It was more the sentences where I would basically look up all the nouns and the verb too (because why not make more or less every word in a sentence unknown?), and the sentences with 2-3 words, that makes it feel really study intensive. Although, I guess for a VN, “a sentence” is more like one text box so probably not actually one sentence.
I also think I built this up in my mind a lot. So now the task seems herculean and maybe when I get back to reading, it won’t feel that bad. xD
I have so many disorganised thoughts that I’ll just spit out and hope that they end up being coherent 
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I’m all in for opening the nominations to non-kinetic VNs. Having a full range of choices would spice things up and be more representative of the VN medium. It might not be super convenient like something neatly divided by chapters but I’m sure we would find a way to make it work. Surely we’re not the first VN club that has worked on a VN together, right? 
I agree that it will be unique for each one. Ultimately if everything fails, worst case scenario we can divide each week purely by character count and leave it at that (e.g. Week 3, 15k characters). That would create problems like having hard stops in critical moments, or we can always shorten or lengthen the character count in that case. One possible benefit that we could have with pure character count is that depending on the VN difficulty we can have a poll about how many characters people are comfortable with and go with an average, adjustable as time goes on. This is, of course, supposing Textractor works as good as with Loopers, which is not automatically guaranteed. Also not everyone has access to Textractor so what I’m thinking is that we could have a repository, something like a collapsable window in the first post that is divided by chunks of character counts like, let’s say, every 5k, and if you click one it shows a screenshot (that we can previously warn about if they contain spoilers). So every 5k characters there’s one screenshot that people can see to discuss or know where they are approximately, while keeping everything safe with spoilers (e.g. Question about content between screenshots 3-4). Can be whatever amount we decide on. Anyways just an idea, not sure in practice how effective or terrible it would be.
About the difficulty, this is I think where it gets messy. Personally I think we should embrace the uniqueness of the medium and differentiate this club from the others as we need. What I mean by this is that we don’t necessarily have to adhere to a specific format or rules, I think by now it’s clear that this will very much depend on what VN we’re reading and what fits best to that particular title unless, again, we go by pure weekly character count and its issues. It also seems super hard to divide it into very defined difficulties like you can for other clubs with children books, teenager books, young adult, and so on. I don’t think having two VN clubs divided by difficulty would be a good idea because the participation already is pretty low, so that leaves us with one club open to any VN. I guess if we measure by book clubs this would automatically puts us up with the advanced book club in terms of potential difficulty range and/or expected reading amount. This is where, I think, compromises must be made. As ccookf mentioned, quite a few of us here are upper WaniKani levels (or 60s) and while that doesn’t really mean anything in terms of overall language proficiency (I know this is true for myself, I’m by no means an advanced learner at all) I think it’s fair to say that at the very least it makes guessing readings or learning new vocabulary much easier than it is for people in lower levels, just out of pure familiarity. I don’t do WK at all anymore but for the ones of you that do, having daily reviews and lessons on top of a large amount of reading is not appealing at all. However, at the same time I think a certain degree of commitment is needed and while I think there should still be room to read other things on the side, I think that’s something that perhaps should be personally decided depending on how every one of us judge the difficulty of what we’re reading. What I mean by this is that in my opinion we shouldn’t limit the VN club strictly to easy and short reads so that there’s room for the rest of the clubs; instead, everyone can personally decide if they can add other clubs on top of the VN depending on how they judge its difficulty. I don’t think we should necessarily pick hard things to read, either. I guess this leaves us with picking things purely out of what we’re interested in reading and adjust the pace accordingly.
Overall I think it’s a matter of having an only club for a very wide range of language proficiency levels; what someone finds hard, another person might find easy, and so on. I don’t think we can do it any other way, though, having more than one club for this is a dead sentence. So I guess this is where we all have to commit and decide what limit we want to put to things, either on difficulty or on length. Personally I ended up wanting to read a lot more of Loopers once I got a bit more accustomed until now, when I read the chapter in one or two days and wait six or five until the next chapter. In my case, obviously, I wouldn’t mind reading something harder or longer, but that’s just me and doesn’t mean the rest of the club is the same so I understand. I don’t read any other book clubs so of course I’m eager to read more, but to someone reading more clubs it might end up feeling suffocating, even if that doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong with the club itself. Personally I would love the club to be a super active place with tons of discussions not only about the plot and whatnot but also a place where we could actively learn more and work through Japanese together, discuss grammar, and so on, so in that regard I don’t really mind the difficulty (unless it’s like impossible to meet each week’s schedule). That’s only because I don’t read other clubs and can go all-in with this, though, which is not necessarily what you all may want and that’s perfectly fine. I guess all of this to say that I’m fine with whatever, and while I would be a tiny bit sad for the lost opportunities like reading the more famous VNs, I’m sure I would still have a blast and will definitely participate. It’s not like I’m advanced enough to make the best experience out of those VNs yet, anyway.
