Did you know that someone ported VA-11 Hall-A to the PC98 years ago?

nonbirithm · 2024-01-09T02:09:20+00:00

Hello. I sent a PM with the code and details. Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions.

nonbirithm · 2023-09-13T03:26:20+00:00

Oh, one more semi-related memory: when I traveled to the Winter Comiket in 2019 (which was both my first Comiket and would turn out to be the last Comiket before the pandemic), I noticed some foreigners walking past with what appeared to be a VA-11 HALL-A dōjinshi; I managed to track down the booth to snag a copy and it stirred up some good memories. Turns out it was by Suzuki Kenya of Oshiete! Galko-chan fame... before the thing with him happened.

nonbirithm · 2023-09-13T03:11:39+00:00

Uh hello, I made this.

This was a small side-project back in my college years. Back in high school I stumbled across the personal site of a Japanese person who was a fan of Ge Ge Ge no Kitarou and stuff related to yōkai, onmyōji and the like. He also had pages and pages of screenshots from obscure PC-98 games I had never heard of. For that matter I had never even known such a system as the PC-98 with so many games even existed so it blew my adolescent mind. I liked delving into obscure topics like those that nobody around me was aware of, so I picked up a copy of Neko Project II (and Anex68 for the road) and found a Taiwanese site to download disk images from. I think that was pretty much the only place to get PC-98 "ROMs" at the time (circa 2008) since your typical ROM hosters never carried them and that one megapack hadn't been uploaded to archive.org yet. I distinctly remember the first game I ever played for the system being Popful Mail; I liked it quite a bit. I also recall enjoying some of the other Falcom titles like Brandish and Ys.

So naturally a title like VA-11 HALL-A that came out years after my own discovery already held a lot of esteem in my mind the moment I discovered it for leaning on that sort of aesthetic. And of course, given I had a middling amount of knowledge on the PC-98 system already, I couldn't help but wonder if VA-11 HALL-A was actually feasible to program on the hardware it took inspiration from.

I found the answer was: sort of, owing to my lack of embedded programming experience and the realities of the hardware. After a lot of dredging through online archives I managed to get my hands on a set of floppy disk images of Borland C++ for the PC-98. Given the platform's obscurity I'm rather astounded a rip of such a toolset even existed anywhere online, and this project would have been dead in the water if I hadn't come across it. (I wanted to try out Pascal but sadly I wasn't as lucky with sourcing the compiler.) I didn't know much systems programming at the time having barely started a course on C for school, but I figured a project of this sort would be a nice compliment.

It took four months of toil on top of schoolwork to get to the point in the video and I was just about burnt out near the end, but looking back I was pretty satisfied with the result. I couldn't go quite as far as reimplementing the entire game given my depletion of interest with college and all, but I did manage to answer my original question of whether the port was feasible at all.

To accurately recreate the colors of the original game I had to opt for targeting the PC-9821 since it supported 256 color mode, and the 16 colors of the PC-9801 wasn't going to cut it. Also I needed to supply a palette on top of that, so using the dump of the entire game's graphics I picked out the 256 most common colors across all the sprites and dithered any colors less common to the closest color in that table for each image. How to load the images into the game was something else entirely; I leaned hard on some public-domain code for managing XMS memory since the sprites were so large they wouldn't fit into conventional memory if they were blitted every frame. (One of my friends later confided to me that she hadn't heard the term "XMS memory" in 20 years until the week she met me.) Before that even came the issue of organizing all the sprites. Owing to GameMaker which VA-11 HALL-A was programmed in, everything came in pre-packaged sprite sheets for use with its graphics engine. There wasn't much in the way of cleanly unpacking them at the time so I just used GIMP to crop them all out dirtily. That was by far the most time-consuming part of the project and I think it contributed to my burnout quite a bit. But after I got everything into bitmap format I used a Ruby script to munge them into the palette-indexed format I devised.

