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I'm playing Baldr Sky at the moment (just finished Dive1) and while I have not been exactly bowled over the Reminiscence section that has opened up has nearly killed my drive to go on. I'm not going to quit or anything (not when Dive2 is supposed to be one of the best VNs ever) but man this was a splash of cold water.
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Feb 5, 2020 15:49
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Like I get it, they probably wanted to have a way to refresh players returning to the story in Dive2 since there was a period of time in between the releases, but it makes no sense to just throw that into the combined release as-is. It's pretty depressing how far down I can scroll in that section and thinking about how much is ahead of me before I can like get back to the actual story, especially since the final route of Dive1 (Chinatsu) was pretty bad and not exactly the best note to end the action on.
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Feb 5, 2020 21:50
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Experiencing AI again through SGF's streams reinforced to me that it is my favorite Uchikoshi VN. It's a story that is far more focused on the characters themselves and how they relate to one another and thus puts the pseudo-science and twists on the backburner more often than not (relatively speaking). So there's far more leg work put forth towards pathos on things that may not even relate to the main mystery and that gives a lot more weight to their lives when they do get involved; something like Mayumi's somnium I just don't think would've been realistically possible in the Zero Escape or Infinity games. It's true that that the somniums are overall not more fun to play than the puzzle rooms, but at the same time I think they also elevate the characterization in a way that the puzzle rooms couldn't have either. I think probably my only real criticism is that some aspects of the finale do feel a little forced and clunky; it reads like Uchikoshi thought of 95% of the plot starting with the ending and worked his way backwards, but realized that there were still some plot holes and rushed to fill them in. Pretty much everything is explained but it gets far less elegant when it actually relays how Falco/Rohan/Saito ended up swapping all around and Falco subsequently losing his memories. But then again I don't think I could name another Uchikoshi story that wasn't fairly clunky in its wrap up, by contrast to all of the Zero Escape games AI got off pretty light IMO.
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Feb 10, 2020 14:09
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Finally, finally, through Reminiscence in Baldr Sky. It took about 2 weeks though that did also include one route that unlocked halfway through. At least the back half was more new content than much of the first so it gradually got less tedious.
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Feb 17, 2020 19:29
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meefistopheles posted:Is there a canonial list of VNs I should try out? A friend recommended me Steins;Gate which I enjoyed, and I moved onto 428, which was even better. I've heard of the When they cry series, is there anything else that's a must-play? Linear VNs are a lot more common than you might think, and I think they can still serve as examples of how the medium can tell their stories only in the format of a visual novel even without multiple branches. When They Cry for example makes extremely deft use of music and sound/ambiance direction as well as internal monologue to develop its characters, both of which would have to be sacrificed in some fashion if they originated in anime or manga (and you would see this quite explicitly in the Umineko and Higurashi animes). Perhaps more than anything else, The House in Fata Morgana is a lot of people's favorite VN (me included) and I wouldn't want anyone interested in VNs to skip or put it off for being too linear. The Fate series (stay/night and its sequel hollow/ataraxia), which presumably you've heard of via osmosis, does feature what I feel are some of the most intelligent route branching mechanics from a meta standpoint. I realize that that is a daunting series to perhaps jump into headfirst but it can be very rewarding if you want to see another advantage of telling a story in the visual novel format, and hollow/ataraxia in particular is an extremely fun example of what the other end of the spectrum of linearity can look like because you have an extreme amount of freedom to experience the story in any way you want due to its looping format.
