9-nine-ゆきいろゆきはなゆきのあと 9️⃣ Week 8 [END] (Visual Novel Book Club, offshoot)

[rikaiwisdom]

This is being read as an offshoot continuing Episode 3. Episode 1 was originally read as part of the Visual Novel Book Club.

Home Thread Here!

Current week start date: September 8, 2023
Previous Week (Week 7)

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: 24.9k

Finish the VN.

Choices to follow

Once again I don’t think choices matter at all, so you’re probably completely safe picking the order you prefer, but I followed the guide regardless (I thought the guide order was cool) and this is its order:

No.	Choice
1	【恋人と迎える朝】 ： 希亜の枝
2	【一人じゃない】 ： 春風の枝
3	【忘れないでね】 ： 天の枝
4	【犯人の自死】 ： 都の枝

Scene transitions and character count (Steam version)

Location	Character Count
Kakeru’s home (Beginning of 4/29)	0
Kakeru’s home (Beginning of 5/17)	1 276
Rooftop	1 276
Kakeru’s home (希亜の枝, day 5/01)	3 770
Station (春風の枝, day 5/07)	4 085
Kakeru’s home (天の枝, day 5/16)	4 525
Shrine (都の枝, day 5/10)	4 903
Rooftop (current branch)	5 639
Kakeru’s home (5/01)	17 774
Station	18 541
Restaurant	18 905
Station	20 828
Kakeru’s home	21 025
Station	23 175
Date	23 874
Post credits	24 266
End	24 928

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

[AzusaChan]

Spoilers

Hmm I kind of have mixed feelings on the ending. On one hand, it was cool to see the roles finally reversed and Kakeru just killing Yoichi over and over but at the same time, I wasn’t really into the whole power leveling thing going on.

I didn’t really understand how the illusionary body thing worked near the end with all of the girls. If I understood right, he brought their souls over via the world’s eye? It sounded like he was able to use their powers as a familiar due to the way the worlds eye worked, I’m not sure if he needed their soul to be over there too to use it or if they were just there to make the scene more emotional.

I don’t know if Takamine carries over any memories from the previous branches but I did find it annoying how he kept helping Yoichi no matter what. The dude has killed him on two different occasions and has no feelings for him. Stop trying to be on his side

The scene between Noa and Kakeru near the end was funny/cute when she was talking about the other branches. I thought they were just not going to mention him and Sora’s branch at first but it was funny when she brought it up. That has got to be a weird feeling for Noa to hold all of those memories.

I found it kind of weird that they reached out to Yoichi in the end after Iris died. He’s not a threat now but the cast has confirmed he’d basically kill all of them if he could get away with it but they still try to be friendly with him.

The series ending on a cliffhanger lame. I thought this was originally supposed to be a complete 4-game series but Sophie telling the player that there was one more branch they had to take care of and then the game ending was not what I was expecting. It looks like its the bad end from game 1 where Miyako dies, I’m guessing we’ll have to stop that from happening in the extra episode? The VNDB description says the game contains after stories for each of the girls, so I wonder how that will even work.

Overall thoughts on the series

I think the series was decent overall. I don’t think it lived up to its hype; game 4 has a really high rating on vndb and I see a lot of jp learners play/recommend this series but I think that might be due to the series being relatively easy language-wise. Looking back on it, its a bit sad that Miyako’s episode was basically a prologue for the series. The episode itself wasn’t bad but Miyako’s character never really got as in depth as the other 3 girls I feel like. She ends up feeling the most bland out of the main girls (while Sora is the best, of course).

My main issue is that I didn’t care for the villains or plot that much. The series reminded me of those battle shounen anime and I’ve never been a big fan of that stuff. The whole “there’s someone even more evil behind this” thing didn’t do much for me either. It was interesting in ep 1 when things felt more mysterious but when it progressed from evil eye user → ghost → Yoichi → Iris, I just didn’t feel that emotionally invested since their motives & characters weren’t that interesting.

The slice of life and comedy scenes were good throughout though. I ended up enjoying the series the most when the plot was in the background and it was the main characters just goofing off or doing whatever. I think this was peak in episode 2 just because Sora’s character is incredibly funny.

I did enjoy reading it with the club each week and there were a lot of high points in the series when it was focusing on the characters. Thanks to everyone for running the club and discussing the games

[Daisoujou]

I'll wrap spoilers and overall together I guess

They really, truly just went with Yoichi being someone who didn’t want anyone to tell him what to do, huh? I mean yeah in a less ridiculous way that’s kind of a real personality type but… well alright. I dunno how seriously they want us to take that “I/he was this way from birth!” but it still rubs me the wrong way, and multiple people said it.

