>>120036
How is that one so far? How does it compare to the older ones? I've read through the original trilogy and the 3DS stuff but haven't touched those newest ones.

>>120044
I played through them a few years ago. They were pretty fun overall, but I enjoyed the original trilogy + Rise from the Ashes and Investigations 2 more. Otherwise I think they're better than the rest of the series (4, Investigations 1, Professor Layton VS, 5, 6).
Chronicles is a port of the two Dai Gyakuten Saiban / Great Ace Attorney games on the 3DS. The first game was made with a sequel in mind, so it leaves a lot of plot threads hanging, which makes it feel lacking as a standalone game. In contrast, I think even if you stopped at 1 or 2 in the original trilogy you'd be able to feel satisfied.
The games take place in Meiji-era Japan but also in Victoria-era London. The main character is Naruhodou Ryuunosuke, a university student and ancestor of Naruhodou Ryuuichi / Phoenix Wright. シャーロック・ホームズ / Herlock Sholmes and Natsume Souseki also appear as characters. Personally I'm not familiar with Sherlock Holmes, but I think The Great Ace Attorney contains many references to the original stories that were written about him, but the games are still enjoyable even if you don't catch them. Natsume Souseki is caricatured as referring to himself in the first person as "wagahai" due to his famous novel Wagahai wa Neko de Aru.
In some respects they feel like a spiritual successor to the Professor Layton crossover. They share the same director/writer (the guy who also wrote and directed the original trilogy), the same main composer, London as one of the settings, and mob testimony.
The soundtrack is great overall but feels different from the other games except the Layton one because it relies on more period-appropriate instrumentation instead of, say, square waves and electric guitars. The tracks associated with Asougi and Susato blend Japanese and Western elements in an enjoyable way similar to what >>119364 described for Utawarerumono.
Unfortunately the Western releases lack the option to set the text to Japanese while the Japan and Asia releases let you switch between Japanese and English as you please. The first three Japanese DS games were like this too, except that in those games each language gets its own save file, while here you can continue right from where you left off in the other language. Also the port doesn't feel like the definitive edition because it's lacking some of the 3DS DLC, such as a meta skit where the characters in the courtroom talk about buying the DLC, some videos of the developers talking to the camera, and two other neat bonus episodes where you get to play as some characters you don't get to use in the main story. There's also a part that I think originally might've made use of the 3DS's stereoscopic 3D gimmick that had to be re-adjusted here, but that's a minor issue.
Pic related is Iris. She makes some cute pouts.

>>120044
I like it, it's pretty fun. I think it's just as good as the originals. Also they turned Watson in a little girl >>120072

That feelio when almost none of the cute and fluffy VNs/dating sims without s*x are translated. Amagami got a translation recently however: https://nishishitranslations.wordpress.com/ still in (beta) whatever that means though. I intend to play that soon.

I'm going to start the Konosuba 'Clothes of Desire' VN that got a translation a while ago. With season 3 airing this seems like a good time.

43k files. Seems reasonable. It's all voice files. Do they really not have a better way of doing this?

>>123687
It is the simplest way of doing this because you just need to play the sound file when the dialog is displayed.

>>123687
Not unless you want a VN taking the max adorable memory

catpicture just took max adorable memory

I have kind of finished the Konosuba VN! I say "kind of" because it was 1 ending out of something like 10. The ending I got was the Aqua 'regular' ending because her affection meter was the highest, but I don't think it was high enough for the good ending. I assume the good ending is just a minor alteration to the regular ending. I'm impressed with how long the Aqua "ending" was, since it felt like a whole chapter, just without any choices or gameplay elements.
I call it a VN, but there's some shallow gameplay resource/time management and you also pick which characters to hang out with to see their story and increase aforementioned affection meter. You use the resources to craft outfits and some are tied to story progression while others are side stuff just done to see scenes or increase character affinity. I wasn't able to see all the scenes in one playthrough so I'll play again and maybe try to save at points where I can increase affection to choose routes. The resource stuff is honestly tedious, but it's worth dealing with to enjoy the fun VN elements. You already need to play through it multiple times to see everything so the pressure to maximize resource gathering efficiency really isn't there. I guess I should mention that it's extremely easy and simple so if you feel stressed out at time management like Atelier games then you shouldn't be for this.
Being Konosuba, it's very funny and occasionally a little serious and ecchi. If you know Konosuba you know what this will be like.

