Each week, we will aim for approximately 25K characters. Some most weeks will be longer or shorter, depending on appropriate breakpoints! Check this section in each weekly thread to see the stopping point. There is the possibility of some mild spoilers some weeks, so be aware!
This section will have the list of choices that you should select if you are following along exactly with the book club. While you of course can read the VN however you like, it will be really difficult to contribute to the discussion threads if you are reading a different arc than the club, so please keep that in mind!
This week's choices
海晴との関係は
Discussion Guidelines
Spoiler Courtesy
Please follow these rules to avoid inadvertent ネタバレ. If you’re unsure whether something should have a spoiler tag, err on the side of using one.
Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
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Somehow I managed to get 27k last week. I chose the correct choices and
stopped at the designated endpoint. I suspect there are (at least) three different versions of the game. Let’s see how the reading of this week will go.
It looks like they redrew the background of Rinka’s room for the PS4 version – it looks smaller, has only one window, aircon unit on the wall, and there’s a desk in the room. Final line for this week is still the same text though.
It’s possible there are differences between the Steam Version and DLSite version, maybe, if you are using the Steam version?
I think for PC, the more likely difference in character count would be how the text hooker is set up, though. Keep in mind that the way I did the counting, is I essentially just let the game auto-run at top speed, and when character count got close-ish, I watched for what looked like an okay stopping point. Since I wasn’t watching the actual text-hook super closely, it’s possible it deleted some doubles (turning いい into い, and the like) as it went.
When I was looking up the game before we started, the stuff I was reading was saying that all the PC versions are the same. The only differences should be between PC vs console. Some hooks can grab the character names which could increase the count (not sure if this game has a hook that does that though). If you don’t use regex to filter out special characters there are also parts in the game with furigana that will spit out a ton of random gibberish that can increase the count too, although shouldn’t be that much to increase it by almost 3k. Outside of repeated characters, not sure what else would be causing the difference. My count was accurate for week 1.
I am using the Steam version. After reading @AzusaChan’s reply, I think you are right. This is my first VN, I don’t know how to configure the textractor and stuff well.
I am relieved to learn that. Yes, I saw some random gibberish on the clipboard but there were not that many. Apparently, I should check the copied text, check the settings and make some changes. Thanks!
Ok, I did it! Hope everyone is hanging in there ok, I found this week fairly hard. No single moment that was as confusing as the end of last week, but just a steady stream of long sentences with a lot of words to look up. I can figure stuff out, but it’s more tiring than anything I’ve read in a little while. So if it’s tough for anyone else, you’re not alone.
Spoilers
Pretty big fan of this week. I didn’t expect the multiple perspectives angle, but it makes sense that what Rinka can manage is going to be limited, so this lets us get more insight into what’s happening elsewhere and we can watch some, as of now, more proactive people. And I quite liked them, big fan of Odette so far. They really showed me after I said characters’ personalities were feeling a little thin before. That’s one thing you can’t say about her, and even Federico is at least a pretty different sorta guy from anyone else we’ve seen. Hoping we get to see more perspectives this way.
But even the starting bit with Rinka and Miharu was nice in my opinion, getting a little more to wonder about when it comes to their relationship and what is going on with Miharu. The cafe time was kinda cozy even and pleasant in its own way.
Experiencing the death of the person you nominated is harrowing, oof. I thought that was a really interesting addition.
Also I quite enjoy that song with the vocals, “Chilling with Sidekicks.” Really nice stuff.
Yeah, its definitely an adjustment getting used to these much longer sentences. Harder to stay focused during it at times too but hopefully it’ll feel easier by the end of the club.
Spoilers
I was a little disappointed with the point of view change. I liked Rinka and was hoping to learn more about her. Odette was kind of too wild for my liking but Federico seemed like he could be okay. It makes sense to see what the other people are up to though to get a clearer picture on what’s happening. Odette seemed to have really good intuition to figure out the regret of that guy with the dog that easily too.
If I remember Odette’s explanation on getting cards to appear, you have to know it and have conviction in it in order for it to appear? I wonder if that’s why Rinka still doesn’t have Miharu’s name card since she hasn’t really tried to produce it.
Experiencing the death of the person you nominate is rough. Parca seems pretty twisted but I think she’s interesting. I’m curious to learn about her motivations behind everything here. I wonder if anyone will have a mental collapse after experiencing someone else’s death later on.
