It looks like one ending in particular benefits from being the last, but if I understood it correctly theres some potential fluff all around. I think the developers intent was to encourage free choice on player side so that it would be interesting/rewarding regardless of how the game is played. But thats entirely speculation on my part. Wont be able to say more until I get there.
Thanks! I’m loving Higurashi so far! I just started the answer arcs recently.
I started Higurashi knowing basically nothing about the story. I just knew it was a very popular, well-liked visual novel and that it shared a fanbase with other visual novels I really like. And when I found out that the Hou compilation version of the game was only ever released in Japanese… it seemed like a fun way to experience the story and practice my Japanese at the same time! Plus, it being both on Switch and fully voice acted are sooo nice. Especially since I’ll often play right before bed or on the bus ride to work each morning. (I was very excited when Nintendo announced a couple years ago that they were enabling Bluetooth on the Switch - since it meant I could read my voice-acted visual novels on the bus!)
It’s been suuuuch a fascinating story to jump into with no prior knowledge of it and I’ve done a good job avoiding spoilers. People will sometimes talk about wanting to erase their memory of a certain piece of media so they can experience it again, and Higurashi is possibly the first time I’ve ever thought that myself. It’s soooo well written and engrossing. 
And yes, I’m definitely interested in reading Umineko! 
It was already my plan to read it after I finish Higurashi.
Home thread is up!
Glad you are enjoying Higurashi! It’s one of my favorite stories and really means a lot to me, though I read it back before I started learning Japanese so I’ve only seen it translated. Reading the original must be really nice. There are so many versions; I had it on Steam with mods to add the voice acting and whatnot. That said…
I’m not 100% sure on this, but I THINK because this is a console version it is censored? And that’s kind of a problem in the final two answer arcs. I don’t mean censored in the way people tend to with these games about taking out sex and stuff, it’s more like… there’s a whole lot of political backdrop with references to real historical events and they cut out huge swathes of it seemingly to make the commentary a little less overt and, I dunno, probably avoid some criticisms of Japan and the US based on the stuff that’s missing. There’s also a throwaway line that I find really funny to insist on changing where a character dismisses the idea of going to the police for help as unlikely to work and in this version they specifically rewrote that they go to the police.
When you get there I’d definitely recommend looking into the differences or something at least. Beyond significant real world commentary, it kinda messes up understanding some backstories better too.
That said, still, it’s Higurashi and it’s great, hope you have a great time. I expect Umineko club to take forever but I’ll be building my speed and would love to seriously make it happen one day. I’ve read about half of it and stalled out early in the first answer arc in English… not for lack of interest, just life stuff in the way. It’s seriously great up to there and probably even improves on Higu.
Yeah, I didn’t realize it was a censored version until after I started it… but I probably still would’ve played this version. Having it on Switch just makes it much more accessible for me. I’ve already seen some about differences between the censored vs. uncensored versions, but I’m probably just going to look it all up after I’m done. I’m too wary of spoilers to want to find them all before I finish the game.
Hello friends! Today I finished independently reading a visual novel and I figured I could add a little review here. I don’t really think it warrants its own thread to talk about everything I read, and nowhere seemed more appropriate than this. So maybe whenever I read a VN myself, I’ll start doing this here. Let’s talk about
Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
I especially want to talk about this one because it released pretty recently to seemingly no marketing at all from Square Enix, so it’s been pretty much missed by most people. To put it as spoiler free as possible, it’s about various people investigating mysterious deaths, items, and places connected to ghost stories within Honjo, alongside a rumor of a ritual to revive the dead. That’s not a lot, so for a slightly better description but involving (very early) spoilers: It is quickly revealed that people are being given artifacts that allow them to use curses to kill people who fulfill specific conditions (the first we learn about is when a person is leaving the possessor, they can be killed). If enough people, especially fellow artifact holders are killed, their collected souls can be used to revive someone from the dead. It sprawls, though.
As a VN, do I recommend it? Yeah. I’m perpetually bummed about the lack of voice acting, but there is nearly constant camera and expression changing that makes it feel visually more dynamic than most VNs to help sell it. The story itself intricately connects and where all the plot twists land will depend on individual tastes, but I do think it’s satisfyingly woven together. Still making sure I have my head wrapped around parts of it; it’s a lot. The characters can be amusing and charming but ultimately it’s very plot-focused and takes itself seriously, never dipping into some of the usual pitfalls of bad humor and fan service.
It’s not the most moving thing I’ve ever read, but it was consistently entertaining and for a story with a lot of potential to fall apart, I think it sticks the landing. There’s a cheap jump scare attempt or two early on but it pretty quickly pivots from trying to be scary to being more of a mystery story with dark themes (a lot of gruesome deaths and the like) moreso than really horror. I love the art so I’ll collapse a few pictures
Do I recommend it as learning material though? Ehh… only if you’re a lot better than me. I made it through this on about half interest and half stubborn spite. I wasn’t able to texthook it, though @AzusaChan seems to have had more luck than me on that front searching for text as a test. Largely I didn’t feel too compelled because the script wasn’t the super hard part. I mean, it has its moments because the story is a little complicated and uses some unusual words, and I hope you’re ready for slurry rough characters and the like. But no, the real issue are the files, which are probably harder or not possible to texthook.
