be fun to see how it changes.

The art has been really nice still, although a bit creepy at times like when Shirohime was coughing up the blood-looking ink. I’m really glad they put the text of the new story into the textbox too because some of those words were really hard to try and read on the book.

image
image1327×746 93.9 KB

2 Likes
10

Finished the second tale. Ends around the 76,296 character count

Thoughts on the second tale - following 夢 route choices

I’ve read a variation of the Urashima fairy tale way back in the day when I first started getting into jp and was trying graded readers. I’ve seen this tale referenced in anime/manga before too so I already had an idea of where things would head but it was still fun to read through.

The fairy tale itself is interesting. In the original tale, its hard to say if Otohime is really evil or not. She did have Urashima stay there for a while without telling him the consequences but she also treated him to a lot of luxuries. Its not like his time down there was bad at all and he was never forced to leave. But when he did leave his whole life was basically over and everyone he knew was dead, so Otohime could be seen as evil because of that.

The art when they first arrived at the dragon palace was really nice.

image
image1327×746 166 KB

We learned some new stuff about how the books work too with the events having to play out in front of them before they can proceed in the book itself. When they mentioned that, I knew they were going to be in for an awful time in this story since Urashima is down there for so long. It was funny to see Kurofude start to get upset in these scenes.

I liked the CG when Otohime was going crazy too.

image
image1327×746 120 KB

I’m enjoying the VN so far. I wish they used a little less descriptive text since some scenes can drag on with how heavy they go in that department but I guess that’s just Liar-Soft’s style. It’ll be interesting to see how all of these flashback scenes tie into the present day and what forced them into this role of mending these books.

2 Likes
11

Finished the True End (徒花異譚・現).
I was happy with how things ended here, so I’m skipping the Bad End and 徒花異譚・夢 end.

Some general non-spoiler thoughts about the game

First off, the art and the overall aesthetic in this VN is just great, very unique. The OST was good too, even though there were not a whole lot of tracks. It felt like a few of them were played over and over.

This VN probably has the most flowery and descriptive writing I’ve seen so far in any VN, for better or worse.
Some sections, especially later on can get a bit tedious to go through because of this. Some funky kanji usage here and there, but nothing too bad.

I do wish some of the 絵草子/Chapters were a bit longer. Some of the side characters got very little screen time because their section was really short, which is a shame since they’re all pretty good.

Overall a nice VN. The 2nd half of the last chapter was especially well done in my opinion.

Quick thoughts about each 絵草子/Chapter + True End (Spoiler Warning):

1st 絵草子

This first part really sets the tone for the rest of the story. Things got dark quite fast. I’m not familiar with the original folk tale, so I have no idea how differently it plays out compared to this one.

シロ getting abused and killed (twice) was sad to watch.
The old man transforming into the 徒花荒らし was unexpected. All of the skulls that popped up on the trees were a nice touch too.

I only picked the “correct” choices, didn’t try the other ones, but apparently they do change quite a few scenes. For example, I never got that CG with 白姫 coughing blood.

Good chapter, things worked out in the end, kind of.

2nd 絵草子

I’ve read the 浦島太郎 folk tale ages ago, but mostly forgot about it at this point. Surprisingly, 乙姫 was the bigger focus of this chapter, despite the name of the story.

This one did drag on for a bit after they got to the palace and 乙姫 just repeated the days over and over, but maybe that was the point.

I found this chapter to be ok overall, nothing special. The CG of the dress/着物 白姫 had after the “correct” choices was excellent, though.

3rd 絵草子

This part felt like the shortest one to me. I don’t keep track of character count, so I’m not sure if that’s true.
うりこ姫 was such a fun character (also great VA), too bad she has so little screen time in her “normal form”.
Things went really fast from the introduction of うりこ姫 to her getting “killed”, to her being tied to the tree.

Once again, the CG of the dress/着物 was top notch.

At this point the game still didn’t fully hook me, so I kept putting it off.

4th 絵草子 + True End (徒花異譚・現)

This chapter was a nice change of pace, because it’s not even clear which story this is. 黒筆 was also missing for a large portion of it.

Definitely my favorite part of the whole story, especially the 2nd half (journey back to the real world). I felt like they went even harder with the descriptive stuff in this chapter, though.
They really tied everything from the previous chapters/絵草子 nicely for a great conclusion.

The True End (徒花異譚・現) was done just right in my opinion. The ending fairly happy, but without too much sugar. The attempt to make it seem like 白姫 died a bit after she woke up was a bit sneaky though.

The meaning behind the very last scene after the credits went over my head i think. Not really sure what the significance of the train passenger being a child in the “dream” implied exactly.

3 Likes
12

Finished the 3rd tale at the 102,053 character count mark.

Thoughts on the third tale - following 夢 route choices

This one was pretty good. I never heard of this story before so it was all new to me. It felt like this one went dark really fast with the あまのじゃく. I was half expecting Urikohime to turn into an あまのじゃく herself at the start of the story but having one come to her house and nearly kill her might have been worse. It was interesting in the earlier tales it felt like the choice where you step in and do something leads to the “bad” outcome but in this one, if you let the story play out it turns out poorly. I’m excited to see the changes in the true end later on.

