Since Fatal Twelve has the final thread posted now, should we start making the polls for 徒花異譚? I’m not sure all of the polls we need or who wants to post them. I think we need one to see if everyone is fine with the new proposed format and maybe one for when we should start?
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I’m so excited to discover this club ! 
The next VN to be played seems really nice^^
(By the way, I did Bustafellows on my own and I loved this game 
)
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I may join you on FLOWERS if the Christmas Steam Sales are generous 
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Just be aware that, as far as I know, from the Steam version, you can’t choose text in Japanese. Only text in English and Japanese audio. (That’s the version I have and will join the club anyway)
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Good to know, thanks.
Anyway, I think I have way to go to decipher a whole visual novel in japanese… As for now, I think I’ll stick to english text and japanese audio too.
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If you’re interested in Flowers, its worth keeping an eye out on GOG since they have a bundle for the entire series at a lower price. I’ve seen the bundle go on sale a few times too so it might be cheaper in the next few weeks Flowers Bundle on GOG.com
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If you want to you can go ahead with the polls 
I can post them too I don’t mind (wasn’t sure who should do them since it wasn’t my nomination hehe). I was thinking about one to see who will be reading and another to check if others are okay with the suggested new format. Also yeah start date too.
If we end up adjusting to it it might be a good idea to discuss a new way to measure pace, in terms of setting the end date. I wonder if we could make the play times on VNDB work, somehow? Obviously those times can be very short since not everyone reads in Japanese, not every Japanese reader is a learner, and even learners there can be pretty fast readers for what I’ve seen. But if we can come up with a way to adapt it for the club then that means VNDB is all we ever need in the future for nominations, with “no need” to know how many characters something is (we can still check for reference if we can find it). Maybe using the difficulty polls of each nomination could help decide if something is easy and can be read closer to VNDB’s play time, or hard and needs to add a lot more extra time. Or just simply decide on a fixed length of time (x months) and leave it at that, let nominations decide whether that is a 10h VN or a 50h VN at a given time. But anyways, just a thought.
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Will you be participating in the 徒花異譚 club?
- Yes
- No
- Undecided
0
voters
Are you fine with the new proposed format (no weekly threads/use choices as a reference point)
- Yes
- No
0
voters
More info on the proposed formation here: Visual Novel Book Club // Next: 徒花異譚 - #576 by rikaiwisdom
Preferred start date
- Dec 15
- Dec 22
- Dec 29
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voters
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I put the polls up. Please let me know if I missed anything or need to change anything.
I think that could be a good idea. The playtimes on there can be skewed though so I think if we can find character counts it would be a good idea to use that as the first reference point (I’ve seen some games with the same playtime have a difference of 100k+ characters which could make a big difference for a lot of us I think). For 徒花異譚 I couldn’t find the character counts for it and I think the language in it will be pretty difficult so I’m not sure how we want to set the end date on this one.
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Voting has ended and it looks like everyone is fine with the new format and Dec 22 barely won as the preferred start date.
I’m not sure if we need a home thread for the VN since all the discussion will be under a single thread now? Guessing we will be okay to have just the single thread up next week and nothing else?
As for the end date, in my original submission I estimated between 9-12 weeks based off of the vndb play time. I tried to ask around but couldn’t find a character count for the game. Since this game is on the harder side and we are trying out a new format, I think it’d be better to go with the longer estimate and go for 12 weeks? So we’d start on Dec 24 and end on March 15. Does that sound fine?
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Yeah I think we’re fine with both home and discussion in one thread, imo.
Sounds good . If it ends up being a lot more time than we needed and eventually there’s nobody reading it anymore we can always shorten it, but 12 weeks should be fine.
Unrelated
Discourse has apparently changed how summary boxes display and it has soft broken the format of some posts/threads 
they’re now actually inside a box (it has improved many as well at the same time though). I used to format a lot with < hr > and now it looks off with the new summaries. I might revisit 9-nine threads and ninja edit. I like the change though, but now it feels a tiny bit awkward to abuse it as spoiler discussion D: I’ll do anyway.
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Adabana is 30% off again as part of the winter sale for anyone that hasn’t bought the game yet and is interested in joining us reading it
Some people were interested in Flowers as well, (English only versions) are 40% off each on steam
The bundle on GoG is also 40% off and cheaper than buying them all on steam https://www.gog.com/en/game/flowers_bundle
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The thread is up for 徒花異譚. Hopefully I didn’t miss anything 
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I finished 徒花異譚 earlier and the total character count came to 186,069 after all the endings. We originally estimated 9-12 weeks based off of the vndb time and just went with 12 weeks to be safe but since we have the character count now, do we want to set the end date to be 8 weeks after the club started since that would match the 25k/week count that we normally do for the club?
I wasn’t sure whether to ask in this thread or the 徒花異譚 thread but since the end date of that one effects when we will start nominations, voting, etc for the club I figured asking here might make more sense. For the past few picks, we normally started voting 6 weeks before the current VN ends I think. Since that would be now if the club ended after 8 weeks, maybe it would be a good idea to make it a little longer than normal like 9-10 weeks so we have time to do nominations and voting?
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To be honest it’s currently only three of us reading in Japanese, and if I’m not mistaken apart from me the other two of you are done already . It should be alright, I barely started the other day already but I don’t think it will take me that long to finish once I start reading it diligently, just haven’t had the time yet with all the new year stuff and whatnot. Though it seems polv and Voi ticked the “reading later” option so it’d be good to know what they think as well.
Whatever option is good by me. I’m not sure if anyone here usually buys physical so I don’t know exactly how crucial it is to wait extra time for the nominations/voting. I mean, I don’t know if it’s an actual issue the club currently has, if nobody buys physical then I would say we can keep it at 8 weeks this time. If somebody does indeed buy physical then we can wait that extra time, no problem at all. I’m just genuinely unsure we usually have people buying physical copies from Japan. That being said, I have no issues with 10 weeks so if we want to default to it automatically just in case I don’t mind. Perhaps nominating and voting first would give an idea if someone would purchase a physical copy of whatever gets picked and needs 6 weeks for it to arrive?
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I don’t have an issue with it. I was planning to start this weekend and be done before the end of Feb. Based on posted character counts the VNs about the length of a typical light novel at about 180k characters. For reference 999 clocked at about 340k not counting the puzzle sections (so probably closer to 400k).
So it’s quite a bit shorter than other picks, more akin to a manga getting selected instead of a book in the book clubs and we usually either poll early or just read the runner up for those.
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That sounds good. Maybe we could start nominations this week, voting next week and then see how everyone is feeling regarding 徒花異譚 if they want the extra two weeks or not? I think in the past we wanted the 6 week buffer for sales too but since the holiday season is over now, I’m not sure if there are any big sale events coming up on steam.
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Nothing interesting that I’ve seen on SteamDB. Next major sale is 14 March :<
There may be other sales outside though, I always keep an eye on my wishlist, seems like a lot of VNs are very frequently on sale.
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Since we are doing nominations this week, can someone please edit the thread title to indicate nominations are now open? 
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Done
I’ll probably nominate ISLAND, I’m not done with it but enjoying it so why not! What’s the deadline for making the nomination post?
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