9-nine-ここのつここのかここのいろ 9️⃣ Week 1 (Visual Novel Book Club)

This is being read as part of the Visual Novel Book Club. Another VN, BU$TAFELLOWS, is being read at the same time, feel free to join both clubs!

Home Thread Here!

Current week start date: December 30, 2022
Next week

Pace

We’re aiming to read approximately 10-12.5k characters per week! A suitable enough end point will be selected each week (feel free if you have a texthooker and it hasn’t been posted yet!) and posted within the thread. @ccookf has helpfully begun compiling a spreadsheet to display progress through the days:

Progress spreadsheet

This week's endpoint

Week 1

Discussion Guidelines

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
  • When asking for help, do your best to provide context. Pasted text, screenshots, descriptions, etc. Unlike book clubs we can’t flip to relevant pages, so we may need a little help identifying exactly what is being discussed.
  • Feel totally at ease to ask questions or give your thoughts, any time! Clubs live and die by participation, and asking whatever question you have, no matter how silly it may seem, helps others who are reading it and even the answerer themselves.
  • Have fun, and do your best to interpret anything said with as much good faith as possible :slightly_smiling_face:

Participants

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m still reading but haven’t tired of this placeholder voting joke yet
  • I’m no longer reading

0 voters

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I will join up at some point, but I’m going to be reading behind and not along for quite a while. :sweat_smile:

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As @MrGeneric said. :sweat_smile: I’m already behind on BU$TAFELLOWS and I’m about to have bonkers amount of busy for two weeks… so I’m hoping to catch up after that. Hopefully I’ll be caught up end of January/early February.

@Daisoujou It would be really great if the screenshot for the end of the week’s reading could be posted directly in the OP. I usually read with Switch and a tablet, and google spreadsheets are a bit wonky in the browser on mine.

3 Likes

I already attempted to do that but couldn’t get the spreadsheet to let me copy the image location like a normal site – I can’t seem to directly click on the image to right click, I just get spreadsheet options (copy/ get link to this cell). If someone can help me I’ll do that, heh.

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I could copy it and then paste it somewhere else.

Since I already tried it, I’m putting in both below, I wasn’t sure if we were stopping at the start or end of that scene.


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Thanks! The start is 10k, I’ll put that in the top post. Are you using a tablet/phone now? With the desktop computer mouse all I get are the spreadsheet options.

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Computer (Mac, Safari browser), and I just used cmd (aka ctrl) + c. I had the relevant box (whatever they are called…) selected.

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Interesting. I’m on windows + chrome but doing that just spits out garbage only relevant to the spreadsheet. Removing an opening tag so it’ll show:

!–td {border: 1px solid #cccccc;}br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}–>[image]

Anyway, whatever, thank you!

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Ah, I should have realized it was one of those super convenient Mac/Safari things. There is a reason I’m on the less popular OS, although it also has to do with my profession where many programs comes first to Mac or only to Mac.

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Does Crtl+Shift+V work for pasting it properly? I’m not at a Windows PC to check it myself right now.

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Sorry for the trouble. I tried to leave things open ended for everyone to do what worked for them, but it seems that just turned into a headache all around.

I stopped reading at that point which is probably a good stopping point, all of the school discussion prior to that is introductory content featuring Yoichi (the blue haired boy in the pictures). That point is where the teacher calls in the Kakeru and ends up having a somewhat long conversation on probably a different topic involving Kujou (the girl on the cover) from what I saw the other day.

Anyway, on to my actual thoughts on the reading so far…


It’s immediately pretty obvious how much of a difference the developer/writing staff seem to make. There is a lot more casual(?) speech in this game and I found myself using the multi-language options (usually just switching between English/Japanese with the E/J keys) to help clarify the main ideas. The voiceovers helped a lot as well. I feel like I’m kind of getting the hang of it, but it makes me feel like an old guy trying to keep up with the youth. The other thing I noticed is…

broad spoilers on the setting/characters

holy hell is this an otakufest of a game. I thought it was kind of funny how they had this sort of self-aware take on the festival from the anime and how the town was something of an over-eager managerial screwup, but… A lot of that dialogue on day 2 just straight up murdered me.

