9-nine-ここのつここのかここのいろ 9️⃣ Week 2 (Visual Novel Book Club)

This is being read as part of the Visual Novel Book Club. Another VN, BU$TAFELLOWS, is being read at the same time, feel free to join both clubs!

Home Thread Here!

Current week start date: January 6, 2022
Previous week

Pace

We’re aiming to read approximately 10-12.5k characters per week! A suitable enough end point will be selected each week (feel free if you have a texthooker and it hasn’t been posted yet!) and posted within the thread. @ccookf has helpfully begun compiling a spreadsheet to display progress through the days:

Progress spreadsheet

This week's endpoint, early 4/20, two screenshots since the first is slightly spoilery

Week 2 2

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 still reading but haven’t reached this part yet
  • I’m no longer reading

0 voters

6 Likes
pure joy

I really wanted to like Sora, but I think she said she deleted a 300 hour MonHun save which is just… that better be a joke. Despite her awesome interactions, I’d still say the teacher is my current favorite character. One one hand she feels like a bag of old tropes, on the other it’s handled well enough that I get the impression of her being a reasonably hands-off teacher. If nothing bad is happening or will happen, why fret about it? I appreciate that sort of attitude.

So that statue… ooof. Nails coming off like that makes me think of those torture scenes in movies. If this is what the description meant by “Help Miyako and Kakeru track down a superpowered serial killer before they strike again” it’s definitely an interesting hook for setting up the case. At least one that makes me really dislike whatever is causing this. The police totally not giving a care until it blows up… also a little too real. Kakeru is the man for putting up with that crap, though.

Parfait Queen… not going to lie I’m a little excited to see what happens with her. Given the episode structure I’m wondering if she has the potential to be a heroine in future episodes. So far it doesn’t seem like this VN is one for putting effort into background/side characters. Also, 「コーラうめぇ」:joy:


^ Another, Yoichi fan I see…

Getting home the virus gag was just freaking solid. I love how they cut out the bgm just for Sora’s screaming and immediately went back to ‘normal’. For a while I was treating Kakeru as some sort of self-insert character, but it’s nice getting moments like this that make his personality… well, exist. I thought it was interesting early on that he had ‘normal’ reactions to the cosplay event in day one and sending Kujou home, but (semi-spoilers for the game) it turns out those are forced dialogues for the mandatory first time playthrough, they’re not showing the choices which makes me think they’re not super indicative of his character unlike scenes like this.

OMG the stuffed animal! I was going nuts trying to figure out where I had heard the voice before. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever looked into a voice actor on my own. Turns out she goes by the names “Arai Satomi” or “Ari-san.” and played Kuroko from Railgun and Beatrice from Re:Zero among others. Niiiice.

I’m starting to think I’m going to have an adult-only tangent every week, but JPDB character counts are probably inflated with adult content. I got the word 精液 in my vocab at a surpringly high frequency (like 13 times total, iirc). So there’s probably a good chunk of text we won’t be getting in the all ages version.

4 Likes

Story starting to get interesting.

I had used Textractor to read Loopers, but this was my first week actually setting up Yomi-chan and Clipboard Inserter and it’s definitely way more convenient like this for look ups since I run into many unknown vocabs. Struggled a bit with Clipboard Inserter though, the Firefox version didn’t work properly. Thankfully it wasn’t terribly difficult to fix.

This week's content spoilers

I had completely forgotten by now what the synopsis for the VN was, somewhere in my head I was under the impression that this was going to be some light mystery story :stuck_out_tongue: Was very (and pleasantly) surprised by the turn of events during the bleeding statue scene.

I haven’t played that many VNs, but I found interesting that technique they use here showing the back of a character’s sprite when they are going away. It’s a nice and interesting touch.

My favorite scene from this week:

LOL

I’ve had mixed impressions of ぬいぐるみ characters in other stories, so here’s hoping this one is not of the annoying kind.

