I read somewhere that you can circumvent that by using that dialogue history thingy that lets you reread lines and jump back to them. 
So basically you can apparently just go back one or two lines and then save there.
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I’d like to call attention to this post with polls for everyone who is reading with us that haven’t voted yet: BU$TAFELLOWS 💰 (Visual Novel Book Club) // Planing phase - #44 by MissDagger. Right now we have two different paths at the same number of votes, the poll on whether to do bad endings and all memorabilia (CGs I believe) together with a club (aka scheduled time for) or by ourselves also looks like everyone haven’t voted on.
We do need the path poll if nothing else to get out of a deadlock. xD
Also a reminder that the second post of this thread has votes on when to start, I think most everyone have voted there, but if you haven’t, go ahead soon. I’m planing to close all current polls in a couple of days.
This is your friendly reminder! 
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My mom said that she would never let me do it.
I’ll have to wait a few years until I move out.
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Sorry to hear that. Hopefully you can find some other book clubs here on WK that you’re interested in. And all the discussion will still be here to read later. 
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Hey, how is everyone getting the Switch version paying for it? I believe the Japanese eShop requires a Japanese credit card, meaning I (who only has an American credit card) would need to buy JP eShop gift cards from a third-party site (like Play-Asia). The issue is that the “exchange rate” on the third party sites is generally about 100yen/$1, so if anyone knows a way to buy the game “directly” in order to take advantage of the absolutely insane exchange rate, that would be awesome.
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Don’t know any easy ways to buy directly, but when I last bought from it personally, I bought my gift cards from here: https://www.seagm.com
Still not the best exchange rate, but slightly better than playasia. You could also try to figure out how to buy the gift cards from amazon, which doesn’t charge extra, but personally I gave up on trying to figure out how to do that.
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I haven’t done this, but I think nintendolife recommended either playasia or amazon.co.jp. Don’t know if there are hops to jump through. Amazon tends to want a Japanese address but except foreign credit cards. I know some people have sometimes needed to do 1-2 purchases with VPN set to Japan too.
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I buy Japanese eshop cards from Playasia and load them onto my Japanese switch account
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Here are the results from the polls:
- Start reading: December 16th
- First route: リンボ
- For multiple routes: either I pick, or I make a poll for those that don’t care about spoilers (if/when this comes up)
- Memorabilia/bad endings: the majority is fine with either, outside that no was the biggest faction. So I guess we go with no? We’ll get an idea of how long bad endings and extra memorabilia are for this first route, and if it turns out to be longer stuff, we can vote again later
All right then! The last thing left is pace.
Only… I have no idea how to schedule this, or vote for a schedule. I will check out the game some time in the next week, just starting it up and looking around (so basically menu stuff). Considering how long the game is, I find it highly unlikely that one chapter a week is gonna be a good amount (aka that will maybe be too long). Even so, we might need to have chapter threads because we have no good way of dividing the chapters.
Aka we might have to do: okay, we have two weeks to read chapter one. If you have questions, put it behind a details tag or hide it behind a blur spoiler (both can be found under the cogwheel in the top of the text window), and try to say what the spoiler covers or where it is without giving spoilers. Stuff like “soon after they left X place” or “right after the third choice (誰ですか (this being the option we were supposed to pick))”.
I’m not sure we can divide more granularly than that, but if such things are discovered, we will absolutely update the schedule!
An option to try could be to say “we read until the first/second/xth choice”, but obviously we have no idea how long until it, and we’d probably pause in the middle of a conversation/situation.
If anyone have any clever ideas that would help, please share! 
So this is the content we will cover for our first route:
- Prologue (very short as I understand it)
- Chapter 1*
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- リンボ A side
- リンボ B side
*I do believe the trial/free portion is until the end of this chapter.
The bad ending/memorabilia we’re not doing: 2 bad ends, and a CG variation/memorabilia. I will give info for when to save for these and what to pick instead under a spoiler tag in the relevant threads, so you’ll know how to find them without needing to check the guide yourself.
Edit: I added the structure for the schedule to the OP, but except for when we start, we haven’t currently decided on what speed to try for. I’m hoping to get some ideas from you guys. Otherwise we might just need to pick a random speed and adjust as we go.
| Week | Start Date | Chapter |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Dec 13th | Prologue + Chapter 1 |
| - | - | Chapter 2 |
| - | - | Chapter 3 |
| - | - | Chapter 4 |
| - | - | リンボ A |
| - | - | リンボ B |
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The Steam version has a 35% sale right now
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Turns out I have had the game for a while (bought it last year I think xDD) so I will probably tag along. However, I am not sure if I will make the same choice or just go my way. Very surprised to see an Otome nominated but that’s great, I like them.
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Right so I started the game and checked around a little. For example in the gallery (I think they called it that) and under videos, you can find like an extended trailer. It will either just have spoken Japanese, or you can get one with English announcer (with Japanese subtitles). Those are the first two.
There are a few more unlocked, which seems to be some kind of audio/cd drama, and considering my listening comprehension is pretty bad, I didn’t try to listen to it (beyond confirming what it was). Since it is unlocked from the start though, I assume there aren’t spoilers for the story, but that is a guess. I figure it might be easier to do later anyway, when I know who each voice belongs to.
