The ABC (or Natively LN book club, which is around the same level) deal with much shorter content though, so there’s a limit to how far behind you can fall. I know I’m mildly interested in VNs, but even in English VNs are a long endeavor for me. Like the last VN I did in English was TGAA2 which was 20-something hours. Even a chunky novel is like… 3 hours at most for me in English.
Extrapolate that out to my reading speed in Japanese which is about 10x slower than English even for content I’d consider reasonably comfortable, and you’re looking at 200 hours for a VN assuming the language was in a range I’m comfortable with. For like a 10 week book club schedule, I’d have to dedicate basically all my Japanese practice time just to a VN to keep up, and I get the impression my time spent is on the higher end here.
So I know I’m currently considering joining the IBC, but even if a VN had language equivalent to some of the stuff in the ABBC or BBC, it’s sheer length would make it something that I’d be much more hesitant to join. I think that’s where a lot of your difficulty recruiting people is coming from, Not saying you should change, because obviously going too slow for the people that are demonstrably already into VNs and putting in the time is also a risk.
When would be the start date for ISLAND? From this post I’m guessing that officially 徒花異譚 ends on February 16th, that would be ISLAND starting on March 1st?
Could also extend a bit 徒花異譚 so that ISLAND starts when the sale is live?
Yeah I think 徒花異譚 would end on Feb 16. Some of the past picks we’ve started the next week (so Feb 23 in this case) but we’ve also had a few weeks break in between for some VNs as well (think we had like 3 weeks or something between Fatal and 徒花異譚?). I’m fine with either start date. I know some people for 徒花異譚 voted that they were going to start later so I’m not sure if they’d want the extra weeks or not to finish before Island starts.
As much as I want to read 徒花異譚, I just cannot get it running. I don’t really plan on spending anymore time trying to get it started anytime soon.
If I had just held out for the Switch sale.
ISLAND on the other hand, that one I already have running.
The next club pick, ISLAND, just got a -30% discount on Steam until 12 February. As per SteamDB it may drop to -40% in the Spring Sale, but it’s worth posting regardless, the difference is small.
Oh, it seems I missed the voting D:
As for lack of participation, in my case I was just traveling. And lately the picks haven’t really aligned with my preferences which might not be a deal breaker if it was a book but VNs are a big investment so I’m only joining if I really wanted to play it in the first place.
There is a discount of 30% on Island on steam until february 12th
edit : I think it just showed up because I’ve not received my mail notification already
edit² : sorry, it was not new at all, @rikaiwisdom told it a while ago
And we are starting! (it’s March 1st in Japan already, sorry for everybody living in the past )
Of course, if you haven’t grabbed the game yet but are thinking about it, no harm in waiting for March 14th, where hopefully we’ll see a nice sale, and based from others’ comments, you can maybe judge if it’s something for you. Since we don’t have a real schedule it’s pretty easy to just jump in anytime and read at your speed
Now if you are reading with us, head now to the home thread for more info!
PS: Can a Regular change the title of this thread to “Visual Novel Book Club // Now reading: ISLAND”
I’m reading Charade Maniacs.
Pitch : a high school student, her best friend and 8 others persons are kidnapped to an other world where they must play dramas to entertain the population, gain points and maybe one day going back home.
It’s an otome, so there are nine routes for nine love interests. However, romance is not always the most important in the game, and the discoveries and actions the characters do in order to get back to their world are really enthralling. That said, the heroine isn’t the brighter light of the tinsel, as we say literaly in french, so she is a little annoying in some routes
I play it on switch, I listen the voices in japanese and read the subtitles in english. I recognize or guess a lot of vocabulary like that, and sentences doesn’t seem very complicated to me, so I think it would be rather easy to read it in japanese for a more experimented reader than me. But as the game is on switch, I don’t think it would be possible to use any textractor or tool like that
Not for free at least, and definitely not as comfortably as with Textractor. Pretty much your only option (apart from something like pointing your smartphone camera with an OCR program to the Switch screen, of course) would probably be a capturing device for streaming to a computer and an OCR program like Game2Text.
I’m already very surprised something can be done to help reading in japanese on switch
I have a lot of VN yet to play on this console so thanks for the tip
If you’re okay with emulators, you can also use Agent to hook Switch games almost the same way as people do with Textractor. Only problem is if you don’t know how to extract the scripts for the game, you have to hope someone else has already done it. There is a decent list of games it supports so far though (and a lot of steam games on there too).
