月影のシミュラクル
Developer: Applique
VNDB Play Time: 13h48m
Character count: 285,345
VNDB Link: Tsukikage no Simulacre | vndb
Summary
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.
Availability
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.
Personal Opinion
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.
Pros and Cons for the Book Club
Pros
- Mystery VN
- All characters seem to be voiced outside of the MC
- Good art
- Texthook works
Cons
- The VN is tagged with “high amount of bad endings”. I haven’t looked at a guide yet so not sure how many there are exactly or if they are necessary to complete but it could potentially be annoying
- There does not seem to be any chapter break or date system in place for us to schedule around
- The game is only on PC
Pictures
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