We could throw in some polls, perhaps? That way we can maybe easily see how people want to do things, if we’re comfortable with the current pace, if we want less or more, shorter or longer VNs, and so on. Or just simply nominate things, see what wins, and then plan accordingly with a reasonable commitment that allows catch ups, breaks and other unplanned setbacks.
Oh yeah totally, I know that experience well. Still have it often enough, but rarely ever with Loopers if that’s any consolation! A couple more things read down the line and that needle will at least move upwards. If that was happening particularly often, having stuck with some weeks (and still planning to come back and finish it later) is itself a good accomplishment 
(I was already nearly finishing this when @rikaiwisdom posted that so I’m just going to post in a sec then go read heh)
So I think we’re settled on choices being totally fine if we work out how to tackle them together. Maybe I’m just looking for ways to absolve myself of responsibility but I don’t think we’re going to find absolute resolution on where the reasonable line for time commitment lies, which is very fair. How much you’re willing to do also depends on just how excited you are about the pick, as others have pointed out.
With that in mind, if there are no strong objections, I feel like @MissDagger 's suggestion might actually be the best, ensuring we all understand as much as we can what we’re in for but opening the floodgates on length, with something like under 20h generally recommended, or at least that’s a nebulous point where the length starts to move from pro to con. The community is reasonable enough that I don’t think we’re going to get flooded with outside votes that sabotage our pick or anything like that, haha. I’ve done Summer Pockets: Reflection Blue (50 hours on VNDB) when I was worse at reading than I am now, and it took me like half a year, but I do know there are definitely very long VNs I’d stick with. In the abstract it’s not recommended, but maybe there are some out there that most of us feel the same way about.
I think more than anything the test run showed me we’re a relatively small group that can pretty well be trusted to self-manage without too many hard rules so far, yeah? I’ve been sort of just letting the discussion play out to see exactly where our views are and let us making cases in directions more than really trying to find “the answer” and it seems like a big chunk of our core group is keeping up with the conversation anyway so we’ll have all that in mind when we’re let loose to choose.
Personally, still torn by what I think is at least a big correlation between gargantuan length and the best quality VNs (though I more than agree that they tend to have their weak spots, I almost associate unevenness with the whole medium despite how much I love the highs haha). But I do think we’d be better off around the 20 hour line at most and will most likely nominate and vote accordingly, unless someone happens to nominate something I’ve been especially dying to read.
Anyway, I was trying to read Loopers at this moment haha, gonna go do that more and then come back later to @rikaiwisdom + whatever anyone else says.
The first few VNs are always tough like that and my reading speed is still terribly slow but it has gotten better over time. The first VN I ever finished in jp earlier this year has an estimated 15hr playtime (300k~ characters) and it ended up taking me closer to 90-100 hours to complete.
I do agree with this. My main concern is just losing interest over a very long VN if we read it over a very long period of time. For me personally, Loopers hasn’t been too interesting but since each week is relatively short it isn’t too hard to keep going but if we did something much longer over a longer period of time I could see dropouts being a problem. But then again, if we all collectively vote on the VN and think it looks interesting, that is a risk we take no matter what.
This might be the best idea. When nominations come in, we might not even see any “long” ones and it’d be a non-problem then 
It’ll probably be easier to discuss a plan on how to proceed once we’ve decided on the next VN we’ll be reading
This is completely true. Textractor really is a godsend, it makes reading the VNs stupidly easy and convenient. If anything I seriously admire the determination of anyone not using it at this point, really. Goals .
I’ve read similar accounts. I don’t even know why that is but there are several people I’ve read about over recent years that improved extremely fast and their method was primarily VNs. I’m quite curious myself.
It’s actually funny because I think that’s probably going to be the case with my nomination . I found something that is just a bit longer and harder than Loopers and that is neatly divided into chapters, so… there goes all this discussion for me, smh. Just not sure yet what I will nominate exactly though, I just happened to discover this randomly yesterday.
Speaking of nominations, how or when should we start thinking about them?
Well, in other book clubs, you can nominate whenever, but there will be a call for nominations a couple of weeks before the next vote.
I don’t know if @Daisoujou want us to do that differently.
I might nominate one of the otomes I’ve bought. Not sure if anyone is interested in reading those, but the only other nomination I would do is the Marco one, but since that nomination is staying, I don’t have to redo the post. xD
Outside that, I haven’t explored much what is available. ^^’
Determination, yeah, that’s the word… definitely not just too lazy to set it up even though it would save time long-term
I mostly attribute it to just throwing tons of hours at Japanese, and I’m not trying to say I’m great or anything, but I guess I had that experience too. Like, I also did some Satori Reader, but beyond that pretty much just reading Ace Attorney and Summer Pockets (and I mean also a little manga and books on the side, but orders of magnitude less, and to be fair WK for kanji) took me from finishing Genki 2 to passing (even if only just) a full scale practice N2. In like half a year. You can get so much out of these.
