Got it! I’ll start as soon as I’m done with Planetarian, very little left. 
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Oh, I didn’t know that, thanks!
Now that I do, I’m a bit conflicted on it. I like removing DRM from things I own to use them more comfortably and having to use dictionaries instead of text hooking is such a pain. Using a text hooker would allow me to play the games I want years sooner.
But on the other hand I like playing on the Switch. Maybe I’ll play a few games this way, and a few others the other way, hum.
I wonder if Agent also works with Suyu, which seems to be the successor to the smoking crater that is Yuzu after that Nintendo lawsuit two weeks ago. I guess it would, probably being a fork and all? But if not yet, I guess it will probably soonish.
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I ended up getting the English limited edition! …Though with the MTL-quality translation, I wish I got it in Japanese instead 
I personally liked it. I hope you enjoy! Would love to know your favorite characters once you’re done 
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I’m back with my feedback as I’ve just finished the game @emime !
Impressions on Charade Maniacs (minor blurred spoilers)
I can say I really enjoyed the story and most of the characters of the game. The atmosphere was surreal, mysterious and tense, with little touches of humor, and I really liked the adventure !
About the characters, I first must say that I found the heroine really bland, weak-willed and at times, totally clueless. I think it’s the worst heroine I’ve ever seen in an otome (and I’ve played a bunch of otome so I don’t say that lightly 
). Some routes were really difficult to enjoy because of her personnality (well, also because of the personnality of some of the LI, but I’ll say more about that later).
Strangely, I think it’s in the route with Futami where she is the most enjoyable when she shows him that his twisted mind won’t do if he wants a relationship with her. She didn’t back up at any time, and that was really empowering.
When it comes to the love interests, my favorite of all was Dazai, hands up ! 
I love the mix of kindness and responsability in his personnality. It’s also the best romance route to me, as they really share a lot, and they really suit each other.
I liked Ebana a lot too, even if tsundere are not always the personnalities I like the best. Ebana was touching tough. The circomstances of his fear of feelings and contact were totally understandable and he did what he could to overcome them.
My third favorite… I hesitate between Akase and Gyobu here, as the first one is really nice altough not brilliant, and the second one is brilliant altough not respectful (but moving in his own way).
As for my bottom 3, it was without any doubt Tomose the worst for me (and I say that while I love the “childhood friend” trope. However, I hate crazy yandere like him 
).
I enjoyed Iochi as a general character but their route was one the worst for me when it came to romance. I felt really betrayed here .
And finally, Haiji. Thanks but no thanks. The good ending of his route makes as much sense as the heroine personnality, so to say : none. How was this supposed to be a good ending ? (Am I harsh here ? I think I might have been, sorry if you like them, you can like them as much as you want, I won’t judge you, I promise 
I’m curious to know your arguments, though, if you liked them. Maybe I’ll change my mind)
To conclude, I enjoyed this game pretty much, but some routes waaaaay better then others. I liked the story and all the characters (for some of them only in the general routes though, not in the romanced ones), except for the heroine (which is a pity, I know 
). My general conclusion would be : this game is way too uneven.
A few days of break and I’ll be fresh to start playing Island \o/
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Response to Charade Maniacs Impressions (w/ spoilers)
It’s so funny you say this because I played Tomose’s first and I hated the heroine in his route. I love the childhood trope as well and yanderes are very hit-or-miss with me (two of my favorite LIs are yandere though 
) but I found Sena so entitled and selfish in his route that I started feeling bad for Tomose. IIRC, Sena was essentially like “I don’t love you, but I’m going to hurt myself to hurt you so that you risk your life to save me!” and then all of a sudden she likes him? And this was the very day after she finally rejected him, so she gave him no time to cope with his heartbreak. They were both just awful for each other LOL
Futami was my favorite LI and route! I played his 2nd and boy was that a roller coaster ride 
My 2nd favorite was Gyobu (did not expect to like him so that was a surprise!) and my 3rd favorite was Chigasaki 
No arguments here. I was completely indifferent towards him
I’m usually a bit more forgiving with consistency when it comes to these games with 8-9 LIs, though I do feel like the quality of a route can really affect whether or not I like a character, like you mentioned with Iochi. Iochi was one of the characters I was most interested in but their route fell short 
But all-in-all, I enjoyed the concept! I went in blind and thought it’d be a bit more mature like Zero Escape, but I guess too many fatalities wouldn’t have worked out for this game haha
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts
Hopefully this club does another otome in the near future 
I still need to catch up on Bustafellows though, so I’ll probably comment on the old thread while I play along!
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You have the power to make it happen there are a lot of nominations spots available still, and then show up for the vote!