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Feb 19, 2020 15:26
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(Yeah this is a copy from the other thread but shrug) Baldr Sky was a decent VN that I feel stumbled too frequently for me to say I truly enjoyed it as much as I was hoping. In the end it just never quite came together. To start off somewhat positively, the setting* is just interesting enough and the characters are all quite compelling that I never felt particularly bothered with reading even as it dragged at times. It was able to remain engaging enough that I had no qualms about keeping at it even as I grumbled at times. I wanted to see these characters through to a hopefully good end because I cared enough about them, and while that sounds like a very simple/basic thing sometimes I feel making the audience care about the issues/development/welfare of a cast is a hurdle that stories, especially one as long as this one (near 80 hours by Steam's count), don't pull off. Points of contention: -The battle system is not fun. I appreciate it in concept and the pacing of the story probably doesn't work if they just removed them completely, but it's just not well designed at all and is more of a thing to wrestle with than anything else. I can't count how many times it extended sequences into tedium by having you deal with constant fodder that had no place interrupting the story's flow. Muv-Luv's mecha scenes were not all that exemplary but a part of me almost sees Baldr's being replaced by this awkward battle system as the writers not having the confidence to write such scenes. I never once regretted turning down to Very Easy and even that still had numerous sequences that were a pain. -The Reminiscence section is just straight up awful and was the closest I came to dropping the whole VN, though that was never all that likely. I assume it was more necessary when Dive1 and Dive2 were separate but the moment they combined the two games they should have treated the already read scenes from Dive1 as skippable text. -*The setting, while interesting, is just kind of weird and convoluted in a way that makes a lot of it feel "off" or otherwise just sort of forced. The entire crux of most of the conflicts in the story spin off from AI and anti-AI, but what these concepts actually entail and how the factions spin out from that just don't work that well IMO. I feel like the story wanted to hate the anti-AI characters but still distrust the AI because of all the ~mystery~ surrounding them but at no point did it feel it was done so convincingly (this is partly why Chinatsu's route is such a chore to get through, you intuitively know that Kou is making a slew of decisions that going to suck for everyone but welp the plot demands it). I don't know, this sounds like a weird thing to get hung up on but this permeates EVERYTHING in the story and after a while it just felt a bit forced. It's like the writer had this incredibly ambitious cyberpunk world envisioned that they just couldn't quite translate to paper fully. I know that there are other Baldr games so I wonder if some of this is just that those games are better introductions to the concepts of the AI in this game. -Too many scenes had me saying, "well, that was a choice". Scenes of female sexual and physical abuse, tone deaf dialogue from lots of characters including Kou ("I know that [rape] is a terrible experience for women but it's not worth killing yourself over"), some racial stereotypes that are probably not coming from a place of malice but are still what they are, and some relationships that honestly developed in a way that felt kind of skeevy in a way that I don't feel was justified for the story being told. -A little related to the above but the villains are not good, they are either basically non-characters or just grating. I'd go as far as to call them a very shallow part of the game. Ultimately by no means a bad overall experience and I do think it landed the ending that it deserved and needed, if not particularly surprising. Given how long of a VN it was it would've been a bummer if it had gone out on a unsatisfying note. Nate RFB fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Mar 8, 2020 |
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Feb 24, 2020 03:47
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Majikoi group has the Kawakami sisters so it's them by default even before getting into the rest who are pretty good, though Masato in LB is the superior muscle idiot character.
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Mar 9, 2020 13:40
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I'm not sure how I feel about Raging Loop, sans the Extra stuff and Revelations of course. From the beginning it was a VN with a fairly unusual structure, pacing, tone, and dialogue, and that persisted from the beginning all the way to the ending. Frequently it made for a refreshing different sort of take on that sort of VN story but I also just as frequently felt I'd step away from it, digest it further, and find that it wasn't quite coming together either. Part of it I think is the Feasts themselves; they are both the strength and weakness of the story. They're good in that they are compelling games of wit that keeps you on the edges of your seats, and often on the best routes they were what kept me coming back. On the other hand because of the structure of the game after a certain point a ton of routes have basically no major scenes happen outside of the feast, with character interactions being reduced to vague/cryptic scenes that may or may not pay off down the line but don't really do much in the way in developing the characters, and the Feasts themselves don't really give the characters a lot of room to breathe because of their nature So in the end the cast kind of felt...kind of shallow? That's a bit reductive and obviously not universally true (and I'm sure the Revelations/Extras will change this a bit), but I can't help but feel that most of the cast just came off ultimately as underutilized. The ending itself is just also kind of forced and convoluted for my tastes (some real Processor Layton Twist energy), with a lot of what I would perceive as sophistry used to bullshit its way through it. Some of which was certainly satisfying for the characters involved but a lot of it was more "well I guess that's how that's going to go, huh".