I liked it a lot!

Today's the 20th anniversary of Clannad!

>>123839
I think that if people count things like Dating Sims as VNs then this should count as much as any as one. How long was it? Might give it a shot if I can spare some time.

>>123840
When I learned that my father liked Clannad, I was really shocked, until I learned that he was referring to the Irish folk band.

>>123864
Oops, I didn't see this post until now. It's not long, but hard to accurately gauge because of the resource thing. I tried to min-max before realizing that seeing everything in one or even three playthoughs was impossible. Probably like 5-8 hours if you don't do a bunch of experimentation and a host of save files at different points like I did. I imagine it will be hard to resist making a whole bunch of costumes even if it's not necessary, though, and for that you'll spend time messing around with gathering.
Sadly you can't just share a saved file for all the stuff either because the event gallery is only for the costumes and not all the other scenes.
The dating-like parts kind of run into the same problem as the Sword Art games- the story is already established so you know in your mind all of this is "fake". It's nice to hang out with Wiz in a first-person perspective, but I know that this is superfluous fluff that exists outside canon.

Anyway, I entered this thread again because I'm going to try reading Nekokawa ( https://vndb.org/v1320 ) after I saw a random /v/ thread mention it, but I'm having issues since it's old and certainly not meant for a modern OS with multiple monitor setup. I think I have Japanese locale installed, but I haven't done it since I reinstalled. The story is translated, but the error popup menu definitely is not.
I wonder if I can even use a controller for it without doing some awkward keyboard emulation which I again haven't set up since reinstalling windows a couple years ago.
I'll have to try again later after I get some sleep.

I decided to try out Steam's controller stuff and it seems like I don't need to use JoytoKey any more, which is great because the two heavily conflict with each other if you use a Switch controller.
Something interesting I noticed is that this "Mouse Region" thing here for joypad lets you move the cursor around the screen as if you were aiming a gun in one of those console shooter games. Move it slightly left and the mouse moves to slightly left of center, move it all the way to the top and right and it moves to the top right of the screen!
Using the controller buttons is good for stuff like the Enter or Escape keys, but some of these older games do rely on mouse movement sometimes to navigate menus so this is pretty nice.
I decided it's time to read ToHeart 2 and then I'll play the Dungeon Travelers game with them in a few months since it was finally translated over a decade later and was put on Steam unlike the other Dungeon Travelers games.

>>126482
It isn't my favorite controller ever but I've found PS4 controller to be a pretty good all-around PC gamepad. The touch screen is really helpful for when you need a mouse. I re-programmed the PCB in my joystick to emulate the PS4 touchpad. So now I can hold down the start button on it and navigate with the mouse pointer using the joystick itself.

https://www.brookaccessory.com/detail/06960737/

I've found these PCBs to be really good for PC support on *nix and they're easy to work with. If you get one with the headers you don't even have to solder. I'd like to get a large shell and build a custom gamepad out of one of them. They're just small enough that they could fit in something comfortable.

You can force it to identify as dinput, xinput, switch/Wii controller and about 4 different other things. It works with both PC and every console since the Xbox 360 era. Steam support is really good.

Steam keeps taking over more of my gaming stuff. At first I really didn't want to rely on it for controller support. But it simplified configuration of all my fighting games when we're using more than one controller. So I've defaulted to it now for most stuff. I haven't used joy2key for anything in a long while.

I was surprised to see Atri survive voting in the seasonal stream, so now I must read it before the anime really gets anywhere!
It's quite interesting to see the options in a modern VN. It has some option to send information to external TTS software for unvoiced lines? Huh. Japanese TTS might be better (Zundamon, etc) but this still seems like a major immersion breaker to me.

