It should be discounted in the upcoming fall sale (I see it discounted on pretty much every seasonal sale) and its usually 40-50% off too during those sales for anyone that is waiting to buy it then.
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For Android, the app does not appear to be region-locked at all – I just downloaded it with my UK English tablet. The app is a free download for chapter one, with a single in-app purchase (GBP 33.11 for me) for the full game; I haven’t yet tried to make the purchase.
The game doesn’t seem to autosave if Android chucks it out of memory when you switch to another app, so looks like you need to remember to manually save…
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There are a couple sites that are good for tracking for games on Steam for those who aren’t aware of them. I personally like IsThereAnyDeal which includes multiple storefronts beyond Steam (eg. Humble Store) if it’s available on any of the ones they track.
SteamDB is more focused, but not a bad thing if you’re not hunting for cheapest sales.
https://steamdb.info/app/976390/
One of the more interesting things is that SteamDB also shows some hidden information that’s popular with dataminers, for example it looks like they are considering adding DLC to 9-Nine: Episode 1
As an interesting aside, going by the price history it looks like they give the deeper discount on the major sales such as Summer and Winter (aka. Christmas) than the ones in the middle. An individual episode will go for 11.99 USD or 9.99 USD with the bundle rolling at ~43 USD or ~34 USD. The bundle discount isn’t that great, so honestly I’m thinking I might just grab the first episode for now and wishlist the rest in case I find myself not enjoying this one.
Edit: I should probably say I didn’t vote in the main poll with the intention of reading whatever was picked as long as it was hookable. Since it looks like we’re doing two groups I’ll probably join 9-nine-
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Yup, same, I’ll play it safe. Going for them individually there’s no point waiting one month for the possibility that the winter sale goes for 50% instead of 40%, it’s a negligible difference. Someone going for the whole package though I guess it might be a little bit better but nothing amazing either.
I guess ultimately it depends on how early can we start it, depending on how long will it take for the physical copies to arrive the ones ordering them. I’ve no idea how long it takes for the average order to arrive from Japan, never ordered before.
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I’m fine with it! And I’m always oscillating in enthusiasm along with my maladies but I should be able to stick it out for at least running 9-Nine. Might not hang with Bustafellows but I want to try, if I catch it at a good time. Thinking I might go to the effort of trying to OCR it with Game2Text or something; I do have a capture card.
If anything I had envisioned multiple VN clubs as a cool thing in the past (I was picturing by difficulty more like how the other clubs operate here, but this is an interesting surprise), but figured there wouldn’t be an audience large enough for it. This seems like it’ll work fine though. Even though there’ll be small groups probably, especially on my side, I trust that at least a few of us will make it through and even that is fine by me. I absolutely agree with the points made about it being really important to avoid just barring out half of the interested people, now that there is such a dichotomy.
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I just made my order since I had the items I wanted to buy ready. And the game is predicted to arrive between November 20-24. So shouldn’t be that long for me at least.
@Daisoujou Yeah, I might have accidentally started an otome vn club. 
To everyone: I’ll be making the home thread for BU$TAFELLOWS in the next couple of days.
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I’ve had a lot of success with ShareX’s OCR and Yomichan’s clipboard paste to the point where I don’t use game2text anymore, I feel like it has worked significantly better on average. It’s my favourite way to play anything non-texthookable now and I have ShareX running in the tray at all times because I use it so much, so it’s always readily available, no need to set up or launch anything every single time. It’s usually really good but I guess as any OCR it depends on the font and background, but still. You can always fix any parsing errors afterwards.
When I launch a game or whatever I just turn on the clipboard monitor and that’s it. Once you select the area of the thing you want to track with OCR, it automatically pastes the sentence there and then you just go Shift what you need as usual.
That’s actually really early 
I thought it would take more time, certainly good news!
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Amazon is pretty fast when it comes to orders, even from Japan.
I did however notice only after making the order that they didn’t include any kind of import fees, so I’ll probably be hit with those (also adding at least 3 days to delivery). Meaning I’ll pay a small amount of custom plus $7 handling fee (75 SEK). I don’t like the ridiculous handling fee, because you get hit with it even if your custom fee is $1.
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I think import fees are already included in the item price on the amazon site.
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So I found out the least intimidating VN on my list of things I seriously wanted to read actually supports hooks (supposedly wasn’t the first time I looked). I’m actually going to drop the template here for future voting periods.
