9-nine- 9️⃣ (Visual Novel Book Club + offshoots)

Week 7 Planning (more spoilery than normal, seriously)

So the rest of the novel is 14,337 characters until the mandatory bad end.

5/01 is 7,060 characters
5/02 is 1,215 characters
5/06 is 6,062 characters

Honestly, there’s no real need for screenshots or anything. It’s really just a matter of whether you’d rather do this in one week or two.

To describe the plot 5/01 ends on a big question that drives the entire thing to the ending. You could stop before or after 5/02 if you want to divide this which really doesn’t matter. It’s mostly the protagonist thinking over the events of 5/01. I personally didn’t want to stop reading, but I will concede part of that was knowing from clicking through before that 5/06 was the last day. As soon as I realized that the second day was only like 1k characters I knew I was pretty screwed…

This ends the character count at about 80,807 for achieving the bad end.

I haven’t started working on the good ending yet, but it’s essentially rereading the novel while getting a set of 5 choices at key points in the story to change events (with four of those being in the prologue). I suspect it’ll be mostly skipping read text. The game even offers a skip to next choice button.

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Week 7 planning

Hmmm… So the options are either one long week of 14.3k or two short weeks of 7k each (I’d pair 5/02 with 5/06). Personally I prefer the long week, as that would be 2k characters above the established maximum, while the short weeks would be 3k below the established minimum twice, but I’m also biased towards reading more so do let me know what everyone wants to do in this case.

Alright that’s handy. I suppose since we’ve already read things we shouldn’t count re-reading for new week content but that’s me supposing we’d skip text and not read it again (because what’s the point if we have it fresh anyways). What’s everyone’s opinion on this? Or at least the ones opening these spoiler sections, which is probably just you and I :joy: .

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14k this week (about 11.5k average overall) or 7k for two weeks (about 10k average overall)

I’m happy with either choice for this week. My reading ability has improved drastically with this VN so I lean higher, but considering the averages look within our planned range either way the only downside would be curiosity and cliffhangers. For those who didn’t want to read the spoilers, I’ve advanced pretty far in the story and those were the best break points.

As for the future content…

Planning

I’m definitely on team skip read text. The choices are fairly small, so my suspicion is that it’s going to result in scenes getting replaced with a new one that probably adds a couple thousand characters for each choice. For example, the first choice in the game is all the way on the very first day during the festival where Kujou is cosplaying and getting swamped by people taking photos. Kakeru gets the option of either leaving without doing anything or trying to help. So this might alter the bit at the cafe later where Kakeru mentions having mostly had no contact with her or when he talks about things with Yoichi at school. Or those scenes could stay unaltered and we get a short bit where she says thank you. Regardless it’s probably pretty obvious (more so with the yellow text) that there was a divergence from what we read just a few weeks ago and the choices themselves are probably a good reminder of what happened regardless.

Since I had fast forwarded though the story before to get an idea of how many days were on the calendar I’ve actually been referring to a guide to get the bad end this whole time. If you’re curious here’s the link: 9-nine- Episode 1 Walkthrough (Palette / Sekai Project / Denpasoft) - Otaku Lair

But I’m just speculating at this point. Maybe I’ll start this weekend and find out it’s totally different from my expectations. The only thing I’m really not cool with is if we end up spending weeks re-reading the same old content. That would probably be worse than that middling section of Loopers that went full slice of life.

Edit: I should probably mention that JPDB lists this novel as 142k based on extracted scripts. Loopers was a bit shorter by our counts and the JPDB script includes r18 content so I’m going to guesstimate we have about 35k or so left to go overall.

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I admit if we’re close to the first end I prefer finishing it completely rather than splitting it in half, especially if the next day ends up being extra spicy. Unless there are differing opinions, let’s make it tentative and go with that for now at least to get the thread up. Does any of the pics from the spreadsheet correspond with this endpoint? Just to keep the format, but not that we need it anyway since it ends things very clearly.