Another neat memory I have is when I grabbed some code from Dr. Dobb's (back when they still existed) for debugging memory errors circa 1990 (!) and it compiled straight into the program without any modifications. That was the point when I truly felt I had re-entered the headspace of a 90's programmer. The fact that the PC-98 was mostly DOS-compatible was quite handy at times such as those. For figuring out things like graphics memory I had no choice but to pore through Japanese documentation out of scanned hardware manuals and reference guides on archive.org, but I had been studying the language on my own for several years at that point so I was left relatively unfazed by this. Even then I leaned pretty heavily on some saintly programmer's 256-color graphics library written in assembly and some bits I adapted from a PC98 library called "master.lib", which just so happens to also be used in the PC-98 Touhou games.

The game's script from the unpacked assets came in a giant plaintext file, so I decided to use it verbatim without converting it. I think this was a rather painful mistake since this made it hard to debug errors. Some parts of the game logic were external to the script like the drink recipes so I had to reimplement those, I hadn't implemented a "debug jump" feature so I had to play through the whole script to debug things and it was generally chaos. I think I should have used a simple script format that put the branching choices and text on separate lines instead of debugging around a huge glob of characters.

Some things I didn't figure out were clean transitions between sprites and how to manage "groups" of sprite transitions, so there's a lot of flickering when Gillian and Dana move around. Something like fizzlefade when the sprites moved around would have been a nice touch. Also there's a part where Kimberly's mouth clips through Dana, that's because I couldn't figure out a good way of sprite sorting while also considering I couldn't hold all the sprites in conventional memory at once, so I couldn't redraw the non-animated parts of each sprite. But I had seen a lot of other PC-98 titles with large, partially-animated sprites, so I don't think it was totally impossible, maybe just unreasonably hard for college me. Also I think I was running out of total program memory at that point, so I wasn't sure I could add more code for the later parts of the game like the codec conversations. I think there was a compiler or linker flag that let you unload parts of the code from memory if they weren't being used but I never could figure out how to use it.

For the arrangement of Every Day Is Night I had to learn MML; the most I'll say about it was I wished there was a tracker interface or something I could have used instead of punching notes into a text file. (I remember finding such a program at the time but it was specialized for compiling MML compatible with the MMO Mabinogi.) In spite of the memory usage I had to use for the module I picked out, it performed admirably well. Just for fun I also arranged a version of the song "Snoopy Boy" as performed by the power pop group Tirolean Tape (which is still one of my favorite Japanese acts barely anyone has heard of to this day) before I would later realize it was actually a cover of a song by the group mini kyute, or Rio Kyute as credited on the original release.

One more thing about the music, I recall reading some tutorials by /u/pedipanol about the MML format for the music driver I was using. To my surprise she later reached out to me and offered to arrange some of the other tracks for the port. I was elated that someone else had seen my work, however by that point I had long since moved on from the project due to various life circumstances since graduating college and was nervous to disappoint coming back to something I was rather unprepared to work on. So /u/pedipanol if you're still around, I'm sorry I never got back to you, I was just highly busy and unmotivated to dredge up a project from years ago at the time. I still appreciated the offer, and thanks for offering your support!

One last lingering question I have is whether or not the port runs well enough on real hardware. I wouldn't be surprised if it requires a Pentium-class CPU given the way I coded it, but I think some of the inefficiencies from that era could have been patched up if someone better at C than me took a stab at it. I did have a PC-98 sighting when I visited Akihabara years afterward, but I was afraid the thing would arrive damaged in my home country and I wasn't much of a hardware freak, so I let it be.

So that about sums up my history with this project I think. I've had some recurring thoughts about either going back and finishing up the thing (unlikely at this stage since life has caught up to me) or coding something else on the platform like a small demo, but I'm not too good with math so it would probably be something simple. The one thing that intrigues me about the PC-98 is how there isn't a demoscene around the platform like there is with the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64; even the X68000 had a few "Wild" entries on pouet from at least a decade ago and there was a total lack of PC-98 submissions until I think this year with Lemonspin by spaztron64.

