Fatal Twelve 1️⃣ 2️⃣ 💀 (Visual Novel Book Club) // Finished!

Japanese Language Book Clubs
1

image
image460×215 60.1 KB

What is this?

We are going to be reading Fatal Twelve as part of the Visual Novel Book Club! Fatal Twelve is a mystery VN with a death game premise and multiple endings.

Steam Summary

Shishimai Rinka was a high schooler who ran a small café named Lion House in place of her grandmother. She lived her life much like any other person her age, but one day, she was caught up in an explosion while returning home on the train alongside her friend, Hitsuji Naomi. In an attempt to save her friend’s life, she shields her on instinct the moment the explosion goes off, losing her life in the process. However, before she knew it, she was back at Lion House, happily chatting with her friends as if nothing had happened in the first place.

“Good evening, my lovely little slaves to fate.”

A few days later, she found herself in a strange world. Here she met Parca, an odd girl claiming to be a goddess. It turns out that she had somehow become a participant in Divine Selection, a ritual carried out over twelve weeks by twelve people, which allowed them to compete in order to undo their deaths. Yet, what shocked Rinka most of all, was the presence of her friend Mishima Miharu amongst the twelve.

In order to get through Divine Selection , one must eliminate others by gathering information regarding their name, cause of death and regret in the real world, then “electing” them.

This turn of events would lead to her learning about the truth behind her death, as well as her own personal regrets. She would also come to face the reality that Miharu was willing to throw her life away for her sake, as well as the extents to which the other participants would go to for the sake of living through to the end.

Far more experiences than she ever could have imagined awaited her now, but where will her resolve lead her once all is said and done…?

View the nomination post here!

Where to purchase

PC: Steam • DLSite (50% Off until 06/26/2023)
Console: Switch version ・PS4 Version
Note: You do not have to purchase the PS4 version from the Japanese store; international copies of the games allow free switching between Japanese and English text! (The link is the Canadian PS4 store because it’s what pulls up in a cursory google search for me. It’s mostly there as a stand-in to let people know that the PS4 version is available!)

Schedule

We’re beginning on July 28th, 2023! Each week will aim to be approximately 25k characters long. I will try to have the full schedule mapped out shortly, but for now I have it scheduled through to the first ending.

Week Start Date Approx Character Count Cumulative Character Count
Week 1 July 28th 23.8k 23.8k
Week 2 August 4th 23.8k 47.6k
Week 3 August 11th 27.6k 75.2k
Week 4 August 18th 23.2k 98.4k
Week 5 August 25th 23.0k 121.4k
Week 6 September 1st 26.8k 148.2k
Week 7 September 8th 24.3k 172.5k
Week 8 September 15th 23.5k 196.0k
Week 9 September 22nd 24.8k 220.8k
Week 10 September 29th 25.1k 245.9k
Week 11 October 6th 24.1k 270.0k
Week 12 October 13th 24.7k 294.7k
Week 13 October 20th 23.9k 318.6k
Week 14 October 27th 24.3k 342.9k
Week 15 November 3rd 26.9k 369.8k
Week 16 November 10th 25.9k 395.7k
Week 17 November 17th 26.2k 421.9k
Week 18 November 24th 27.0k 448.9k
Week 19 December 1st 25.9k 474.8k

Weekly average: 25k c/week.

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.

  1. 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.
  2. Any potential spoilers for external sources need to be covered by a spoiler tag and include a label (outside of the spoiler tag) of what might be spoiled. These include but are not limited to: other book club picks, other books, games, movies, anime, etc. I recommend also tagging the severity of the spoiler (for example, I may still look at minor spoilers for something that I don’t intend to read soon).
  3. Any information from later in the book than the current week’s reading (including trigger warnings that haven’t yet manifested) needs to be hidden by spoiler tags and labeled as coming from later sections.

Instructions for Spoiler Tags

Posting Advice

  • When asking for help, please mention the page number, and check before posting that your question hasn’t already been asked. As the threads get longer, it becomes more convenient to use the Search function, which is located in the upper right corner of the forum. It is the magnifying glass which is near your profile picture! The best way to search is usually to type part of the sentence you are confused about, and select “in this topic”. This will show you all posts within the current thread which has that string of text.
  • Be sure to join the conversation! It’s fun, and it’s what keeps these book clubs lively! There’s no such thing as a stupid question! We are all learning here, and if the question has crossed your mind, there’s a very good chance it has crossed somebody else’s also! Asking and answering questions is a great learning opportunity for everyone involved, so never hesitate to do so!