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Mar 19, 2020 01:42
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Snooze Cruise posted:chloe... chloe!11
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Mar 30, 2020 02:09
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I somehow didn't even realize that Summer Pockets got a translated release. I don't think I know a single thing about it and have not heard anyone actually express a sentiment on it, positive or negative or otherwise.
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May 21, 2020 22:21
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I am too many years removed from when I played Rewrite but I basically remember it as: both the writing quality and cohesiveness of the various routes was all over the place (a problem I think most Key works share) so nothing felt like it flowed or connected together that well, and then most of the characters were unimportant or lacked agency in Terra and made it kind of feel like most game had wasted some of their character arcs and development on the way to get there.
Nate RFB fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Jul 30, 2020 |
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Jul 30, 2020 00:28
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I wrapped the two Utawarerumono Mask of Deception/Truth VNs after a fairly long hiatus towards the end and my overall feelings haven't changed: I think the story drags and ultimately relies on some very forced and dumb plot developments in order to justify the need for the final few battles, ultimately making me care less and less about how it'd would all get resolved. I like the characters and when it tries to be funny or heartwarming it usually succeeds, but pretty much all of the serous plot threads did not work for me at all.
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Jul 30, 2020 21:46
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You post about it in the discord well after I go to bed so I'm not able to comment on it in real time but I hope you like it!!
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Nov 7, 2020 13:19
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I also wasn't sure how I felt about the early doors, especially when my initial impressions were that it was going to be mostly only vaguely connected vignettes, but I do think by the end when you look back at them they feel very necessary and absolutely do contribute a lot to what the story actually has to say. They're awkward in spots but it winds up feeling purposeful, if that makes sense.
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Nov 9, 2020 05:27
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It's the exactly the sort of tone and shift you needed after how harrowing so much of the rest of the story was, and the way/when it is pulled off makes it feel earned. And while it's obviously not 100% the case, in a lot of the sidestories and especially the story postmortem by the cast it's a tone that carried on through. It always gave me the strong impression that Novectacle deeply cared about the world and characters they had written.
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Nov 12, 2020 04:53
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Meakashi is a real rough one. Which makes the anime's choice of removing Shion's TIPs diaries which provide pretty much all of her internal monologues all the more unfortunate because then it's mostly just a series of bad things that happen and then it ends.
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Jan 1, 2021 03:10
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJY6TRfvq9s
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Jan 7, 2021 13:47
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psychoJ posted:btw are the console arcs good Saikoroshi-hen has some bits of moderate overall importance and is also super short but the rest can be skipped IMO.
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Jan 7, 2021 17:48
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It was a pretty common theory around the time of EP4 once peopled picked up on that (major spoilers)Battler never sees Kanon and Shannon in the same room, and when the game tries to pull a fast one on you in EP5 it's when he's not the Detective/POV character and is instead just Lambdadelta's piece.
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Jan 20, 2021 02:25
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Mar 2, 2021 02:58
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The problem with DR2 especially is the exact opposite problem. "Oh this character is becoming interesting, they are obviously going to die next". There was no stakes or tension because that in of itself became super predictable and boring. They could solve this by just making everyone compelling in some way but both of the first two games, and especially DR2, drop the ball so hard on doing just about anything of note with its cast.
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Mar 4, 2021 20:48
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I enjoyed going through Summer Pockets in the sense that it was the first Key VN i've read in about a decade but there's really not much to say about it, it's pretty obvious what kind of story it is going for out of the gate ant it does very little to stand out among other Key stories in any way.