Some of these are very long, and you want to read them. The average difficulty just reminds me of books kind of, with longer more complex sentences. Sure, some are about a place or about, say, the concept of juvenile delinquency in certain eras of Japan so they aren’t needed, but others give rich background on characters to make them feel more fully considered. And then there are the mysteries. As spoiler-free as I can: these are files detailing the circumstances surrounding someone’s death, essentially. The problem is they are both written with uncommon archaic type words because they took place well in the past, and they’re in this sort of… vague contextless first person sometimes? They sort of ramble and don’t give you much to grasp onto so some I was ok with but others I found borderline incomprehensible. Admittedly I even used Youtube to just read a few super long ones in English at the end of the game. Oh yeah, they get REALLY long too. So the problem I have is sometimes I open the game, look at a couple files for like 45 minutes, and then that’s my session of Paranormasight. I definitely left it open a fair bit while not playing, but it’s estimated to take 12 hours, and I logged 57. Oops. Could work as a challenge if you’re brave, or just better at this language than I am right now.
Finally, progression can be odd, too. I can’t really describe how the puzzles work but they can be tricky sometimes, but the real issue is a flowchart where you jump between scenes and sometimes you need to do something in another part to open up progress, but I often couldn’t tell if I hit a dead end or just needed to do something different, and eventually I resorted to using a guide through the rest of it. It also hits you with a puzzle eventually that requires you to understand, in great detail, those exact files that I mentioned gave me so much trouble. So watch out for that.
Still, it’s a cool VN. I’d rate it well above what the club has read so far – maybe barring 999 but that game has been around for so much of my life that it’s hard to settle how much of my love for it is nostalgic attachment. It goes for a lot of unique elements that are unfortunately best seen and not described. If you’re in the mood for a pretty elaborate, dark mystery and feeling brave when it comes to Japanese, give it a look maybe.
Thanks for the review, it was nice to read! I still haven’t played the game outside of the testing I did for the texthooking a while back but the game sounds nice from your review and I like the art style a lot. I think I’ll like it once I get to playing it.
I tend to read VNs on the side too by myself so maybe I’ll leave a review for them in the future.
Yeah, definitely let me know what you think whenever you do get around to reading it! I could get into a lot more detail with nitpicks and cool things but overall I’m definitely glad to have tried it; the niche it carves out for itself is pretty cool.
I think you should review them here, yeah! I was just thinking it’d be nice to have this thread serve that sort of purpose too, basically be a general VN hub here on the forums. It’s really good to have direct perspectives from fellow learners because the problems that crop up for us certainly aren’t on anyone else’s mind. If we get more of this kind of thing we could start collecting the posts up top, too.
Featuring “visual novel,” “multiple endings,” and “romance” !Some of the stuff steam recommends me because I play visual novels is wild. I am always amazed at some of the stuff that makes it onto that platform while more tame stuff gets rejected or has to be heavily censored.
My recommendations are kinda weird too for real 
. I get a lot of sexual content just because lately I happen to play VNs, smh… Funny to see it’s the common experience.
Even without doing VNs on Steam (I tend to purchase them elsewhere), I also got that same recommendation from the tags:
“Story Rich” “Anime” “Adventure” “Single Player” and also, thanks to Tales of Arise SOMEHOW having the tag “Sexual Content”???
So, yeah. Steam seems to think if you play anything remotely Japanese-adjacent, you also want to play that. 
Story rich! I don’t know if I find that funnier, or the idea of recommending games on the basis of being single player. Steam is so silly.
Yeah I think I’ve just spotted these in new/trending more than being recommended, but the amount of variations on nazi sex games is uhh… concerning. Steam is a mess. Seems like the platform is simultaneously good and really bad for the medium? It’s helping somewhat to mainstream it, until the absolute flood of Once a Porn a Time games convince people that that’s what all of these games are. And yeah I’ve definitely heard stories of VNs getting really arbitrarily rejected.
Yeah, I definitely had a good laugh at “Story Rich”
And a strong shake of the head at the other tag being applied to Tales.
Yes, swimsuits are definitely in the exact same category as that game (this is literally the only thing I can think of that would have earned Tales that tag; they do a swimsuit costume pack, as JP games seem to love to do). That’s 100% reasonable. 
Facebook is no better with its recommendations. If you show any interest in Japanese stuff it’s going to swarm you with waifu games.
So, idk about making a formal proposal, at least not until the full version is out on Steam (currently out on Switch), but having played the demo of ghostpia, it feels like a great fit. Not too long, not too complex, and really groundbreaking for the genre.
Here’s the vndb link: ghostpia | vndb
It seems pretty obscure still which is so weird to me. It feels like something everyone should be talking about.
I hadn’t heard of this game before, but I’d definitely be interested in playing it! (either on my own or with this group) It looks really cool! )
The steam summer sale started earlier today. Most of the VNs we’ve nominated (including Fatal Twelve) are on sale right now for anyone interested. Lots of good deals 
We all know VNs are long, but just thought it would be fun to put it into perspective now that I came across this… I just started reading a new novel (硝子の塔の殺人), which is 541 pages long. Obviously book/font size and the like is going to play into that; I bought an ebook so what do I know about all that – but pretty much no matter what, 541 pages of book is on the intimidating length side, yeah? It contains 269,772 characters. For comparison, any 2 chapters of 9-nine- goes well beyond that, and chapter 4 is not going to be too short of it on its own. Fatal Twelve is going to be 473,479. When I get people to read Umineko one day it’ll be 2,255,029 lmao.
If there’s a point beyond “look at these big numbers,” it’s that anyone in this club should feel really good about the sheer quantity of Japanese they’re managing to get through. 
Wow. That’s roughly where we’re at with 999 not counting this and next week’s reading!