9-nine-はるいろはるこいはるのかぜ 9️⃣ Week 1 (Visual Novel Book Club, offshoot)

[rikaiwisdom]

This is being read as an offshoot continuing Episode 2. Episode 1 was originally read as part of the Visual Novel Book Club.

Home Thread Here!

Current week start date: May 26, 2023
Next Week (Week 2)

Pace

We’re aiming to read approximately 25k characters per week! A suitable enough end point will be selected each week and posted within the thread.

This week's endpoint: 25.8k

Mid 4/27.

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Scene transitions and character count (Steam version)

Location	Character Count
???	27
Kakeru’s home (Beginning of 4/26)	1 639
Street	2 124
School	3 733
Nine ball	4 783
Kakeru’s home	6 892
School (Beginning of 4/27)	10 918
Shrine	12 794
Kakeru’s home	19 771
Kakeru’s home (Endpoint)	25 753

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

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

[Daisoujou]

About halfway through the reading already, it’s going well. Just wanted to quickly say since we get the same or a very similar explanation of the anime and the like at the beginning of each episode – those parts are a little longer and more complex than a lot of the writing after, and I remember starting episode 1 being surprisingly hard. Obviously it helps that I basically know what it’s going to be saying now, but I’m definitely finding those parts a lot easier to read now than I was at the beginning. Big progress.

[Daisoujou]

I’m done! Hmm, this week…

Spoilers

It might just be safe to assume the game is gonna get worse when Rig Veda is around, heh. Again we have a chuuni deep dive plus the humor of just turning Kakeru into the stereotypical id of a teenage boy. The 胸 stuff (wonder how many times that word is used this episode…) being the general attitude around Haruka so far is a little unfortunate… that aside, I at least kinda found her more likeable here than I did in the past episodes, and the slow stammering didn’t bug me the way it previously had. I again appreciate that we got into things quickly; they seem to have shaken off one of episode 1’s biggest problems. The spy angle is ok but I don’t think I’m all that interested in centering Ghost as an antagonist again, assuming that continues through the episode. Who knows yet, though.

Yuuki’s magic chant nonsense is one of the hardest things I’ve “read,” if you could even give me that credit, yet in Japanese, so I’m a little scared of episode 4 now. Otherwise, not too hard this week.

I guess overall this week kinda continued what we’ve come to expect from the VN with all of us having reasonably similar takes on its pros and cons. Not totally unenjoyable to read in the end but… she’s just not Sora, y’know?

[adamstan]

Since we’re at Ep. 3, let me repeat my post about differences between two all-ages versions - Steam, and Palette’s Japanese-only Complete Edition - maybe it will be useful to someone

Summary - 2 CGs, one scene and one sprite variant missing from Steam version. Spoilerous details inside

• The CG for the scene where Kakeru influenced by Haruka’s power pushes her on the bed and starts touching her breasts is missing (replaced with white screen) and the text also seems to be shortened.
• Even though the text mentions Haruka wearing Kakeru’s shirt, there’s no sprite with her wearing a shirt - instead the one with her normal clothes is used. In the later scene, where she gives Kakeru a lap pillow after unbuttoning the shirt, it is also text-only in Steam edition, while in Complete Edition there’s actually sprite variant with the unbuttoned shirt (in adult version there was a h-scene with boob sucking)
  
  
  (Yes, those are the screens from the “All Ages” version - but I guess Steam wouldn’t allow that)
• The scene with the two getting together in a bath has been completely removed from Sekai’s all-ages version, while in the Complete Edition it’s intact.

@Daisoujou

she’s just not Sora, y’know?

Well, sadly, not everyone can be Sora

[AzusaChan]

Spoilers for this week

We started off with a recap which isn’t that surprising. I’ve used the same texthook page for this series without deleting anything, so I checked the recap lines and they were just all copy and pasted right from game 2’s recap up until the rig veda stuff. At least it made that part faster to go through having read it once before. On one hand it is nice to get a small recap so we at least know at what point in the story we’re going back to (no way I’d remember what was happening on 4/26 in the story) but it’d also be nice if they didn’t copy & paste the lines.

It was a nice surprise to see Haruka wasn’t as shy as she was in the previous episodes. I still don’t really have a strong opinion on her but I am glad her speech is more normalish now in pacing.