>>131544
zundamon narration??? i think that could be fun

>>131544
I'm also surprised to see that you can choose to display multiple languages at the same time. Good for language learners, I suppose. (For those 3 people on the planet learning Japanese for VNs). My assumption is that this was a feature made for the international release as there's also Chinese, but in theory I guess it could help Japanese people learn English if they wanted to for some reason. (I think those people would be playing FPS'd or something)

>>131549
Yeah, the reason Zundamon was originally brought up on kissu back in early 2022 was because it was a TTS voice used in some Japanese streams. >>90430
Sadly it's too difficult to use it in English, but you can use that thread if you want to try it.

It looks like that new To Heart project they announced some time ago is an all ages remake of the first To Heart VN.

>>131871
Really? Where'd you see that? There wasn't supposed to be any sort of announcement until November.
That one was never translated by anyone, but maybe this one would get an official one?
Thankfully Utawarerumono already got that treatment so the Utawarerumon announcement in November must be something else! Something related to Kuon???

>>131872
I saw some artists drawing the characters and mentioning a remake, and there are several Japanese media outlets writing about it as well so I assume it's real.

>>132081
damn are all aussies this big

After spending a few hours reading it, I'm not sure if I'm going to keep reading Atri's VN when the anime is available. It does go into more detail about things, but so far from what I've seen it doesn't really add more to it than the anime's fantastic visuals do.
Maybe if the anime adaptation was worse and skipped more things I'd be more interested in the VN. Or maybe it was a mistake to read a VN and watch its anime adaptation at the same time.
What to do, what to do...

>>132081
>australia
You mean fucking kill everything with a machete,senpaiang, and didgeridoo before the air becomes too poisonous to breathe?

>>132473
Not edgy enough, try again with a bit more effort.

I am playing Your Diary +. It's good so far, the only complaints i have is the translation is bad and the game is broken.

Yeah, I'm sucked back into it. The last time I read it, it was on Vita but now I've got my monitor tablet thing in bed so I can do the PC release of Utawarerumono 2 and 3! Unfortunately it's really not made for higher resolutions, but you can get a patch for the 3D parts at least to scale them higher than 720p.
I guess my plan is to read 2 and 3 again, then do an AI translation thing for the BD bonus disc (which I'll make a thread for) and then I'll see what Utawarerumono-related announcement Aquaplus has for November. It seems unlikely to simply be a remake, so I'm really hoping for a brand new Utawarerumono story. They did a prequel with Monochrome Mobius, but you can't compare VN length to something like that, although it did have the same Aquaplus charm.
Anyway, yeah, November will be an announcement for something related to Utawareumono and ToHeart. In an ocean of gacha, Aquaplus gives a reason to think positively of the future of (some) media!

I really should read Underwater Ray Romano someday. There's a remake of the first game isn't there? Should I read that or go for the original?

I am currently eyeing Tokyo Necro. I asked about it, and people said it's really good if you like edgy content with big sword fights and lots of blood. Somehow the budget for this game wasn't a lot of money yet /vn/ called it Nitro's magnum opus. Hopefully it's what worth it.

>>133058
I read the original like 14 years ago and then the remaster when it came to vita/PS4 which was like 5 years ago? I would say the remaster is a better experience.
The original has sex scenes, but they're not very good. They feel tacked on instead of part of the story. In some VNs they're the culmination of relationships and feel natural, but in this one they're just there to hit a quota. "Well, I'm a new female character in the party so I guess we need to have sex now with a couple paragraphs of dialog."
The remake is of course easier to play on modern PCs/vita, has a higher resolution, and the gameplay is better. They applied the stuff they learned from making 2 and 3 and ported it back to 1. The combat is still simple and easy when compared to 2 and 3, but it feels better than the original. There's some optional bonus content battles completely unrelated to the story that are kind of fun, but it doesn't really add anything to the overall experience. If I remember right you had to farm % drops to unlock the ultimate optional battle, which seemed lame to me.
There's an option to mix in some Uta 2 and 3 music for related moments which sounds cool to me, but I can't remember how that worked. Music is such a huge part of VNs that this seems really good, though.
There's DLC for Uta 2 and 3 characters to be used in cleared/optional battles, but that's atmosphere and gameplay balance destruction so I wouldn't recommend those.