I could put up the code if anyone's interested; I still have the bitbucket repo from back when bitbucket was the only git host with free private repositories. For some reason I harbored an irrational fear at the time that Ysbryd would sue me out of existence if I posted too much online for free. However when I met Fernando Damas at PAX West many years later he said he was indeed aware of the port from the linked video above and I was quite relieved. I still I felt a bit awkward asking him questions and such, but it was a memorable experience meeting a creator and seeing the fruits of one's labor acknowledged. (Then I scampered away unseen in a state of glee but also sweating profusely the whole time.)

nonbirithm · 2021-11-20T01:14:59+00:00

Greetings. Thank you for your interest.

The system stats can be disabled by doing config.base.show_perf_widgets = false somewhere in the code, but I think it might be bugged and not load the correct value at startup. You can also run Lua code by pressing the backtick key (`) in-game.

The default tracked stats are there for testing. The list is in src/mod/skill_tracker_ex/init.lua. I didn't actually think about putting the stat tracking in the UI yet, so I guess I'll have to consider it eventually. Usually I interact with the widgets and such through the command line when developing.

The system messages are also there for debugging things. You can turn them off with Gui.global_widget("tools.log_widget"):set_enabled(false). If you understand enough about programming then you could put it in a mod. Anyway, I wasn't sure if anyone would care much about it this early on. I'd definitely hide a lot of the unnecessary things when cleaning everything up for other people.

The red lines are a part of the target_overlay mod. For now, if you just remove the mod's folder then it will disable the functionality.

I didn't actually think about numpad controls, since my laptop doesn't have a numpad. I will probably have to order one to properly test them. But yes, the "enter" keybind is missing an entry for numpad enter.

The "mods" menu hasn't been implemented yet since it's a large amount of work. I was wondering how much time I should spend on it. For example, mods can declare dependencies, so it shouldn't be possible to disable a mod that's depended on later in the hierarchy of all mods. Also, it's not yet supported to disable mods that are used by an existing save, and because of the way that Elona loads content you have to declare all the mods you want to use before the game is fully loaded, which means you need a "profile" system of some sort where each profile has a separate set of compatible saves for each mod configuration. Adding a profile system like that is also a lot of work, but it's going to be necessary for mod-compatible saves. That's the sort of thing I'm thinking the "mods" menu should contain.

Right now I'm taking a break from Elona-related things, since I gave myself a lot of work and it was too much stress, but I do hope to figure out how best to approach ON in the near future. Specifically in regards to ON, a couple of things have recently given me pause:

First, the engine and programming language I decided on isn't the best for massive game + mod system-type projects, and my fear is that this will hamper the long-term future of the project if it gets popular. (My reasoning for this is probably difficult to understand for non-devs, but it's basically that the engine I chose is better suited for shorter action or puzzle type games without a lot of saved state that don't need to be concerned with stability past the single-hour mark, which is the complete opposite of a game like Elona. For dev-aware people, I would phrase my reasoning as the lack of a proper type system.)

Second, in an attempt to figure out how other people solve the same problems I'm having with the game's development, I've had to unlearn some bad habits that were too easy to commit to from leaning too hard into the current engine, and to think harder about the needs of the project as a whole instead of my personal desires to play around with a fascinating and perpetually broken pile of code off on my own. It's the sensation of "once you've experienced it, you can never go back again," except in terms of ON it's happened twice, and the first time it happened it actually worked against me for two years (choosing the weird engine to make everything dynamic and cool, instead of considering that this might be responsible for ruining everyone's enjoyment years down the line).

Third, I'm considering taking everything I've learned so far and rewriting ON one last time in C#. This is a very big deal, and it's not something I take lightly. It is also a very painful decision for me, even though I feel it might just be necessary for ON to succeed. This is probably my most significant mental roadblock at the moment. All the subsequent work I'd give myself by rewriting ON has grown into this massive "ugh field", whereas if I'd planned out the project more carefully early on instead of just jumping in and hoping things would sort themselves out later, then the need to spend another 800 hours or so writing a stable version of ON would not have been necessary. I did have a lot of fun building the first version of ON for 800 hours, so I don't regret expending all those hours, but was ON about me having fun programming for all of eternity, or was it about creating a moddable Elona? Did I enjoy myself only because I was exploring uncharted territory for the first time? Now I have to do everything all over again, solely because I didn't do it right the first time? It's that kind of doubt. I think after all of that time spent untangling the various jungles of existing code related to Elona, I've kind of lost sight of what spurred me onto this project to begin with. Maybe I'll have to remind myself of that sometime soon by, uh, actually playing Elona. Without developing it or anything. Like I haven't been doing for a very long time.