That was my understanding too. That’s definitely a line that should not be crossed >.<

4 Likes
Spoilers

It seems like the mystery is starting to pick up. I thought we were going to get more slice of life heavy stuff at the start but it looks like we’ll get a good amount of plot in the beginning too.

The whole thing with the girl turning into a statue is pretty interesting. That has to be an awful way to go out. Anyone else think the OST was kind of unfitting in some scenes? The song itself was fine but like when the nail came off and everything, I was expecting a bit more “horror” vibes. They also use the “dance dance dance” song a lot so far but that’s mostly nitpicking at this point.

I’m still enjoying the character interactions a lot (minus Yoichi :joy:). The parfait queen seems interesting although she kind of has an aura of someone who gets mad easily. I was hoping to get a dialogue with her but I’m sure we’ll see more of her soon. I’m hoping we see that お姫様 type girl again soon from last weeks reading (I don’t think we found out her name?). Her design looked the cutest so far I think.

I thought the voice sounded familiar too but when I looked her up, I realized everything I’ve seen her in, she is only credited with a supporting cast role. :sweat_smile: I think I recognized her voice as the fairies from Jintai though.

The game doesn’t seem h-heavy, so I would guess the all-ages version is probably 10-15k characters shorter than the 18+ version.

4 Likes

It’s also worth noting, that there are TWO all-ages versions of this game, and there are slight differences between them - but mostly in Episodes 3 and 4. The Steam version is a bit more cut than the Japanese all-ages version from Complete Edition by Palette.

I’ve summed up the differences in This post at Fuwanovel forums (hidden by spoiler tags) - there’s one scene missing from Episode 3, and some CG differences.

As for Parfait Queen’s heroine potential - she’s the heroine of Episode 4, so you’ll have to wait a bit :wink:

5 Likes

That’s an interesting set of differences. I can’t exactly fault them for censoring things a bit more especially with Steam’s inconsistent adult policies. I think the only censored VN’s I’ve actually played were Nekopara which… still felt pretty explicit with the dialogue way back then. Maybe times have changed.

****! If ya’ll don’t vote to continue this series I’m at least going to read it in English on my own time then. Actually, just go ahead and vote for Nekopara or something so I can commit sooner /s

5 Likes

Yeah. And also Palette’s complete edition came out later (and it’s in 1080p) - they deliberately prepared it as an all-ages edition from get-go, could not only cut but also prepare alternative versions of scenes or CGs, and - like you said - didn’t have to worry about Steam’s policy, while Steam version was done earlier by Sekai Project (who also did translation) - I guess mostly with the intent of being patched with H-patch anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

5 Likes

Ho boi I caught up just in time. I don’t have much more to add that hasn’t been said already and it’s a bit late so forgive me if I don’t add much to the discussion this time. I will join again as usual for the next one, this week has been pretty disorganised for me overall but should be good from now. I’m curious about where everything is going, the plot thickens! c:

Hopefully I can read early this week and see how easily we can manage the new stopping point.

4 Likes

Thanks a lot for keeping this going, really appreciate you all. No promises but I’m trying to get back to it, just finished this week 2 reading. I’m interested in where it’s going but I’ll save trying to make real (late) posts until I’ve eased back in another week I think.

Just a little rambling about myself

Arm is still on and off with problems but it hasn’t been specifically TOO bad with the computer itself. Kinda went through a period of being depressed along with it flaring back up and just couldn’t touch Japanese for a couple months, so I’m easing back into learning at all. Luckily restarting reading hasn’t seemed as bad as I expected.

5 Likes

Glad to see you around again :slight_smile: . Take your time, if you need anything at all do let us know. Luckily this VN has been pretty manageable in terms of finding out where to stop so our experiment with going purely by character count has been pretty successful IMO. Pretty reassuring for future VNs.

It’s also been manageable difficulty wise so far, so I’m sure that will help ease the process of gradually coming back to reading.

3 Likes