Future weeks

Oooh okay hold on, I think I’m misunderstanding this. So when we reach an end, the game starts over and then it gives you different choices to pick from, but it still goes gradually from the beginning and depending on the choices you pick eventually as you read everything again you would have new text here and there, right? But if we use the skip to the next choice we would miss that text. That’s certainly unideal, now that I think of it, we’d lose some flavour and small details or potentially big details or new info. The challenge then becomes how can we make it engaging enough so that we don’t have to read the whole thing again but we still can divide every week neatly into a character count and not make it a complete mess at the same time :thinking: . Well, now that’s a different beast :joy: . I suppose we have at least one whole week to plan how we want to do this. I wish there was an option to skip to the next unread text, but unless I’ve missed it there only seemed to be one to skip to the next choice right? If we could skip to unread text it would make it super easy…

The guide you posted marks two ends, the one we’ll get inevitably and the other one. I’m taking it that as long as we don’t reproduce the first one we’re good to go? Which I suppose it would be easy if we pick a different option from the development we’ve had so far. So the next thing is we reach the other end and that’s it, and then it’s a matter of reproducing it with the other options if we want to read any unread bits?

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I didn’t read the spoilers (I like to go in with as little information as possible) but I am okay with the longer week.

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Week 7 thread:

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pics (massive spoilers)

End of 5/01

End of 5/02

End of 5/06

I’m not sure if I can get a picture for. I’ll include what shows up for me, but IIRC the first time I saw this I actually got the end credits and there might have been an extra line leading into restarting. So because I’m technically on a replay things are messed up for me. I’ll put two images, the first is a super massive spoiler of the last line of story dialogue and what happens (seriously, seriously do not look at this unless you are cool with having story ruined) the second one (black screen) is just a choice box…

Future Weeks

There is if you remember what happened during the setup…

So there’s an option in in the System settings for recoloring read text (makes it yellow while unseen text is white).

And in Message settings is a text skip mode that sets it to skip all read (yellow) text

So I started the new game with those settings enabled and pressed F to fast forward through all the read text and got to the first choice in a few seconds (first time replays might not have the options colored)

The skip button got disabled when I hit new dialogue. I didn’t count the lines, but there was some new dialogue after this that was maybe a few hundred characters until I got back to yellow text and the skip button was enabled.

For all of this I just used the >> (F) button to Skip, but there’s also an option to go back to or forward to the other choices. This might be a convenience feature for people doing things blindly on their own to get the good ending.

Doing this brings up a dialogue box which hard cuts to the scene (where as the normal Skip is like a fast forward).
image

I’ll have more details later, but I don’t want to go too far now as now it’ll be impossible to tell apart what I haven’t read when I actually go back to read this later. I’m not sure if every case will just be a few different lines like this, or if there will be more scattered throughout. Once I tackle this in earnest I’ll give a better explanation and try to figure out the easiest way for people to progress through this. I suspect that at some point in May it will just be entirely new text as if we had selected choice and got on Route B (If you know there’s a mandatory bad it’s obvious that you’re in once you hit a certain event).

That’s more or less what it seems like to me. I don’t remember reading anything about a neutral ending or hidden content, so I think it’s just good or bad side. If you approach the choices from the perspective of an eroge it’s also super obvious (help her, walk her home, protect her… etc.). I used the guide to be certain I wasn’t accidentally reading something from the “good” events of the story, but it’s all pretty hard to screw up if you think of “nice guy wants to date Kujou” for every option.

Edit: (massive spoiler)If you don’t get the same black screen I did you’ll also know you’ve finished because there’s a new title screen with Kujou missing…

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Okay I’ll be honest I’m not opening the massive spoilers :joy: :joy: . I know that I’ll regret if I open any of it (I still read the text for the most part though). Let’s go without screenshots this week :stuck_out_tongue: .

Sorry you went through all the trouble to find them for me, just know that I appreciate it a lot though ;-; .

Future weeks planning

Ooohhhh okay that makes sense. I was looking at the system screen but not at the message screen :upside_down_face: me dumb, pls forgib. Well that makes it manageable then! Back to easy week plannings, we follow the unread text and stop at the mark we want just like we have now.

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No worries. I’m doing this in part because I know I’m ok with getting spoilers for this VN in particular and also because it’s helping me to keep ahead on the reading for the week. If we end up reading the other episodes I don’t mind keeping it up as long as life allows for it.