Fatal Twelve
Developer: LYCORIS / aiueoKompany
VNDB Play Time: 25h (~35 votes)
VNDB Link: Fatal Twelve | vndb
Story trailer
Summary
Shishimai Rinka was a highschooler who ran a small café named Lion House in place of her grandmother. She lived her life much like any other person her age, but one day, she was caught up in an explosion while returning home on the train alongside her friend, Hitsuji Naomi. In an attempt to save her friend’s life, she shields her on instinct the moment the explosion goes off, losing her life in the process. However, before she knew it, she was back at Lion House, happily chatting with her friends as if nothing had happened in the first place.
A few days later, she found herself in a strange world. Here she met Parca, an odd girl claiming to be a goddess. It turns out that she had somehow become a participant in Divine Selection, a ritual carried out over twelve weeks by twelve people, which allowed them to compete in order to undo their deaths. What shocked Rinka most of all, however, was the presence of her friend Mishima Miharu amongst the twelve.
In order to make it through Divine Selection, one must eliminate others by gathering information regarding their name, cause of death and regret in the real world, then “electing” them.
This turn of events would lead to her learning about the truth behind her death, as well as her own personal regrets. She would also come to face the reality that Miharu was willing to throw her life away for her sake, as well as the extents to which the other participants would go to in order to live through to the end.
Far more experiences than she ever could have imagined awaited her now, but where will her resolve lead her once all is said and done…?
Availability
Steam has Japanese support and a demo version
Switch version
Personal Opinion
I’m not sure to what degree the mystery tag is relevant, but a death game setup is usually good for drama and suspense. The game itself has something like 20ish choices with two different endings and bad ends depending on what people pick (there’s a guide on Steam for endings/achievements). The game runs on a 12 week schedule with a popup in the corner that shows date changes, so it might be possible to plan ahead with a bit of effort.
As for the personal part, this is actually super high up on my Steam wishlist because of their other game Sound of Drop - fall into poison - which was a pretty goofy horror VN set in an aquarium which actually won over my heart. One of those situations where it just happened to be the right game at the right time with a pretty sweet ending.
Also, the bad end screen was hella adorable
Despite being made by what is apparently a 2 person team for writing/art there was a lot of effort put into that game and Fatal Twelve looks to follow. Not to rag on Loopers, but there’s more variety in the environment and character art in the ~35k character demo than the entirety of Loopers… albeit at an arguably lower quality. I’ve put a good number screenshots below that hopefully demonstrate what I mean by this.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
- Dialog is voiced
- Supports Textractor
- Steam and Switch versions
- Independent title, not a part of a series or episode 1 type situation
- Averages 7.6/10 on VNDB (~600 votes)
Cons
- Not a known/popular developer
- Character art is probably hit or miss
- Moderately large at 470k characters
- Potential violence
- Choices in narrative
- Per chapter/week/day character counts not known in advance
Pictures
Difficulty Poll
How much effort would you need to read this VN?
- No effort at all
- Minimal effort
- Moderate effort
- Significant effort
- So much effort my head might explode
- I don’t know
0 voters
I know this is just a name thing, but I’d like to pretend that for a brief moment I found legit furigana in a VN while leafing through the demo.
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I hope you don’t hate me @Daisoujou. 
I added a bunch of stuff to the OP. A dropdown with links to previous polls (for VNs) and the winning nominations. Plus a section for previous picks (maybe one day early since Loopers finishes today, but anyway).
I also added a short line saying which ones are coming up next (I didn’t want to take down Loopers yet because the last week isn’t over).
I took most of the ideas for how to show it from the Beginners Book Club (with a bit of modification).
(Also added the new nomination to the nomination list.)
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I was just thinking about this recently, great addition 
. Unfortunately we can’t change the title (at least I can’t) so we can’t remove the “vote now” ourselves. Daisoujou先輩、暇があったらお願いします c:
Also for some reason I’m so excited about this club gaining momentum 
. I tried book clubs three times before but always quit after a short while, which was annoying because I was interested in the picks, but sitting down to read books on schedule is so much harder for me than sitting down to play a regular game or a VN. In my defence I ended up reading 君の名は on my own eventually, which I started with the book club, so perhaps it’s just reading books on a schedule that I don’t like. VNs on the other hand I feel like I could read for many hours and not feel even a little strain as long as it’s not something crazy hard.
