Finished just in time for round three! Overall thoughts is that I’m fine with the series. It’s not going to be an award winner, but I’m enjoying it enough for what it is and just have to accept that the plot stuff probably won’t be that good moving forward. I think I’ll give this one 7.5/10 Mostly fine, but I wouldn’t really recommend it to someone unless they’re specifically looking for this kind of thing.
spoilers
I think I had the opposite perspective on VNs, where so many seem to emphasize interpersonal relationships and character stories that I generally don’t have much expectation for the plot. And 9-nine is leaning into that. I don’t actually think the supernatural elements are problem, but the execution of the plot is. For instance the encounters with Rig Veda and the first battle with Ghost lead to a pretty big attitude adjustment in the cast, put bluntly a lot of character development. Things like Sora getting scared, but confronting her fears to save Kakeru and such.
The problem I see with it is that the authors are focused too much on those big character moments that everything else is presented as an afterthought. Things like the town lore or even explanations of what’s happening tend to happen either just as or after needed. I complained about it in the last thread about how the gang getting together in the end was weird and unsurprisingly they took the most convenient solution to things:
Which is honestly frustrating, it’s disregarding Chekhov’s gun* in that Sophie explicitly warns that Sora’s powers might not be fully cancelled, things will take time, and people might not get memories back… and what happens? Yuuki mentions the sensations of losing some memories and that’s about it. Everything is happy ending and there’s no consequence.
* This idea is a bit contentious in itself, but the impression I’m getting is that they’re going too far in ignoring setup and cohesive presentation of information to audiences. Whenever information is shown it feels kind of random as whether or not it’s relevant, and it makes the deus ex asspulls feel worse.
Getting back to characters I’m actually happy with Ghost. I’m a bit sad that she couldn’t develop into a more rounded character, but considering she ended up a disposable pawn for an episode it wasn’t bad. She played her part and drove the main cast into action. However, I really hated Takamine in the end. They spent most of the time playing him off as some sort of chuuni idiot, but then he actually becomes a villain at the end trying to get revenge… while muttering what sounds like more chuuni shit. Like, make up your minds writers. What were you trying to do with this character? Maybe something will come up now that Yoichi is apparently getting involved, but at most I feel like it’ll be more in post retconning at best. The kind of crap that’s like “oh he’s been secretly maneuvering this whole time, le gasp~!”
To me it’s just another trope. The really nice friend who always helps out was actually the bad guy all along or whatever they want to call it. Even if they play it well it just feels disappointing and I feel like it’s already undermining my impressions of the Yoichi meeting Rig Veda scenes. Admittingly it’s just wild speculation on my part from a tiny teaser I was pretty exhausted reading, but… I just don’t see this being particularly great even if they handle it well. I like see the cast acting as friends and helping each other, having Yoichi being something else just turns the situation back into a taco party.
I’m a little excited in that she doesn’t seem to be a straight お嬢様 and that exploring her character will probably be reconciling whatever is going on between her personalities and inner/outer thoughts. They’ve done a good job with a lot of the character development so far, so I’m at least a little optimistic that they’ll do something interesting with her.
language stuff
According to steam I spent 37 hours on this one, a little under 4x the average on VNDB. I was a little disappointed at first because it was almost as long as the time spent on Episode 1, but then I realized this was also like 33% longer. Plus I’ve idled a good bit in both.
However, I don’t think my real progress this time was in speed, but in endurance. Initially my sessions were around 5k characters, but with the catch up period I was doing 8-12k without too much issue with my longest single session at 18k immediately followed by 13k lol. Its tiring and time consuming, but doable for me. I can’t say it was healthy to stress myself out doing that, but I have a lot more confidence tackling readings now.
I’ve been a little inconsistent about doing new lessons on JPDB with the medical crap in my life, but progress for this VN ended at
I think this helped me understand some of the arguments I’ve read in the past better. Probably the first and most important point is that the 80/20 rule is in full effect here. Proportionally the amount of vocab needed to get decent coverage is pretty low all things considered. The word list frequency approach also helps as it tends to focus on words that have meaning and not just common words (eg. core nk decks). In the last episode I pointed out 髪飾り and for this one I think I’ll go with 超能力. I’m still able to spot a lot of connections between what I’m studying and reading despite getting to a point where the new words are down to frequency 5. For beginners that want to get into native material like this ASAP I think it’s a much better approach than WK, core decks, etc. but at the same time still has room to integrate with those methods.
Speaking of WK, one of the things that drove me nuts with it was how lessons never seemed relevant to what I was reading. I would see people claim you only need about 800 kanji, with some claims even lower, but using WK I felt like my kanji knowledge was insufficient even when I was breaking 1k and above. For long form content, I can see now that that this kind of targeted study is fine. The kanji have the same problem as vocab where their frequency of usage is exponentially weighted towards the top so especially with a tool like Yomichan it’s much easier to study the actually common stuff first as words with unknown kanji are probably also low frequency words I’d be looking up anyway.
The last thing I think I’d bring up is that there was something of claim that reading sequential works from an author would be easier because of shared writing tendencies, vocab, etc. I’ll just leave this as my anecdote. I could feel it going from Episode 1 to Episode 2, but it’s really obvious looking at the stats for Episode 3.
In contrast here’s the stats for Loopers
It’s not like coverage is everything, but I feel like it’s a pretty good indication of relative ease of reading for beginners.
It all sounds a bit obvious when I write it out like this, but having finished our third VN as a club it’s really sinking in now.