9-nine- 9️⃣ (Visual Novel Book Club, offshoot) // Reading 9-nine-はるいろはるこいはるのかぜ (Episode 3)

Japanese Language Book Clubs
1

Welcome to 9-nine- :nine:

9-nine-
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I just wandered in, what is this?

This is the home thread for the visual novel “9-nine-”. See the visual novel book club home thread if you need an explanation of visual novels themselves, but 9-nine is a murder mystery story with supernatural elements. You can learn more about the VN here on VNDB (links to Episode 1).

Episode 1 was read as part of the Visual Novel Book Club. The rest of the episodes are currently planned to be read as offshoot clubs on a separate schedule.

Where to buy

Steam, PC → Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3 | Episode 4.
Switch (only available as a bundle of all 4 episodes)
PS4 (only available as a bundle of all 4 episodes)
DLSite (also PC but, if you prefer, the larger all-in-one version)

Discussion Rules

Please spoiler tag / collapse all spoilers, and keep refrain from discussing happenings beyond the current week’s thread (a new thread for each week will be posted every Friday). Don’t be shy to ask any questions at all about the language, freely give your thoughts on the content of the writing so far, etc. Just remember usual forum and etiquette and it’s all good. And please do chime in, the more the merrier and all that :grin:

And if you drop off the schedule, that’s no problem either. Often someone is still watching these threads, so (as is true with all clubs here) feel free to ask or comment even after the end date!


↓ ↓ ↓ EPISODES ↓ ↓ ↓

9-nine-ここのつここのかここのいろ (Episode 1, completed)

9-nine-ここのつここのかここのいろ

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Link to VNDB

Discussion Threads and Reading Schedule

We’re beginning on December 30th, 2022! Each week will aim to be approximately 10-12.5k characters long, with the end point posted as soon as possible in the weekly thread.

Week Start Date Approx Character Count Cumulative Character Count
Week 1 December 30, 2022 9 800 9 800
Week 2 January 6, 2023 10 900 20 700
Week 3 January 13, 2023 14 600 35 300
Week 4 January 20, 2023 7 700 43 000
Week 5 January 27, 2023 11 500 54 500
Week 6 February 2, 2023 11 800 66 300
Week 7 February 10, 2023 14 300 80 600
Week 8 February 17, 2023 14 400 95 000
Week 9 February 24, 2023 10 900 105 900
Week 10 March 3, 2023 20 000 125 900

Weekly average: 12.6k c/week.

Member List

Are you planning to read 9-nine-ここのつここのかここのいろ with the club?

  • Yes
  • Yes, but I might start late
  • Not sure
  • No

0 voters

If so, which version are you reading?

  • PC
  • Switch
  • PS4

0 voters

9-nine-そらいろそらうたそらのおと (Episode 2, completed)

9-nine-そらいろそらうたそらのおと

9-nine- ep2

Link to VNDB

Discussion Threads and Reading Schedule

We’re beginning on March 24, 2023! Each week will aim to be approximately 22.5 - 25k characters long, with the end point posted as soon as possible in the weekly thread.

Week Start Date Approx Character Count Cumulative Character Count
Week 1 March 24, 2023 24 700 24 700
Week 2 March 31, 2023 23 000 47 700
Week 3 April 7, 2023 24 600 72 300
Week 4 April 14, 2023 23 900 96 200
Week 5 April 21, 2023 23 300 119 500
Week 6 April 28, 2023 21 800 141 300
Week 7 May 5, 2023 27 300 168 600
Week 8 May 12, 2023 13 000 181 600

Weekly average: 22.7k c/week.

Member List

Are you planning to read 9-nine-そらいろそらうたそらのおと with the club?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Yes, but I might start late
  • Not sure

0 voters

If so, which version are you reading?

  • PC
  • Switch
  • PS4

0 voters

9-nine-はるいろはるこいはるのかぜ (Episode 3, currently reading)

9-nine- episode 3

Link to VNDB

Discussion Threads and Reading Schedule

We’re beginning on May 26, 2023! Each week will aim to be approximately 25k characters long, with the end point posted as soon as possible in the weekly thread.

Week Start Date Approx Character Count Cumulative Character Count
Week 1 May 26, 2023 25 800 25 800
Week 2 June 2, 2023 22 200 48 000
Week 3 June 9, 2023 26 500 74 500
Week 4 June 16, 2023

Weekly average: 24.8k c/week.