Yeah at this point I think talking about allowing long ones may be more in the abstract than something that we even have to worry about much of anyone trying, haha. In the end I guess I can try to get your all’s opinions on what should be allowed and then restrict nominations that way, but if we just nominate and vote it’s more or less the same thing just deferred to that stage. The only risk would be if a bunch of people who didn’t do the first VN all show up in droves to nominate/vote (thus maybe not knowing as well what to expect) but that doesn’t seem too likely.
I guess I’d prefer not to have it open always because I’m going to have to trawl through the whole thread making sure I didn’t miss anything since last time the poll was made, if people actually nominate all the time. I should probably get a system in the future (when I engage my brain before the VN is nearly over and someone else pokes me haha) for making the transitions more smooth, but I consider us still sorta feeling things out so it is what it is. Want to give this topic a little time for more thoughts on how nominations should go to come in, but I’d be happy to open them up in a couple days or sometime soon like that.
I’ve never read one, but I’m down to try them out!
Stuff like Anki integration is more of a pain, but I promise the text hooker is pretty simple to get working!
If you’re willing, you could ask a mod to make the first post a wiki, then anyone of us could add a link to a nomination when it happens.
And if not so, you could always ask after adding all you think are new to the op (before doing the vote), and someone will surely tell you if you missed one.
But I’m fine with having a specific nomination period too. The only thing to remember is that someone might be extra busy for a few days/a week right around that time, so it would be good to have it long enough so they get a chance too. (I’m a bit sorry my brain is so good at seeing these kinds of situations, and I personally try to take such thing into account so I mention them. It gets messy sometimes. ^^’ )
You’re not alone in this, you know, we’re all happy to help. 
Tbh, I also had to look up quite a lot of unknown words. It’s still an improvement compared to my first attempts at reading untranslated VNs, when my speed would be three or four times slower than the average indicated on vndb 
Now I’m at around half of the “normal” speed My “best” result recently was with Aonatsu Line - 36 hours with vndb average time being at 26 And indeed I felt like this VN was quite easy - but lovely at the same time.
It has non-sexual versions - for Switch, PSV and PS4 - of which the former two can be played on PC with emulators (that’s how I played), but I’m not sure if romantic slice-of-life is the suitable option for bookclub. Indeed mystery titles (and relatives) seem to be more appropiate
I know that you wanted to dive into something bigger and with choices this time, but - just in case - what about the latest KEY’s short title - Tsui no Stella?
Or maybe Seven Days? I played it after the Loopers, and I loved it. It’s linear with some minor choices, but at least it was longer. I also didn’t find it overly difficult - and it’s available on Steam
It’s not truly a huge deal, just what seemed sensible to me, so I can probably keep them open longer term / always in the future.
I had no idea this existed, neat. Very new one! I’d personally maybe lean slightly away from Key right after just to avoid fatigue with “Key style” (I know nothing about this new VN so maybe it’s different but they often have their similarities).
Appreciate the ideas either way!
Well, giving nominations sufficient space and then moving to voting is going to put us with a bit of a gap between clubs anyway, so might as well get started, huh? I’ll update the main post to reflect this, but:
Please refer to the template in the top post, nominations are only accepted using that structure! Remember to adhere to the basic rules in the top post, but when it comes to choices/route structure and even length, anything goes this time. Do keep in mind though, as we’ve discussed, the sort of time commitment required at learner reading speeds for longer VNs. For those not a part of our first club, Loopers is a “short” VN (5 and a half hours on VNDB) and we still broke that into 17 weeks, between 6000-8000 characters on a typical week. Most of us found that alone to take at least an hour or two, sometimes more.
Oh and assuming no one goes wild, you’re welcome to propose multiple things should you desire.
I’m probably fine to run again, but at some point I may need to offload operating the club to someone the way all the book clubs work.
Can’t wait to see what we get
Awesome, that’s exciting!!
I’ve got a lot of VNs on my to-read list in my study log, but now that I’m checking them out on vndb, they range from 25h to 50h, so I don’t think they are great candidates 
Just nomitating the only short one I have.
Developer: ALICE IN DISSONANCE
VNDB Play Time: 6h20min
VNDB Link: fault - milestone one | vndb
END OF PEACE. BEGINNING OF A JOURNEY.