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Yeah that’s completely fair. In all honesty I’d be at the same spot if I actually made a serious attempt at organising this as I probably should since I’m the one currently putting up the threads, so if anything I should apologise that I haven’t been doing it myself. I actually enjoy these planning bits to make it a bit easier for the rest, and precisely because of that I appreciate a lot the help you’re offering with all this.

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Week 8 Planning

So this week I ended up reading about 14,460 characters into NG+. This one’s going to be a little awkward to explain, but I should probably start talking about NG+ overall.

It’s pretty much what was speculated before. There are four decisions to be made that cause alterations to the story. Most of them are small, capping out at a few hundred lines. There were a couple exceptions, specifically 4/18 replaced half of the day for 3.5k characters with 4/21 and 5/01 having totals of around 1k characters of “new” text.

The quotes around “new” are because they leave what seems like unchanged content around the scenes. I’m guessing this is to help people skipping through everything to remember the context of what happened for the most part. In addition, these new sections aren’t always immediately after the choice. There’s a few instances where multiple new sections are added throughout the day. Honestly, the easiest way to handle this is the read text + skip approach. Just click the skip/fast forward button until it forces a hard stop at a choice or new dialogue then read like normal until the text changes back to yellow.

Once again we are in an awkward spot for actual breakpoints. The new choices and text take place on the intro day, 4/18, 4/20, 4/28, 4/29, 4/30, and 5/01. If you read all of this it’s about 8,144 characters with a a lot of repeated text. From this point on it’s more or less a completely different timeline with the following day* being 6,316 characters long. This would put the total at 14,460 for the week. There is one breakpoint in the new day we could add if was really needed, but I’m kind of hesitant on splitting that day up.

* Not giving the date as that is in itself a minor spoiler

As for my opinion on re-reading… I didn’t feel like it was necessary. There was one day I looked back to see if a certain thing was brought up and that was about it. Being honest, most of the “new” dialogue had me bored out of my skull anyway. I was pretty close to calling it quits for the new night, but forced myself to start the new day and I’m really glad for it because holy crap the vast majority of what happened before that was… disappointing.

Description Character Count Cumulative Ending Screenshot
Intro through 5/01 8,144 8,144
Part of new day 1,447 9,591
Finish new day 4,839 14,430

Aaand I’m apparently off by like 30 characters. Screw arithmetic. Being serious, my counts will probably be a tiny bit less accurate than normal. I noticed that when going back and forth and changing dialogue options that the game would sometimes forget that I had already read a line so some of the sections probably have an extra line added to them :woman_shrugging:

Edit: I forgot to include the choices. Over in Bustafellows we’ve been putting them blurred out so you can go down the line and unspoilerize them one by one. Apologies in advance if I transcribed them incorrectly.

Intro - フォローする
4/18 - じゃあ校門あつま集合で
4/20 - 九條を庇う
4/29 - 手を振り払う

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Week 8 Planning

You mean there are four choices in total throughout the playthrough with two possible options per? So like, two choices, one that ends up in the previous ending and another one that would give us the new one? What if we mix one and the other, there are choices more decisive than others?

I’ve read the choices you gave and will follow those, I’m just curious about the whole thing.

This is what I had in mind originally, organising the new week just taking the new text for the character count. So people are free to read everything again but if the week is already long enough, it might be overwhelming to read long chunks if we decide to skip. I think it’s the best option though, supposing we have the story fresh. We can always use the thread to ask for reminders if we don’t locate a scene as easily in any case. I’d do it this way but I’m not sure how the rest would want to do it.

Alright. I think after this previous week, the important part is reaching a different conclusion of the same point, right? Like, of course all text is important, but everything is working towards reaching that same point in a different timeline. I don’t mind another “long” week, more so if it would set us right at the same point we finished last week. The weekly character count only makes sense for the people reading together with the club until it concludes (people reading once it’s over can read at their own pace with no deadlines), and at this point so close to the end none of the people currently reading have specifically complained about longer weeks. There are no clear signs of people about to start reading this, and MissDagger has mentioned in another thread that they’ll temporarily drop this so they can focus on finishing other things for the time being, so that’s also why I’m a bit more carefree with the character counts at the moment, as we’ve expressed wanting to read a bit more and right now we have a situation where we can do in a controlled manner and not inconvenience anyone in the process (and it’s also a test for us to see if it’s a pace we can keep consistently for Episode 2 if we decide to start that eventually, see how we do on a regular basis). There’s the topic of the Bustafellows merge polls too which if I’m not mistaken would require us to be on the faster side. I’ve also taken Daisoujou into account, but sadly they haven’t been around since they wrote back then. I really hope they’re doing fine.


