Visual Novel Book Club // Now reading: ISLAND

ルーパーズ / L∞PERS

Developer: Key
VNDB Play Time: 6h 15m
VNDB Link: L∞PERS | vndb

Summary

Let’s set out to find a real treasure.

Tyler is a high school student who is obsessed with geohunting, a GPS-based treasure hunting game.
One day during summer vacation, Tyler and his friends get drawn into a mysterious incident while out treasure-hunting.
The real and imagined become interconnected. Thoughts are thrown into chaos. Tomorrow becomes today.

Swallowed up by a time vortex, they are trapped in a never-ending time loop, repeating “today” again and again.

Then they meet other “loopers.”
Simon, the leader, and the mysterious girl Mia.
If they join forces, will they be able to break out from this eternal prison…?
[From vndb page]

Availability

PC: DLSite, Animate Games, DMM Games
Switch
Android, iOS (Japan only)

Personal Opinion

A short, recent game by big industry name Key sounds like a nice introduction to VNs for the club, plus the synopsis seems intriguing. Apparently it’s pretty short and has the usual perks (voiced, log, voice replay…) so it should be pretty accessible for a first VN.

Pros and Cons for the Book Club

Pros

  • Available on several platforms (PC, Switch, mobile)
  • Text-hookable (on PC)
  • Quite short
  • Voiced with replay ability and log
  • Interesting premise

Cons

  • Probably can’t expect a super developed story in such a short time
  • Not on Steam

Pictures

Screenshots



image

Difficulty Poll

How much effort would you need to read this VN?

  • No effort at all
  • Minimal effort
  • Moderate effort
  • Significant effort
  • So much effort my head might explode
  • I don’t know

0 voters

14 Likes

I haven’t played the game yet but I do own it and previously checked to see if it was text-hookable (I almost nominated the game too) and you can texthook it with no issues :slightly_smiling_face:

3 Likes

That’s great! Thanks for telling me, I’ll edit it right away.

4 Likes

It’s been about a week now! I’m going to be fairly unavailable for the weekend, so I’ll just give it a few more days and hopefully be in a good position to start nomination voting next week.

@Kazzeon Just wanted to give you a quick nudge in case you do want to nominate one of those VNs you mentioned.

11 Likes

For anyone who’s interested in ATRI, it’s currently 40% off on steam through the 23rd! :grin: (also in a bundle with this other Japanese folktale VN which has a cool looking art style :eyes:)

7 Likes

Off topic, but I was looking at this book list and knew I saw that somewhere. :eyes:

https://www.worthsharing.jpf.go.jp/en/vol_1/

4 Likes

Ah the (かぜ)つよ influence expands :eyes: That’s cool! Nice that the Japan Foundation thinks I have good taste sometimes :laughing:

6 Likes

Time for our first vote!

For some reason I had the feeling there were more nominations, but I think a small list works fine because after this first pick we’re likely to expand our possibilities so that’ll be like a small refresh, anyway.

The poll will run for one week. Two of our nominated VNs have been on sale recently, but at that time there will be a Steam summer sale, so if the game chosen is on Steam, we might be able to get it cheaper. Worth keeping an eye out for anyway!

You can vote for up to 2 VNs! Please refer back to the first post for links to each nomination for more information on them!

  • キラキラモンスターズ
  • マルコと銀河竜
  • ATRI -My Dear Moments-
  • ルーパーズ

0 voters

After voting ends June 27th, when would you prefer to start? Can select multiple.
  • ASAP (July 1st)
  • In a couple weeks (July 15th)
  • In a month (August 5th)

0 voters

11 Likes

Ok it looks like I did those polls correctly, good. Voting time is here! I figured it would be decent enough etiquette to just put up 2 possible choices with 4 options, so I could vote for my own but also one other. I genuinely am ok with any of those VNs though, so good picks everyone. I figured we could potentially get started pretty soon because VNs are such a primarily digital thing, but left the option for waiting up to a month. If you have other thoughts on when we start, feel free to share.