I guess all this is to just say that I’m happy to have found a club that works for me, cause reading or activities in general with other people adds a certain kind of fun that I like. It’s good that the pool of clubs in WaniKani increases so that eventually there’s something for everybody.
I should probably pick novels more often cause when I pick one I can feel the difference in language and it’s quite significant . I still haven’t returned to 人間椅子, woops.
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Very good choice! I’ve been wanting to read this one for years but have been putting it off. I can pretty much guarantee that will be one of my votes next round haha
I came across some furigana the other week when I tried to read エヴァーメイデン (had to drop it cause it was too advanced for me atm).
Every few lines had at least one word with furigana in it. I have a VN and novel frequency thing installed on yomichan so I can see how common words are and that VN had a ton that were in the 30k+ range
I can relate to this. I’ve tried to read some novels and whatnot on my own free time too but I end up getting really distracted doing that compared to reading a VN. I guess all of the voice acting, music, art etc helps keep me focused? But yeah, I am glad to see the VN club is doing well so far 
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I appreciate additions to the top post! Sorry it’s been an unusually busy period for me on top of trying to limit computer use a bit, but I think I got everything I need finished for the moment.
It’s here!
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Been wanting to suggest a VN for quite some time now but most of the shit I want to read has h scenes in it, thank you very much Japan. Did some digging through my VNDB and finally found one that doesn’t.
LUNARiA -Virtualized Moonchild-
Developer: Key
VNDB Play Time: 10 hours
VNDB Link: LUNARiA -Virtualized Moonchild- | vndb
Summary
The Moon and Earth: a love story spanning 384,400 kilometers.
Skyout is a cutting-edge VR action-battle race.
T-bit is not your ordinary high school student. He’s also an undefeated genius gamer.
Day in and day out, he logs into Skyout, winning lots of prize money.
But one day he ends up wandering into a mysterious area.
Lunar World, a Moon server whose existence no one knows about.
There T-bit meets an AI avatar who introduces herself as LUNAR-Q.
It turns out that she’s a rejected mascot character for a lunar terraforming project, and she dreams of seeing the Earth some day…
Availability
(LUNARiA -Virtualized Moonchild- [Key] | DLsite PCソフト)
Personal Opinion
Key visual novels are really well received, and I played a bit of this one and it seems pretty interesting. I haven’t heard much chatter about it but it has a 7.67 on VNDB, so it can’t be that bad I guess.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
- Short
- Has JPDB deck
- Divided into chapters
- Kinetic novel
- Texthookable
- Free trial
- Voiced protagonist
Cons
- Is a Key game = nakige = potentially soul crushingly sad?
- Difficulty may be an issue, 6/10 on JPDB. I read some of it at 4959 / 7343 words known and 89% coverage but it was relatively smooth
Pictures
Difficulty Poll
How much effort would you need to read this VN?
- No effort at all
- Minimal effort
- Moderate effort
- Significant effort
- So much effort my head might explode
- I don’t know
0 voters
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Lunaria is sitting somewhere on my wishlist/backlog. If I remember correctly, it has been released together (or not too far apart) with Loopers? And is also similar kind of short title?
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LUNAR-Q meets T-bit
LUNAR-QT
ಠ_ಠ
Being a bit more serious, I was looking at another 6/10 difficulty game and it didn’t seem much harder than Loopers was at 4/10, just a bit more lookup intensive. Strangely enough the VNDB time is twice as long, but I’m guessing that’s because there’s only 18 votes.
Going by jpdb, ever so slightly longer at 143k characters. (About the same as 9-nine- episode one, Loopers was ~130k)
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The moon is a circle.
Circle = π
QTπ
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It’s two weeks until Bustafellows starts and I’m like super excited, and like totally like “aaaah what to do about pace, aaaah”. Well, thanks to help, I think I have all the assistance that exists; that still means we’ll be going blind. Basically with chapter dividers but no idea how long any of them are.
Definitely feeling a bit envious of the ones with PC versions that have character counts to help them. xD
Also, if curious, I put up a completely made up schedule for route 1, assigning two weeks per chapter/part and that would take us until March 9th. But that will basically be reassessed like every 1-2 weeks, so 
Yeah… basically just me putting a placeholder with dates, lol.
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Yeah good luck, I don’t envy you at all haha. In all likelihood our side is just gonna have a character count to shoot for and wing it. There are definitely some times with this medium that we’re just not gonna be able to have a good plan and have to somewhat go in and adjust based on what we find.
Rooting for you all!
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