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Thank you! I haven’t nominated any yet since I already see a lot of good proposals on the list (and a bunch that I own and haven’t played), but I’ll think about which ones might be good for a more general audience based on story, length, and platform
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Thank you for sharing your thoughts @emime ! It’s nice to talk about an otome with someone else as I don’t have anybody around me who plays this kind of games (well, my daughter does sometimes, but we haven’t the same tastes at all as she loves yandere and I prefer wholesome relationships. It’s fun to argue with her on that, though. She’s definitely forbidden to go out with a true yandere in real life )
I’ll think about that too. The problem is that most of my otome are on switch and not available on steam. On Steam, there are a lot of great dating sims (the american otome 
), but they’re usually in english.
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I’m currently reading Island with the book club along with a VN from a former Natively book club, called Christmas Tina. Christmas Tina doesn’t work very well with Textractor, so I looked around for an alternative. I found LunaHook and it hooks Christmas Tina without any issues. I just wanted to let you know in case you’re reading (or want to read) a VN that doesn’t work well with Textractor.
LunaHook also has a translator called Luna Translator, but I’m happy with the hook plus the Texthooker website.
(By the way, I want to nominate Christmas Tina for the next book club pick after Island, or maybe the one after that so we’re closer to Christmas. Can I nominate now or should I wait until we’re almost done with Island?)
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Thanks for the tip! Yes you can nominate at anytime
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Just as a side note, Christmas Tina (and other Unity projects, I assume) work super well with Textractor once you replace the texthook.dll with the one found here: Alpha build archive · Issue #868 · Artikash/Textractor · GitHub (At least it did for me with the one I got there a few months ago)
Firefox reports it as malware while downloading, but virustotal seems fine with it, and I can see why an automated check would think a DLL that injects into other apps is maleware. And, well, it’s by one of the collaborators of Textractor, so if you trust Textractor…
It also didn’t feel particularly Christmassy to me, so I’d recommend reading it whenever you want 
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Like it was mentioned above, feel free to nominate whenever. We usually start voting about 6 weeks before the current VN ends (around the end of June this time I think) so you have a while to make any nominations you want 
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Thank you! I did download the dll but I still think LunaHook works even better. LunaHook found just a few hooks and the first one was the right one. Textractor found lots and lots of hooks and I couldn’t always find the right one. But it’s good to know that there are other options with Textractor too!
No, I agree (at least so far, at the end of chapter 3). I still don’t know why it has Christmas in the title, but I guess I’ll find out!
Good to know that I can nominate any time! I’ll make sure to do so before the next voting starts in June.
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Huh - the “lots and lots of hooks” is what happened to me before the DLL. With the updated DLL Textractor shows exactly three hooks for me, and the third one is the right one and works perfectly. (This is the DLL version I was using, but I’d be surprised if newer DLLs wouldn’t work too…)
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Thank you! Maybe I didn’t find the right one the last time. I’ll try that dll!
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thanks for sharing this, super helpful for a problem I was having with another game
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About LunaHook, I’ve been trying it lately as well. It’s apparently a project that aims to keep texthooking development going, since Textractor hasn’t had significant development since 2020 other than minor bug fixes, as per the author’s words on their github FAQ, and those DLL files you guys have mentioned maintained by other people. I occasionally browse /r/visualnovels on Reddit and there was a thread a few days ago where LunaHook’s author said they had merged Textractor’s DLLs and more than two hundred additional hooks, so that may be the reason it’s working equally good or better.
It apparently supports all of Textractor’s plugins, which is nice. For the little I have tried it, I got the impression it also pulls the text a bit faster.
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Textractor recently stopped working properly on both of the computers I use on a regular basis, so I tried LunaHook on one of them, but can’t get it installed because the anti-virus software (Bitdefender) flags it as a threat and quarantines it directly after the download. Has anyone encountered similar problems and if so, how did you get around it?
(For the record, I’m hesitant to just turn it off, because this is technically my parents’ computer and I don’t want to mess with their virus scanner)
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If you trust LunaHook enough, you can get it out of quarantine again: https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/2092/
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Yes, I had the same thing. Windows Defender nuked it either when I downloaded it or, if the download managed to go through, when I opened the exe. I’m not super knowledgeable about it as a whole, but apparently the method that text hooking uses is also a method that can potentially be used to design malware and so on, and since the file might be too recent to be whitelisted yet, it just gets rid of it because it doesn’t know what it is, so better safe than sorry.
I don’t use Bitdefender myself so I’m not sure how it is there specifically, but there’s probably an option somewhere to whitelist a specific file or folder. That’s what I did with Windows Defender, I whitelisted the folder that contained LunaHook.
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