Looks good! I’ll put in a quick guide with pictures for the settings so people don’t have to read the other thread.
Basic guide for skipping read text and clearing the first half of this week's reading
There are two major options that should be enabled to make this easy.
I’m not sure if “Recolor already-picked choices affects the second playthrough”. I’m technically on my third because of prep work I was doing before, but it shouldn’t matter as the choices are fairly obvious.
Read text will appear Yellow:
The bar at the bottom has three tools for navigating:
When an option isn’t available you’ll see a stop sign
appear in place of the cursor. The option itself won’t glow on hover if this is the case.
When using the “Skip” button it actually functions more like a fast forward that automatically stops on the last read line before a new choice or new text. From there advance the text as normal. “Skip” itself is pretty fast. Getting to the first choice only took about 7 seconds on my PC.
WARNING: If you toggle the languages via E/J the game will occasionally forget a line has already been read. Don’t be surprised if something yellow turns white all of a sudden if you do this.
My recommended work flow is to enable the above options to it’s easy to discern text you have already read and use the “Skip” feature. All choices in the story have new dialogue immediately after them, but the first line after a choice always seems to be the same as the first run and as a consequence appears as “read”. However, there are also bits of new dialogue separate from the choices so using the “Jump to next choice” option might skip that text. I didn’t think to test that, sorry!
Thoughts on this week's reading through 5/01
Previously I had known about the choices and started to question some of the characterization. I think I had previously made a comment admiring Kakeru’s not-my-business take on some things, but it turns out that was just the bad ending having a character not go out of his way to get in Miyako’s pants. I do appreciate that some parts of their relationship do feel a bit better overall. While I didn’t like Kakeru gushing even more about Miyako having little additions like the “nini’s burger is bigger than mine” scene went a long way towards showing that both of them are more interested in each other from the beginning. We already knew that Miyako kind of respected him for the attitude he took as a frequent diner at Nineball so it seems the new actions went just a tiny bit further in explaining her attitude towards him.
However, I was expecting more things to change. Last week the idea of Kakeru’s power being time control was brought up. After mulling it over a bit more that would certainly make a mandatory bad end more plot relevant, but the NG+ here doesn’t seem to indicate that he has any knowledge of the bad end… but I don’t think that theory is completely off the table from this alone. When starting over again I forgot that the name of that shit anime was something along the lines of <fancy cycle of reincarnation buddhist term: mobeus ring>. So maybe there’s more to this theory than it just being a matter of Kakeru’s power.
I’m sure most of you picked up on it, but there was one major change this time around in that the improved relationship between Miyako and Kakeru resulted in the discussion with Sophie about killing the boy never happened. Kakeru never knew this in the good ending, so it really was that memory which set Kujou off on a suicidal war path in the bad ending. The logic behind 5/01 isn’t any better, but now I just see it as bad writing to ensure that Kujou’s mind reading occurs and that they slide in Noa again before she’s irrelevant to the story. I really did enjoy her admonishing Kakeru after Miyako gets extremely embarrassed this time around…
The new day
I’m a bit surprised that the bathroom scene was brought up on 5/06 instead of being a new drop in for 5/02. We can guess how 5/02 actually went, but seeing that date change surprised me a bit. If I remember correctly, it was Sora that pointed out the events were happening weekly in the bad end. Since Kakeru and Miyako are doing their own thing today there’s a good chance we’re going to see a third victim tomorrow, right?
As for the the rest of this day… what am I supposed to say? Cute as hell? I assumed it was going to go this way the moment Yoichi went into wingman mode with “everybody” (no mention of the fan club this time), but seeing it play out was interesting. Just insert a lot of whining on my part on how hard this was to read. This section really seemed to confuse me with omission, topic changes, and general grammar stuff biting me in the rear. There were a lot of times I’d interpret things in a completely incorrect way and had to reread parts a few times to follow along. I still feel like their relationship has advanced a little quickly, but I’ve seen worse in real life so I’ll let this slide.
And with that we’re in completely new territory. No more beating around the bush with weird spoiler warnings and stuff… probably. Given how things have gone with Kousaka and Yuuki I’m assuming they won’t play a big role moving forward, but maybe I’ll be surprised. What’s going to happen with our favorite 魔眼 user? Will another civi die? Will Kakeru finally get laid? Find out next week on…