>>133067
Remaster it is then.

I wonder what the most effective way is to properly catalog VN moments for future enjoyment. Utawarerumono 2 has 50 save slots, but it's nowhere near enough. I was going to have a save slot for each character introduction, so that's like 20 slots. A slot after each story battle? That's like 30 slots, etc etc. The SoL stuff is often done in chunks with a menu so I guess that part is easy to save, although it makes it hard to find the specific scene you want. I can't remember if you unlock a Scene Selection thing when you beat this game or not, although those generally miss stuff.
I've recorded VN scenes before in video form, but it's not very efficient. What to do, what to do...

Also, in sad news I've learned that Karula/Karura/Karulau's VA passed away a few weeks ago. She was still very active this year and I wonder if she was (or was going to be) involved with the to-be-announced Utawarerumono project... https://anilist.co/staff/95100/Atsuko-Tanaka

>>133161
I won't say it's effective but I just take screencaps.

Finished reading uta 1 recently, now I'm planning to read MoD and experience Kuon's story at last. I hope the older cast make a relevant appearance in both sequels. Karalau in particular was my favourite character, it's a shame what happened to her VA
>>133161
There is a bonus section where you can replay previous scenes in uta 1, I assume a similar feature is also present in the other games
Alternatively, you can extract the game files with something like garbro and view the cgs directly, although I doubt that would be enjoyable without the dialogues, music, etc. Video recording is probably your best bet

>>133191
>now I'm planning to read MoD and experience Kuon's story at last.
Excellent! Feel free to make a thread about reading it with updates and opinions! I'd love to read and comment on it! (but I understand if you don't want to) Something I need to point out is that the the first part of the duology (Utawarerumono 2/Mask of Deception/Itsuwari no Kamen) has a lot of casual slice-of-life stuff in it. It establishes the world and grows you closer to the characters, but not everyone has a willingness to spend 15 hours reading that stuff until it gets serious. The cooking parts are a common complaint, but you could turn on the Skip option to allow you to skip ahead of stuff you haven't read. It has the same "home base" selection stuff that the first one did, so when you see Kitchen you know what you're going to get.
But, as I've said before many times around kissu, I think Aquaplus are the undisputed lords of charm, emotion and character stuff in general. You will smile, laugh, and of course cry. I could read these all day.
Oh, and
DO NOT WATCH THE OP FOR THE THIRD ONE! (Mask of Truth/Futari no Hakuoro)
The spoilers in it are ridiculous. I don't know why creators do this, but skipping the opening has been an ingrained action of mine for a couple decades now for a reason.

>>133191
>Karalau in particular was my favourite character
I thought she was such a fucking cunt when she decided to kill her fellow slaves in her backstory, and she didn't ever become sympathetic after that.

>>133191
>Alternatively, you can extract the game files with something like garbro
Dang, it didn't work on Utawarerumono 2. I assumed it wouldn't, but that's still a bummer. I'd love to have access to source images not just of the portraits but also the UI since it's so good. I guess I have to do things the hard way with screenshots and editing.

Steins;Gate reboot/make/master thingie coming next year.

>>97818
Noah is just a mess. The official tl for noah is fine but there is just so much stuff missing/censored in the game. The coz tl for noah is just a terrible fanfic. Play the original game instead.

>>134773
>>134774
How is their patch for Chaos;Child? The official TL for that had some missing/untranslated stuff in it too that they added in, but I'm aware that it also needlessly changes stuff like the case names, at least in the later revisions.

>>134773
I would say that in most cases, needlessly changed text that gets the general message across is still better than no text at all.

Don't play the version that has missing content, play the other version that has even more missing content.

You know I never made the connection in my head when watching the endings for the School Days VN that the entire VN was animated and real-time decision making. Think I still need a bit more time before taking this one on because I can't read jp notebook notes in 2 seconds.

>>135134
>was animated and real-time decision making
What do you mean?