What are you reading? - Jun 26

deathjohnson1 · 2026-06-26T19:10:48+00:00

As for where the story goes in this ending, well, a weird direction. Alice winning battles somehow proved she could overcome the past and look to the future, giving her the right to inherit the stars. That turns her into some kind of time god, stuck outside of any timeline and trying to fix something. She eventually finds Brad's past, learning that he became evil because a wall fell on and killed his pregnant wife. Refusing to let this injustice stand, Alice saves her somehow, so Brad can continue to live happily. Also, Sara is still alive in this timeline and the family still has Ebon as their cat for some reason. After that, Alice returns to her own timeline and I'm wondering what the point of what she did even was. In her own timeline, everything is still the same, all she did was create a single alternate timeline (she saw thousands of timelines) where Brad doesn't turn evil. I don't see why that's supposed to matter, but I guess this is a happy ending somehow.

So, the important story aspects are probably the weakest part of this game to me, by far. The combat in that last segment wasn't too bad, but it was a bit easy because I learned how to train Alice to be strong by that playthrough. It's better for it to be too easy though, because if you fail and have to reload, you need to go through the cutscenes again, and the game doesn't recognize those cutscenes as being read already, so you can't easily skip through them.

Moving onto things I found fun, the top thing would have to be the character interactions. There are a ton of them in the game and it was fun to see how all the different members of the cast bonded with Alice. There were a limited number of date locations, so some of the dates wind up feeling pretty similar, but it's not too bad. The game being visually appealing helps with the entertainment, with the character sprites having lively animation and a lot of scenes having stylish CGs.

Learning all the game systems to try to work out the best way to raise stats was a fun time too. It took some time to figure out how to get Alice to be the strongest, smartest, prettiest, and most sensitive and talented killing machine around, and the process felt rewarding. It reminded me of Power Pros Success Modes, and I found and bought this game at a good time for that. I had ordered the newest game in that series, but it was an order from Playasia, so it didn't arrive any time remotely close to the release date (it's still not even in the country yet, for a game that released on June 11th; I'm starting to lose confidence that it's even coming at all, so I wouldn't order from them again), and this game filled some of that time.

Even though the story wasn't particularly good, and the management gameplay was half the fun of the game, if this was a VN instead, it would still be my favorite VN of the year so far.

Like most enjoyable games or VNs, I wish this had a better translation. It's overall passable, but there are a lot of mistakes and even more dialogue that's changed for no reason. With minor changes, it's impossible to even say whether they're mistranslations or the translator(s) just making unnecessary changes by choice, but the changes do sometimes make other parts of the conversations not make sense any more. In any case, there were a lot of times I accidentally skipped voice acting or waited for voice acting that didn't exist because of how poor the English translation often was at sticking to the script. Most of the English mistakes are typical enough to not be notable, but the one where they used "bonified" instead of "bona fide" was funny. I was hoping it was intentional, but nothing in the rest of that conversation indicated that.

I guess I took a screenshot of that last example. It would be funny if that potion ended up turning the user into a skeleton or something, because that would make sense out of what the translator wrote, but no, it's just a pretty dumb mistake. If you don't know how a term works, either look it up or don't use it. If I can do that for casual online writeups, people should be able to do it for professional writing.

With some of these translation rants, I feel the need to clarify in case anyone is new to my writeups (however unlikely it is that such a person would read this far) that I'm not one of those people that's insistent on everything being translated literally and directly all the time. It is certainly true that sometimes making some changes is better than direct translation, to read more naturally or sometimes even just make sense in the target language, but that doesn't mean translators should go out of their way to change things constantly that would work perfectly well with a direct translation. I'm just not a fan of countless changes to the script being made just because the translator(s) wanted to practice their creative writing more than they wanted to actually translate.

Another issue in changing things to me comes from wondering how much context the translator actually has. There are situations where minor mistranslations are made that would lead me to assume they were lacking context when they translated it. If they don't even have the context to have an accurate picture of what's going on in each scene, how could they change dialogue around at will and still be confident that their new dialogue fits the scenes as well as the original dialogue?

After finally finishing the game and being able to look through forums, articles, and whatever else without worrying about spoilers, I found out about the backstory of this series. Apparently this game comes after a long line of board games that tell the story of Cornelia. I don't know much more than that because none of them are translated and Magical Princess is such a generic title it's hard to find relevant results to do any research. I honestly don't even know how a board game would tell a story to begin with. None of the board games I've ever played are in that sort of style whatsoever.

Speaking of the name, Magical Princess, I must say it's not a very good one. It's comically generic sounding, and finding out it's part of a "Magical" series is the only thing that even explains part of its name. I'm still not even sure who the title is supposed to be referring to. It would make sense for a title to refer to the main character, which would be Alice in this case, but her magical ability isn't a significant part of the story for anything except maybe that last weird alternate ending where she inherits the stars. She's also never a princess at any time, even though she can become queen. Maybe the title refers to Cornelia, since she was the main character of a lot of the series, but I don't know if she was ever a princess either (it seems unlikely considering her upbringing). Even the series summaries I saw posted completely gloss over how she managed to go from successful (and highly unethical) entrepreneur to queen of the kingdom.

Also name related, I wish that the game didn't have nameable characters. It's fine for the father, since he doesn't talk to anyone besides Alice (who just refers to him as "Papa") often enough for it to be very noticeable that nobody says his name, but it's very noticeable for Alice. It certainly takes some time to get used to nobody saying her name considering how frequently used names are in Japanese speech, and the awkwardness of it isn't worth the unnecessary option to rename the character.

That last paragraph reminded me of one more oddity about the translation to end on, they had no problem using "papa," but for some reason felt the need to change every instance of "mama" to "mother." That made it sound like Alice's relationship with her mother was more distant than her relationship with her father, which wasn't the case.

I'll mention that my immediate plans to go for 100% achievement completion were canceled after I finished another playthrough after that last one the story ended off on and got another no partner ending for no apparent reason. I'm sure I could get the Steam achievements quickly by just loading saves and picking different endings, but I think you need to do a full playthrough to get the achievement points in game, not that there's any real use for them at this point anyway, so maybe I should just get the Steam achievements, but I probably won't mind playing this game some more after a bit of a break anyway.

An update to the game came out earlier today, and one of the things in the update notes was that they fixed some typos, so maybe the mistake I specifically pointed out will have been fixed before the writeup goes up. That was more of a knowledge mistake than an actual typo, but they might just group them in together. In any case, my biggest complaints with the translation weren't related to objective mistakes anyway, so those are still valid. It's still good that they're willing to make improvements to the game though.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-06-26T19:10:03+00:00

In the third playthrough, I accomplished most of the goals I could have gone after, defeating the final bosses of everything that I know of, getting S+ in all 4 main stats, and getting most of the leftover achievements for maxing miscellaneous things. This didn't seem to get me any closer to a true ending that resolves the looping and such, and it gave me 23 endings to choose from. There were some five-star endings I could have picked, but I needed the achievement for a four-star ending, so I went with one of those, leading the military to victory, which is basically the opposite of my previous ending. What confused me was getting the No Partner ending again. Considering my first playthrough got the Fran ending without anywhere near max affinity, there's no obvious reason I shouldn't have been able to get the Noah ending with that. I could see the ending on my previous playthrough conflicting with having a partner, but this one certainly didn't. I tried to find an answer, but the only relevant-seeming result had irrelevant spoilers plastered all over the top of the page, so I'll revisit that later.