Otherwise not so bad of an ending given what we were working from. Thoroughly beating Yoichi over and over was nice enough. Those final designs reminded me a lot of Nocturne’s Demi Fiend, heh

The JRPG boss music was nice but eventually got tiring, might be the fault of my reading speed, haha.

Yeah the series was alright. You can tell they have a good knack for writing silly situations, joke setups, making cute CGs, etc. That was all great. Credit to the overall plot for having a lot of ideas and trying to explore its concepts thoroughly I think, though it’s still kinda whatever. Definitely too shonen for my tastes. It beats Loopers but not 999, and while I have an overall positive impression of the series having gotten through the other side, without the club there were stretches where I may have asked myself if it really felt worth continuing. I think the VNs I’ve nominated recently (Fata Morgana and The Great Ace Attorney) are leagues above this, still.

Poor Kujou; I borderline forgot she was a character. As soon as the others started taking more precedence she just couldn’t stand out at all. She’s a blank slate with a power, sadly.

It’s been cool seeing my improvement with how long form this club has been going. We have a few more weeks technically, but yeah, thanks a lot joining, really enjoyed your all’s company. Looking forward to Fatal 12 with most of you, Flowers with at least a few, and whatever we move onto next.

[2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz]

Final week spoilers

Welp, sadly the game disappoints by just going by what we expected and pulling super-powerful クソ兄貴 out of thin air with the whole ‘I can connect worlds and suddenly can use all powers I acquired in all branches, and also I am so gifted at using them’.

He invokes imaginary bodies for the 4 heroines, but they end up kinda just in the background rooting for him while they wait for the moment for Noa to strike. The moment where Iris almost kills ‘nine’ (us?) with Noa’s artifact was kinda weird, and felt off since the game has done a very lousy job in actually making us feel involved, since all the “choices” we make very forced (we just go “Wakatta” every time クソ兄貴 request something) and doesn’t feel like we really intervene (or matter) in the game at all.

I agree that there was some slight satisfaction at Yoichi getting continuously murdered, but still feels like him and Iris are soooo boring as antagonists.

The whole explanation of Satsuki connecting all Iris-es in every branch by using Sophie as a starting point pretty much went over my head - though I think the most glaring moment for me was when they are in the final moment about to strike Iris and Takamine cuts down her ability to teleport. I was reading the japanese and was like “I have no idea what on earth he is saying.” so I switched to english and it was “I have cut space itself!”… I was facepalming so bad.

The epilogue was probably the fun part of this week, though not that much. Sora as usual is the one that delivers:

Also, the worst kind of betrayal that makes all other betrayals in this VN look like child’s play:

How could you!?

Thoughts on the game overall

Agreed that the bad points on this VN are: shounen-showdown was too shounen, too cliche, they don’t even have the guts to have Sophie die in the end - they all talk about sacrificing many lives to defeat Iris, but the VN fails hard in making the readers feel that way at all. The usual cliché of “the hero is about to die and then out of nowhere some new power shows up, or unexpected ally appears, and so on” is just sooooooo over-used… I’ve seen anime since the 90’s use the same idea. It’s been more than 30 years, they can surely come up with something else at this point geeez

Overall though, I had fun. I can only feel bad at the wasted potential of having just a slice-of-life VN where Sora and クソ兄貴 just have these goofy moments, and then they slowly meet these other girls (and maybe Takamine) and we get to enjoy discovering several sides of them with slight tinges of romance. Would have been a total masterpiece.

Gotta say that reading this every week with everyone definitely helped my enjoyment quite a bit. I don’t know if I had gone past episode 2 if I hadn’t been reading this with everyone. I can imagine that part of the reason ep 4 is so highly rated is not because it’s particularly better than the other episodes, but probably because (A) it provides closure to the main plot, and (B) probably the people that disliked the VN and dropped it in previous episode never got to vote on this one, so the score is probably skewed a bit.

The art was very nicely done and very cute. Sasuga Pallette. The music was decent, though not varied enough for some of the scenes.

My score overall is 6/10, with maybe 7.5~8 for the ep 2

Huge thanks to everyone participating, and specially @rikaiwisdom for going through the trouble of finding us a good ending point every week. It’s highly appreciated!

[adamstan]

I see that the biggest drawback of this VN mentioned by most of people is overuse of battle-shounen cliches.
I guess I got lucky, since I haven’t watched or read those kind of stories much (almost nothing), so I haven’t got so tired of those tropes yet - and perhaps that’s why it wasn’t bothering me that much

[rikaiwisdom]

Finally got a proper moment to sit and write my thoughts on the series.