Earlier I thought the scenes with the boy and girl reading the books were a flashback but based on what happened during this section, it seems like they’re happening simultaneously? Not really sure yet how they’re related to what Kurofude and Shirohime are doing but I’m guessing we’ll get some big reveal coming up in the last tale here.

Based on the character counts, this is about the same length as the previous two stories but it feels like we get a lot less focus on the “main” character Urikohime before things go crazy compared to the last two. She was a funny character from the little we saw though.

2 Likes
13
Thoughts on the 4th tale & 徒花異譚・夢 ending

I’ve never read Momotaro before but I have seen it referenced a lot in anime so I was interested in how the story was going to go. This section didn’t really talk much about him though and felt like a backdrop to explain everything that was happening with Shirohime. I still enjoyed this section despite that.

Based on what was explained here, I guess those scenes earlier with the boy & girl were flashbacks but it was weird the one time Shirohime was dreaming about it (touching a book or something) it happened simultaneously in the flashback and in the adabana dream world.

I thought the reveals here were pretty good but it felt like they were dumping everything story wise all at once on us. There were some hints earlier as to what was happening but I think it would have been nice if they paced these out better. Each story is supposed to relate to a person in Shirohime’s real life so it sort of makes sense but I don’t remember the Hanasaka story or Urashima story talking about Shirohime’s grandfather or tutor in those flashbacks. It was only scenes with her and the young boy at that point. I think it would have been good to put in some more foreshadowing there.

The choice to stay in the dream world or go back to reality felt bad here since we have to make a “bad” choice to get this ending. At least Shirohime looked really happy in the moment.

image
image1327×746 119 KB

The ending was sweet for a moment there when she was able to reunite with Kurofude at the tree.

image
image1327×746 116 KB

But then they immediately took away all that happiness when it cut back to the real world and Kurofude being at her bedside.

image
image1327×746 138 KB

I was surprised they had an epilogue for this ending. I thought the final CG flash before the credits rolled was a perfect ending. I felt like it was obvious she passed away based off of that CG so them explaining it felt kind of unnecessary.

I’ll give my overall thoughts on the VN once I finish the true end. I did like this first ending though, it had some nice emotional highs in it. I was glad they had some new songs for those moments too.

2 Likes
14

Finished all routes now. Total character count came to 186,069.

True end/overall VN thoughts

After reading through the true end, I kind of wish I had done only this route or at least this one first. This route fixed some of the issues I mentioned in the other route since the new scenes add more info about Shirohime’s childhood, her tutor makes an appearance, etc. All the new info makes the final reveal a lot stronger. I didn’t think the other route was bad but the other one did feel more like a bad end in comparison. The new info by making the true end choices strengthens the narrative a lot.

The true end choices were really nice for the new CGs too. All of the kimono CGs were absolutely beautiful. The overall story is a lot happier when making these choices too since in the other ending, Shirohime was coughing up the blood-like ink to “fix” the stories.

I liked the way they tied all of the fairy tales into the ending bits too. The ending itself was a little cheesy but I thought it was great still. A perfect way to end a fairy tale type story.

The part where they were talking with the passenger got me for a second too. I was really surprised that they had her die until they mentioned she lived until she was 52.

I wasn’t really too sure about that either or if they meant to have any implications there. In the three endings, the final train scene changes a bit and the passenger mentions how Kurofude (or whatever his real name is - don’t think they mention it) looks young in the two endings but in the true ending the passenger doesn’t say that. He he should be relatively old too since Shirohime already passed away at age 52. It feels like based on what ending you get, Kurofude changes a lot on the train (age, way he looks based off of text descriptions etc). Not sure if the train is supposed to be a “real” place either or something metaphorical.

The passenger also mentioned that Kurofude looked a lot older in the dream so not sure what to make of it. Either way, I still liked the ending a lot. The final CG was great as always.

image
image1327×746 183 KB

Thoughts on the VN regarding the difficulty

This is easily the hardest thing I’ve read. I’ve been on vacation the past week so I had a lot of free time to spend on this but on a character count per hour basis, this is probably the longest its taken me to finish any of the VNs we’ve read in the club. There are a lot of scenes that feel overly wordy with a ton of descriptives.

Felt like there were a lot of rare words used throughout too. My yomichan has a frequency list thing and a lot of the words were in the 25k-30k range. Having to look up so many words killed the flow for me at times. I probably would have enjoyed the flowery prose if I was more “fluent” but a lot of it was lost on me having to consistently look up the words. Thankfully I liked the story and characters so I was still able to enjoy reading this.

I’m not sure if this VN helped me too much from a learning perspective but it was a nice story so still worth the time & effort.

I’m glad this VN ended up winning the last vote, it was a fun read! I think its my favorite VN so far that I’ve participated in for the official picks.

2 Likes
15

I’ve begun tonight and I’m at the first choice, hesitating between the normal end and the true end…
I don’t usually do normal or bad ends in VN, I go directly for true / good endings.