That song is really nice! I’ve been enjoying the OST so far. The song when Miharu and Rinka were talking at the cafe was kind of too intense for the scene but overall the songs have been good so far.
The way some of the rules were used now, like not giving Federico the info so he couldn’t also nominate, makes me wonder how much the complicated rules will actually come into play, and whether they might more frequently exist to manipulate what people do given their knowledge of those details.
The conviction bit is definitely a little hazy, I get that they need to cover up for someone just reading off a list of something like ways to die, but it definitely has the potential to feel a little contrived when it works or doesn’t if they’re not careful. I’m not too bothered by it, but I think the way the reasoning worked like “fat businessman → probably a stroke!” shows we might not be getting the most thorough investigations out of this story; the deductions had some big leaps.
I definitely get where you’re coming from; I guess my personal take is that what often makes these sort of situations interesting is the big cast all thrown together, but by the nature of the type of game they’ve made here, we don’t really get that. It won’t surprise me if Rinka finds another (seemingly?) decent cooperative person or two among the group, but overall getting near each other is a risk so I think the way we just sort of learned about Ro in a secondhand summary and then he died wasn’t bad to have happen in this case, but it’d run the risk of just being a parade of that happening repeatedly from Rinka’s perspective? Not that they couldn’t somehow make it work, but y’know.
Thoughts on Odette are just tastes, she’s pretty exaggerated in a way I enjoyed but it’s certainly not subtle or realistic character writing haha. And I don’t blame you for wanting more Rinka. I imagine we’re still going to see her more than anyone considering it kept going back to her?
Yeah, that was interesting. There wasn’t exactly a super high level of conviction displayed there, was there? I suppose since you have to guess somebody’s internal motivation there’s never going to be conclusive evidence of that, so it can’t really require super strong belief.
Did I understand right that as well as there being 12 people to whittle down to 1 there’s also a fixed number of weeks (also 12?) before the end?
Thanks. “What happens if we get to week 12 and people haven’t been eliminating each other fast enough to whittle the players down to one?” is presumably just another of those fiddly corner case questions Parca doesn’t care to explain
I actually did enjoy this week quite a bit, felt a bit better for me overall than first week with all the complex rules and whatnot but that might just be me starting to acclimate to the VN already.
The change of narrator was pretty cool to me, I didn’t expect it. It’s nice that while we still have a protagonist we also have access to the thoughts of everyone else going through this, and I’m guessing eventually this will include Miharu too.Though I also hope it’s not always the same distribution of Rinka → new character every week and they mix things interestingly so it doesn’t become boring. I like both Odette and Federico. Taking the genre of the VN, it feels like things will be moving forward consistently every week, looking forward to that. I’m very curious about the motives of the white hair girl of the train.
I’ve said it before but I’m quite pleased with the choice of art style and music, they create a nice atmosphere. Songs like the one you mentioned make me go into a nice reading flow whenever I’m reading this VN. Mining words into Anki with the music in the background is very relaxing .
Having to experience the death of the person you’re eliminating is intense. Especially since we know now that multiple people died in a fire…
I didn’t expect the change in perspective, but it was kind of fun! I am hoping/assuming that Rinka will be our mainstay character and we’ll keep coming back to her. I do wonder if we’ll get any other new PoVs, though. It’d be nice to see some of the other characters’ perspectives on this. Since I feel like there has to be some happy medium between Rinka’s ‘basically ignore that this is happening’ and Frederico and Odette’s ‘It’s murderin’ time!’ stances.
As we get further into the story, I’m really appreciating the daily life scenes, too. It reminds me of Higurashi (which I’ve also been reading in Japanese), which the nice, chill daily life scenes with cool characters. You appreciate them more after the more intense scenes.
My first thought on seeing Odette is “She looks like an Octoling from Splatoon!” I think it was a combination of her pointy shark teeth and her hair looking kinda like Octoling tentacles 'cause of her hair decorations. Especially in 3/4 angle shots like this: https://t.vndb.org/ch/87/93887.jpg
That may just be me, though.
As others have said, Odette’s a very exaggerated character, though she is an interesting one to switch back and forth with compared to Rinka. Also, because of how exaggerated she is, Frederico can serve kind of a foil to her. He’s like her straight man and is regularly pointing out how scary she is.