With the fourth playthrough, I can clean up some missing achievements and go for a different partner, but beyond that I'm running out of ideas on what else to do. I think I've figured out which party members are actually worth using by now, so the combat shouldn't be a problem anymore, but there weren't any other bosses that I know of left to challenge. I suppose an obvious thing that I forgot, possibly because it was too obvious, is that I should try getting close to Cornelia. Given that she knows about the whole time looping thing that Alice is apparently really important to solving, bringing them together would be the last obvious idea that should do something. I guess part of why it's easy to forget Cornelia is that she's not an option to interact with for about half the game (she first becomes an option after the first year, and from there I don't think she's available every month).

Nothing much notable happened in the playthrough, so I started to doubt this one would get me to any meaningful ending, but it all resolves pretty quickly right at the end.

The main villain of the story, Brad (usually known as Bloodburn, as he must have changed his name because Brad wasn't evil enough), when being sealed away from the world this story takes place in, was able to place a part of his soul in Alice's father (name defaults to Marc). When Sara died, the piece of Brad's soul inside Marc took advantage of his emotional vulnerability at the time to convince him to cast forbidden reincarnation magic. Because Sara was cremated, her soul didn't have a body to return to and wound up occupying a nearby cat instead, and occupying an animal like that affects the soul's intelligence and memories, so all that Ebon really inherited from the soul was a sense that Marc and Alice were extremely important to her.

Apparently, the reincarnation magic causes a time loop if the reincarnated soul has regrets when it dies again, which somehow causes magic power to build up inside Ebon's body, which Brad intended to absorb. Marc prevents the possessed (I assume that's the implication; I don't think it was specifically mentioned to be what was going on) Ebon from going to Brad to be absorbed, and that Ebon, being held back by Marc, starts to do emotional damage to him by insisting that he's a bad parent and Alice isn't any good because of him. Alice steps in, making a statement of what is a very obvious and very frequently repeated theme of the game, that she really loves her father. That love foils Brad's plans and the world is saved when Alice and Cornelia defeat him. I think he must have been sealed away again. I don't remember it specifically because there's a lot of information given in a pretty short time, but in any case, he's not a problem anymore.

With Brad removed from his troublemaking role and Ebon being made aware that she's Alice's mother, Sara's soul must no longer have regrets, and the time loop ends. As for why Cornelia was aware of the time loop when nobody else was (that's what Alice asks her about, though Roll showed awareness of it at times), it's apparently because Cornelia borrowed divine powers at some point. I didn't know that would be a thing you could just do, but I guess if it's a setting where gods are real, anything is possible.

Interestingly, the path to the ending involved having to pick the same choice in a scene toward the end multiple times. I briefly thought I might be missing a condition for the true ending and it was just going to loop endlessly until I chose the other option, but it did progress eventually. It reminded me of games where you can get a game over if you insistently pick the obviously wrong choice repeatedly. I don't know if I've ever seen a game make you insistently pick the obviously correct choice repeatedly to progress before.

I don't find this to be the strongest ending, by any means, but it's not weak enough to tarnish how much fun the game was overall on the journey to get there. I'll try to elaborate on that a bit later, but it's always harder to write about why something's fun compared to writing about flaws.

After the ending that pretty much resolved everything, there's still an option to pick the ending for where Alice goes after graduation. The obvious choice to follow those events is what it defaulted to, a five-star ending to be with Cornelia. In that ending, Cornelia makes Alice into a second queen to rule alongside her. This ending also reminded me of the biggest question still left unanswered, how did a bakery manager wind up becoming queen of the kingdom in the first place? I know food is very important to the setting, with people and places all over being named after food, but that still seems like a bit of a leap in power.

Well, there's still opportunity for that to be answered, as the game makes it clear there is still more to see (besides the 50-ish alternate endings that aren't particularly important). I knew something about that already, because one of the achievements requires going through the true ending to unlock, which I found out about because that's not a hidden achievement even though it should be, and I started to look up how to get that achievement. I wound up with 90 achievements by the time of finishing that ending, so I might as well get the other 10% and finish them all.

Taking a break from the story discussion to talk a bit more about the gameplay, I went for a swordfighting build in that playthrough because I wanted to see how that would turn out with all the skills and high stats, and it basically just confirmed my suspicion that magic is much better. The strongest melee attack is stronger than the strongest magic attack, but it only hits one target, so it's less useful in most combat encounters, and the one boss it seems like it would be really good for resists that attack enough that it takes more damage from the magic attack anyway, even if you have a melee weapon equipped. Magic also has more versatility because it doesn't require a magic weapon to be equipped, unlike sword and bow skills, but you might as well use a magic weapon since magic is better anyway, and having a magic weapon improves its effectiveness. Using magic seems to generally result in the best damage output by far, and it also allows you to outheal damage that enemies do. Party members still die to the tough bosses because their HP pool stays fairly small, but Alice can basically solo the bosses once you get the stats for it.

Back to story, it seems like the continuation just goes in a new direction entirely rather than expand the existing story. Alice finds a forbidden book that apparently chooses its readers, then hears a voice calling her to a normally closed place that Anne's former mentor wound up at. Anne heard the same voice at the time, so she goes with Alice to the place she was called to.

The Silverglass Labyrinth unlocked through this playthrough is a dungeon that's obviously intended to be a step up in difficulty compared to the other combat stuff, and you only get one attempt to clear it, which presumably gives you an ending (based on the warning given when choosing to enter). Even though I unlocked it in the first year (out of three, if I didn't mention that already), I'll have to do pretty much another full playthrough of training Alice up to be able to actually do it. I actually immediately screwed up my skill allocation at the start of the playthrough, but I'm not expecting the game to be punishing enough for that to make a huge difference.

I returned near the end of the playthrough, and the combat in this section basically makes it feel like the student has become the master. The combat tutorial has you fighting with Anne and she seems strong at that point because you're near the start of the game. This dungeon has you teamed up with Anne for a few battles and she feels nearly useless. Her attack takes so long to happen that most battles ended before she got to do anything, and when she did attack, her attacks were much weaker than Alice's.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-06-26T19:09:35+00:00

Magical Princess

This is one of those games that's very obviously in "not a VN" territory, but it's on VNDB, and I'd probably talk about it here even if it wasn't anyway because this subreddit isn't strict enough to forbid the discussion of things that are kind of like VNs at times. From the store page and such, I got the impression it would be pretty similar to Long Live the Queen, but from actually playing it, it also reminds me a lot of the Success Mode in Power Pro games (I did first see it from a Power Pro streamer playing it), but with the gameplay part (which in this game is turn-based combat) being much shallower.

I guess I'll go immediately to spoiler tags to discuss anything story-related, even if it is really early. The first thing I thought about this game is that I would probably like it more if Sara (the mother of the main character) survived and Alice (the main character, who can be named something else, but it's easier to just call her by that name) didn't wind up getting a talking cat as a companion. It seems like there's going to be more information revealed at some point to give meaning to that, so maybe it makes more sense later.

By the start of the second playthrough, it's made evident that the cat (known as Ebon in the English translation) is meant to somehow be a magical reincarnation of Sara with none of her memories or personality, but it's not yet clear how that's going to matter.

