Flowers šŸŒŗ Visual Novel Informal Club (Now reading Printemps)

Japanese Language Book Clubs
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Welcome to FLOWERS -The tale of the girls who grow with a season-.

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I just wandered in, what is this?

This is the home thread for the visual novel ā€œFLOWERS -The tale of the girls who grow with a season-ā€. See the visual novel book club home thread if you need an explanation of visual novels themselves, but Flowers is an all-ages mystery yuri visual novel by Innocent Grey.

This club is an informal club meaning there will be no weekly threads for discussion. Instead, each game will get its own thread and people can read at their own pace while dropping in to discuss the game.

Steam Summary

In the middle of a forest isolated from the rest of the world lies Saint Angraecum Academy , an all-girls school. This is where Suoh Shirahane, a painfully shy girl with a mysterious past, will begin her first year of high school. Follow her as she navigates new friendships within the academyā€™s special ā€œAmitiėā€ partner program and attempts to unravel the many mysteries at the academy, including occult rituals and the mysterious disappearance of fellow students, all while trying to pass her classes.

Within the halls of Saint Angraecum Academy , spring warms into summer, as does Suohā€™s friendships until they too blossom into something much more.

Where to buy

JP Versions

PC:
Game 1 https://e-mart.jp/gungnir/products/detail/15 (potentially region locked? need to verify)
Game 2 isnā€™t listed on there - need to find a place to buy it?
Game 3 https://e-mart.jp/gungnir/products/detail/16
Game 4 https://e-mart.jp/gungnir/products/detail/20
Switch (includes all 4 games)
PS4 (includes all 4 games)

English Versions

Steam:
Game 1 Flowers -Le volume sur printemps- on Steam
Game 2 Flowers -Le volume sur ete- on Steam
Game 3 Flowers -Le volume sur automne- on Steam
Game 4 Flowers -Le volume sur hiver- on Steam

GOG:
-40% Flowers Bundle on GOG.com

There is no console version for the English release, only the PC versions above.

Discussion Rules

Please spoiler tag / collapse all spoilers. Donā€™t be shy to ask any questions at all about the language, freely give your thoughts on the content of the writing so far, etc. Just remember usual forum and etiquette and itā€™s all good. And please do chime in, the more the merrier and all that :grin:

And if you drop off the schedule, thatā€™s no problem either. Often someone is still watching these threads, so (as is true with all clubs here) feel free to ask or comment even after the end date!

Discussion Threads and Reading Schedule

Printemps - 10/20/2023 - FLOWERS -Le volume sur printemps- šŸŒŗ Visual Novel Informal Club
ƉtĆ© - 01/12/2024
Automne - 04/05/2024
Hiver - 06/28/2024

Member List

Are you planning to read Flowers with the club?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Yes, but I might start late
  • Not sure
0 voters

If so, which version are you reading?

  • PC
  • Switch
  • PSN
0 voters

Which language do you plan on reading it in?

  • Japanese
  • English
0 voters
7 Likes
2

Start times

When should we start

  • October 20th
  • October 27th
  • November 3rd
  • Other (please leave a comment)
0 voters

Do you want all the threads up at once?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Fine either way
0 voters

If we will be staggering the threads, how long do you want each thread to be up for before we start the next game?

  • 3 months
  • 4 months
  • 5 months
  • Other (please leave a comment)
0 voters
5 Likes
3

I copy and pasted most of the information from the 9-nine club so if I am missing anything in the OP please let me know and Iā€™ll try to fix it. :blush:

3 Likes
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Looks good! Excited to get back to the series.

Iā€™ve already said it elsewhere but for the sake of this thread if it gets new eyes, Iā€™m definitely going to join, but I read the first VN a little too recently (which is the only one Iā€™ve read), so Iā€™ll hop in when you all reach number 2! And the first was very good so people should totally give this a shot :grin:

I wonā€™t comment on starting time since Iā€™m not jumping in til 2 anyway, but otherwise I voted on everything.

5 Likes
5

I havenā€™t done a lot with VNs in japanese or followed the VN club threads very closely, but what does a ā€œreasonableā€ club speed tend to look like? Not that it necessarily applies to this casual club. printemps is a little over 310,000 characters according to jpdb over ~12 weeks would be about 25k characters per week.

I have no real frame of reference for what that really means in terms of time, basically :sweat_smile:

5 Likes
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25k is what the current clubs are moving at, but we started closer to 10k to ease in on short VNs at first. Itā€™s not an insignificant amount of reading, doubly so because Flowers is a bit of a step up in difficulty compared to some easy ones (maybe not any harder than the current Fatal Twelve though?). Back when I read it, especially in the early days, I was scraping by with about 5000 characters per session because the writing style was making me move a little slowly. Right now I usually spend a couple hours and get ~10k+ depending on the material. Not the easiest thing to describe since speeds vary, but yeah.

