BU$TAFELLOWS 💰 (Visual Novel Book Club) // Completed

@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.

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Oh, that is great. Will make organizing so much easier. No possibility of accidentally overshooting a chapter. :partying_face:

Also, thanks! More questions sure might come up. :sweat_smile:

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! :smiling_imp:
  • 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. :sweat_smile:

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! :sob:) 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!

  1. 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.
  2. I will be rather an available for the next 48 hours, so if you ask me something, I’ll answer when I can.
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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…

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I read somewhere that you can circumvent that by using that dialogue history thingy that lets you reread lines and jump back to them. :eyes: 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! :moneybag: :heavy_dollar_sign:

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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. :slight_smile:

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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! :smiley:

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 :slight_smile:

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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. :slight_smile:

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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. :moneybag: :moneybag: :moneybag:


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. :melting_face:

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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 :smiley:
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)

Here is what I can see: (I don't think it reveals anything but hiding the image just in case)

(it’s the Steam PC version so the texts are in English)



I kept clicking for what felt a long time, so without actually reading the text, and barely made it to 3%!

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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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