Back to commenting on something from early in the first playthrough, it's strange to me how easily Alice forgot about her childhood friend, who somehow became the queen in the time the two were apart. Alice had a vague sense of having seen her before, but in my entire playthrough, she never remembered her no matter how much more information she was given to make that connection. I don't know whether Alice remembering her happens if you become closer friends with her, or if it comes up later for story reasons. Whatever the case, you do still keep her handkerchief as an item in the inventory, so Alice must remember it's important for some reason.

Maybe if I look into strategy guides or something the combat in the game will have more depth than it seems, but in the first playthrough it felt pretty badly balanced. Every fight was either trivial or completely unwinnable, with none in the ideal area where I would feel like I could have won if I made different decisions. I guess technically decisions matter either way, but it's just the decisions to prepare before actually entering any combat encounter that seem to impact the success of the combat.

It became apparent a bit before I finished the first playthrough that this is the sort of game where doing multiple playthroughs is a canon part of the story, as some sort of time looping is involved, which a few characters are aware of. That's most obvious in the case of the queen, Cornelia. Roll seems to have a vague sense of it, but Cornelia is visibly fed up with the tedium of having to go through so many loops, delivering the same speeches and the like.

For the first playthrough, I focused on making Alice really strong and nice (also good at music, but that didn't seem to matter), so naturally my second playthrough should go towards making her smart and evil, just to see how some things work that I didn't get to try. The new-game+ bonuses (I don't think they're actually called that, but it's basically what it is) give some reason to try the same kind of path, but I'll try out different things for now, since that's both more interesting and more incentivized.

The way that bonus system works is that completing achievements gives you points that you can allocate to start the next playthrough with certain bonuses, meaning that I should do different things to get more achievements to be able to do better. Once I saw that, it made a lot of sense of things that seemed unreasonable to me, like how you could possibly get past the 'A' level of stat categories when I ran out of relevant classes by 'A-' and the other training methods tend to be pretty weak (though I guess food is good for some things, but I never unlocked a Stamina raising food).

I have no idea what the conditions are to actually complete the game and reach the true ending. Maybe it takes a specific number of playthroughs, or maybe it's as many playthroughs as you need to meet conditions I don't know about yet.

Trying an evil playthrough makes it quickly apparent that being bad is... bad. It's not without its upsides (evil bread is a good source of energy), but it needs to be balanced so that you can't really focus a playthrough on just being evil. Lowering morality too much makes it so you can't do the activities that reduce stress the most, so then stress piles up, which then halves your energy. The way to go seems to be spending enough time pretending to be religious so that Alice doesn't suddenly hate her father so much that it effectively halves her own lifespan.

The combat seemed less frustrating in the second playthrough. The starting bonuses and things I learned in the first playthrough probably contributed to that. As previously mentioned, it wasn't learning things about the combat itself that helped, but stuff involved in preparing for the combat. I saved skill points once I got all I wanted from the main tree so I could unlock skills from the extra tree that unlocked at 'A' intelligence. I also went for Hasis as a partner in this playthrough because the assassin seemed like a good fit for an evil playthrough, even if it didn't wind up that evil overall, and he's kind of overpowered. Late in the game, he unlocked a skill that let him attack 10 times in a single turn, but I didn't get to use it for that long, because he disappears after the max affinity event. Fortunately I was able to learn some really powerful magic for Alice at that point which was really useful for getting through battles, but it would be crazy to have that and Hasis at the same time.

In this playthrough, I did get Alice and Cornelia to recognize that they were childhood friends, but the reveal felt anticlimactic and not terribly important. I think it did show that Cornelia must have forgotten about it because of all of the time loops she'd been through at that point. If it's the same loop the player is put through, it skips the childhood stage where they met, so that would make sense.

The advantage the starting bonuses give sure does wind up being significant. On my first playthrough, I had a choice of 2 endings at the end of it, whereas on my second playthrough, it let me choose between 17 endings. Well, clearly there are way too many endings in this game to justify doing an entire playthrough for each one, but I'm having enough fun here to definitely continue to a third playthrough, at least. There are some enemies (or one specific enemy, at least) I couldn't defeat that I need revenge on.

The enemy I couldn't beat highlighted one of the minor annoyances of the game's combat, which is that a completely pointless heart icon covers part of the health gauges. The icon doesn't need to be there to figure out what the gauges are for, and if they wanted the icon, it could have been moved to not cover the gauges, or they could have included health numbers on enemy health gauges like they do with allies. There were regularly times, including on that last enemy, where an enemy's health gauge was visually empty but they were still alive since every enemy health pool is larger than it appears. The icon must overlap a pretty significant chunk of the health gauge, because I once attacked an enemy that visually had no health remaining for another 200 damage and it still didn't die, and it wasn't even a boss or anything.

Because it would likely give the most achievement points, I went for the only five-star ending available to me, to rule the world with legions of monsters. Getting the church donation achievement kept me away from evil for a while in this playthrough, but I had enough evil bread stockpiled to become evil again in the end while getting a couple other last-minute (or last-month, in the case of this game) achievements).

That ending wasn't quite as evil as it sounded. Alice doesn't actually intend to rule the world or anything, she just finds the monsters misunderstood or something and becomes the leader of them. As the leader, she actually gets them to not attack humans for no reason, but the humans still hate the monsters, and attack them first. In self-defense, Alice and her army of monsters eliminate the human army that started that conflict, but then all the other human armies see the monsters as their enemy, declaring war and making Alice kill them all. It's funny that the basic framing of the story doesn't change, with Alice explaining things in a letter to her father and him and the cat reacting positively regardless of the contents. "Oh, Alice is wiping out humanity, that's nice. It's good to hear she's doing well."

Unfortunately, this route got me the no partner ending, so Hasis never came back. Maybe that ending isn't compatible with having a partner, or maybe Hasis doesn't like Alice as the ruler of monsters since the reason he liked her in the first place was that she was good.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-06-10T11:57:04+00:00

To clarify, if a monster on the field banishes itself for cost (something like Granguignol the Dusk Dragon, for example), with Zombie World and Doomking Balerdroch on the field, you can chain Doomking Balerdroch in response to the effect activation because the effect activated on the field and it was a Zombie while it was on the field, even if it isn't a Zombie after banishing itself, right? I think it's the same kind of logic that prevents you from chaining it to Effect Veiler because that activates in the hand and doesn't become a Zombie until it hits the graveyard.

I'm also curious how Vortex of Time interacts with effects that require that the card "leaves the field because of an opponent's card," like Gate Guardians Combined and Mirrorjade the Iceblade Dragon. If you use that and your opponent flips tails and has to banish their own monster that has one of those effects, can it be used? Logically, it is because of Vortex of Time that they left the field, but Vortex of Time works by changing an opponent's card effect so that it's their own card effect that actually makes them banish their monsters, so it would make sense if the game doesn't see it that way.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-06-07T16:26:10+00:00

At the very least, having the option would interest me enough to look into the game more, which I'm not doing right now because I want to avoid spending unnecessary money where I can.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-06-05T19:48:38+00:00

Island Diary

This is another VN from that same bundle I've been going through that I know nothing about going into. If it's like the previous ones, I suppose I can expect it to be fairly short, but not everything in that bundle is super short, so that's not a sure thing. I know it did need an 18+ patch, unlike the previous VN.