Overall thoughts on 9-nine-, full spoilers

I share most of the sentiment that has been expressed before, really. Personally I expected more of this episode as a whole, considering its rating on VNDB, and honestly I don’t think it makes it justice. Perhaps it’s a matter of subjectivity in how everyone sees ratings overall, but for me an average of 9 on a 1-10 scale is a work that is or almost is a masterpiece, a work that despite everyone’s preferences has achieved very high consistency with no major flaws or flaws that divided the fanbase significantly in a negative way. Now obviously a masterpiece would be a 10 but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a work with many votes that averaged a 10, as that would be super unnatural and biased. Judging art is extremely subjective after all.

Yukiiro is an 8.6 which is quite close to a 9, but I wouldn’t give it that high rating at all, personally. Matter of preference I guess? I think Episode 3 was overall better, or Episode 2. The romance in ep 4 was extremely rushed, went from 0 to 10 in the span of 30k characters, it failed to give a decent closure to whatever was up with Yoichi, and Takamine also ended up as a character that you don’t really understand either? I don’t know. The game followed its trend of being in the brink of despair and suddenly bringing up a very convenient way of solving whatever was troubling them in a matter of seconds with some overpowered solution. It’s not that the plot was bad or anything, it’s just that it felt very convenient in a way that doesn’t really make you feel very strongly for the characters because you already knew there was going to be some holy grail fallen from the sky with little effort.

Those are some of the reasons I don’t feel this game deserves that much rating. However, with that being said, I did enjoy it quite a bit for other reasons. Like we mentioned in some other occasions it’s evident that the strong points of the VN are the slice of life and overall silly banter that is going on all the time behind the plot. The voice acting was very nice -especially in characters like Sora-, the art was a bit lacking but otherwise super pretty in some of the CGs, the music was overall decent, and most of the romance (save episode 4 for me) felt okay too and fun to see develop. Miyako was unfortunately relegated to a very secondary position for most of the VN after episode 1, Haruka and Noa had a much more significant development than her. Takamine was a character that didn’t make much sense with always supporting Yoichi no matter what, but when he wasn’t excessively chuuni or picking questionable plot choices I honestly enjoyed his slice of life moments a lot, he ended up being one of the characters that made me laugh the most with his silly laughter and dialogue. Sora was great, Haruka I know felt a bit annoying for some of you but I personally enjoyed her character a lot as well. Some few moments throughout the VN actually felt emotional, despite the previous criticism, but not many. Most of the fighting scenes felt flat, but some I actually did enjoy, like the last one.

Overall the VN to me felt like something that was enjoyable to read, and enjoyed reading with you all a lot which added to the experience, but it was not something that closed in a fully coherent way. If it weren’t for the quality of the slice of life, I probably would’ve gotten bored of it as well, but those moments carried it super hard. I would probably give it a 7, personally. Fun, cute, entertaining for the most part but nothing amazing. I also think Zero Escape 999 was better, and it has lower rating on VNDB. Better than Loopers though. That means I would probably give Loopers a 6 at most, whoops.

In all honesty, like @2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz mentioned, I think the ratings for divided works on VNDB are automatically biased because people who got bored of the VN probably quit reading it much before reaching that point, which only leaves people who already like the VN a lot voting highly. There’s a difference of a thousand votes between ep1 and ep4, and from the 2k of ep4 even 500 of those reviewers voted a 10… And 700 voted a 9. They do seem inflated, but that’s my impression. I’ll take ratings on VNDB that aren’t single works with a pinch of salt from now on haha.

With all of the above said, it’s important to also consider that part of my impressions of this VN can potentially come from misunderstanding or not fully grasping certain things. I don’t think the VN felt super hard to understand save for a couple points here and there, but I’m still a learner of Japanese after all and I still have a long way to go until mastery of the language, whatever that means, so it’s possible that my understanding of certain things is flawed just for lack of language proficiency. I’m confident that regardless of that I got the majority of it and seeing everyone mention similar things gives me some validation, but there’s that. Will I re-read it in the future? Ehhhh. Maybe if I want to go back to the banter between characters here and there, it’s the only thing I will genuinely miss.

Those are my impressions of the VN as a whole. If the New Episode saves part of it then that’s another story, I will judge that one apart and not with the four episodes, which are supposed to be the actual VN. As Azusa said, ep4 ending in a cliffhanger is pretty ehhh.