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Mar 13, 2021 01:45
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At the end of the day Ange is someone who only knew her family for the first 6 years of her life, during which she was never to our knowledge treated in a untoward manner, and then proceeded to spend the next 12 years harrowed by the media attention of her family's affairs and dirty laundry, ultimately poisoning all of her personal and social interactions. For some people in the Ushiromiya family it absolutely would have warranted getting justice, getting to the bottom of either the direct or extenuating circumstances, but for Ange it's going out of her way to allow things outside of her control to dictate her livelihood and happiness. It benefits no one and ultimately serves no justice for her specifically to be the one that tears open the cat's guts.
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Mar 19, 2021 09:57
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Unlimited doesn't really have a proper route structure like Extra, it just changes a few things at the very end depending on what girl you are closest with. So for all intents and purposes you can stop with Unlimited after finishing it once and move on to Alternative.
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Apr 24, 2021 14:21
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There are some very specific aspects of Alternative that I would not have minded exploring in other games or side stories, but as far as I knew pretty much none of the extra stuff that is out there covers it so I felt more than comfortable not bothering. The only thing that I would've been on board for is Altered Fable but AFAIK that never got finished (latest update that I see is from 2014 with a few routes done).
Nate RFB fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Apr 24, 2021 |
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Apr 24, 2021 15:28
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Well that's good, I always just assumed those were the various side stories. I redeemed those codes but never bothered to download them.
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Apr 24, 2021 16:31
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I have to say that while I heard a lot of misgivings about the first case of DR V3, it's the end of case 2 that is making me completely lose my mind and not in like any sort of fun way.
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Jun 23, 2021 04:27
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If you liked the main story it's worth doing. Reincarnation is more superfluous though IMO.
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Jul 1, 2021 00:05
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I finished DR V3 but there's not much I can really say I feel. I enjoyed the ending and and bits and pieces of the last few cases but there's too much VN to get to those points that I did not care for all that much. It turns out that if you don't really like the first two VNs of a franchise it's probable you're not going to be over the moon for its third either.
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Jul 13, 2021 03:18
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Man there's this big VN hole on my PC now that I'm done with DR V3... If only there was another VN about mysteries that I recently got on a Steam sale that could fill it...
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Jul 14, 2021 13:28
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> : (
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Jul 19, 2021 00:58
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It would have, though I had gotten an answer elsewhere before having to trial & error it anyway. But still, c'mon!
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Jul 19, 2021 02:23
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It is and it has been, shall we say, a somewhat buggy experience at times.
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Jul 19, 2021 14:07
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It's been so long since it was announced that for a bit I thought this was the new game they were doing (which is like a RPG) rather than the Fata Morgana spinoff that came out after FM / before Requiem that it actually is.
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Aug 8, 2021 12:57
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Snooze Cruise posted:so what everyone is saying is if i act like lady in mystery made me angry and mad i can trick em into playing it...
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Aug 30, 2021 17:45
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batteries! posted:Finished Umineko yesterday, almost in time for Halloween and it's... definitely an ending. I loved the cast, so many characters that appear unlikeable on the surface but end up growing on you by virtue of being so well written. Incredible soundtrack as well, every great moment heightened with these amazing tunes. That said it might be helpful to read the "Our Confession" extra chapter which is available in English in Umineko Saku which provides the mindset of how a gameboard might be set up, as well as the manga-only EP8 "Confession of the golden witch" chapters which makes some of the subtext in the reveals just straight up text. quote:Going through my questions I know a good part of the story just went over my head, but that's on me as a reader. -I don't think there's a need to look at the "fragments" where characters have somewhat different fates in a purely literal sense; you could read it as being just a "what if" that Bernkastel is telling the reader in a extra meta layer even further stripped away or more simply just "this was one possible path in this fragment, the actual epilogue of EP8 is in a different one". -Bern isn't a nice person and is being presented, along with Erika, as the type of mystery solver who going for the cruelest possible resolutions whether it narratively even makes sense. -Definitely elaborated a bit more in "Confession of the golden witch" but in general you're discounting the connection she had with Battler and how the two of them bonded over mystery fiction; like Kinzo she wanted to gamble on a miracle because it was the only way she could figure out how to resolve the myriad of issues roiling in and around her. -Don't forget what a "game" actually entails: they are representations of what happened as analyzed via either bottles thrown into the ocean by Beatrice or forgeries written by Hachijo Tohya. So long as no one has definitive answers (via, say Eva's diary) and the catbox remains closed there are as many games as there are stories written by people. But for sake of simplicity the first two were from message bottles, while EP3 and beyond were ostensibly written by Tohya. I want to say EP7/EP8 are kind of their own thing but they can probably thematically be treated in the same light.