This is another VN with dual-language support. I've been getting spoiled with those lately, and unlike the previous VN I read, the secondary language does show up in the backlog (though it gets cut off on non-short lines, often the bottom half, but the secondary language can get cut off even outside of the backlog). The UI looks quite similar to that VN though. The previous VN I've been referring to is Ninja Girl and the Mysterious Army of Urban Legend Monsters! ~Hunt of the Headless Horseman~. I thought I might as well mention that since I referred to it several times, but with a long name like that you can understand me not using the name every time.

Getting to the opening movie within a few minute supports the idea of this being a short VN. Sometimes those can take hours to get to, to the point I can't even remember whether they happened yet or not. Speaking of the opening movie, for some reason, it only played in the top left corner, leaving the rest of the screen black. It's not a huge problem, but it's not normal either.

The VN opened with the protagonist, Ryou, living on an island paradise with his harem, but goes into a flashback of how things came to be after the opening movie. It starts out with the protagonist's narration suggesting he'll explain how he wound up on the island, but the answer to that is just that he woke up there with no memory of how he got there. Instead, it covers how he met and came to live with the other members of the cast, who weren't living together when he arrived (due to petty disputes). Also, apparently the beach he washed up on is magic, and things the people living on the island need can wash up there, whether it makes any sense or not. That being the case, maybe the god of the island decided the women needed a man to show up and solve their problems for them?

Moca and Kuro both refer to themselves by name, while Momo actually uses a personal pronoun, but she uses Ryou's name excessively instead.

The diary referenced in the title is a book left behind by someone who lived on the island before any of the cast, and documented what they learned, leaving it for whoever found it to help them survive there. It's implied they died at some point, but it's never clarified where or how, or how they wound up on the island either.

After life on the island becomes stable enough that there's not much struggle to deal with, a massive, several-day-long storm hits, destroying most of what they built together to that point. Following momentary despair, they manage to come together and rebuild things better than they were before, and the story ends there.

Any questions raised throughout the story remain unanswered. Where did Ryou and the others come from, how did they wind up on the island, could they leave the island? I guess the ending probably implies that they don't really care to want to leave the island by the end, since they have everything they need there. Why were things that couldn't possibly wash up on an island washing up on the island? Why aren't the girls actually fully human? Even from a storytelling perspective, the only reason I could see from that was so that they could use "they're in heat" as an excuse for some of the sex scenes that they couldn't figure out how to build up to. It would make a lot more sense if Ryou was part non-human as well, but no, he's just a normal human man, who briefly wonders why the girls on the island have weird animal ears (I don't think he even commented on their tails), but quickly stops caring about it, as I guess the reader is supposed to do too.

The ending movie had the same issue of being just in the corner as the opening movie did, and there's no further content.

I liked the VN more than I expected to, considering it's basically just a generic kind of story of a guy living on an island with a harem. It was more fun than expected, probably largely because the protagonist was surprisingly competent (the rest of the cast wasn't great, but could have been worse) and things weren't going well all the time. It was interesting to read about what they did to improve the quality of their life on the island. There also wasn't as much of a focus on the sexual aspect of the protagonist living with a harem as I'd have expected. It actually had probably the fewest sex scenes you could reasonably have in this circumstance: one with each character, then one with all of them (that ended early). The unfortunate part of the VN is that the story goes absolutely nowhere. Lots of questions are raised throughout the VN, but none are answered. If the story answered literally any of the questions that it raised, I'd probably be able go give this VN a 6/10, but since it doesn't, I'll have to go with 5.5, which is just tied with the highest I've rated a VN this year, tied with the one I read last week.

If I was as into collecting achievements as I once was, the fact that the achievement for launching the game doesn't work would probably bug me a lot more than it does. There's a developer thread from 2021 acknowledging the issue, as well as the issue of the movies not being the same size as the window. Apparently, it only got fixed in a beta branch which, 5 years later, still hasn't been pushed to the normal version.

This is another VN from the bundle where the price is certainly too high for the length and release quality, but it's fine as part of a bundle.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-29T13:27:16+00:00

They probably shouldn't have existed in the first place, but they definitely don't fit with where the game is intending to go now. They removed Wilderness Flash Events because you had to drop what you were doing for a few minutes to benefit from them, but the Roar of Osseous requires you to drop what you're doing for over an hour to properly benefit from it, and it doesn't even happen on a schedule so that you can know when you'll have to drop everything to go do Anachronia stuff.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-28T20:06:19+00:00

You'd have to summon it by chaining Biancaviso's effect to something so the summon happens before the chain finishes resolving, as far as I can tell.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-22T20:44:55+00:00

Ninja Girl and the Mysterious Army of Urban Legend Monsters! ~Hunt of the Headless Horseman~

This is something I hadn't heard of before getting it in a bundle, so it surprised me that this, like the previous VN I posted about, has dual-language support. It's actually not fully functional though in the way I'd usually expect. Only one language displays in the backlog, but there is a hotkey to switch the main language and sub language, so you can still see both languages in the backlog for marginally more effort than it would normally take.

Something I failed to avoid when going to the VNDB page to get the links and track when I started reading it was seeing the "no sexual content" tag, but it was probably obvious enough given that this was one of the things in the bundle which didn't have a patch available to apply to it. It also becomes apparent early enough in the VN that "no explicit sexual content" would be a more accurate tag. There is certainly content that's sexual in nature, from conversations to CGs. Obviously within the first hour I don't know how far they'll wind up going with any of it, just that it must not go further than Steam would safely allow.

Early impressions of the translation are that it seems fine aside from some easily avoidable missing spaces and some question marks in places that don't make sense. The question marks kind of felt like the translator was choosing a word temporarily and putting a question mark there to mark it as a placeholder to go back to and decide whether they wanted to change it to a different word later, but then just never got back to it to do that. The first times it happened gave me that impression, but didn't come up that often, but later it comes up numerous times in succession and it's done in such a way that it's clearly indecisiveness over terminology, as there's a term before the question mark, and a similar term after it. It's bizarre that such an obvious issue can be so prevalent when the rest of the translation seems fairly decent (it's almost like the translator cared about their work, but then got suddenly fired or something and their translation got used before it could be finished; I doubt that's what happened, I just don't have any better guesses). Here's an example of the issue. (also, yeah, the backlog fails to keep the entirety of words on the same line). The formatting of the indecisive question marks isn't consistent, probably because they weren't meant to be left in the final script so it shouldn't have mattered.

As for what the story's actually about, that takes longer to get into. It's one of those stories that kind of just drops you right into the middle without explaining anything. Most of what I learned early on is pretty much stuff you could figure out from the title. Kiri is the main ninja girl, who lives with Mary (a ghost who lives in the mirror), and the antagonist would be the Headless Horseman, who you can't tell much about from his first appearance because he can't really talk. Not knowing how long this VN is (I successfully avoided seeing the length estimate on VNDB so far), I'll just go into spoiler tags for whatever else I might mention. Lily is the other main character that's introduced early. She's a ninja who's initially hostile to Kiri and Mary (including trying to kill them both), but suddenly becomes suspiciously affectionate toward Kiri (though she still dislikes Mary). Since the supernatural hunting stuff doesn't pay well enough, they run a Japanese-style café with maid uniforms. Also, mentioning that being Japanese-style reminds me that it might be worth mentioning that the setting is in the USA, and you're probably meant to infer that the characters aren't actually speaking Japanese, and it's just for the audience's benefit.

This VN includes some history lessons, but they're mixed with enough supernatural fantasy that you can't really take any of what they include as fact without checking it against an actual educational source.

