VN talk is probably going to be long so I'll collapse it
Yeah… Steam is a decent resource still, and I’ve gotten some things there that I want to read (Ace Attorney trilogy, Little Busters, Musicus, etc), but it’s certainly hit or miss. Unfortunately a Steam sale JUST ended today, heh. I imagine you’ve seen already, but luckily Steam does at least clearly label language availability. Annoyingly, while both being made by Key (along with Little Busters), Clannad and the version of Summer Pockets without the extra content are both English only on Steam. Funny side note there, Little Busters is literally titled “English Edition” all the way to its name in your library, despite being the one to feature Japanese 
That link I sent you also has various further links to some VN recommendations based on difficulty, and while I think those links can be hit or miss, that might be a good place to look if you’re trying to find more stuff that you might interested in.
I hadn’t heard about that, but it might be true? When you ask about where I got Summer Pockets, I’m hoping it’s not like this across the board, because Summer Pockets sells for like $80USD, which I find absurdly and prohibitively expensive, and well… going to have to let this sentence trail off, on the Wanikani boards. Summer Pockets is a hard one to recommend anyway because it’s common to have to change your system location to Japanese to make VNs work, but it’s not a huge deal. Nothing actually changes if you just tell Windows you’re in Japan. But the engine Summer Pockets uses, while not a common measure, goes all the way to checking your PC’s language and even time zone settings, and if anything is off from Japan at all, it refuses to launch. I… worked around it, but this game was a struggle to start, heh.
It won’t be quite that bad generally! I’m still in the process myself of working out where and how I’m going to get all my Japanese VNs, but the visual novel subreddit has a purchasing guide, and honestly probably the easiest way is to just choose a game and check its page on VNDB. They have links near the top to buy the games.
Danganronpa is wonderful, and you should play it, but it’s one I’d be concerned might not work with a texthooker so you’d need the more finnicky OCR, plus I do want to warn you about the class trial segments. I’m not sure how much you know about how it’s presented, but during those gameplay sections words are like spinning around and shooting across the screen and it’s all sytlized and chaotic. Might be a bit of an extra layer of difficulty.
Oh that’s excellent to hear! I just assumed it was an issue with the text not reading well enough, oops. Great choice of game, too.
Summer Pockets: I’m managing… a bit more of the reading totally tripped me up today, but I’m also fighting off early migraine signs. Seems to happen to me a lot these days :\
The reading session was mostly fun, regardless. The return of a particular character led to the VN doubling down on its worst joke I referenced before, but otherwise, it’s increasingly starting to actually put its characters together in situations, as opposed to the isolated meetings, so those interactions are nice. Today I got my proper welcome to the island, which reminds me how slow I’m reading, haha
Today’s interesting but strange historical reference was to Tairo no Masakado, a samurai “notable for leading the first recorded uprising against the central government in Kyoto.” I need to learn more Japanese history… and culture… oh, and the language. Small order there.
Zoo 1: The fourth story has been a little rough with increased description, but I’m grinding through it, and I’m 71% through the book! I just wanted to briefly mention it because I was shocked to come to what seems to be a lightly sci-fi story? Thus far, seemingly a rather touching one about death and the nature of life. I’ll have to write about my total thoughts on Zoo 1 when I finally finish it, but I’m quite enjoying it! There’s a surprising amount of variety.
Or perhaps this has to do with the prevalence of consoles over PCs in Japan?..
(he doesn’t know the Japanese version, of course, he is only reading the English one). And I must say, I’m really impressed how well he manages to keep up - the English text is not exactly easy to understand and contains quite a few words that even I don’t know.
. Like, it only just occurred to me to look into this, and it turns out increased migraine occurrence is pretty common in people who caught it (along with lots of other stuff I’ll resist ranting about, heh).
I have heard of this, but I had not heard of 柊鰯 (