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Nov 4, 2021 14:26
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I finished Muramasa and I leave it with mixed feelings. First and foremost I'm glad that I had the chance to read it at all and it's deserving of its reputation in VN lore, so it finally have a TL is a big hurdle that I'm glad was cleared. For me personally I think it occupies a similar space as Muv-Luv where it's a story that is both ambitious and requires a lot of investment to see through and thus I appreciate it I think more than I actually enjoyed it. The biggest issue is that at its heart it only really has one theme/element to work with (it is not "heroic" to kill anyone regardless of how you justify it) and this is made explicit and obvious extremely early on, to the point where virtually nothing that happens in the story is ever surprising. You can to a T see every major plot beat coming a mile away once you know the basics of the the setup for the chapter in question and yet Muramasa does not seem aware that its readers will know this, so instead it chooses to belabor and pontificate this to a degree that is frequently obnoxious. So when combined with the VN's extreme length (about 35 hours to get through the first two routes, almost 60 to finish the whole thing) it frequently bristled against my patience. All of which is not to say that there weren't some standout moments and beats. I generally enjoyed most to all of the endgame content and the action writing is definitely a cut above most VNs. I'd even call most of the cast memorable in a good way, though I will respectfully disagree with the notion that Kageaki is himself superlative in any way. I think he works fine as a vehicle for the story but as one much better character put it, he is a sad, sorry, hopeless sack of blubber.
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Feb 9, 2022 03:02
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I definitely agree that Narahara Ittetsu thought it was cool (I guess they retired from VNs afterwards too). I'll agree that Chachamaru is cool at least and I wish they got more to do than like two action scenes one of which wasn't even shown.
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Feb 9, 2022 20:10
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As a recent R;N reader these were my thoughts in the other thread My memory of the Robotics;Notes anime was that while it was worse than S;G it was still decent enough when all was said and done. Finishing the VN if anything lowered my overall opinion and I left it absolutely disappointed. The pacing is honestly kind of insane where a good 75% of the VN is spent on the SOL Robotics club nonsense with what feels like only token overtures of the larger real story, and this has the effect of kind of ruining both sides of it. Anything with the club feels undercut when it's set aside for what "really" matters and the actual serious story segments never feel earned because they show up too infrequently that it never feels like a cohesive part of the story. If anything I bet this felt better in the anime because the shorter runtime and more condensed story meant you were probably bouncing back and forth between those two poles more reliably. Further, Kaito being the only POV for actually further said main story is such a bad choice given the type of listless, unmotivated dullard so he never has anything actually interesting to contribute to the conspiracy theorizing or SciAdv lore. This could have easily been remedied if like S;G the entire cast was involved but weirdly having it all pigeon holed into just him makes it so much less fun than it was in the other games. Then the finale hits and due to all of the weird pacing from before it has to sprint to the finish in a way that isn't going to satisfy anyone. Doesn't even have an epilogue or anything which boy it needed so it really has a "The End, No Moral" vibe of all things which just tonally is awkward as hell.
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May 19, 2022 13:49
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It'd be better if he had someone, virtually anyone, to bounce off of when he's off doing the real story. They give the briefest of overtures to this by having Frau tag along once but that's only for about two scenes with no follow up. It'd be like what if S;G didn't have the lab crew together whenever Okabe was looking into SERN. You have this whole stable of mostly decent characters and just choose to never engage with them for most of the major scenes that matter.
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May 19, 2022 14:52
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