Member List

Are you planning to read 9-nine-はるいろはるこいはるのかぜ with the club?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Yes, but I might start late
  • Not sure

0 voters

If so, which version are you reading?

  • PC
  • Switch
  • PS4

0 voters

8 Likes
2

I think that covers everything I need to change in the thread template for now, I hope :crossed_fingers:. I’m really disappointed I couldn’t find any Youtube playthroughs that ran beyond the demo period, that might not be doable here. Getting one part (which should be on sale soon) shouldn’t be that demanding in price, but still.

So, @adamstan , do you recall if there are clear dividing points we could structure club weeks around? Any other info we might need to know for preparing this would be appreciated.

I made sure to get the thread up quickly to get things started for discussion of planning, but it’s a relatively busy period for me and I’m about to be mostly unable to check in for a few days.

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I can’t remember for now, but I will check it out.

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4

Thanks so much! No rush on that. I guess we should also discuss when we want to start, which I’m probably going to steal straight from the BU$TAFELLOWs poll haha

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When do we start reading?
  • November 25th (a week from now)
  • December 2nd (two weeks from now)
  • December 16th (a month from now)
  • December 30th (after the holidays (mostly))
  • Later, tell in a comment

0 voters

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Based on what I know there are no chapter breaks, date display etc in this game so finding a structure might be hard. For the PC crowd we could just have a schedule of read x amount of characters each week but then we might stop right in the middle of a conversation in-game + it’d be hard to track for the switch crowd?

Regarding the length of how long the club will go on this time, did we want to try to increase the speed a little bit for this one? It is roughly the same length as Loopers (only about 10k characters longer) and I know from previous discussions we’d like to eventually tackle longer VNs so this might be a good opportunity to see how we do at a slightly faster speed?

Here’s a guide for the game, I usually use this site for all jp VNs (warning some of the ads on there are NSFW) https://seiya-saiga.com/game/palette/kokoiro.html - It looks like we will have to do 2-run throughs to finish the game. The game does have a skip to next choice button though so the second go around should be relatively quick

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I’m totally open to it because Loopers wasn’t too bad for me and this looks to be similarly easy to read, but I know we had at least a person or two express that the club took up a relatively large chunk of time (with all the other stuff they’re reading) so I’ll wait to see everyone’s opinions on that. I was thinking about how we’re going to handle this with BU$TAFELLOWS going at the same time but I suppose we actually benefit a lot from being able to hang out and read multiple episodes of 9-nine- if they’re still running, which they sure will be unless they decide to do a few routes and stop early.

I have to admit I prefer punting the start date a little mostly because Splatoon 3 has a large update coming at the start of December :melting_face:

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Even if you find them it’ll be against their content policy and as a consequence against WK policy (piracy). I had to do a bit of digging, as Sekai Project (the publisher) no longer lists this information on their site and is instead deferring to individual developers.

ゲームのプレイ動画を公開してもいいですか？

弊社が所有する楽曲、音声、その他作品データの一切の転用、ウェブ上での公開を弊社の許諾なしに行うことは禁止させていただいております。ただし、プロモーションや頒布を目的としたデータ（体験版など）に限り、データの改変が一切行われていない状態であれば、弊社の許諾なく公開しても問題ございません。

Go to the Palette official site and click Contact if you want to see for yourself. Also, they have a youtube channel that looks full of odds and ends. Anyway, if I understood that right it seems that publishing their content outside of marking is no good.

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Not only hard to track on Switch, probably impossible unless the switch version for some reason tracks this (which I find unlikely but can answer in a week or so depending on how easy it is to see).

But on the other hand, the likelihood that I, personally, will read this at the end of each reading week is very high. So a PC person will probably have finished first so they can screenshoot the last screen. But there might be other people who will read with Switch.

Also, just a note I will probably not be super involved in the planning discussion, because I’m holding one of my own. xD

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Oh trust me I’m excusing myself from the BU$TAFELLOWS one too haha. Best of luck over there, it’ll be great. We’ll see which of us lasts longer in the other’s club :sweat_smile:

To the actual point, I don’t particularly like the idea of splitting by character count alone, but I could see how there might feasibly be nothing at all better for a group going in blind, if they give us nothing to work with. We may need a rough amount per week and then when someone finishes early they pick out a scene break or otherwise logical stopping point and post it for us? I mean it’s not an elegant solution but we do need to convey to people a specific stopping point (for those without texthooking and in case of any count discrepancies) and it allows us to not have to stop mid-conversation.