I actually have a screenshot from my very early days starting the VN showing my speed slowly creeping up, and there 25k characters was about 1000 lines:

Character Count

5 Likes
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Oh and Iā€™ll just add (seems people already saw my post so Iā€™m avoiding editing to make sure it doesnā€™t get lost) Iā€™m sure Iā€™d be comfortable at 3 months but Iā€™m not going to be too impatient if it works out for others to space them a bit more, so if it ends up close at all, feel free to take the slower pace.

3 Likes
8

If people want, I wouldnā€™t mind making just game 1 be 4 months and then the others be 3 months (depending on how the final voting goes). Game 1 is the longest in the series (game 2 is almost 60k characters shorter) and the start of a new series generally tends to be the hardest part. Iā€™m also fine with 3 months for every game of course if everyone votes that way.

4 Likes
9

Makes sense :slight_smile:
Though 3 months is very poetic, itā€™s the duration of a season :grin:
Iā€™m already well in Flowers 1 so I think Iā€™ll finish it but Iā€™ll wait for the club to start Flowers 2 then :smiley:

4 Likes
10

Got it all set up with my texthooker and yomichan stuff today! Read through about the first 1000 characters to get a gauge on difficulty and think I could probably manage. Especially with the reading speed increases that come with being more familiar with a series over time, and also with just reading a bunch over the course of several months to a year :laughing:

Some things I couldnā€™t get to text hook well, but they show up in the backlog and then I could hook them there

3 Likes
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Where did you buy the Japanese version? I might try the Japanese version when we get to volume 2, letā€™s see how confident I feel about my skills when we get there!

4 Likes
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The only digital versions in japanese that I could find were on the switch (pain in the butt to get around region locks, even if you change your region sometimes it locks you out of buying jp games if you donā€™t have a jp credit cardā€¦), so I bought the game on steam in English and then found some alternative means to play it in japanese (steam release, inexplicably, does not have jp language options!). If anyone else has found a good real way then please share because I absolutely could not find one :melting_face:

The website to buy a CD looked region locked (didnā€™t try to put in a fake jp address to see if that worked, but it sometimes does and you can send those to a proxy service and have them shipped), but thereā€™s also a few copies of the normal CD version on ebay if you really really really wanted a cd version. Thereā€™s a japanese PSP version that I wouldā€™ve bought in a heartbeat if I didnā€™t need yomichan for reading this to be feasible :sweat_smile: Might still buy it just because I like physical games next time I do a big jp purchase.

4 Likes
13

I asked one of my Japanese friends that is a big Flowers fan too if there were any digital options for PC available and they said it was a DMM exclusive

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ē‹¬å č²©å£² :upside_down_face:

So outside of setting up a VPN to access the all-ages section for DMM (still crazy to me that only the all-ages section is region locked but 18+ is fineā€¦) Iā€™m not sure if you can legally get the PC version digitally if you live outside of Japan.

If youā€™re buying it on console and having trouble with payment on that front, you can buy digital cards on https://www.play-asia.com/ and then redeem the code to buy it that way.

Per JAST, the licensing fees to include the jp text was too much for them to want to include it so all of us language learners suffer now :grimacing:

5 Likes
14

That does just seem to be the case with so many visual novels Iā€™ve looked at :upside_down_face:

Ah thatā€™s a great idea! This will come in handy at some point Iā€™m sure

4 Likes
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I forgot to put a close date on the polls for voting when to start etc. Iā€™ll manually close them on the 18th since two weeks should be more than enough time for people to wonder in here and vote?

With the way the voting currently is, these would be our start dates:
Printemps - October 20th
ƉtĆ© - January 12th
Automne - April 5th
Hiver - June 28th

There is no weekly assignments since this will be an informal club but for anyone that is curious on what the weekly pacing would look like for each game:
Printemps - 26.1k/wk (313,551 characters in total)
ƉtĆ© - 21.3k/wk (255,970 total)
Automne - 23.2k/wk (278,894 total)
Hiver - 23.5k (282,297 total)

So overall, the time commit should be about the same for anyone that has participated in our normal VN club recently.

6 Likes
16

I suppose I shouldā€™ve waited to buy it on steam, all 4 are currently on sale for the Visual Novel Fest, from 8/7-8/14 :laughing:

4 Likes
17

I closed the voting polls for the start dates since its been two weeks now. Having one thread for each game every 3 months(12 weeks) won so our schedule will look like this:

Printemps - 10/20/2023
ƉtĆ© - 01/12/2024
Automne - 04/05/2024
Hiver - 06/28/2024

Iā€™m excited to re-read the series and I hope everyone who is reading it for the first time enjoys it too :partying_face:

4 Likes
18

Nice! Looking forward. Happy to have some time before ƉtĆ© starts, maybe Iā€™ll be done with Island by then :grin:

2 Likes
19

Iā€™m too stupid to read dates. So in ISO format:

Printemps - 2023-10-20
ƉtĆ© - 2024-01-12
Automne - 2024-04-05
Hiver - 2024-06-28

3 Likes
20

Just a reminder for everyone that we will start reading Printemps a week from today :grin:

3 Likes