9-nine- 9️⃣ (Visual Novel Book Club + offshoots)

As for my vote I feel like it would be good to explain things a bit. On jpdb’s visual novel list there are 490 titles. The median value sorting by character count is Steins;Gate0 at ~535k characters which is listed as ~35h on vndb. (Okay, it’s not quite the median, but I figured the more recognizable name was worth something. It’s actually entry #246)

When I saw this I had something of a thought that going too long would be a different, but also kind of frustrating problem. If we did a novel of this length at the pace of Loopers it would take over a year which probably isn’t fun, or at least a good reason to consider jumping these kinds of VNs into an intermediate/advanced book club. So I picked an arbitrary target of 6 months which still felt long, but more fair given that we’re talking about games 4x longer than Loopers. At that pace we’d have to average about 22k characters per week.

I’m actually ok with the idea of higher character counts (my personal comfort level is about 3k/day. It’s just a magic number for me). But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared to jump into that pace right away. 12.5k would be my first pick which ends up being about the length of the longest Loopers chapters iirc. And obviously I don’t mind with a slower pace if a lot of newer readers join us. 9-nine- episode 1 is relatively short so it won’t matter too much, but I’d definitely push a higher pace if we tackle episodes 2+.

Another think I’m open is picking an aggressive pace and having a vote to see if we want to slow down after the first week’s reading.

About 760k I think. It’s quite long in total.

Considering the relative difference between the two groups in voting I’d argue trying to merry them up is a lost cause. They’re basically separate clubs that happen to share technology.

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I don’t entirely disagree given the large gap there, but I’m not sure how hard I want to commit to turning this definitively into two smaller VN clubs based on a single vote. Feels like we should at least try once more to see if a pattern like this keeps emerging? I’m not sure we can definitively call them otome club yet, may just be people who wanted to read Bustafellows / didn’t want to read 9-nine-. There were genuinely some people who just showed up for Nighshade and that, but others who voted for Atri, Marco, etc. I dunno, I think it’s premature. At the least before thinking about that I’d want to go ask them if there’s a sizeable enough group that would like to split off into a permanent 2nd club on the specific basis of being otome or some other classification they might suggest.

@MissDagger I know you were not going to be super active here but this bit’s pretty relevant to you all

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Good point. I wasn’t looking that closely at the votes, but it’s a nice catch. That also means there’s a very good chance that some might either leave or double dip between clubs if we hit a new vn after they finish a route.

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Maybe after we finish ep one of 9-nine we can re-evaluate and see where they’re at in Bustafellows? We could talk then and see if we’d want to continue on with ep 2 while they are still reading Bustafellows and follow up to see if people from that group would be interested in reading non-otome VNs. Like you said, there could have just been a large group of people interested in specifically that VN rather than the fact that it is an otome.

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It is actually better to do the opposite, because reading something new means a new style, new vocabulary and such. So it is better to start a bit slower, and then after a couple of weeks speed up. Especially if there are no natural dividers, it should be much easier to manage.

I totally think we have some people that just came for the fact that bustafellows is an otome. Not all though, because Bustafellows is a fairly well known VN, even outside the otome crowd. But I can totally see how it would make sense to have a poll on that about the time Bustafellows decides to officially end (whether that is at 100% completion or not) (or when @AzusaChan suggested). Then we’ll have the crowd that found reading a VN with a group (since bustafellows pulled in a lot of new people) to be nice, and we can see if it is just VN in general or otome specifically that people would be interested in going forward.

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This is exactly what I was thinking about and hoping for when I mentioned that going for both wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would be awesome if everyone had a lot of fun in their respective groups and then we came back to a single one with a stronger base and participation. I’m sure someone will bite :eyes: and then their soul will remain forever with us.

I agree though, I think it’s early to talk about branching off.

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I pretty much agree with all of this as at least the way I’m orienting towards moving things if I don’t face more objection.

Anyway it was definitely good to at least get the idea out there about there being 2 groups longer term, because I do think it’s worth being aware of as a possibility and exploring when the time comes. Just for now I definitely personally prefer trying to work towards the goal of re-merging so we are in a good position to do so if people want to then.

