m(_ _)m
I have the Japanese Guide.
I’ll be here if I can manage 
Looking at both Japanese guides and picked a route at random, and they don’t seem to have the same choices noted down for the same route. 
But then looking closer. Seems there are two potential good end routes, one leading to メモラビリア/memorabilia (CGs?) #28 and the other to #29, and it seems one guide picks one version as the normal/“correct” route and the other one as the additional, and the other guide picks opposite. xD (Neither guide called the other a bad end, those where shown separately.)
Both guides also shows where to save and how to get bad ends. Pretty cool.
Meaning there might be some picking involved. I wonder how much difference are between these things. Maybe having a week for bad endings and alternative path for each route would be a good idea. Obviously depending on how long the additional content is.
The way I see it. What we need to vote on right now is which route to do first, and what to do about bad endings and getting all メモラビリア, aka whether we will put that into the schedule or not. Basically, we’ll preliminarily pick for our first path, see how it goes and feel free to change our minds if things doesn’t turn out to work that way.
Is there something I’m missing? (I’ll make the poll(s) later.)
Edit: Also to vote on how to choice the main path of two different ones lead to the same good ending (but different メモラビリア).
Also to note, we will have to be a bit flexible about amount per week. Without knowing how long each chapter is, it will be hard to plan exactly. So just know that we’ll probably need to adjust as we go.
Meaning we might say, let’s do chapter 2 in one week, and as we start reading the chapter just goes on and on and on, and somewhere we have to say “eh maybe we need to two weeks”, and maybe another time we’ll notice a chapter is really short. And maybe that’ll work as catch up week for those behind, or if caught on the first day, maybe we’ll add a bit more to read.
This is a visual novel. A kind of video game that is mostly a book. I’ll let @Daisoujou explain from the main club thread:
Visual novels exist at the intersection of books and videogames, often on the PC but sometimes on videogame consoles as well. They are written stories that always feature at minimum the written text, accompanying music, and images. They often but not always also include things like voice acting, multiple choices (which lead to different routes, with a full playthrough of a visual novel often involving seeing all of said routes), and occasionally even some gameplay elements. Games you may be familiar with like Danganronpa, Ace Attorney, and 13 Sentinels sort of sit on the edge of being considered the most game-y that visual novels reach.
A choice is the one thing you often (but not always) do have. You familiar with choose your own adventure books? It’s like that, with the addition of pretty pictures and music and often voices.
I loved the Goosebumps ones when I was a kid, haha. Hopefully that gets the point across, but here you can have a quick look at a video of BU$TAFELLOWS if you want.
I think it is rated adult for some violence somewhere in the VN.
Oh sorry, I’m signed in so I didn’t know. It is M by ESRB ratings – gun violence and drugs apparently.
Interesting link there. I checked the length of the first chapter (the only one allowed to be on Youtube and such) and it was 3,5 hours on auto (it seemed to hold for the audio). Now I feel like I have to go check the length of some chapters of Loopers on youtube, and maybe get an idea on how long chapter 1 might be. ^^
That’s all the way to the end of part 9 of the Loopers auto youtube play-through. Although it doesn’t seem to hold on narrative very long, and that is past the four chapters I have read of Loopers, not sure how much past.
Soooo… I think I can say with some surety that chapter 1 of Bustafellows is a lot longer than chapter 1 of Loopers (even excluding the short prologue and going for the actual first chapter…).
Right, good to know. O_O
I don’t think the drugs were a huge part of some of the routes…except Helvetica’s.
Would you mind spoiler-hiding the name of the route that has the drugs? 
(You’ll find “blur spoiler” under the cog wheel) Thanks!
Worth noting though that in that Bustafellows play-through, there are weirdly long breaks between one sentence and the next, even after the audio has finished playing. Like a couple of seconds each time, whereas the Loopers one has basically no breaks at all.
I feel like that might add up quite a bit, so while chapter 1 of this is for sure a lot longer than Loopers chapter 1 
, it might not be quiiite as bad as the video lengths on their own might make you believe? 
I definitely hope so! 
@Yoshimaster55 Can I trouble you with one more question (hopefully the last one!)?
Is it very clear when one chapter ends and another begins? Is there like a chapter title screen or such?
Ask as many as you like! I don’t mind. Yes, the chapters are labeled. There will be a title screen that says Chapter 1, chapter 2, etc.