Basically, the VN club is such a monster it may start putting more management demands on the members themselves :melting_face:

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At least we (bustafellows) seem to have some kind of chapters. Hurray! Although no idea of their lengths. xD

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I don’t really mind getting spoilerized. After I get the game (Autum sale, preferably) I can click through and get character counts for the scenes + screenshots. I did that for one of the earlier chapters in loopers and it wasn’t too bad, just a bit tedious.

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Yeah its definitely not ideal but hard to come up with a schedule when there is no in-game system for us to plan around. There is a VN club in a discord server I’m on and they run their stuff by giving people 1-2 months to read the selected title and they just discuss as they read without a definitive schedule but I think that leads to less discussion. Harder to keep track of participation that way too.

That could work if we have someone consistently reading it at the start of each new week? Not sure if we want to start a poll to decide how long the club will run for this time and then after that we can find a rough estimate of how many characters will be read per week.

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Yeah I wasn’t sure about assigning a particular person for general flexibility sake – like often I’m going to read at the beginning of the week but I know things come up for me so I doubt I’d hit every single one on time. Some openness for whoever gets there and can get it close might be best? But as a general concept I can’t think of anything that works too much better, and I don’t want to put too much work (and spoilers) on @ccookf

I can try to whip something up for character count, one sec…

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Preferred reading speed in characters per week
  • 7,500 per week (19 weeks)
  • 10,000 per week (14 weeks)
  • 12,500 per week (11 weeks)
  • 15,000 per week (9-nine- weeks)
  • Other (please leave a comment)

0 voters

Had to use some heavy rounding treating the 142,217 characters on JPDB as 140,000 (I think we established they tend to list slightly high anyway?) and then round a little further when dividing by these numbers, but hopefully I didn’t make any silly mistakes. Loopers was all over the place, but I think 7,500 is sort of how it averaged out? Our longest weeks went 10, 11, and 13 thousand, for reference.

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It’s funny we’ve picked the same options so far :joy: . I think it’s fine to say that a fair amount of us found weeks below 10k lacking and wanted to read more. I’m fine with anything above, personally. Somehow reading 15k characters feels much easier to me than reading 10 pages of a book. Going by the average characters in a novel page Redglare gave me in the read every day challenge, though a tiny scope, we’re talking about 366 characters per page. So I guess we were all reading a lot and didn’t even think anything of it ^^ . I feel like voice over definitely helps, and there’s a lot of language repetition going on too.

It’s not a bad idea to keep in mind the Bustafellows thread to see how more or less they’re going to lay everything out and see if we both can finish around the same date, roughly, so we can go back to reading a single title the next voting. I would have a blast going for 9 weeks, but perhaps it’s not the most realistic, considering we have people reading both and Bustafellows will take significantly more I suppose. I really don’t want to sit for three more months doing nothing ;-; .

Loopers felt a tiny bit long to my liking with 17 weeks, but 11 or even 14 doesn’t sound bad at all to me. It also depends on how hard Bustafellows and this turn out to be, I guess. Too many questions :joy: . Bit by bit, team.

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I referenced this a little earlier, but given the length of their VN, if they don’t bail early after some routes, I don’t think there’s any way we manage that without being absolutely glacial. The plan is probably to play to the advantage we have with some flexibility in 9-nine and after we finish the first game at our pace we can look at how they’re doing over there, then probably read another one or two without even needing it to be as much of a spin off.

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Considering Bustafellows is around 4.5 times as long (going by hour length on VNDB), I don’t think there is a chance we’ll be keeping Bustafellows near quick enough to read these two at the same pace. If you were reading all routes of 9-nine-, it would be another discussion since then 9-nine- is supposedly longer by quite a lot if I remember correctly.

Edit: As leader of bustafellows, my plan is we’ll go for one route, see how many are still in, do another route, see again the number still with us and how much quicker a second route is vs the first, and so on. Basically continually checking.

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@Daisoujou @MissDagger Hmm yeah you’re both right, it’s not a good idea to mix both with the length of 9-nine-.

I think both of your opinions are extra important here, as (edit: potentially) the two of you will be reading both of them. Ultimately I’m fine with anything really :slight_smile: .

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I’m fine looking at some other way of doing it too! Just seems to me the most natural way to try to meet up in the end at roughly the same time, which I do agree is a good goal. Just ultimately neither of us quite know how far our club is officially going while we eyeball what the other is doing further out, and what the people in the club end up even thinking of what they’re reading, so that’s the tentative idea I had that’ll inevitably have to be evaluated as we go.

5 Likes