That part where Sora said 「は? そんなエロゲみたいな設定、 現実にあると思ってんの?」 was a light enough jab, but I’ve accidentally found myself getting into r18 games too many times that I legit sympathized with her roundabout way of explaining things. Even if we’re playing the all ages version, this is technically one of those games too… (if you need the proof you don’t even need to get the patch, they left the panic button in. see below)

If that wasn’t bad enough that conversation with Yoichi on 4/18 was… ugg, that brought back memories of high school anime club I could have gone without. I wasn’t expecting psych damage from the get go, but here we are. 「九條さんスタイルいいし、 絶対“使える”写真になったのに……。 くっそぉ……!!」 Ooof. I’m dead.

Also, I get that people need to CYA things but… first and second year high school students… :man_facepalming:

not otaku discussion

Ignoring the above, I actually do appreciate the feeling of the characters overall. There’s a lot of templating, but I don’t get the impression that the people we’ve been introduced to will be as painfully archetypal as what we saw in the Loopers side characters. I was honestly a little impressed at how much they were able to convey so quickly (and I’d have to say I actually like what I’ve seen of the English translation).

The amazingly thorough Steam description was “Help Miyako and Kakeru track down a superpowered serial killer before they strike again.” so I have to wonder to what degree the town’s folklore and shrine treasure are going to be relevant to the story. The creepy stuffed animal that’s definitely not going to offer a contract (for the love of all that is holy I hope this thing just stays a mascot character or something) kind of implies that it’s not a trap, but we’re like 7% into this story. At the least I feel like I should point out that getting through 4/20 way back when net me the steam achievement for the “prologue” so we have something like 25kish characters to really set things in.

Finally, did you know that there’s a “panic” button in the game? Pressing P makes the window change to a black screen with a cross hair and the icon switches to the MS Paint icon with the window titled 「無題」 lol

6 Likes

This game is pretty annoying on a technical level. I’m having the same sort of texthooker problems mentioned in the other thread – it’s more than usable, but I don’t have a perfect hook. It does a lot of annoying things like cutting out an い from いい and occasionally dropping the first character or even several in lines. Still overall good but it makes me even less confident in character counts matching up, which is going to be annoying for planning future weeks.

The game also froze on me a couple times when switching back to its window. It always came back, but usually with a few lines skipped.

I’m not quite done with that first 10k, but should be by tomorrow.

Oh yeah definitely. I’m a little out of practice recently so I dunno how much to blame myself, but this has been a little tougher than expected. I’m getting it, but it’s written a little differently than anything else I’ve read.

A few things

Oh man, all of that. I don’t think we’re meant to find that an extremely offputting thing that immediately makes us dislike Yoichi but, well, here we are heh. Basically, if this VN is indeed good like I hear it is, I get the feeling this Hard Drive article sums it up: Glowing Anime Recommendation Only 70% Caveats

I do agree on the characters and writing though. I’ve been enjoying the banter with Sora more than anything so far. And in this 10k characters we’ve learned a lot about the history of the town and how it looks right now, the main character’s living situation and relationship to several characters, various possibly important plot threads (hair accessory, shrine treasure, earthquake, mascot, etc), on and on. That’s all happened while mostly giving the appearance of just killing time with the mostly mundane, so it feels promising that they can carry that energy when the real action starts.

The panic button is really funny, thanks for that info.

Oh and I have a real personal gripe with that pose anime-style characters do where their hand is all curled upwards sometimes, like the teacher, haha.

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It’s easily one of the best things in this game - it made her my favorite character of the whole series, even though my favorite route ended up being the last one (Noa’s - from episode 4).

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Finished the week’s reading! My texthooker has been a bit wonky about characters but it ended at 10,260 so not bad. Guess it overall works out for me to be able to estimate from. Perhaps that upcoming location transition away from the school (closer to 12k) would’ve been a cleaner stopping point, but I wanted to give people the low end of the reading load for week 1.

The last bit

Not much else to say because the last bit of the chapter was just Yoichi continuing to be himself. It’s not exactly even inaccurate from some gross teenage boys but I’m… skeptical the VN has anything to say about it in that way, heh. Far more likely feeding into the otakufest as @ccookf mentioned.

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(Minor for next week) Sort of not really, the conversation with Kujou and the teacher immediately segues to something else. He does briefly chat with Youichi afterwards, but it was filler iirc. From an overall perspective it probably would have been better in the sense that the first four days (the “prologue”) are like ~35k which can cleanly divide into three weeks more easily, but that’s assuming I didn’t screw up the first pass. I’m only about halfway through 4/19 now, but any counts you see in the spreadsheet should be more accurate than the first pass since I’m actually reading along and collecting screenshots now.

As for planning purposes, the game is structured over 10 calendar days until hitting a mandatory first time bad end. I guess we’ll deal with things as they go, but it was a bit annoying to see and might extend our schedule a bit depending on how we end up tackling things from there.

