Really appreciate everyone’s nice comments! Glad you’re enjoying the screenshots, cause I certainly like posting them.
Love to see it! Having more people playing this stuff is exciting for me. And I can’t wait to hear what you think over time, such a good series. The digital root was kind of a weird concept for me, so I’m glad you were able to follow the description in Japanese, haha.
From a reading perspective, middle of the road, kind of? Nothing too despair-inducing, though I’d say I struggled more than average. It was, surprisingly, conversational stuff this time. Some of those blocks of kana still throw me off… it’s hard to describe; I should’ve taken a screenshot of the kind of line I mean, but there are times when it’s just a mass of なんs and particles and the like and it’s hard to directly turn that into words – I think there’s a certain layer of intuition for those kinds of sounds and conversational indirectness that I just don’t have yet. Perhaps even mixed in with sentence parts that serve more to replicate real life fillers or otherwise soften the text moreso than add meaning. Does that make sense?
All that said, today was an exciting mixup, and I ended up with a bunch of screenshots I wanted to share as I went along… I’m just going to collapse this section and indulge myself for those interested, because as you’ll see, it’s a bit of a special occasion.
Today's experience
First, I came across this image and wanted to share it early. It’s the former mountain path in the evening light – I love what this VN does with times of day. It’s, as you may expect, a very summer-oriented experience, but the altered vibes of otherwise familiar places make me think how cool it would be to see this art in other seasons.
But then I realized I couldn’t just share that, because I came across an upside-down man.
And then, of course, we played ping pong.
It actually entirely slipped my mind that this visual novel has minigames, so this was a fun surprise. It’s totally optional, but on a first play at least, I had fun. You can see those circles behind him – basically a ball comes at the screen and you click the circle it’s heading towards, scoring better based on your timing. The circles change in size, shift around, and grow to 5 instead of 3. It’s a simplistic clicking timing game, but it’s fun. I’ve always loved rhythm games, sunk tons of my life into Rock Band and Guitar Hero and the like.
I did well, apparently, I think! I did hit the ball a whole lot of times, and he seems impressed. For now the plot is starting to move on, but I suppose I’ll be coming back to this in the future.
Oh yeah, I should add a word. Definitely 死力を尽くす (しりょくをつくす), to make frantic efforts. Also the name of the ping pong mode I played haha.