Since there were quite a few, thank you so much to everyone for the congratulations! Feeling good about what I’ve done and very happy to have you all here supporting
Summer Pockets as a first VN
Hmm, it’s got a lot of good points, but it’s hard to recommend for a few reasons.
One is simply the length, as you might have noticed, haha. I’d think most people would be best served starting with a short-ish VN, but I had a particular desire to read it. It’s a lot, but I suppose that’s already clear. The biggest downside is accessibility in getting it at all – if you buy it, it’s really expensive (something like 9000yen) and it’s also unusually hostile to players outside Japan. Like it checks your system time and everything. I found a means to bypass that but talking too specifically about getting around DRM might skirt a line on WK without taking it offsite? Fuck DRM though, heh.
That said! I think it’s a great read, it’s written at a level that I found good for my first (well other than Ace Attorney), and it plays great with the texthooker. Plus it’s nice that it’s a very modern one, above average in technical polish and the like. I’m running up against small irritations from Flowers in resolution and all that now, heh.
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It’s Flowers time. Specifically, the spring (each of the four entries is based on a season). I continue to read things that are seasonal, and at the wrong time.
Content first impressions: I dig it. Lovely art, and I like the quiet, fragile, contemplative tone so far. It’s a solid contrast to Summer Pockets which had a totally energetic, outgoing vibe. Most of what I read was a girl stuck inside her head, beating herself up, and commenting on how pretty the girls around her are, haha. It was a nice prologue, but I didn’t move too much further, reading only a bit over 3000 characters, because…
Writing first impressions: Definitely feeling the challenge of starting something new. I’m also pretty sure this game’s writing is simply harder. They love kanji for words that don’t usually have it (筈 はず has a kanji, huh? and 為る as なる, all sorts of things I’ve never seen). The Catholic school slice of vocab teaching me words like 磔 (はりつけ, crucifixion) might not be immediately useful and certainly isn’t anything I’ve come across yet haha. But more than anything it’s just that sentences are a little denser than what I’ve been reading. Gotta brace myself for the のように, because we are making non-literal comparisons to everything all of the time.
You’re gonna put じっと in kanji like that?
I read slowly in part because I had to look up words in almost every sentence, but also just because I made myself slow down a little to make sure I was soaking it all up. The writing seems really nice and… flowery ( ), and often the difficulty is just making sure I can hold the whole sentence in my head, even when I definitely understand all of its parts. For example, lines like this are common:
美しい波となった歌声は春の陽を受けて輝くステンドグラスに反射し、緊張のためこわ張り着席している私たち新入生へと届いた。
You ask me, that’s a lot of information piled in there. To put a final pin in that point, a few lines in they hit me with another new N1 grammar point (たら最後, sort of an “if you do… negative result”). I expect to see a lot more of that stuff. Overall though, it’s a challenge, but I don’t feel too bad about it. I’m pretty confident I can comprehend and learn from this. My reading pace has taken a hard reset, but prior to Summer Pockets I have serious doubts about if I could’ve read this at all. I remain excited to continue.