Actually, imo, words might not be that obscure, although a little on the harder side. Kanji also, sometimes without Furigana. Like, 閂 or 埒があかない.
Though, of course, many words are attached to the themes, like medical, marine, or robotic. So, unseen outside the specific themes…
Yeah that’s pretty much where I land. It’s a little hard to boil down vocabulary in a specific domain into being a pro or con because it depends both on what the individual wants to get out of their reading and how they go about doing it. In general I think the VNs recommended so far look like they’re on the fairly gentle side in grammar complexity and whatnot so it’s like… if their vocab DOES land in an area of interest for someone, there’s basically no better way to get started learning those words.
Super pleased to hear that! If you have any troubles setting all that up, let me know. Shame to hear about the VN you mentioned – a whole lot of games and VNs split into non-Japanese versions for some reason, which gets so inconvenient.
I found this trial one in Google Play Store (for Android smartphone) – https://ruriirodays.com/. I still find ATRI not available in my region, even with Google account set to Japanese region (or I don’t know how).
Even if my region isn’t Japan, only Japanese version is available anyway.
The language isn’t too difficult (or at least, I expect myself to know the words, but not yet). Audio and playback dialogue too (although MC doesn’t speak). I think it is good so far, but it is too early for me to give a real assessment.
In any case, Android smartphone is going to be far most available to me. I do take my laptop everywhere, but it is primarily Linux, though I can restart the laptop to boot into Windows. My Android tablet is as available as my laptop. I have a Windows PC at my dorm, but it is immovable…
Anyhow, I am new to VN, so I might have wrong expectations (e.g. on how fast I can make decisions, rather than following along). Also, not much to compare with, as I have no experience.
So this is like a VN read along? I’m totally down, have played some stuff before. Most recently the Muv-Luv series, but in English only. I still have to figure out how to do texthooking 
Planetarian is one that could work. Only concern I have is the somewhat disturbing content? But it’s pretty mild. Other than that, it’s very accessible, cheap, and short.
Yeah! Sorry I kinda skipped explaining how this would actually work on the basis of there being other book clubs on Wanikani, but we’re going for vote for a VN to read and there’ll be a thread (or threads? we’ll see how we’re structuring things when we get our choice…) to discuss what we think of the content, or to ask questions about the Japanese itself. In my experience these book clubs have always been extremely helpful for making reading more accessible, so it’s my goal to make this club like that, too.
A lot of the main WK clubs will split up the books/manga into chunks with a weekly reading schedule, but at least for our first VN, we’re just going to have an end date and let people check in as they want (with heavy use of spoiler tags of course). Visual novels not being easy to flip through the way a book is make close scheduling more of a challenge, but we might try it in the future.
And yeah, Planetarian totally fits the criteria! Feel free to make a nomination post for that if you’d like. It came up briefly before and the only concern was that it’s possibly a step up in reading difficulty from most of what’s been recommended so far, but that’s just going to be something for people to judge when they vote.
Developer: Key
VNDB Play Time: 6h 15m
VNDB Link: L∞PERS | vndb
Let’s set out to find a real treasure.
Tyler is a high school student who is obsessed with geohunting, a GPS-based treasure hunting game.
One day during summer vacation, Tyler and his friends get drawn into a mysterious incident while out treasure-hunting.
The real and imagined become interconnected. Thoughts are thrown into chaos. Tomorrow becomes today.
Swallowed up by a time vortex, they are trapped in a never-ending time loop, repeating “today” again and again.
Then they meet other “loopers.”
Simon, the leader, and the mysterious girl Mia.
If they join forces, will they be able to break out from this eternal prison…?
[From vndb page]
PC: DLSite, Animate Games, DMM Games
Switch
Android, iOS (Japan only)
A short, recent game by big industry name Key sounds like a nice introduction to VNs for the club, plus the synopsis seems intriguing. Apparently it’s pretty short and has the usual perks (voiced, log, voice replay…) so it should be pretty accessible for a first VN.
How much effort would you need to read this VN?
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I haven’t played the game yet but I do own it and previously checked to see if it was text-hookable (I almost nominated the game too) and you can texthook it with no issues 
That’s great! Thanks for telling me, I’ll edit it right away.
It’s been about a week now! I’m going to be fairly unavailable for the weekend, so I’ll just give it a few more days and hopefully be in a good position to start nomination voting next week.
@Kazzeon Just wanted to give you a quick nudge in case you do want to nominate one of those VNs you mentioned.
For anyone who’s interested in ATRI, it’s currently 40% off on steam through the 23rd! 
(also in a bundle with this other Japanese folktale VN which has a cool looking art style 
)
Off topic, but I was looking at this book list and knew I saw that somewhere.
Ah the 風つよ influence expands That’s cool! Nice that the Japan Foundation thinks I have good taste sometimes 
For some reason I had the feeling there were more nominations, but I think a small list works fine because after this first pick we’re likely to expand our possibilities so that’ll be like a small refresh, anyway.
The poll will run for one week. Two of our nominated VNs have been on sale recently, but at that time there will be a Steam summer sale, so if the game chosen is on Steam, we might be able to get it cheaper. Worth keeping an eye out for anyway!
You can vote for up to 2 VNs! Please refer back to the first post for links to each nomination for more information on them!
0 voters
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Ok it looks like I did those polls correctly, good. Voting time is here! I figured it would be decent enough etiquette to just put up 2 possible choices with 4 options, so I could vote for my own but also one other. I genuinely am ok with any of those VNs though, so good picks everyone. I figured we could potentially get started pretty soon because VNs are such a primarily digital thing, but left the option for waiting up to a month. If you have other thoughts on when we start, feel free to share.
I’m really not sure how I’m going to judge what’s a good amount of time for the club to run, so once we figure out which VN we’re doing and how long it is, please help me brainstorm there 
Haven’t been following closely in the selection process since I’ve no experience in the medium and wouldnt’t have been able to contribute anything. Just went through and read/looked at all the 4 options and its sooo damn hard to pick…
I’m pretty excited to get into the medium and see what it has to offer. I like that all the pics are on the relatively short side too.
From people I’ve talked to, it seems like the average reading speed for beginners is around 3-6k characters per hour depending on the difficulty of the text. I think asking everyone to read an hour a day might be a bit much though haha. JPDB has character counts for most of these games, so maybe whichever VN wins, we could read at a pace of about 1.5k characters a day and set our end date based off of that? I think that would only require about 20 minutes a day for most entry-level readers. Although with that said, I am not sure of everyone’s prior reading experience here, how much time they want to spend on it daily etc but just throwing out ideas. I am certainly open to hearing other ideas.
It’s usually a set amount per week or so, which is basically the same, but lets people choose when and how they want to read it, instead of saying they should read x in a single day.
Ah yeah, I didn’t mean you specifically had to read every single day. I just meant use character count as a rough guideline to figure out how many weeks to set the reading for.
Seems like a workable metric to figure out a speed. Although since I’ll probably read on Switch (I just never use my PC…), I don’t think I’ll be able to tell how far I’ve gotten. 
My Japanese probably still isn’t good enough join this but you might find this page useful. It has a list of VNs with a description of how easy it is to switch to English. Not sure if that defeats the point though.
