Visual Novel Book Club // Reading: Fatal Twelve! // Get Your Nominations In!

Maybe we should have a poll to know if there will actually be readers?
I voted for 999 because one day my Japanase will be good enough, and it’ll be great that there’s a book club on it, but I’m definitely not going to read it now :see_no_evil:

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Excited for 999! Planning will be a bit of a pain since those of us who stuck with 9-Nine-, at least, haven’t had to deal with a game with proper routes just yet. I know B$ people voted on route order but it’s not quite as simple as a route per character here, the choices are slightly more arbitrary and hard to signal to people ahead of time. Very general spoilers on what kind of choices they are, blocked for people who want to be very blind: basically at various points characters are forced to split into groups and the choices are about how to split those groups. We may just need a recommended order predetermined? Ultimately the structure does exist to funnel you to a couple specific endings with the others as extra flavor, rather than being all fully developed distinct routes.

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Are we planning to do all endings? Or just whats required for the True Ending? My vote is all of them, I think it took me 20ish hours in English to 100%.

Either way I can help with non-spoilery route planning, I’ve played this game about half a dozen times lol.

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My time has come :joy: Yep! It’ll be my first time doing so so bear with me haha, but I’ll look back at previous things and try to get a home thread up in the next couple days or so!

I figure that’s probably what’ll happen, I’ll look through some walk-throughs and see if there are general recommendations, otherwise may just do a preference poll to see what everyone who’s familiar with the game thinks :man_shrugging:

That was my intention and I think what the proposed timeline and such reflect, but that can also be a poll to include once I get things set up a bit!

Also everyone concerned about difficulty I understand, however please don’t sell yourselves short! I was definitely not a science expert or anything when I played it (like I am now :joy:) and the game does go on tangents sometimes yes, but you might be surprised how generally approachable it is, especially with voice acting and if you have textractor or game2text or something. Of course you don’t have to read with the club if you don’t want, but if 999 is something you really are interested in playing then I definitely recommend just giving it a try to see how it feels, you never know!

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Quick followup on this point – I’ve only played 999 in English so far so I can’t truly speak to the difficulty, but Ace Attorney was one of the first “real” things I read in Japanese and it worked out because just like 999, it was originally a DS game, and those textboxes are pretty small. Even if they’re throwing out a lot of jargon, there’s only so much room for unknowns per sentence, and not much space to make the sentences grammatically complex. It’s probably more approachable than it looks for this simple technical reason.


Also, has anyone tested texthooking for sure on the PC with this game yet? That’s going to make a pretty big difference, at least for me. I’m waiting on the sale or I’d do it myself.

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Fantastic! Let us know if you have any questions. I know I and @Daisoujou make our home threads slightly differently, same is true for the weekly threads, but as long as all info is there, I don’t see a problem with it. Also don’t be afraid to steal templates from the helpful thread on how to run a book club: Tips for Running a WaniKani Book Club

I look forward to being just a spectator, I won’t be joining for this game. I’ll be full up finishing B$ and finally finishing Loopers. :smiley:

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I will be a spectator as well since I’ve read this VN already but I tried to test it out to see it textractor would work. It does attach to the game but it doesn’t pick up any of the text, instead of just spits out of a bunch of random stuff. There was about 20 different hooks and I scrolled through them all but none of them were picking up the actual text. I tried to search around as well but I couldn’t find anybody that knew of a working hook for Textractor, so I think you’d have to use game2text for this.

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I’ve never really messed with texthooking so I’m the wrong person to ask, but I vaguely remembered people talking about it and I found some previous troubleshooting: 📚📚 Read every day challenge - Summer 2022 🏖 ☀ - #392 by Scylie

So verdict is maybe? Not my area of expertise unfortunately :joy:

Guess what’s on sale :eyes: Save 60% on Zero Escape: The Nonary Games on Steam

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Hmm ok, I used game2text before and that’s definitely going to be slower but it’s… servicable. I’m finding it a little hard to follow on the post how well they did or didn’t get texthooking working but maybe my brain is a little slow right now.

Also that’s a full Spike Chunsoft sale, oh no :melting_face: – oh and the spring sale hit today anyway, I missed it.

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Hey! Sorry I haven’t had a moment to read all the replies yet but I saw this and wanted to link to further discussion I had with Scylie back then when I tried to hook it:

So overall we should be relatively good for anything outside of the puzzles. In puzzles, uhhh we’ll see I guess :joy: .

We really have a lot of good discussion in the challenge threads huh :joy: . Forbidden knowledge, forever lost.

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I was going to go the DS route because I’ve been meaning to play it that way since it was released but I thought, if the PC version happens to go on sale in time to start with the club, I would really like to have the voice acting. Question is, will I want to continue into the third game? Not much more for the trilogy bundle.

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:eyes: nice
I didn’t vote for it since I’m not really sure yet if and how much of it I want to reread, but I definitely wanna join in some way. Will just have to figure out how exactly, I’m thinking I might go find a playthrough on youtube instead for some novelty + listening practice, or maybe reread it properly after all but only the story parts (I feel like the puzzles might be a good bit less interesting if you still remember the solutions :see_no_evil:)
I guess in theory I could also wait for the club to catch up with where I’m at right now, but I’m not sure I like that idea :joy: Would probably a bit tricky anyway since I doubt the route order would be the same.
Will have to see. In any case, fun times :smile:

Does this have a start date yet? :thinking:


Oh hey it’s me :joy:

Yeah I think that’s a good recap :laughing:
The story parts work more or less fine with no issues (aside some weird extra characters inserted here or there, but nothing major).
During the puzzle sections things get kinda weird, you can ultimately work with that as well but probably not without workarounds (unless there’s another better hook that I just didn’t find, could be)
We’ll figure it out somehow :laughing:

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If we’re picking a set route order my personal recommendation would be sub, knife, axe, safe, then true - though I’m not sure about routing each door, and that might vary between the DS version and the port because of the flowchart.

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999 wins!! :tada: I don’t see anywhere what day we start reading, but maybe I just can’t find it? Or have we not decided yet?

My vote is also for all of them. We definitely need to do at least two, but I think we should do all of them. Definitely do the required ones last. I have some ideas for order… but so do a lot of people it seems!

Can’t wait to read the award-winning visual novel 999999999*
*9 hours 9 durtles 9 doors 9 鰐 9 蟹 9 coelacanths 999 reviews

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Not decided yet. I’d say minimum a week from now. Need time to get everything set up and organized and such. Date will be decided in the home thread and it’ll be linked here when posted. :slight_smile:

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I agree with this, except maybe do coffin before safe as well?

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Home Post is up! 極限脱出 9時間9人9の扉 (Zero Escape: 999) 🗝 (Visual Novel Book Club) // Voting for schedule!

I think I hit all the main points in the intro, and I’ve put up a couple polls for start date and scheduling things. Let me know what you guys think! :grin:

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Personally I don’t think coffin adds much except some alternative dialog (not even that) and it means we either reread or skip over a lot of the dialog for true

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When you do true I assume you’d just skip to the point where it picks up from coffin rather than replay the first 80% of the route :thinking:

It’d be less about ‘adding’ and be more about building suspense by pausing and doing a different route before returning imo

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9-nine-'s continuation considers themselves an off-shoot. I’m moving B$ to off-shoot too so we can put Zero Escape: 999 in the spotlight. If anyone thinks that’s wrong, let me know. I’ll do the switch over tomorrow or the day after, to allow a little time for someone to actually reply to this message. xD

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