I thought I’d let you know.
The only relevant thing for scheduling that I found is that there seems to be a % completion shown on the title/main menu screen (it also showed in the gallery). However, I don’t know if that updates as we read or as we receive memorabilia. Basically good endings, bad endings, alternative endings, all of it seems to give memorabilia. So my guess would be it updates on receiving those, meaning it won’t help us with pace.
If it instead seems to track how much of the text you’ve read, we’re golden. We just have to figure out a % per week to read. However, I think this is unlikely, so don’t get your hopes up!
I’m planing to test the % hypothesis closer to when we’re starting. I’d prefer not to just have to click through some stuff to check.
We have an indication from the length of the youtube videos for chapter 1, that it is probably not a short chapter (even if the video length is a bit janky due to pauses between each line). My suggestion is that we aim to finish the prologue* and chapter 1 over 2 weeks.
*prologue is supposed to be very short, as in only one scene.
Of course, we’ll check in after one week how it is going. But I must stress that this is a long VN. At native speeds it is about 35h according to VNDB, so we probably need to spend some real time each week reading.
So what do you guys think: 2 weeks for prologue and chapter 1 as preliminary scheduling?
- Yes
- No, please comment below with your suggestion
0 voters
Another thing to think about, how do we want to make the threads?
Pick your preference
- 1 thread per chapter/part
- 1 thread per route
- Other, please comment
0 voters
Considering BU$TAFELLOWS is divided by chapters, a vague time based option like weekly or monthly threads doesn’t make sense (to me), also because we have no idea how much content we will do each week, and no way to actually divide it neatly.
This is also a decision that will probably change with time. So for the first route it might make sense to divide up the chapters, but if route two proves that it is mostly about picking different choices in the chapters and not reading anything new, or very little, then we might combine chapters then, or just add the little bit of extra reading to the A part of route 2.
As always, please let me know your thoughts. I’m making this up as I go along, so feel free to share your ideas.
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All right, guys!
I’ve closed the latest polls. I think we are probably done with polls until we start reading. Yay! xD
So it looks like 1 thread per chapter/part and we’ll aim to finish prologue plus chapter 1 over two weeks. Hopefully that’ll turn out to be a good amount, not too little and not far too much.
I will definitely check in on the % thing on the main screen right before we start reading, like maybe only a day or two. Because I don’t wanna start reading early—I want to keep my impressions fresh!—and I’m very busy until the 13th or so. And most likely nothing will change with our schedule because it will probably be related to memorabilia and not number of screens read or something like that. ^^
So I think we’re done with the planing phase and now just waiting for December 16th to come around.
PS. I did go ahead at filled in a schedule (completely made up), putting in two weeks for each chapter/part for the first route. And just FYI if we read at that pace, this first route will take us 10 days into March next year. That is almost exactly 3 months, you guys. So, either we have to read quicker than that or the other routes really have to be only the A/B side with new choices in the chapters because otherwise this one gonna go on forever if we want to complete it as a group. 
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I gave it a shot, I opened the game and clicked for what felt a very very long time, while looking away from the screen, just seeing enough to see if there is a choice and choose the first thing
Then I tried to save. Took me forever to find a key on my keyboard that did anything… It’s the “Home” button! (and “End” for backlog).
When I save, I can’t see any %.
But as you say, on the home screen, I can. I don’t know what to look for, so I just kept clicking. I was hoping to reach chapter but I didn’t make it, wow there seems to be a lot of content X)
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Maybe I’ll try searching online for what the % might mean, although I suspect I might have to do that in Japanese. But it is something I can try right now.
But there is the possibility that it is connected to the number of choices you’ve made, so the game records like each path from a choice that you could make. Or something similar to that. Unless you also unlocked something in the gallery?
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I checked and I didn’t unlock anything in the gallery. However as people talk, sometimes in the corner an icon blinks “Archive”. And then you can see the list of Archive and read them again I suppose. I think I’ve unlocked around 10. Maybe that could be a way of tracking our progress too.
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Huh okay. I wonder what that archive thing is, separate from the backlog, I assume? I’m not so well versed in VN stuff yet. ^^
Well, I seem to find nothing online on the %. I’m not good enough at Japanese to skim read multiple search item summaries in any kind of a timely manner. So I give up. 
So… maybe we/I can use the first prologue+chapter 1 to figure out how the % works, and see if it can be used to pick pace. This is what we’re in for when we decide to have VN clubs, sometimes very imprecise ways to divide up content. ^^’
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The archive is the name of the dictionary in this game, it’s a collection of definitions of terms/places/characters.
I took a look at the percentages (I’ve played before so didn’t need to worry about spoilers) and it appears to be linked to the memorabilia. Mine measured out to about 5% after skipping through chapter one.
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Is the archive part of the memorabilia? Or maybe a better question is: what are the memorabilia? I know it is definitely CGs, but is it only CGs?
Also, appreciate the help!
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No the memorabilia was empty! It’s probably more rare events
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