Oh, that is great. Will make organizing so much easier. No possibility of accidentally overshooting a chapter. 
Also, thanks! More questions sure might come up. 
Okay so we have a few more things to vote on. I want to once again say that some of these things we will re-evaluate after the first route is done. And honestly when it comes to speed, it looks like we’ll have to play it a lot by ear, since we don’t know the length of chapters.
First things first. We have to pick a route to start. Here are the choices: リンボ, シュウ, ヘルベチカ, モズ, and スケアクロウ (time to practice our katakana!). リンボ is the main guy on the cover and mentioned by name in the description in the OP. @Sylph found two different recommended orders, the one I just listed them all in, and リンボ, スケアクロウ, ヘルベチカ, モズ, and シュウ. Read Sylph’s post for more information.
The VN is set up so we can pick whichever one we want (they are all unlocked from the start), but it seems we kinda have to decide early in while reading, so let’s just pick one going in.
Which man should we date first? (Yes, you only get to pick one! 
- リンボ
- シュウ
- ヘルベチカ
- モズ
- スケアクロウ
0 voters
For at least one route, there are two possible paths to the good ending (if I’m reading the guides right). Do you want me to put up a poll in that case or should I just pick a path (basically if the guides disagree on what is the main path)? Do realize there will be (mild?) spoilers if we go with the poll option (otherwise I’ll need to call the options path A and path B, and then the poll doesn’t really matter, does it? xD ). I’ll make this poll to decide anonymous so no one feels like they have to announce whether they trust my judgement when it comes to path picking. xD
Shall we have a poll if there are multiple paths to the good ending for a route or can MissDagger choose one (both should be good supposedly)?
- Poll
- MissDagger
0 voters
Next poll is about memorabilia (CGs I’m guessing) and bad endings. Each route has at least a couple memorabilia and one bad ending. I believe there is something unlocked at 100% completing the game, but for the true/full ending, all we need to do is get the good ending with each man (if I understand it correctly).
Should memorabilia and bad endings be part of our schedule?
- Yes
- No
- Either is fine
0 voters
Also to note, I will always note what answers we have to give during choices in the game to take us down the right path. And I’ll pass along saving instructions whether we decide to read the extras together or not (so you might easier go back later to finish the alternative things).
We will revisit some of these decisions after we finish the first route. Because we might feel different.
I also want to note, that we could be reading this VN for a very, very, very, very long time if we read slowly. I absolutely think we should start slow and then speed up as we get comfortable, but I’m saying this now because the amount we will need to read each week (in a while) might make this very hard for a beginner to keep up. I expect intermediate folks (like me!) will have to dedicate a lot of time too if we want full comprehension.
This VN is rated as 35 hours long at native speeds. We won’t be reading at native speeds. Loopers (the previous pick in the VN club) was rated as 5.5 hours and that was read over 17 weeks. And I know for myself I was spending about 2 hours a week for the first few weeks (I kinda crashed out of it so can’t tell if that would have improved), and that was reading among the shortest chapters in the whole VN.
I’m not saying all of you will be that slow, or that I will be that slow with this VN. But we can’t exactly take 7 times as long because that is over 2 years (7*17 weeks = 119 weeks). xD
So if we want to read it the whole thing together, by necessity we will have to go fast after we get settled into the writing style, etc.
Also, for those who’ve done other book clubs here on WK, for the first VN read with the VN club, we didn’t have a vocabulary sheet, but then probably 90+% were reading on PC with yomichan, so they only had to hover over a word to get the definition. As mobile and Switch readers, we won’t have yomichan.
I’m debating back and forth whether it would be a good idea to set one up or not. It is a lot of work to contribute to it and I know I personally won’t have time to do that. (Sorry! 
) And they aren’t that readable on a phone (google sheets complains my tablet has a too small screen…), so depending on what medium you guys use for lookups while reading, it might not be used much.
Let me know if I should put up a poll about a vocabulary sheet.
And lastly two things!
- Don’t forget to vote in the when to start poll and whether you’re buying physical from Japan in the first post after the OP.
- I will be rather an available for the next 48 hours, so if you ask me something, I’ll answer when I can.
Speaking of saving and choices, I saw in the game’s save/load menu that it will not allow you to save when it’s showing you a choice (which seems really silly to me, but there it is). Though I guess you could always start from an earlier save and fast forward to get back to the choice point again…