Membership

Will you be reading with us?
  • Yes
  • Yes, but I might start late
  • Maybe
  • No
0 voters

If you have already read this but will be participating in the discussion, please select yes!

Which version will you be reading?
  • PC
  • Switch
0 voters

Don’t forget to set this thread to Watching in order to be notified when weekly threads get posted!

There are some extra steps necessary to get Fatal Twelve running on MacOS/Linux if you purchase the game via DLSite:

Instructions for MacOS/Linux Users

After downloading the game, follow the same steps that @WeebPotato did:

2

I’m getting the thread up pretty early to try and drum up some attention, as well as to give us a good place to start talking about the planning. I won’t be jumping straight into setting up textractor tonight, but over the next day or so (maybe even out to next weekend), I’ll look up the guides that @ccookf mentioned in the home thread and start trying to get a preliminary schedule planned out so that we have something to actually discuss on that front!

Of course, if anybody has read/played this already, feel free to offer some input on scheduling! Anything that makes the puzzle of planning these VN clubs simpler is welcome! :joy:

Same to if anybody has an emoji suggestion. :wink:

3

:one: :two: :skull:
…?

4

Looks good to me!

5

I’ve been wanting to read this one for a while so I’m excited for it!

I haven’t looked up too much about the game but the guide I found nsfw ads on the site so I’ll put it on spoilers 誠也の部屋【FATAL TWELVE　攻略】 makes it seem like we’ll need to play the game in a certain order to unlock all the content. Not sure if we want to start a poll at some point to vote on the playing order beforehand or do something else?

There’s also a very short drama CD for the game on steam. We can wait to see how the actual game is first but could be fun to continue as a spinoff if the series is good although my listening skills are awful

6

That was something I definitely thought about when ccookf mentioned the multiple endings and choices, so I agree that is a good idea!

7

For anyone that prefers to buy off of dlsite and doesn’t have the game yet, Fatal Twelve is currently 50% off until 06/26 https://www.dlsite.com/home/work/=/product_id/RJ223761.html

8

I’d be surprised if Fatal Twelve doesn’t go on sale in the Next Fest (6/19-6/26) or Summer Sale (6/29-7/13)

9

Well, between that 50% off and the coupon they gave me for signing up, this will probably be the cheapest VN I’ll ever purchase. :joy: I’ve paid more for some manga.

On this note, I’m downloading the game now and I’ll start working on a preliminary schedule this weekend. :grin:

10

Alrighty, I’ve got textractor set up and it seems to be working smoothly, so today is the day I’m dedicating to making sure I get at least a rough idea of what’s going on. Just one question for those of you who have been using these texthooks for character counts – where are you getting that count? Are you just copying the text into a word document/similar to get the character counts, or am I missing something obvious within textractor itself?

11

I use a texthook page and use clipboard inserter to copy all of the text there so you can get a character count. These are the two texthook pages I mainly use Texthooker and Clipboard Insertion Page - Anacreon Edition. You should see the character count go up in the top right as more text gets copied over.

There’s a little guide on here that explains it too Learning Japanese with VNs - TheMoeWay

12

Perfect, thanks! Basically just throwing this on auto to see character counts up to decision points and going from there.

One thing that does throw a little bit of a wrench – it does seem that there are some decisions that don’t actually have an impact on endings; how would everyone like to handle those choices? Obviously for ones that push towards an ending, we’ll all want to enforce same choices, but I’m not totally certain how to handle choices that don’t do that – do we just pick one to start, and then loop back to the other choice during other endings? (Presuming that those choices also pop up in the other ending, since not all choices will be available in all endings)

13

From what I can tell on the seiya-saiga guide I found, there’s like a dozen or so choices that have no impact on the story. The first choice that matters isn’t until the 11th choice so it doesn’t seem like we would need to go back to the beginning to replay the other ones. They recommend just making a save at every choice and selecting the other one to see the additional text for ones that don’t matter.

For me, I don’t really have any preference on how we handle the choices that don’t effect the ending. I’m guessing its only a couple lines at most that it changes in that specific scene. So if people want to reload after the couple lines to see the difference or just choose one and move on, I’m fine with either.

14

That sounds good to me. Iirc, bustafellows had some completion percentage and stuff tied to all of the choices so it mattered a but more there. Otherwise I think its fine to hit them whenever. Personally speaking Id lean towards picking them in advance just to keep our character counts consistent.