I’m really not sure how I’m going to judge what’s a good amount of time for the club to run, so once we figure out which VN we’re doing and how long it is, please help me brainstorm there :pray:

7 Likes

Haven’t been following closely in the selection process since I’ve no experience in the medium and wouldnt’t have been able to contribute anything. Just went through and read/looked at all the 4 options and its sooo damn hard to pick…

I’m pretty excited to get into the medium and see what it has to offer. I like that all the pics are on the relatively short side too.

5 Likes

From people I’ve talked to, it seems like the average reading speed for beginners is around 3-6k characters per hour depending on the difficulty of the text. I think asking everyone to read an hour a day might be a bit much though haha. JPDB has character counts for most of these games, so maybe whichever VN wins, we could read at a pace of about 1.5k characters a day and set our end date based off of that? I think that would only require about 20 minutes a day for most entry-level readers. Although with that said, I am not sure of everyone’s prior reading experience here, how much time they want to spend on it daily etc but just throwing out ideas. I am certainly open to hearing other ideas.

3 Likes

It’s usually a set amount per week or so, which is basically the same, but lets people choose when and how they want to read it, instead of saying they should read x in a single day.

3 Likes

Ah yeah, I didn’t mean you specifically had to read every single day. I just meant use character count as a rough guideline to figure out how many weeks to set the reading for.

3 Likes

Seems like a workable metric to figure out a speed. Although since I’ll probably read on Switch (I just never use my PC…), I don’t think I’ll be able to tell how far I’ve gotten. :sweat_smile:

3 Likes

My Japanese probably still isn’t good enough join this but you might find this page useful. It has a list of VNs with a description of how easy it is to switch to English. Not sure if that defeats the point though.

6 Likes

I have to mention that, making a choice to play at all, is heavily about the price and whether there is a demo version. Reviews may help, but don’t win against the price itself. [1]

About Steam, I aim for Japanese full audio, but I am not exactly sure some of the things I need are in the above list.


  1. I found ATRI too hard in the language, and probably won’t be playing it. Nonetheless, I have already bought the full version for cheap, so might be considered later… ↩︎

3 Likes

Japanese full audio is indeed one of the elements that makes a good VN for reading practice.
Others things that should influence everyone’s votes to some degree:

  • Can you replay dialogue at will?
    (Most VNs that have narration will let you do this)

  • Can you swap between English and Japanese language and / or show both at the same time?

  • Can it be used with texthooker or similar software?
    (This one’s very important as it makes looking up kanji or unknown vocabulary as easy as looking over to your browser and looking it up with Yomichan. There’s a great guide on how to set this up here, and it’s well worth the time it takes to set it up.)

  • Are there options to show furigana?
    (Showing furigana is, in my opinion, a must have as an alternative to texthooker. Unless you want to spend 90% of your time looking up unknown kanji by radicals that you may not even have learned yet, stroke count etc.)

1 Like

I wanted to try out the texthooker tech so I bought ATRI -My Dear Moments- (btw, it’s 40% off on steam until the 23rd) and followed the instructions you linked @Daisoujou but this part has me stumped:

As you can see after attaching the game I’m only getting a bunch of FFFF’s rather than the game? Any tips on how to proceed?

3 Likes

You should be able to select from a list of several subprocesses of the game’s .exe file in the dropdown list highlighted at the top of the picture you included. You should go through each one by one until you find one that outputs the correct text.

The name of the subprocess may not necessarily be the name of the game, but as long as you’ve selected the game’s .exe file on the left side of the window they should all be tied to the game in some way.

5 Likes

Ty, that worked this time somehow, I think what I might have done wrong the first time was attach the game after starting the story (then I only got two of the FFFF options, the one shown and a blank one), but this time I got a bunch of options after attaching the game while at the start menu and then starting the story :upside_down_face:

6 Likes