On another note, didn’t have great sleep today so forgive me if I’m not remembering well, but the plan from the polls @MissDagger made the other day is that depending on what Bustafellows club want to do with their VN going forward we either keep reading separately or we merge back together right? So it would be convenient to start tackling that topic at some point soon to prepare for new nominations, to see how long we have to finish this one ourselves, to see if and how we continue with Episode 2 (which doesn’t need to be immediately after anyways if we don’t want), and so on. I have all episodes on my Steam wishlist in case a new sale comes, but I’m not sure if there would be one before the spring sale. A Steam sale before starting the next VN would certainly be very appreciated :sob: .

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Week 8 planning reply

Yeah I always just skip previously read text otherwise it would take forever to finish things (and I would also get bored rereading something that soon). In other VNs there is a “next” button that skips to the next unread text or choice (whichever comes first) and makes things a lot faster than pressing the skip button and waiting.

I think another “long” week is fine. At this point, there’s only like 4 of us actively reading and none of us have complained? :joy: Like you said, it’d be a good test for pace too in case we continue onwards with episode 2 or even a different VN since at some point it would be fun to try longer VNs but not be tied to it for forever due to pacing.

I tried out the deluxe edition that is sold on dlsite. It is considerably more expensive (they do have sales at times though) but it does have all 4 games in it. Anyways, I wanted to mention it because when I tried it I found out that all of the texthooking issues were fixed in that version for some reason. In the steam version I was occasionally having issues where short sentences would be copied over twice or the start of a sentence would be cut off etc. I played through all of last week on the deluxe edition and had none of those issues. That version supports 1080, has some new art and the sound mixing was also notably better.

I thought I’d mention it in case we do continue to read the rest of the series and people are getting annoyed with the texthook issues etc

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Week 8 Planning

Exactly. It’s fairly obvious which is good and which is bad, especially if you can remember what happened on the last playthrough. I’m not sure what happens if you mix and match, but I will say parts of the good route I’ve read so far seem dependent on having picked the good choices so my guess is that anything but all good choices result in the bad end.

I think we’re on the same page. Honestly, if you think back on what lead into the bad ending it’s probably an easy guess as what changes.

I realize now that I didn’t explain my thoughts in the last post, but I left the breakpoints like that because:

  • 5/01 - Ending here makes for a good catchup week if anyone was behind or needed a break. The content getting back to that point would be the equivalent of an anime recap episode. However, this also means that there’d be very little to discuss in the thread.
  • Part of new day - Purely to get closer to the 10k mark. There’s pretty much no question what’s going to happen afterwards so I feel like stopping there would have been more of a tease.
  • Finishing new day - New content wooo!

So really it’s easy week recap vs. longer week with better discussion or something kind of in the middle.

Given the relative popularity of Bustafellows and the otome stuff in general I feel like we’re better off considering them the main club and treating 9-nine as an offshoot. I think it makes more sense for the bigger group to do what they want as it’s mostly a handful of us here doing our own thing, especially if we end up reading more of the 9-nine one way or another.

Ah, I forgot to test that. There is a skip to next choice, but I don’t know if that means it also skips over all the new “unread text”. Tbfh, not much changes so I doubt someone would miss out on much that couldn’t be summarized with a few sentences in the discussion threads… However, the skip read text button was essentially a quick fast forward. I didn’t find myself waiting all that long to get to new sections.

The steam sale is probably close by anyway: Steam :: Steamworks Development :: Changes to Four Major Seasonal Steam Sales + Upcoming Seasonal Sale Dates

At the current pace I’m speculating 3-4 weeks of reading left in 9-nine: episode 1 which would end right before the next sale. Personally speaking I think I’m going to buy and read the rest of 9-nine regardless of what the VN clubs choose to do. My JPDB experiment has been a huge success and continuing with more of the same series will be beneficial for now.

That said, there’ no guarantee 9-nine would be on sale in the spring… Maybe I should have bought episode 2 last time… whoops.