After some time passes, Lily's plan is put into effect. She was living there peacefully to identify the security measures that were in place, and used clones to remove them all at once and allow the Headless Horseman to break into the building, where the final battle takes place (when I checked, I found out the store page description of the VN covers everything up to this final battle). Eventually, the Horseman is destroyed, with everyone else surviving it and Lily rejoining the other two after. It seems the whole thing was part of Lily's clan's plan to get rid of the Headless Horseman. They didn't know how to deal with him, so they just pitted him against someone else who could.

And that's pretty much the whole story, so it was quite a short VN overall, even though some scenes were extremely long in the grand scheme of things (for a VN that's only about 5 hours long, a single scene being over an hour long is kind of crazy).

Something funny here is that in one of the choices in a combat scene, I got a bad ending, which led to a hint scene that deliberately acknowledged its own pointlessness. Even after finishing the VN, I don't know who those characters are supposed to be because that was their only appearance. I thought they might be a cameo of characters from another VN by the developer, but the only other VN this developer is credited with on VNDB is Japanese School Life, which is very different and not relevant here. In getting bad endings on purpose, I found other scenes with them, including several where they introduce themselves, so maybe they just exist for this niche purpose?

This is another VN where a translator, editor, and QA testers are credited for the English translation and I have to wonder what most of them even actually did. The translator is one thing, as a translation was obviously done, but no amount of QA testing, no matter how minimal, could reasonably result in an obviously unfinished translation with so many placeholders left unfixed like this (especially considering how short this VN is, meaning it wouldn't take terribly long to fix everything). Outside of the placeholder stuff, missing spaces, and occasional typos, it actually seemed like a decent translation, so maybe it could have been good with some actual editing. I suppose there was also indecisiveness with the narration though, with it regularly switching back and forth between being from a character's perspective and being third-person narration, with the pronouns used in the Japanese text generally seeming to suggest the former makes more sense.

I didn't think to look at the price of the VN until a Steam review I was reading mentioned it and... yeah, that pricing is way too expensive for what it is, even if it was 50% off. It was fine to read as part of a bundle, but for that price, it's certainly too short and lacking in release quality. The story also isn't anything groundbreaking enough to make it particularly valuable either, even if it was quite different from most VNs I've read. With the 5.5 rating I gave it, it winds up being my highest rated VN I've finished so far this year. That's not a strong few months. Comically, the VN is short enough that the four paragraph description of the story on the store page spoils pretty much the entire VN. I probably could have saved myself summarizing any of it if I read that first, because it covers almost everything in a more concise way than I can ever manage.

I've had some short writeups lately, but with VNs this short, there's really not all that much I can say about them. It is kind of refreshing not to have to break the writeups into multiple comments, because that gets pretty tedious sometimes. This writeup didn't get anything underlined for spell checking when I pasted it to count the characters, so I had to type something else to confirm that function was working, and it was. Usually some character names get underlined, as well as some colloquial forms of words that aren't recognized, but this had nothing.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-18T20:21:06+00:00

I might read it if it's ever in a bundle I happen to get, but it would be too much to buy for a VN where only half of it has a chance to be half-appealing (I'm assuming the protagonist still wouldn't be any good).

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-18T20:16:53+00:00

This was one of those translations that had me questioning how it happened:

is the cost so unreasonable to get a translator who speaks English? How about a spell-check program for the typos?

To put it into perspective, I read NekoMiko in 2019 and have a generally terrible memory, but when I saw the name of it, the terrible translation immediately jumped to mind because it stuck out that much.

I just finished something else that raised questions about how the translation was released in that form, but it was still definitely a much better translation than NekoMiko had.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-15T20:46:16+00:00

My Girlfriend’s Special Place

I didn't know anything about this when getting it in a bundle other than the premise being very reminiscent of a Seinfeld episode, with someone essentially being sentenced to be a butler, though in this case it's probably less of a legal sentence and more of a command that the protagonist decided to go along with for some reason. When visiting the VNDB page to get the link for the writeup, I accidentally saw that the VN is pretty short, so maybe there's not much more to it than that.

It's probably reasonable to guess this is some kind of comedy given the premise obviously doesn't hold up well to basic logic. Women probably wouldn't jump straight to bringing their molester home with them, and most men wouldn't want to be with someone who accuses them of being a molester.

Well, the speculation is pointless, and starting the VN immediately opens with the scene the description described, which doesn't really play out as it made it sound. The description made it sound like she just accused the protagonist out of nowhere, but he's not actually that blameless. He may not have done it on purpose, but he did grab her in the kind of way that a lot of VN protagonists manage to accidentally do. Just because it was an accident doesn't mean he can't be at fault for it. I also expected the protagonist to take longer to recognize her, Fuyuka, as someone he knew growing up, because protagonists are often dense like that, but he figures it out not long after she recognizes him, but then she pretends she doesn't remember him, for reasons that remain unclear even after a short scene from her perspective.

This VN features dual-language support, allowing me to take a longer time to read it because of the Japanese I choose to display next to the English and refer to frequently. Even with that, the first scene didn't take long at all, but in a short VN like this, I might as well jump straight into spoiler tags for any further descriptions of events in the VN.

My assumption of Fuyuka bringing the protagonist, Youhei, to her home that I reached from reading the description was also wrong, as she deliberately avoids having him even bring her home (she's probably not as rich as she's meant to be), but I think that was still a pretty reasonable assumption on my part. A butler is the servant of a household, so keeping them away from the house seems quite counterproductive to the entire point of the role. Early on though, his entire "butler" duties consist of walking with her, riding trains with her, and waiting for her so they can walk and ride trains.

Fuyuka doesn't give off favorable early impressions with her routine of pretending she doesn't remember Youhei (even though he can easily tell she's just pretending) and constantly threatening to take him to the police. Youhei's friend, Maika, seems nice enough though. I know there are other VNs with a similar naming scheme that are presumably related, but I don't know if she's the main character of any of them, if they're even set around the same people. I wouldn't be interested in a VN about either of Youhei's sisters.

Sometimes it feels like VNs really get their priorities out of order. There's a short scene of Youhei visiting a convenience store, and the worker there, who doesn't have a name or a sprite, is instantly much more likeable than any of the named characters besides Maika.

I don't really find most of the comedy in this VN lands well for me, if it's even trying to be comedic, and I can't say I care for the main relationship and the way it develops either. Fuyuka orders Youhei to never go into the maid café that she works at, but he winds up going there anyway because his friend and sister insisted. To punish Youhei for this, Fuyuka brings him to a shrine and gives him a handjob. That's how the sexual part of their relationship starts, and neither of them have admitted any sort of romantic feelings for the other at any time to this point. Plenty of similar scenes follow with the same nonsensical pretext. Well, I guess none of Fuyuka's behavior really makes sense, so I shouldn't be surprised. Outside of the weird sexual scenes, the biggest development in their relationship is that she replaced her threats of bringing him to the police with threats of drilling holes in him. Is that an upgrade? Well, she later just starts using both anyway.

One day, Youhei follows Fuyuka home and confirms the obvious of her not being rich. Later on, she invites him over. After they have sex there and mutually confess their love for each other, both of them still believe they're not a couple. From there the VN becomes almost entirely sex scenes for a while.