---

That was a long 9 months ish though, wowee (9-months-, amirite ). How did everyone feel about the pace? Personally I feel 9 months is way too long to read something, it’s pretty challenging for me to keep being interested reading the same thing for the majority of a year, simply because I start wanting to read other things already if something takes too long (which I have, but still). That was fun, and easy to organise, but going forward I don’t think I’ll join for something for this long again, much as I have enjoyed reading this with you all don’t get me wrong . It just feels like way too much continued commitment for a single work; similarly to how I feel about the read every day threads over time, at some point I start to drift away from posting. Also I’ve felt that the more my skill develops, the more I feel (fortunately or unfortunately in a sense) that faster paces start to become much more interesting and productive for me. I look forward to reading more stuff together with the club, though at the same time it would be awesome if the club kept developing over time, like the 9-nine- club did. Good job everyone for finishing this .

[AzusaChan]

@rikaiwisdom

I think the ratings for divided works on VNDB are automatically biased because people who got bored of the VN probably quit reading it much before reaching that point, which only leaves people who already like the VN a lot voting highly.

I usually think that too, especially when there is a big jump from game 1 to game 2 but the ratings for 9-Nine are kind of weird on VNDB. big jump from game 1 to 2, stays the same for 2 & 3 then a big jump from 3 to 4 but then the extra episode drops more than a full point. You would think since only people who liked the original series would continue to the extra ep that it’d be rated higher but who knows. I personally had game 2 rated the highest & game 1 rated the lowest.

I tried to read some of the reviews on vndb for ep 4 to see why people liked it so much. Lots of people were praising the fight scenes and I even saw some people say Yoichi was one of their favorite characters throughout the whole thing. Maybe if I was more into action/superpower stuff I’d have liked the VN more but I definitely liked the slice of life portions a lot more than the action stuff

@rikaiwisdom

How did everyone feel about the pace? Personally I feel 9 months is way too long to read something, it’s pretty challenging for me to keep being interested reading the same thing for the majority of a year

I can relate to this, it can be hard to stay interested in the same work for that long. I have mixed feelings on the current pace, especially being in two VN clubs I have noticed it puts me in a weird position. I’ll usually have 2-3 “free” days each week to read something outside of the two clubs but that’s not enough to really start a third VN on the side so I end up reading random miscellaneous stuff waiting for the new week.
I’ll be curious how the Flowers club goes once it starts up since there’s no weekly assignment, I can just read it continuously and make progress on it every day. I don’t think that type of format would work well for the main club but I think it’ll be a good idea for these side clubs if we ever start more (I do want to read the Kara no Shoujo series at some point but its 18+ so it’d have to be a side club, if anyone is interested in the future ).

But for the main club, I wouldn’t mind faster pacing in the future for longer works so it doesn’t take as long. Although ep 1 we were reading slower than the other eps so that would have cut down about a months time. I know some people are near the max for their weekly reading at the current pace of 25k/wk so I guess it brings back the question if we need an “advanced” vn club or not or save faster paced stuff for side clubs

[adamstan]

@rikaiwisdom

That was a long 9 months ish though, wowee (9-months-, amirite ). How did everyone feel about the pace? Personally I feel 9 months is way too long to read something, it’s pretty challenging for me to keep being interested reading the same thing for the majority of a year, simply because I start wanting to read other things already if something takes too long (which I have, but still).

Yeah, 9 months is long. If I haven’t read this VN before, I’d probably get impatient and rush forward, just like it happened for me with Loopers
FWIW it took me around 70 hours spread over two weeks for all 5 episodes - but it was pretty intense - I got sucked into the story and just had to continue no matter what

• Ep. 1 - 2021.09.08 - 2021.09.11 - 12h30m
• Ep. 2 - 2021.09.12 - 2021.09.13 - 16h (whoa, that was intense, 8h per day )
• Ep. 3 - 2021.09.14 - 2021.09.17 - 16h30m
• Ep. 4 - 2021.09.17 - 2021.09.19 - 19h
• Ep. 5 - 2021.09.19 - 2021.09.21 - 6h

Yup - looking back at it, it was kind of insane

[Daisoujou]

@rikaiwisdom

Personally I feel 9 months is way too long to read something, it’s pretty challenging for me to keep being interested reading the same thing for the majority of a year, simply because I start wanting to read other things already if something takes too long (which I have, but still). That was fun, and easy to organise, but going forward I don’t think I’ll join for something for this long again, much as I have enjoyed reading this with you all don’t get me wrong . It just feels like way too much continued commitment for a single work;

I have some bad news for you about Muv Luv

[Daisoujou]

Ok to also actually say something more meaningful, been thinking about it and yeah, it’s been a long one. I get the issues but I don’t think it bothered me personally; it’s been kinda fun to have a group go on this long form. I’m definitely happy to see it finally finishing, but I’m down for more big projects like this I think – I better be, cause those of us joining for Flowers are already planning to go long haha.