It might have just been because I knew I was reading a visual novel, but as soon as Frederico mentioned that Ro had a dog, my first thought was “That’s it! That’s Ro’s 未練!” I was mentally shouting at Frederico that “It’s so obviously the dog!” But I think that’s just 'cause I knew I was reading a story and so figured we’d be getting a hint.
Thanks for sharing the OST playlist on youtube! I’m also really loving the music. I have a history of buying the OST for visual novels after I finish them (especially if they’re not already on Spotify). I have the soundtracks for both Robotics; Notes and Raging Loop that I ordered from Amazon Japan last year.
I find I get really attached to visual novel soundtracks. Part of is that the ones I’ve been playing lately have excellent music, but also, I think it’s just a side effect of the genre. You need to have good engaging music in a game like this that’s mostly text. Plus, unlike more action-oriented games, when I’m reading/playing a visual novel, I always have the sound on. It’s not a game I can multi-task with or play while I watch TV. That combined with the immersive and emotional story means I tend to have pretty strong associations with the soundtrack after I finish a VN. )
One thing they’ve mentioned a few times now that I keep wondering about is… why do they all have to be in Japan? Odette and Frederico are heading to Japan and, from the start of their PoV, they’ve mentioned a few times that they’re going to be heading to Japan. I can’t remember exactly what they said about it, but I got the impression that they needed to be in Japan for week 12 for some reason? (I may have just made up that detail)
I’m curious if this will be a plot point to explain away why there are a disproportionate number of participants who live in Japan. Honestly, I was just going to roll with it 'cause it’s a Japanese game. So, it made sense to have multiple Japanese participants. It’s more interesting if some of the participants can interact with each other, after all.
Speaking of which, I did think it was clever to have an in-universe explanation for why everyone’s ‘speaking Japanese’ (i.e. why all the participants can understand each other).
Though I do kinda wonder how it sounds from an outsider’s perspective. 'Cause, when that ‘tourist’ came to the cafe, Naomi heard them as speaking English to each other. How does the book ‘decide’ which language it sounds like the two of them are speaking? (I’m probably thinking too much about this, honestly it’s probably just a hand-wavy explanation that I’m not supposed to read too much into)
If the tourist who came to the cafe was a participant, was she trying to get information from Rinka? If so, she was certainly subtle about it… but I’m not sure how much information she would’ve been able to glean just from that interaction… figuring out cause of death sounds really hard when you’re in a world where all of those deaths have been undone already and never happened.
I also liked how they called out “How does the dream world decide what we’re all wearing?”. I hadn’t even considered that, but it’s a good point! As is Rinka’s comment about how it feels uncomfortable to have that sort of personal information shared with everyone else in this setting. She said their school uniform is pretty common, so it wouldn’t give too much away, but it definitely gives something away!
As someone who makes liberal use of menu options in VNs, it keeps bothering me that the card list isn’t consistently updated. Like, we saw the faces of two of the other participants (the two kids), but they haven’t shown up in Rinka’s list of cards yet. (eve
[/spoiler]n if we know nothing about them, we could at least have a photo of them) It also hasn’t been consistently updating when Odette/Frederico finds out new info. Very small thing, but I’ve started keeping my own list of everyone’s known information 'cause it bothers me otherwise…
Oh no you said the words! Hahaha, you know you’re right, the thought never occurred to me, but I see the connection you’re making. I don’t suppose you’re playing Splatoon 3? I’ve been doing way too much of it
Very cool! I wish the maps were a little… not the way they are, haha, but I still love it. Big fan of salmon as well, got 999 on two of the maps but it takes SO much time in one rotation I haven’t bothered going for the others. I’m kinda chilling, trying to get better at heavy splatling and stuff right now. And that high jump challenge today was so much fun!
If you get back into it and ever want someone to join, I’m still playing it basically daily and probably not quite as bad as your average random player
I guess if you’re trying to get somebody’s info it makes sense to go to their location, if you know it. I think O&F had tagged their next target as being Japanese, though I’m not sure why. But Japan is definitely special in the rules – selections happen at midnight Japan time. Maybe that’s just enough of a hint that that’s a good place to go to encounter the other players?
I chose the correct choices and
.
Especially since we know now that multiple people died in a fire…