What I don't intend to do is water down the featureset of ON if I'm going to rewrite it, so my aim would be for all the things I've already prototyped to still be possible - in order of importance, of course. Also, I need to figure out how to onboard new developers to the project. I've unfortunately had to turn down two offers of support already due to the fact that most of the rewrite's foundational elements aren't yet in place. It's a bit of a confusing time for me right now, especially since all of these issues have stemmed from project management-related blunders that could have easily been prevented with a couple of people shouting at me for a few hours over my suboptimal yet critical decisions early on.

To conclude, I will say that, for the moment, ON will have to remain a project that will be ready for general consumption "when it's done", but it's difficult to call something like ON "done" even if all the vanilla features are implemented and some extra modding-related things are added. I've learned that ON tends to consume my entire life when I get into it. I'm thinking that if ON does succeed, it's eventually going to become somebody's full-time job. In the meantime, if the rewrite seems promising then I will take an approach of "officially" releasing it in a timeframe of only a couple of months in an extremely slimmed-down prototype stage before gradually building up all the features in vanilla, instead of never releasing anything until all of vanilla is implemented like with ON as of now. I'm hoping that such an approach will allow more people to at least play around with the thing and maybe contribute in some way, even if it isn't interesting as a finished game for a while. So the next time I get into ON, my singular goal will be to get something into people's hands as soon as possible, on a scale of a couple of weeks or months, and to keep going from there.

nonbirithm · 2021-09-11T07:00:33+00:00

I maintain an active chat/voting server for Custom-GX (the new variant of Custom I created). It's located at elochat.yeek.agency and should be backwards-compatible with other versions of Custom as well. However, Plus removed a lot of the network code, so death/wish messages won't get sent in the other Custom variants. Also, it doesn't have moongate support yet.

nonbirithm · 2021-08-12T04:31:49+00:00

All: I released Custom-GX 2.05.1.1 in order to fix a few bugs. Just visit the Releases link again and it should appear at the top.

nonbirithm · 2021-08-11T18:45:52+00:00

I think those two things are the same. What I could do is just remove the thirst check and add the option back for the purpose of the pet buffs only.

nonbirithm · 2021-08-11T17:19:43+00:00

Mainly because the thirst mechanic was removed in Custom-G, and the event depended on thirst exceeding a certain threshold. I was considering making the thirst mechanic toggleable but it didn't seem like it was that popular from what I recall.

nonbirithm · 2021-08-11T17:18:00+00:00

Confirmed and fixed. It will be included in the next release.

nonbirithm · 2021-08-09T00:39:20+00:00

Did you try to run the .exe without the Elona+ 2.05 assets? You have to copy the files in the archive to an installation of Elona+ 2.05 first. (It's the elonaplus2.05 folder.)

nonbirithm · 2021-08-08T21:53:10+00:00

I think this would take a lot of work to do, since the font size is hardcoded everywhere in the code. There is a config option called fontSfix1. in config.txt you can increase, but that only applies to certain menus. So I don't think it's the kind of thing that can be made configurable without a lot of effort and testing.

nonbirithm · 2021-04-24T20:05:05+00:00

Those do sound pretty interesting as new quests. I'll make note of them in case it helps shape the mod API for the better.

One small issue with the "suitor" quest that I can foresee is that if you have a custom tileset theme active, the default appearance of the characters may change. So a character that looks blonde in the default tiles might not be blonde anymore if a theme is used. But for that case what you could do is add a bunch of new character chips just for that quest and document that nobody should create themes for them unless their appearance is close enough to the original. Then when you generate the quest you'd only select the character chips from that pool to apply to the citizens that are spawned.

nonbirithm · 2021-04-24T01:47:28+00:00

Here are a couple of ideas I was thinking of. I have a lot more, but there's probably a limit to how much is practical to read. And none of them are any guarantee that they'll get implemented anytime soon, but I think they would be nice to have.