Edit: Now that I’ve said this in multiple places watch Week 9 be the ending just to piss me off.

Ooof, now I kind of regret not getting that one. I’ll put up with the steam version just because it kind of works in my environment for now. While jank, I’ve changed my extension order to this
image
which works probably 90% of the time. Every now and then I’ll have to delete a line and force a reparse by pressing the “J” key which tricks the game into re-rendering the same Japanese dialogue. However, it does have issues with certain things like characters saying ふふふ or the like. It’s not perfect, but imo miles easier than trying to say read a manga out of the beginner book clubs…

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:joy:
Starting with the ABBC tomorrow, let’s see if you’re right. Last time I tried, it was definitely too hard and unfun for me.

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Best of luck! I dug out a physical manga I had and reading it seems tolerable after the experience I’ve picked up with Loopers and 9-nine. I don’t think I could justify it from a learning a perspective (text hooks + yomichan are so nice), but I could see it being more fun.

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Week 8 planning

Alrighty! Skip it is then, going for another 14k character week c: Thanks for the input!

True. I guess I considered both the main club in my head :joy: . I was just wondering if there was an idea of merging and going for a single nomination, not sure what the results of the polls were, I admit I haven’t been following them :sweat_smile: .

That’s convenient :pray: .

That’s probably what I’ll do too, I’m enjoying it and unless it drops the overall vibe and becomes full eroge with nothing going on then I might drop it, we’ll see. But so far it’s interesting so I’ll continue.

Also what’s the JPDB experiment? >:D

Something tells me the character count is going to end up much shorter than what we all have in mind, just you wait :joy: :joy: .

Honestly I’ve continued to look for the perfect hook I mentioned a while ago and have been going with that, no issue whatsoever. The only thing is having to spend about 2 or 3 minutes to find it but after that it’s all good to go. At this point having Episode 1 on steam already I’ll probably continue just getting them there, and I feel like this way I can also quit if I suddenly don’t like where the story is going (which would be rare tbh, I tend to enjoy most stuff).

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Off topic on manga

If you read digitally you can use Mokuro in order to use yomichan and whatnot. It lets you scroll over text to either copy/paste words or just yomichan the word

example

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From what I’ve seen I’m pretty optimistic about things. I was hesitant before we started, but right now the series kind of fills like B-tier content for me. It’s not amazing, but enjoyable enough to have my fun. Since Episode 1 seems so heavily focused on Miyako I’m guessing the other VNs pivot pretty hard. The store page screenshots for Episode 2 looked very enticing me given what we’ve read so I’m low key excited.

I wanted to get back into studying properly after Loopers and decided to use JPDB’s word lists (sorted by frequency) + kanji cards instead of WK + mining. It’s been a huge success so far. After two months on a mostly fresh account these are my stats for our current VN:

As implied by that coverage number, having just the top 1k words specific to this VN has gone a long way. The word lists are also pretty different sorted by frequency within the novel compared to frequency within their corpus (similar to the core k decks). I had a decent advantage given my prior studies, but this was much more relevant to our reading material overall and helped me uncover weaknesses I wasn’t spotting with the other methods.

The end result was that I’ve had a relatively easy time reading episode one so far with my biggest weakness being a lot of the casual speech and grammar related stuff (thanks yomichan for handling hard vocab!).

Check if your install path is in Program Files or Program Files (x86). When I wiped my pc I used the default installer and Textractor wouldn’t save my hooks. As soon as I dug out the portable install that was on a different drive things just went back to working.

manga

That is very nice. I’ll keep it in mind if I find myself reading another manga in the future. The other issue I had was that digital manga tends to be poorly scanned and compressed in official and unofficial channels, but after trying out their demo it looks like they’ve mostly sidestepped that issue. I don’t want more physical stuff like books in my home anymore, so it was a bit upsetting to see how much more readable the print versions were even if some of the kanji and furigana was clearly meant for ants.

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Week 8 Thread:


@ccookf I have to leave at the moment but I’ll make sure to answer later when I come back :slight_smile: . If you can when you have a moment let me know if the info in the new thread is correct and I haven’t missed or misunderstood anything ^^ . I don’t trust my lack of clarity today ;-; .

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