15

That’s essentially what I figured, too, just wanted to hear other’s thoughts. :grin:

With the first few choices pretty much always being available, and having no impact on the endings, I figure just do one run through with essentially “all top choices” (for example; I’d probably actually just go with “black text/pink text” like the guide has it) at first, and then “all bottom choices” for the next ending, if that makes sense? I’m probably wording that poorly, but I hope y’all get what I’m getting at.

I guess the next question becomes, with 4 bad endings and 3 main ones (with, based on that guide, a beneficial play order – as it says that completing one of those endings before the other results in an epilogue) – how do we want to go about it? Do we want to say, clear bad endings first, and then go for the good endings (following that one order recommendation)? Or do we want to commit to one ending and then do the other endings as an off-shoot?

It does seem like we could skip large amounts of the VN for replays because it’ll be stuff that’s already been read, but I’m also just generally not sure how big of a commitment all of the endings would be, and if that would be better for, say, a spin-off club, or if it’s self-contained enough to fit within the 19-21 read time we have set.

Tagging @WeebPotato; I don’t have a preliminary schedule set, but figure you might be interested in sharing your thoughts on how we shape the schedule a bit (plus, I also forgot to tell you that the game is currently on sale on dlsite, if you plan on picking it up!)

16

I’d prefer to follow the recommended order so we don’t miss out on the extra stuff.

A while back in the main VN thread, we decided to read the entirety of any VN that wins the nomination I believe. We got the character count from jpdb which includes all of the text from every ending, choice etc so we should be good on the time limit. The character count they have is 473,479 so that’s about 19 weeks at a 25k/week pace.

The guide I was looking at has recommended save points for the parts where choices effect the story, so after the first playthrough, the other endings should be relatively quick I think. Just load that save and make the new choice to get onto the new ending.

17
Recommended order/mildly spoiler-ish, maybe

Okay, so that I make sure I understand correctly, it sounds like the only way the play order matters is that when going for the good endings, you want to play Ending 3 before Ending 1.

Otherwise, the order doesn’t matter, right?

Basically, my thoughts on play order would be to follow 9-nine’s example and get the bad endings out of the way first, so have our playthrough (following the way the guide you posted lists things) go essentially:

Save 1 - Select the choice that gives you bad end. Play it out, then we start over from save 1, select the good option there, then go on to save 2.

Save 2 - Select the choice that gives the bad end. Play it out, and start over again, this time from save 2, select the good option, then play through to save 3.

Save 3 - Rinse and repeat, starting back over from save 3 after bad end.

Save 4 - This is where things split a bit; since we would want to get that epilogue, we would select the option points us Endings 2, 3, and the final bad end.

Save 5 - Select bad, play it through, start over from Save 5.

Save 6 - We have some variability here, but where End 3 seems to have the more direct impact on End 1, it seems to make sense to go with End 2 first, then loop back, play through End 3, and then finally loop back to Save 4 to get End 1 with the Epilogue.

Of course, all that assumes I’m following what the guide wants us to do properly.

18

This is what I normally go for anyway. I feel like bad endings kind of lose their point after viewing a good ending.

This number always seems to be bloated a bit compared to our actual character counts, so we probably have a good bit more wiggle room too.

It sounds reasonable, but I think for simplicity we could also just make one save file at that first decision Azusa pointed out and use skip read to fast forward to what matters. I might be overly optimistic on the tediousness of that given that the novel is much longer than say any episode of 9-nine, but it would cut out the save file management.

Another odd thing is that the guide I’m looking at seems to have two variations of one of the bad ends… annoying, but ok.

19

Oh, yeah, that would probably be fine. I was just using those as “signposts” to avoid having to put any actual text from the game (since Azusa and I are looking at the same guide). I’ll probably still juggle save files just because it’s how my brain works, but how we approach that bit is definitely an individual choice anyway.

Which guide is that? Multiple sources for planning aren’t necessarily a bad thing, especially since I’m not seeing a variation in the bad ends on the one I’m looking at.

20

I’m used to making a lot of saves whenever I play VNs so I don’t mind the save file management stuff. Reloading from save 1 and skipping to the new choice or just making a save 2 at the new choice is more or less the same, just saves a minute or so on having to skip through stuff. Its a personal preference, we’ll all end up back at the same point either way :joy: But yeah, the order you posted @anon99047008 looks good to me!