I may begin with the true end, and see then if I’m tempted by continuating the story with peeking at the normal end.

First impressions

The art is great in this game, really unique. I’m looking forward to seeing more.
As for the voices, I’m really glad the heroine is voiced, but unfortunately, it’s another little girl voice as in a lot of VN… I like Kurofude voice a lot more.

I’m not fond of the amnesia trope, so I’m willing to quickly discover how was and how will unfold the relationship between the two protagonists. There seems to be a lot of confidence and support between them, so I hope i’ll see a beautiful friendship blossoms.

Early thoughts on difficulty

When I started the game, I immediately wondered how it was for the members of the club who chose to read the game in japanese (I read it in english with the japanese voices), because even in english, the language is really rich and poetic, in formal register… Now I know :grin:
However, the voiced sections are not so difficult, and I could already grasp some vocabulary words or recognize some sentence structures, so for now, it’s a nice stroll.

3 Likes
16

I’ve finished the visual novel ! :blush:
As planned, I only played the true end. I prefer not seeing how it can end bad or less well^^

What I liked

I loved the art in the game, and particularly the colors, which I found stunning :heart_eyes:
I would have like a little more animations for the faces, the bodies and so on, but like that, it was already really enjoyable.

I loved how the relationship between the protagonists unfolds along the story. We saw them first in the tales, then in the storage in the childhood memories, and then at the end when they are adults (btw I found the scene when she wakes up incredibly gorgeous and moving). It’s a triple bond :face_holding_back_tears: (and that’s the childhood friend trope for you, my friends. Yes it’s one of my favorites :yum:)

I was deeply moved by how the tale resonate with some important questions the heroine needs to reflect on, like death, resignation, love, free will… It really gave a sense at those stories. I only knew the Urashima Taro tale, which I happened to read in a graded reader book, and when I read it, I thought it didn’t make a lot of sense (to me at least). But the interpretation done by the heroine is really moving and makes totally sense in this context. Finally, the sense tales have is the one we give them.

What I liked less

I’m not really into horror stuff, so I am not fond of the Adabana spoilers or some scenes of the Urikohime to Amanojaku tales :face_with_spiral_eyes:

The relationship between Shirohime and Kurofude was really well written and shown, but I was a bit disappointed by the others. The grandfather is never shown in the memories. We only know the books and the storage are his. The tutor doesn’t have a name and don’t really have interactions with the heroine in the memories. As for the bethroded, he shows up at the turn of a page when nobody expected him (but to be fair, I liked a lot the relationship developped afterwards between him and the girl).
The sister is the only character on which we have more informations, and her relationship with the heroine is moving too.

Ah and : the end in Adabana on the various paths of death was too long to my taste.

What about japanese ?

As for my japanese learning with this VN : I was happy to have a glimpse into japanese folklore literature.

I didn’t learn any new words apart “ink” and “brush”, but it’s not because I understood it all :sweat_smile: It’s more because I was so into the story that I didn’t think about using

Blockquote

my dictionnary. And also because the english itself was difficult (english is not my native language so I struggled with some formal parts of the story).

TL;DR

I loved this game. I found it gorgeous with a nice bitter-sweetness.

I was really moved by the internal struggles of the heroine (and at the end by her struggle against the illness), but also by her relationship with the boy, which seemed very deep.

The interpretations of the tales, which escort the heroine thoughts, also stroke a chord with me. The back and forth between the stories and the thoughts of the heroine are very well written, I think.

Well, now I’m going to read your impressions on the VN !
Thank you for this game, it was really a good reading ^^

3 Likes
17

The true end is definitely the highlight of the VN so I don’t blame you. I kind of wish I had played the true end first instead of the normal end cause I think the story ends up flowing a lot better following that path.

Reply to spoilers

It was worse in the normal end since the tutor makes like no appearances whatsoever but she shows up in a few of the flashbacks when you follow the true end. I think it would have been nice to expand on Shirohime’s relationships with everyone a bit more but with the way the tales are told, it links back to her relationship with everyone so it wasn’t a big deal to me. Better to be short than drag on I guess :stuck_out_tongue:

Some of those scenes surprised me. Especially the first tale, I was not expecting all that stuff to happen to the dog. I was even more surprised when I looked up the original tale and they were being mostly faithful to it.

I’m glad you enjoyed the game! The art and storytelling is really beautiful in this one.
I want to read other Liar-Soft games eventually. They all have really nice/unique art like this one but I think I need to improve my jp more first so I can appreciate the flowery prose better next time.

3 Likes
18

I’m finally able to read properly every day and started the VN again recently. I just reached the first choice, since you mention that, do you think I should do 現 instead of 夢 first? Not sure if someone else read the other ending, haven’t read most of this thread yet until I read a little more and can start opening things. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
19

Yeah in retrospect that is what I would have done. The 夢 ending isn’t bad but this is one of those games where I think you’re fine reading only the true end. The story ends up being more impactful knowing all the info the 現 route gives.

1 Like
20

Alright, I’ll do that then :slight_smile: thanks! I’ll still read the other end afterwards just out of curiosity and completion.

1 Like