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I certainly aim for Bustafellows not to take a year to read the whole thing if we decide to read it all. 6 months is kinda a good time frame to aim for as a kinda upper limit; although I do believe more in a model of speeding up later on to hit such a target, because I want to make sure to have space early to let people get used to the medium + writing style + something else that I forget what it was (lol!); also not sure how feasible that is for a VN as long as Bustafellows. But it is hard to figure out lengths with no character counts. ^^ I promise we over in the other lane will be doing our best to not take forever.

Also, while I said I won’t dig much into the discussion over here, I meant more with the particulars of 9-nine- than the VN club in general. Also, I’m bad at not sticking my nose in. xD

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Oh yeah I feel you; I just thought you might miss buried responses (I’ve certainly not read everything in your thread…) so I wanted to draw your attention when important :slightly_smiling_face:

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Cool didn’t know this was happening. I guess since bustafellows and this got equal votes we’re doing both? Wasn’t planning on reading bustafellows since its too long for me atm but I’ll probably join in on this one. And just to be clear we’re only doing the first game right?

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That was pretty much it. There were a couple people that did vote for both, but for the most part it was two different groups of people so we ended up rolling with the top 2 picks.

And correct again, we only have concrete plans for the first game although the structure of the VN makes for the possibility of an offshoot club to finish it. Although I guess there’s nothing stopping someone from nominating the second episode? Can’t remember if we discussed it that far.

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If the BU$TAFELLOWS group is going well and wants to continue, we may end up running the next game or two right away in order to match to their pace, because their game is much longer than just the first here. But as of now, the first is all we are definitively committed to.

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So far I skipped through first few scenes, and I discovered that there is brief date display at the beginning of new day, so perhaps they could be used as a marking points. I remember that was how I was making breaks when I was reading it - “let’s read up to the end of current day” :wink: But the “chapters” created this way might get rather uneven in length.

BTW another cool feature of this VN, which might help in reading, is voiced protagonist :slight_smile:

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Oh interesting! Hard to plan still without an easy reference to how many days there are, but it’s something good to consider potentially.


With that, was saying yesterday I’d be busy for a bit: pretty much from this point on it’ll be a few days before I’m able to get back to the computer. Don’t break anything while I’m gone :smile:

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The steam sale started today and the game is 50% off (the collection for the entire series is 55% off) for anyone that was waiting to buy it. Save 50% on 9-nine-:Episode 1 on Steam

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Thank you so much for the reminder! Picked up the bundle :smile:

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My game will arrive tomorrow. Apparently getting physical is as quick as waiting for a Steam sale. :crazy_face:

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I just bought the bundle… I have no clue yet, if I’ll actually manage reading it with the club and my wallet is crying but hey - it is, what it is! :grin: :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile:

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Just a heads up this is a surprising case of amazing UI for a VN. You can set the language settings in game with multiple settings for UI vs text:

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I think most of the titles I’ve played on steam required opening up the properties in steam and setting the language globally, so this is pretty awesome.

Another awesome thing I’ve seen in a couple games, but is always a welcome addition is the presence of a toast notification for song changes.

Sample date break

First couple days (final screen inside, so mild spoilers)

Intro: 6,625 characters

4/18: 6,768 characters

4/19: 6,176 characters

4/20: 15,729 characters

Those first four chapters gave me the “Prologue” achievement on steam. Counts are probably a little inflated. I ran into an issue where clicking too fast or using skip would cause Textractor to start doubling characters (or failing to pass lines through the extensions).

One weird thing is that the game does not seem to respect the FPS limiter, at least going by what Steam says.

Also, warning in advance. If that one screenshot on the Steam store page was a little risque for potential viewers in the surroundings it was taken from the start of the game.

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Just to check in – looks like we have a narrow lead on December 30th over 2nd. It’s been 6 days so I can see if anyone else appears but I’m not going to spring a start date on you immediately before so poll can end on Friday to give one week warning if there’s sudden huge interest in the 2nd. Gotta say I like the idea of the 30th myself, though.

We’re absolutely even on character count between 10 and 12.5k which might actually be good. If we have to do it the way I said and just find breaks as we go, while I can’t give an exact number of weeks the VN will last, these character counts are only rough targets so a little wiggle room will likely be appreciated if we can stop anywhere near that range.

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