Glowing Anime Recommendation Only 70% Caveats

Typical conversation with the handful of people I know:

What are you up to?
Reading
Is it good?
Yup
Are you going to talk about it?
Nope

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It is annoying indeed ^^ . What I’ve settled on is looking for that one hook I mentioned. I can’t hook it every time I open that save, and I need to remove the other ones sometimes once or twice, but usually I can find it within 2 or 3 minutes so it doesn’t bother me too much, considering it’s something I’ll do once or twice a week anyways. I have that one save to pick up the hook, then after that I load another save I have at the very beginning of the game, and with it I can test if it’s the hook I’m looking for because there’s a point a couple sentences in that either it breaks or it keeps working. If it breaks, I repeat the process, and if it works then I’m good to go. It’s an adventure to get a proper hook in this game :joy: . But other than that honestly it works absolutely flawlessly, no extensions needed, no pasted junk, exact character count. The only weird thing it did today was failing to paste like 3 sentences in total from Textractor to the HTML file; it picked them up, but the HTML didn’t, but it was as easy as a simple ctrl + c . It marks 9,874 characters up to the screenshot; I had to make a new file and “replay” up to where I stopped yesterday just so it would register. I don’t think it missed anything but anyways, should be pretty accurate.


Week 1 impressions

I’m liking this a lot so far, it has already made me smile several times. The first thing I’m noticing is the audio levels, it’s already alright without me tweaking anything and wowee is it appreciated after Loopers :joy: .

As a caveat, you already know I’m very new to VNs so a lot of these first impressions are going to be just me discovering something new in a new medium, but anyways! Another thing I’ve noticed is the quality of the voice acting and the way everyone enunciates their phrases. I don’t know how to explain it but it feels like they’re not just reading a script but actually introducing themselves into the scene and being part of it, it makes everyone very alive and particular. I guess I get a similar feeling like when I’m watching an anime or something. Sora is such a goof I love her already :joy: . And Miyako (Kujou?) is super cute. Kakeru seems fun too so far and apparently level-headed, Yoichi is a hornball, and Satsuki seems cool too. I’m already liking the characters so far and the interactions between them so no particular complaints (other than a little cringe from some things, but then I remember it’s high school).

I really like the writing style, both the language they use and how descriptions are composed. I’ve added quite a bit of vocabulary already but it’s interspersed with vocabulary I already know so there’s a lot of i+1 so far. The reading level seems about right for me, it’s not a breeze but it’s also not hard. I can keep learning from this at a pace that seems comfortable enough and not straining but still requires focus, so that’s awesome.

Not a whole lot can be said I guess but the atmosphere was pretty nicely set considering it’s just the first 10k characters. I wanted to keep reading and had to contain myself so it’s a good sign :joy: .

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My final text count came out to 9,845 so I guess we all have some slight variance in our counts? Although it doesn’t matter much, I’m just glad I haven’t ran into many issues with mine so far :sweat_smile:

Spoilers

So far I think I like the characters a lot more compared to Loopers. Yoichi is probably the only character that I didn’t really care for so far (he kind of reminds me of a worse Eiichi from G-senjou if anyone has read that). All of the girls have been cool. Not really far enough to have a favorite between anyone but I liked both Sora’s and Kujou’s interactions a lot.

The art style is really cute too. Kind of moe but I like it. I read Summer Pockets way before this and the artist did the design for Ao in that game so I can’t help but think of her every time I see their art since the style is so distinctive.

I never read the steam description, just the VNDB one which doesn’t list that so I had no idea what the actual plot was supposed to be about until now :joy:

Not too much more to say but I enjoyed the first week! Everything from the characters, music, art and audio levels seemed good. I’m excited to read more next week

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I haven’t, but it’s definitely crossed my mind. I know on the whole it’s very highly rated but I do hear some pretty negative things too. What’d you think of it?

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I read it quite a while ago back when I was first getting into VNs but I remember overall enjoying it. The OST is filled with classical music remixes which I loved and the story is very intense in the suspense department. My main issue with that game is that the ending was pretty disappointing compared to the lead up to it. I usually have a tough time deciding whether to recommend those type of games or not cause lackluster endings tend to ruin the experience for me at times but the majority of the game is enjoyable. If you’ve read or watched a lot of “battle of wits” type stuff then it might not be as enjoyable but when I read way back then, I was still new to the medium so a lot of the tropes etc were still exciting for me.

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