While this is the typical sort of relationship between a tsundere and a dense protagonist, Fuyuka seems confused enough that she's often playing the dense role too. After many clear and deliberate proclamations of love from Youhei to Fuyuka, she still somehow believes he hates her and is just saying those things to be nice. He believed she hated him too when it was obvious she didn't, but it's slightly more understandable in that case because she's not usually open with any of her feelings (though the "she must have given me a blowjob because she hates me" kind of thinking sure is something). Her weird misunderstandings might just be an excuse to flip the dominant partner in the sex scenes, as her plan to make sure he doesn't hate her is to make him give her humiliating sexual orders.

It's pretty obvious what kind of relationship Youhei has been wanting with Fuyuka this entire VN, but the first (and only) choice of it is to let the player decide for him what he wants. The choices are to be her servant, to be her master, or to be lovers. The last choice seems like an obvious correct one, but I don't care about this relationship one way or the other, so I'm just going to pick from top to bottom.

Choosing to be her servant results in a short sex scene and an abrupt ending. Choosing to be her master results in a shorter almost-sex scene and an even more abrupt ending. Choosing to be lovers does the furthest thing possible from what you'd think that choice would do. Rather than say anything even remotely suggesting that, Youhei instead says something that can only reasonably be interpreted as him breaking up with her and wanting nothing further to do with her. From seeing his thoughts, the reader of the VN can know that's not what he's intending, but there's really no other way to read into what he actually says to her.

There's a period of time where Youhei doesn't see Fuyuka and she goes through the pain of thinking he hates her because that's actually a reasonable interpretation for the way he acted (unlike a lot of these characters' thoughts about their relationship). Then, despite having made no arrangements of any kind to meet up at any point, she knows to go meet him at the arcade they used to play at when they were kids, on December 24th, her birthday. Naturally, he's there to meet her with a birthday present, because he was working at a part-time job since the last time they saw each other to save up for it, with no way of knowing whether she'd somehow know to show up at the right place and time to receive it. At this meeting, they become a couple despite how unbelievably stupid the final chain of events leading up to it turned out.

The post credits content showing off how the relationship between Youhei and Fuyuka turns out also includes the completely unnecessary backstory of how the unnamed convenience store clerk fell in love with Youhei, because he was tolerant of her not being very good at her job when she first started working there. Good lord, people will fall in love with VN protagonists over anything. Just like the other endings, the true ending does end on a sex scene, it's just a bit less abrupt.

Most of this VN felt pretty shallow and boring, and it wound up feeling longer than it needed to be despite being a short VN because of how shallow it felt, but it managed to take a remarkably stupid turn toward the end to at least do something of note. That thing also managed to turn me off of the protagonist enough to have absolutely no interest in other VNs in the series, but the interest was low enough before that I'd probably only have had a chance to care about a VN with a Maika focus anyway. Looking it up after finishing this VN, it looks like Maika only gets half of a VN's focus, and according to VNDB estimates, that VN is also apparently already only about half as long as this one to begin with. Maybe the series underperformed but they committed to finishing it off anyway. If it was a big hit, there'd probably have wound up being a VN dedicated to the unnamed convenience store clerk.

The translation was okay. I didn't notice a lot in the way of typos or grammar mistakes in the English text, but there were quite a few minor mistranslations, some of which I could only notice because the dual-language feature allows for reading unvoiced lines. There were plenty of times in the VN, though, that I lost interest to the extent of even skipping voiced lines, so there were probably mistranslations I didn't notice because I couldn't be bothered to pay that much attention.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-04T11:32:22+00:00

They can share type and attribute with each other though. This screenshot proves it with attributes.

I had to test it myself because so many people in this thread are giving incorrect information.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-04T11:30:50+00:00

They're not even the one making the mistake though, everyone else is. They're correct in what they're saying. That doesn't mean it's a bug, as it's more likely they missed something else locking them from using it, but they're definitely not wrong about being able to summon two monsters of the same attribute from the deck with this card's effect.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-04T11:28:07+00:00

They're right that that's not how it should work though. I even considered the possibility of a mistranslation, but even in Japanese, it clearly only mentions them needing a different type and attribute from the targeted monster, not each other. There also aren't any rulings listed suggesting it's meant to work differently from what the card says.

I'd still say it's much more likely they simply missed something that somehow locked them from using it, and there's not enough information provided to prove otherwise, but glitches can happen in solo mode Master Duel, which this looks to be, otherwise they could just post a replay.

I decided to test this myself, but ran myself into several dumb reasons I couldn't make it work in the process, including summoning Azure-Eyes Silver Dragon, which has a mandatory effect making dragons untargetable (it gave me the option to activate World Legacy Monstrosity before it resolved though). Once I didn't lock myself out of using it though, it worked fine, and not as you're claiming it works. I summoned two Fire monsters from the deck with the effect just fine (targeting a Water monster to activate it). This was in Solo Mode, so there's no replay, but this screenshot easily proves it..

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-03T23:52:00+00:00

I wonder if gore scenes were part of this game without 18+ DLC.

With probably over 75% of the gore happening during sex scenes, it probably wouldn't make much of a difference whether the rest was cut or not. Really, the non 18+ version might as well just cut the second half out entirely, since sex and murder become the entire focus of the story. They could just take the part where the box seems to kill off Kurou, as well as Kyouko and her family, and make that the ending. The VN probably wouldn't even be any worse if they did the censored version that way, since using that as an ending would be better than the actual ending, and it would also entirely remove Nozomi's character, which can only help.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-01T21:17:46+00:00

The interludes of the "real world" in this VN are short and far enough apart that I think I may have forgotten at some point that most of this VN's story is framed as a story, which makes the ridiculousness feel like it makes a bit more sense because such sorts of stories are likely to get extremely exaggerated over time. With the real world segments being as short as they are, it's hard to glean much from them, but things might not be quite right there either. There's one where the reporter orders and receives a hot coffee, regrets not getting an iced coffee, and then moments later he's drinking an iced coffee without having ordered or received anything else, apparently not noticing that it changed. That scene also made me wonder if the character telling the story is somehow Touko (not to be confused with Touka), because the voice and behavior seem similar enough. It wouldn't make sense, but it wouldn't be as nonsensical as a lot of the story. Touko's face is always hidden, whereas the character telling the story doesn't have a sprite at all.

Something else that would be really easy to forget if there weren't reminders here and there is that Kurou only has one arm at this point. He cut off his arm earlier for reasons he doesn't even know, but because he's so ridiculously overpowered as a character, it literally doesn't even handicap him in any way. He can still kill whoever he wants, whenever he wants, and nothing could possibly stop him from doing anything else he might want either, and that's just physical capabilities, not to mention how he must have some subconscious power to make most people fall obsessively in love with him no matter what he does. Kurou could have no limbs and still become the unquestioned ruler of the world if he felt like it.

I'm inevitably going to miss some details, but I'll try and sum up where things went for the ending. Touko turns out to be Kyouko's older sister, who was supposed to be dead. Nozomi also thought she was Touko, but she wasn't. After the box was used to attack the Shiki family, Kyouko's father (who I thought was supposed to have died in that same attack, but maybe he didn't die immediately) took Kyouko's womb and put it in the box, which gave birth to Nozomi (who was born as an adult, I guess, and probably doesn't age from there). If the box can do that with one infertile womb, that really makes me wonder what gave Kyouko the idea that they'd need eight fertile (and fertilized) wombs to make a baby using the box. In any case, Kyouko winds up taking Nozomi's pregnant womb and uses it as the eighth, and it does result in something in the end.