Plot wise I felt like this week was kind of silly. Kakeru’s first plan didn’t work so of course they had a backup plan that wasn’t mentioned. Once Yuuki showed up, I was like no way she was randomly tailing them, she’s apart of some plan too and sure enough he calls her up to thank her right after.
I don’t think a story needs to be unpredictable to be interesting at all, its far more important how they tell things but sometimes this game falls pretty flat there. All the 胸 stuff was pretty off-putting too. Hopefully its not a running gag this episode, I much preferred the comedy in Sora’s episode.

The additional info on Haruka’s powers was nice though, that she can basically make her fantasies become reality. I still don’t really understand her “other half” お嬢さま personality. They almost make it sound like they really are two different people and communicate internally but I don’t think that’s the case? She mentioned manga and whatnot, maybe she’s an otaku and wants to be like the お嬢さま in her shoujo manga so her powers turn her into that

@Daisoujou

Yuuki’s magic chant nonsense is one of the hardest things I’ve “read,” if you could even give me that credit, yet in Japanese, so I’m a little scared of episode 4 now.

Her chuuni talk is always the hardest part for me too. I always hate chuuni talk in VNs since it feels like random gibberish, I usually just try to understand the vibe and move on

[Daisoujou]

Spoilers

@AzusaChan

Plot wise I felt like this week was kind of silly. Kakeru’s first plan didn’t work so of course they had a backup plan that wasn’t mentioned. Once Yuuki showed up, I was like no way she was randomly tailing them, she’s apart of some plan too and sure enough he calls her up to thank her right after.

Oh yeah forgot to say anything about that but I had similar thoughts. The selective withholding there to surprise the audience is a bit cheap. All I was thinking at that point was that if this somehow isn’t a plan they contrived, then either this is going to be pointless when they explain themselves afterwards, or they have to invent reasons that Yuuki can’t be contacted or won’t believe everyone, and those would almost certainly feel forced.

[2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz]

This week's spoilers

Welp, I never thought I’d sympathize with Ghost’s reactions so much.

You can add my name to the textbox that has the character names there…

Exactly, まじかよ.

I guess it’s somewhat common in japanese media (or maybe media in general) to make someone act like an idiot and pass it as comedy, but it’s definitely not my cup of tea. Or coffee. Or any beverage for that matter.

アァン indeed.

… chibi Ghost can be kinda cute, I guess?

And just like that the whole “confrontation” or “infiltration” was a facepalm fest.

It was interesting to finally understand what is Kousaka-senpai’s power. Definitely feels quite overpowered, but I don’t think I mind much in this particular VN since the focus has not really been that much into the fantasy side of things, but we’ll see how it goes on later.

I agree with everyone that the two things bringing my reading speed to a crawl are… deciphering Yuuki’s chuunibyou spells, and waiting for timid-Kousaka’s seiyuu to finish reading her lines

One last thing… so we finally see some glimpse of Kakeru’s possible ‘power’ and it seems to be related to having memories of what happens in “parallel words” (or branches). Can’t see how else he’d be so sure of Ghost being the culprit. One strange thing though, is that he doesn’t seem to remember that Ghost was NOT actually the real owner of the Evil Eye artifact? I wonder if the game is going to address that inconsistency at some point.

[ccookf]

Umm, wow…

Spoilers

That was more or less most of what I was expecting over the course of the novel… in one week’s reading. It’s all downhill from here isn’t it? I’m glad they finally covered Haruka’s powers after teasing the details for so long. At a glance her situation seems like watamote, but way less cringe which at least gave me a good laugh. I can’t say the 胸 stuff was great, but in a way it was a little more believable to me than some of the logic the kids have been following in the prior episodes. Honestly, after the way some of the more plot oriented story beats have been handled so far I might actually prefer seeing the cast be dumb. I’m pretty cool with turning off my brain and eating trash as long as we’re not trying to pretend to be something better.

@AzusaChan

@Daisoujou

Yuuki’s magic chant nonsense is one of the hardest things I’ve “read,” if you could even give me that credit, yet in Japanese, so I’m a little scared of episode 4 now.