Launched as a throwback to the Science Fiction genre in the 80’s, fault - milestone one is a Science Fantasy Kinetic Novel which depicts the story of a princess named Selphine and her Royal Guard Ritona. While attempting to make an escape from a brutal assault that’s devastated their homeland of Rughzenhaide, the two mysteriously teleport to an unknown forest surrounded by vegetation not native to the surroundings of Rughzenhaide. The atmosphere is thick and heavy and no sign of life can be found, which is particularly unusual for such a lush forest. Sign of life isn’t the only thing missing though. Something is odd about this land - something is amiss - but Selphine and Ritona are too startled to notice the obvious.
Who were the assaulters and what was their goal?
Where did Selphine and Ritona end up traversing to?
Will the two make it home safely?
And more importantly, what will they come home to once they do?
Follow Selphine, a bubbly, happy-go-lucky Princess and her sharp-witted but slightly misanthropic Royal Guard Ritona, in their journey of a lifetime as they head back to their homeland of Rughzenhaide.
Steam link
Switch link
PS link
I don’t know why it’s on my list, saw it as high rated somewhere here on the forums or in a video maybe…
Took the screenshots from Steam, sorry it’s with English text, but the Japanese texts are available
Japanese screenshots:
How much effort would you need to read this VN?
0 voters
That’s cool! I’ve not actually heard of this one, but I’m definitely interested.
One little point – I edited the template, probably late, to explicitly say images with Japanese text so people can use them for an at a glance guess at difficulty (for what it’s worth, this is on jpdb as just a 4/10 difficulty and not a bad average sentence length, so probably a pretty simple read for us ). If you get the chance, swapping to a couple of those would be nice. I did the exact same thing originally posting English images like “look, pretty pictures” until other people asked me to change it so no worries at all haha.
Okay, that makes sense I have the game so I’ll load it up and update the screenshots in a couple of hours!
Developer: Applique
VNDB Play Time: 13h48m
Character count: 285,345
VNDB Link: Tsukikage no Simulacre | vndb
Seiichi received an invitation letter from his dear cousin Rei who he hadn’t seen since he moved. She asked for his presence at the family’s mysterious ceremony which is held once every few years. He decided to return to the town of Izawa where he had once lived, and was reunited with his childhood friends. There is a legend of a living doll at the large mansion in the forest, and it always takes the form of a girl from the Kisaragi family.
The all-ages version is on steam here: 月影魅像-解放之羽- on Steam - for some reason the page is in Chinese but it is a Japanese game and the steam version has the Japanese text.
The 18+ version can be found on dlsoft but since the screenshots on that website include some 18+ stuff I won’t link it to be safe.
It is a mystery VN so I think it will lead to a lot of discussions as we read through it. I have seen a lot of people say it is one of the better VNs they have read and a lot of others begging for a translation, so I assume it has to be decent? jpdb has the VN at 285,345 characters long (the game is tagged with “low sexual content” on VNDB and we would read the all-ages version, so the all-ages version is probably 10-15k characters shorter I would imagine). The length ends up being about double of our current VN Loopers but still on the shorter side when it comes to VNs so I think it would be a good game to test how we do with choices and whatnot.
How much effort would you need to read this VN?
0 voters
I actually have this game as well the sequel on Steam, but never got around to playing them. No luck getting textractor to work, but it looks like it’s ren py based so that’s probably user error on my part.
It’s a teeny bit more towards the kinetic side with the camera doing a bit of pan and zoom to emphasize characters or side conversations. Also lets you swap between English and Japanese with the E and J keys. There are some wordier bits, but on average the text box contents seem shorter than Loopers.
There is a demo on Steam if people would like to check it out, however it seems there won’t be a youtube version per their content policy:
Added the Japanese screenshots in my above nomination
Ah I just saw your post, thanks for the screenshots! Almost the same ones haha
This is actually the one I was going to nominate but you’re absolutely right, perhaps it’s not the best time right after Loopers, which is unfortunate because otherwise it looked like a super good “second” VN. 12h on VNDB, up to level 5 difficulty in jpdb from the 4 of loopers, bump of 30k characters, neatly divided into 16 chapters with character counts of each on jpdb already, Texthooking without issues (was playing with the demo for a second, it’s the same engine as Loopers), and so on. Music was great, sound effects too and it seems nicely rated. It also gave me NieR:Automata vibes, which I love.
Now all of that looks great on paper but unfortunately the downside is that we just finished (edit: or are about to) a Key VN and playing another one so soon can potentially get boring, just out of familiarity. What’s even more, the main character is voiced by Simon’s VA in Loopers and having it too recent can make it very weird. I don’t really mind personally because the very little I did of the demo was nice, it’s not exactly the same as Loopers, but thinking about it as a group pick… again, perhaps it’s not the best time for it.
I say nominate it anyway, a lot of newcomers (me?) that were not around for the first VN bookclub could be interested