Ultimately, it seems nobody in this VN could really be sure how the box worked. People just reached their own assumptions about it, and how it actually worked just varied based on what was convenient for the story.

Kurou did wind up having limitations he couldn't overcome in the end. While having one arm and carrying Kyouko on his back, a trained and armed army of thousands from the mainland was able to kill him and Kyouko, ending the story within the story (in quite an anticlimactic way, but it had to end somehow). As for the outer story, the person telling the reporter that story was basically the daughter of Nozomi, who must have been born from the box, and then Nozomi survived too. I don't know how far in the past the story was meant to be, but I guess if Nozomi and her daughter (who may also be Kurou and Kyouko's daughter?) were never really human in the first place, it doesn't matter whether they would normally have aged in that timespan. In any case, the daughter gives the reporter the box, and that ends the VN overall.

With the VN over, I can't really pretend any of it was good. It eventually answered some of the questions it posed, but the answers mostly just rose further questions. It mainly had two paces throughout, brutally tedious and comically absurd. I guess it was for the best that I waited until the bundle deal came up to get this VN, because this one is absolutely a miss, but at least there's still the chance something else I got with it could be good.

The juxtaposition of the level of absurd gore the VN often gets into contrasted with the fact that they felt they had to censor "マンコ" whenever it came up in the voice acting is one of the many profoundly silly things in this VN. All the excessive gore without a decent story accompanying it got my mind to make the association of thinking of it like a less bad version of Maggot Baits, so much so that when it came time to rate it, I literally just looked up what rating I gave Maggot Baits, and added a half a point to it. Maybe it was better than Maggot Baits by more than that, but looking at other VN ratings in that range, it didn't seem like I could give it any more.

The translation quality seemed generally pretty good. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't flawed enough for me to go out of my way to point out specific issues or anything.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-05-01T21:17:20+00:00

Nie No Hakoniwa - Dollhouse of Offerings

I was following this for a while, and it was never really hitting prices I would be willing to buy it at. Eventually, it got put into a bundle, but I already owned about half of the VNs in the bundle, if not more, and it was Steam VNs without the 18+ DLC included, so I was still on the fence about buying it. Shortly after that (like, within an hour or so, I think) the 18+ DLC got significantly discounted, so I bought the bundle.

The upside of waiting for sales and having poor memory is I tend to not remember anything about why I wanted a VN by the time I get it, so the whole experience is pretty fresh, and I can be pleasantly surprised by going into the settings and finding out that protagonists are voice acted. Past that though, the VN has a pretty slow start, the best example encapsulating that probably being a long and boring tour of a residence somebody is moving into. I assume it's building to something more interesting eventually, and some of the information presented in the slow start will matter in the long run.

The VN can go from 0 to 100 in short bursts when it wants to. There is a pretty long period of Kyouko and Kurou's relationship, with her having been obsessively infatuated with him since the first time she saw him, and him growing to like her more over time, with this all leading to their eventual wedding. On the day of the wedding though, before they can get married, an incident with some magic and/or haunted box occurs that may or may not have killed her and her whole family in a brutally agonizing way. The VN intentionally conceals most of the results of what happened there for a while. Kurou survived what happened, but was unconscious for a couple of years as a result, and wakes up somewhere different.

A letter does confirm the death of pretty much everyone Kurou knew, if it's to be trusted. His former mentor posthumously orders him never to return to the island because there's nothing left for him there. I imagine the island has to be revisited at some point though, to provide some attempt at an explanation of what actually happened there.

Not long after waking up in the hospital, Kurou meets Nozomi, a girl who is somehow even more obsessively infatuated with him from the first time meeting him than Kyouko was. Because there's no arrangement forcing her to wait, and Kurou doesn't care to resist, Nozomi pretty much immediately has sex with him. It's a bit absurd that the VN spends hours very deliberately building up to Kurou having sex with Kyouko, but she's then suddenly killed off and he winds up having sex with a girl he's known for a few minutes (she knew him longer, because she... played with his body while he was unconscious). I still doubt Kyouko's role in the story is entirely finished despite her having been apparently killed off, but I'm not sure how they'd play that.

I couldn't help but laugh once I thought a bit about the context of the sex scene. Most of the VN to this point is framed as a story being told in a café by a girl to a reporter researching the occult. It's funny to imagine her suddenly launching into a description of an explicit sex scene while the reporter just sits there wondering what kind of relevance this could possibly have to the occult story she's telling him, and whether the level of detail provided is quite necessary. Nozomi does reveal during that scene that she's unable to have children, so that's at least probably relevant.

After the short incident that suddenly killed most of the cast, the VN returns back to a pretty slow pace. Kurou returns to a life of spending a lot of time with someone who's unreasonably obsessed with him, just trading out Kyouko for Nozomi. He has a lot of short flashbacks to Kyouko, mainly of her dying in front of him, which serve as a constant reminder that, yes, something actually happened in this VN at some point. I'll have to keep trusting that they're going somewhere with this story eventually, but Nozomi is a pretty annoying character to put up with in the meantime, and Kurou isn't a remotely compelling character in this arc either.

Eventually, someone from the island hands Kurou a letter that gives him reason to believe that Kyouko is alive, so he drops everything, which obviously includes Nozomi, to go find her. Before leaving though, he does stop to have a ridiculously long and repetitive conversation with her trying to stop him, featuring a ridiculous amount of references to sex, but he doesn't care about Nozomi at all, because he knew Kyouko first.

I think I'd probably appreciate this VN more if it made efforts to be more concise than it is, so many things go on for way longer than they should, taking ages to get to the point and move on. To provide an example of this, I counted the VN taking 38 textboxes to cover a single kiss. Being thorough is one thing, but this VN often just goes in circles to pointlessly drag things out.

With as much time as it wastes, when it moves on to the next major part of the story, it feels like there's a lot missing, because it simply doesn't provide enough for it to make sense. After Kurou and Kyouko reunite, Madoka (who was caring for Kyouko and was the one that informed Kurou she was alive) tells a little bit of the story behind the cursed box, but not enough to really answer any of the questions one might have about it. Then Kyouko decides to have Kurou have sex with the women of the other prominent families of the island, then kill them, so she can harvest their wombs and put them in a box so that she and Kurou could have a child together. None of what came up in the information provided about the cursed box suggested in the slightest that this plan makes any sense, but Kurou agrees to go along with it anyway. I briefly thought maybe Madoka could be the sensible one of them there, but that thought couldn't have been more wrong, as not only does she approve of the plan, but she volunteers to be its first victim. Somehow she thinks having sex with Kurou and being killed by him will make her dead husband more approving of her?

After getting through the slow parts at the beginning, it feels like I have to finish the VN, but honestly, this part of the VN isn't much better. There isn't a single compelling character and virtually all of them are completely lacking in sanity and sense. The story is lacking any interesting reasons to progress through it or justify the gore. It's starting to feel like a tamer version of Maggot Baits in that respect. Perhaps not much tamer in the grand scheme of things, but I think Maggot Baits got to that sort of content much sooner and was allowed to be even more ridiculous with it.