Her chuuni talk is always the hardest part for me too. I always hate chuuni talk in VNs since it feels like random gibberish, I usually just try to understand the vibe and move on

It’s hard, but thankfully she doesn’t pull it out all that much. I guess she hasn’t really talked that much, but I felt like Ritapon’s ratio of unreadable text was much higher.

@Daisoujou

The selective withholding there to surprise the audience is a bit cheap. All I was thinking at that point was that if this somehow isn’t a plan they contrived, then either this is going to be pointless when they explain themselves afterwards,

They’ve done it enough that I’m just going to assume it’s their style, but honestly I think it would have been better to just give a chronological telling of events instead. I really don’t like that a lot of writing for anime related stuff is so heavily weighted to the [outcome as a hook then explanation] style. It just doesn’t feel cohesive to me and gets pretty boring when scenes start breaking themselves down like Azusa pointed out with that example. I’ve definitely dropped a few WNs over this sort of thing in the past, although they were bad enough to make 9-nine look like a 10/10.

@2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz

so we finally see some glimpse of Kakeru’s possible ‘power’ and it seems to be related to having memories of what happens in “parallel words” (or branches).

I’m really not sure how I feel about his whole intuition shtick right now. IIRC, even Sophie was limited to information in the past/present of the other branches and couldn’t read future events despite that being her specialty. Giving Kakeru future knowledge seems kind of lame to me even if it’s some nebulous thing where he knows the answer, but not how he got there.

I will say going all the way back to 4/26 again is just frustrating to me. Especially with Sora’s events being not exactly route ending material I would have thought we’d finally get some forward momentum date wise instead of just repeating the same couple weeks over and over again. It feels like they took one of those bigger VNs where there’s multiple routes and a true end route you can see after finishing the others, but then just split it up as a linear story that happens to have parallel branches instead. If anything, that probably would have been better since we’d at least get to skip the stuff that’s more or less the same. siiiiiiigh

[adamstan]

@ccookf

It feels like they took one of those bigger VNs where there’s multiple routes and a true end route you can see after finishing the others, but then just split it up as a linear story that happens to have parallel branches instead.

That’s exactly what they did - they made a VN with multiple routes (and enforced playing order) - and then released each route as a separate “episode”, so you have to repeat four times what should be the “common route”

On the other hand - the overlapping bits in the beginning are short enough that it didn’t bother me that much - the stories branch out quite early.

But then I’m again being strongly reminded that apparently I’m quite easy to please when it comes to VNs, since many things you guys mention here as dealbreakers and crucial flaws didn’t bother me at all

[MrGeneric]

Alright, I’ve finally caught up! (Well sorta, I just finished the first week, and I’m starting the second week tonight, so I’m counting it!) It’s been a bit of a sprint, so it’ll be nice to take things a bit slower from here on and go at a more reasonable pace.

Story Comments

That said, guess we will see how things go from here, eh? I have to admit that I’m still a bit more partial to Sora than I am to any of the other characters at this point, and I don’t really expect that to change. Up to now, she has been the strongest character in the series for me. Sophie has been catching my interest more and more, though, to be fair – hopes that we figure out what her whole deal is kinda keeping me going as far as the “main” plot stuff goes, and I’m just enjoying the ride otherwise because, as we continue into this episode, it definitely seems that the main story beats are going to continue to be deus ex アホか (Edit: ばかな has a better ring to it… this is why I shouldn’t try to make clever jokes. I’m bad at them. ) type of events.

Definitely was in the same boat as Ghost this week, which… well, 呉越同舟, I guess.

The 胸 jokes definitely had me shaking my head a bit. The previous episode had some jokes that would normally make me do the same, but it was carried by the strength of Sora and Kakeru’s entertaining banter even when the jokes were kinda…well, ダサい.

But I am excited to see how Haruka develops from here. Already there are glimpses of some amusing character traits, so I’m excited for that. I’m also a fan of seeing her expression being a little more…well, more. The two previous episodes had her kinda flat. Though, I think that’s sorta by design. It seems that the heroines of each episode definitely get a little bit more attention in the expressions and such in the artwork, even just for the character portraits.

Either way, coming straight off of the Sora episode into this, I do have to chuckle a bit at this week’s ending – all about a strong declaration about not forgetting. The last episode, that was a bit…cooler declaration than how this week went, though.