[rikaiwisdom]

Fair actually

What I mean is mostly just in regards to the pace of the clubs in terms of finishing the week in one or two days, then leaving it for six or five, and repeat over the span of so many months. Maybe it’s not so much the length of time itself but the cycle of resuming something and then having many “idle” days in between before you read again. This is just me personally of course, not attributing that to any others who may not feel the same.

With Muv-Luv I could read as much as I want so I don’t get that feeling of limitation, for lack of a better word. I feel like I had enough content every day or every week to keep things highly interesting. But then again I also have a preference for reading a lot of one or two things, instead of a little of many things, and I also had the time to read a lot daily.

I think it just comes down to eventually all of us reaching a point where reading a little becomes less interesting because naturally everyone starts to read faster as our skill improves. The pace we had with Loopers would not work at all with our current group. It’s mostly the feeling of knowing that you could be reading at a much faster pace, but at the same time obviously it’s not something that is feasible unless we want to leave out the majority of the club in the process, maybe, I don’t really know for others outside of 9-nine-'s club.

I also feel a bit like I’m being a bit clumsy expressing exactly what I mean when I bring this up and I might just be giving the impression of being a gatekeepy hardcore reader but it’s none of that really. I don’t really want to push the club towards something that most may not want, as I’ve always said. Unless the feeling isn’t mutual then there’s no need to change anything, and if it works for most then there’s no issue to begin with.

I guess ultimately there’s a difference right now for me between spending 9 months for 700k characters and 9 months for 3M characters, but that’s highly personal to everyone’s reading speed and time available.

With that said it was not a big issue for me anyway and if there’s something interesting going on I’ll stil join anyway cause I like this club a lot.

I kinda wish Natively’s club would merge with this one instead but eh. They may aim for a different character goal altogether.

[AzusaChan]

@Daisoujou

I better be, cause those of us joining for Flowers are already planning to go long haha.

I’m excited to see how that goes. I think in total the 4 games is around 1.12 million characters long so, definitely a long trip! I’m hoping since we don’t have any weekly assignments it will alleviate some of the issues rikaiwisdom was talking about when it comes to having “idle” days. I guess if you finish the game earlier there will be idle time before the next one starts but that’s (hopefully?) not as bad as waiting each week to continue the same game.

I do completely understand where @rikaiwisdom is coming from. Usually when I read a VN on my own, its something I will read continuously every day instead of just once a few times a week. With a club it is kind of hard to find a good balance that works for everyone.

@rikaiwisdom

They may aim for a different character goal altogether.

From what I saw, I think they’re currently aiming for around 13k per week so some differences in our club vs theirs.

[Daisoujou]

Yeah I get that with the downtime of days. I kinda like having multiple projects to alternate between personally, but that’s all tastes.

@rikaiwisdom

I kinda wish Natively’s club would merge with this one instead but eh. They may aim for a different character goal altogether.

I kinda feel that too, doubly when I learned that they are starting with a VN that we have nominated, heh. I dunno if there’s much overlap but I think that makes Marco more of a dead spot in the polls . Like I’ve always said, I don’t feel like I have some monopoly on VN reading here or anything, but it’s more reason to at least consider if maybe that one should be dropped, if the overlap exists.

[rikaiwisdom]

Personally I just feel that if both groups could have merged instead it would have been beneficial for both, as that would mean more interest and people for something that already is very niche and lacks participation sometimes. I guess it makes more sense to have a club in a forum that is specifically aimed at readers instead of a proprietary product forum aimed at beginners learning kanji, so I could see the logic behind it. But I also don’t know what target audience or skill level Natively aims for, when I checked a while ago there seemed to be a lot of overlap with WK’s community since it was heavily advertised here. Not sure either if it does anything to attract new members.

I wish WaniKani remade the clubs with a major category and then all the different media inside it as subcategories so we didn’t need to have every thing inside Book Clubs, it’s so hard to organise properly. Like create a proper immersion space. The more time passes the more I think it makes no sense and it’s such a huge missed opportunity to attract new members to what already is a big part of the community. But then again Natively isn’t any better in that regard, it’s also all book clubs xD. But maybe with a proper Clubs category it would make it much easier for people to come to WK for the club community, instead of linking strictly WK with the app. It might help the app too at the same time, it’s a big exposure after all. If it weren’t for the community’s iniciative I’m not sure what would become of this place with all the competition around.

But I digress .