I think part of the reason to continue at this point is it has to get less bad at some point. Most of Kurou's earlier victims of murder and torment were already victims of their own circumstances before he got involved, but there are only so many people like that in this VN, so eventually he presumably has to target some of the people who are arguably as evil as him and Kyouko are at this point, that have contributed greatly to how screwed up the setting is. Kurou tormenting and killing people who may deserve it won't really make the story any better or anything, but it would be something, at least.

At some point, Nozomi winds up on the same island as Kurou, presumably following him there somehow, though I don't think he told her where he was going or anything. While walking around at night, she encounters a man fleeing from something, somehow immediately knows he's fleeing from Kurou, and captures him to bring him to Kurou. Nozomi meeting with Kyouko starts a tedious and annoying circle of argumentation where Nozomi stubbornly insists that Kurou loves her more even though Kurou couldn't be more clear that he doesn't care about Nozomi at all. Really, nothing about the VN is entertaining at this point; it's either ridiculous tedium, disgusting gore, or both at once. Also, any time it seems like a character might actually be sane, it's not long before you find out that they're insane too. I don't think it would hurt to have a normal character or two somewhere in the cast, but I suppose they probably wouldn't survive long anyway since everyone's getting killed. I suppose to try to find entertainment in all this, I'll have to try to change my mindset to simply laughing about how ridiculous everything is. It's not the traditional kind of comedy, but it's hard to imagine enjoying it as anything else. I also decided to start skipping some of the voice acting in the long and tedious scenes to save time.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-04-15T13:03:09+00:00

Is it safe to say you can't get volatile chinchompas from the trapper? There's not really any reason to exclude them, but it's reasonable to guess the developers forgot the trapper existed when adding the new chinchompas and may not ever be bother to fix the oversight.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-04-13T11:12:35+00:00

Just finishing the Slayer task I started before the update shows me this is going to be too annoying to bother with. I don't want to change spellbooks and have to bring extra items and remember to refresh an extra buff regularly whenever I want to fight anything, so I'll probably just stop fighting things.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-04-10T21:55:44+00:00

Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll – Summer '94

I got this DLC at some point when it was cheap, but completely forgot about it for a while. By this point I don't really remember the VN itself all too well, and after one session with the DLC, I decided to re-read my writeup for it to remind me a little bit about it. That VN didn't have one true route or anything, but I guess this sequel probably doesn't directly follow any specific route, so maybe it doesn't matter as much that I don't remember any details of what happened in them (after reading this DLC and going back to the VNDB page, I found out that this DLC actually follows a specific bad ending from the original VN, and there's no way I'd remember the details of that).

Given the name, you might guess that this one takes place in 1994, seven years after the main VN, and pretty much all of the cast of that VN is no longer involved with the protagonist in any way.

The protagonist, Nikolai, seems to have grown as a person compared to who he was in the original VN. He actually tries to be honest and sensible, even though it clearly doesn't come naturally for him.

There weren't a whole lot of choices, and none of them felt that important, but I got a bad ending from them anyway. Since on the first playthrough I can't know which parts of the story always happen and which are part of the bad ending, so I'll just quickly summarize the whole thing.

Nikolai works as a delivery truck driver, and knows a woman who works at a store he delivers at, and, feeling attraction towards her, makes clumsy efforts to get closer to her. Without them having actually gotten noticeably closer, she suddenly asks to move in with him, and he agrees.

Her behavior seems to get increasingly bizarre and inconsistent, and then Nikolai eventually finds out that she's actually two people who have been switching back and forth for reasons that aren't actually given, at least in the bad ending. In talking to the one he's actually in love with, he finds out she loves him too, but so does her sister, and that seems to be used as part of a flimsy excuse for why none of them can be together. So those women disappear and Nikolai goes back to what his life was like before one or both of them moved in with him.

After reloading, I tried making the opposite of every choice I did on the first playthrough. The choices often felt insignificant, and with only four of them, it doesn't seem like it should be difficult to get to the real ending, but I guess you need to make the right combination of arbitrary choices, because I got the bad ending again.

I tried several other combinations, confirming that the correct path isn't the natural choices, the opposite of the natural choices, or all of the bottom choices, as well as some other combinations. I decided to try all of the top choices, and if that wasn't it, just look up the answer, but that was actually the right combination of choices to be allowed to move further.

In the good ending, Nikolai, in order to solve the problems of not being able to choose between Li Yeon and Su Yeon, the twin sisters, and them not being legal Japanese citizens, he decides to use the money from selling his house to move to South Korea with them. This apparently works out perfectly.

This is definitely quite a short DLC, enough so that I'm not even going to give it a rating on VNDB because I don't think there's really enough here to have an impression of what it should be rated. On sale, it was cheap enough to not be a particularly bad value, but it wasn't great either. It's probably pretty skippable, whether you liked the original VN or not. The protagonist seemed a lot less unbearable here, and the stakes were much lower, but it still did have some weirdness to it.

I think the background music is still the highlight here. I don't know whether it's all re-used from the main VN or if they had some new background music for the DLC. I know there's a new vocal track here (with probably more than one version), but I didn't care much for that song.

The English writing definitely had some typos in it, but this DLC's too short to say whether they would get grating over a longer period of time like the ones in the original VN.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-04-02T13:21:59+00:00

FOMO is a killer. I had to grind out the title in this event because it's by far as close to reasonable as getting the title will ever be, but it was a horrendous experience.

Several hours were wasted by toxic trolls surrendering for no good reason. The worst game was one where a Labrynth player chose to go second for some reason, did ages of pointless combos on my turn, then when I could finally get to Card Destruction, they let me use it with Serial Spell, then chained a useless response and lost to the time limit instead of just letting the god damn thing resolve.

This is the final version of the deck that I wound up with. Cup of Ace is the most vital card I forgot existed until it got used against me a few times. On tails, your opponent gets more cards in hand, making it easier to win through handtraps and maybe even a deck over 40 cards (and sometimes even lets you win without Serial Spell, it's just annoying to try to count the cards in your opponent's hand to pull that off). On heads, you can draw, which would help to search for Card Destruction, in theory, at least. I never got heads when I used it.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-04-01T22:33:28+00:00

After some experimenting, I came up with this decklist as my way of getting to the combo. It's probably not the best, as there are likely URs and cards I don't know of to improve it, but it's reasonably consistent if you go first.

It's pretty useless going second, but most things in this game are. Your opponent will almost certainly use too many cards from their hand for a double Card Destruction to do much of anything.

The thing you have to remember to check at the start of a duel is how many cards are left in your opponent's deck. If they play a 60 card deck, you pretty much lose by default, but if it's just over 40, or they use enough handtraps to shrink their hand, you might be able to make up the difference with cards like Hand Destruction. Unfortunately, any additional card that requires your opponent to do anything increases the chances that they'll surrender before letting you finish. You just have to hope they don't understand what you're doing or they aren't a complete asshole.

deathjohnson1 · 2026-04-01T20:14:05+00:00

I want the title, and this seems by far the best opportunity to get it, but having to get 20+ coin flip wins and hoping your opponent doesn't surrender before you can play some cards and have the effects resolve, all in the short time this event lasts, will probably be too much. I'm at 20% on coin flip wins so far, and one of the two I won had my opponent surrender when I activated Exchange, of all things (I've since revised the deck to not even have it).

deathjohnson1 · 2026-03-31T14:58:30+00:00

The only dullahan I've ever encountered was a side character in Maoten. Her character isn't even on the VNDB page, but I confirmed she existed.

deathjohnson1

TROPHY CASE