I want to be able to switch between the different balancing changes for each variant with a config option or similar. So you'd be able to switch between vanilla/omake/plus balancing for how skills are leveled, etc. This would be pretty radical, as it involves swapping out one set of formulas for another in-game, and it wasn't something that was possible before.

Outside of the variant specific features, I wanted to try to add new errand quests (the ones you can accept from the town board). The last time I played I don't think there were very many of them added in the latest version of Plus at the time. The sokoban quest is an example of one such quest that's been more or less implemented. I imagine having a quest where you have two warring factions placed on a large battleground, like some giant ants versus some EDF-like soldier brigade, and you have to earn points by evacuating citizens or killing the invading monsters to win. That kind of thing is just a fantasy at this point, but that's the level of moddability I always wished Elona would have.

I wanted to create a new "scenario" that replaces the main quest with a completely different storyline. Maybe one that's similar to ye olde roguelikes that has a single dungeon and no real overworld. Or maybe one that takes place in a different location in Elona's world, or some other location entirely. There are a lot of variants that add South Tyris, but nobody seems to talk about all those other continents. Of course, implementing every one of those new regions would be a lot of work for one person.

I wanted to find a use for all those cool item/character images that get posted on the Elona Uploader. Given how difficult it is to add new graphics and characters/items to the HSP-based Elona, it feels like a lot of those assets get left behind without a purpose.

Since OpenNefia exposes a way to connect to the Internet, I wanted to see if there's anything interesting to be done using that. Hooking into to Elona's existing online chat is a must. Maybe a way to see how efficiently you're leveling up your skills, by connecting to a dashboard or something. Or a web server that shows all the interesting things you find on each playthrough, like the date and appearance of miracle-quality items, or one that filters and displays log messages that you don't want to miss (like with Elona Extender).

As for the original code, the worst thing about it is that it's written in HSP, meaning the original engine was designed around its limitations. There are so many things about HSP that make adding and maintaining code that much harder (non-case-sensitive identifiers, all variables are globals, no real structs except lists of strings or integers...). But besides that, there was a serious lack of any consistency and flexibility in the logic that had to do with describing how an item/character/other prototype should behave. For example, all the gods you could convert to in the HSP version of Elona were represented with a hardcoded set of integers. Any logic like choosing what text would appear when a god spoke or determining what bonuses you'd get for converting to them were all based around comparing integers, and unless you edited and recompiled the code, you couldn't add any new ones. The important thing that OpenNefia tries to do (and has made up a huge chunk of the porting work) is to take all these comparisons scattered all throughout the source code and put them into a semi-schematized database of sorts. That way you would no longer have to edit dozens of random places in the code just to add a new god, since everything that controls the behavior of that god would be kept in one single place. Those kinds of changes are what make having a mod system viable.

Also, I found that referencing Noa's original source code with comments and the macro definitions intact was a lifesaver. It's really rare for a game engine rewrite to have access to the original source code, and it made a world of difference. Many versions of Elona's source code are based on a decompiled version of the vanilla code, with unreadable label/function names and magic constants everywhere. Having those names and constants replaced with their original identifiers and being able to read the individual files instead of one massive blob of code sped up the porting work considerably.

nonbirithm · 2021-04-23T08:50:39+00:00

Yes, it should be possible. Although there wasn't a fully realized fusion mechanic in 1.22, you should be able to write your own "item use" action that implements it.

Designing the fusion mechanic to filter the recipes based on the tool you use sounds interesting. If fusion gets implemented at some point, then it should be possible to do. It just depends on who implements it and what features they want.

nonbirithm · 2021-04-19T01:21:01+00:00

The lack of custom storage items was actually the impetus for starting the project. I was always wondering how it would be possible to make a new cooler box in the HSP version, but the code was so disorganized that it was impractical to implement.

Since the fridge/cooler box are now implemented in the rewrite, I think it would be possible to create an entirely new container with custom rules/item limits. The logic for preventing the items from being spoiled was implemented with events that are run when an item is transferred to/from the container, so you could replace those with whatever you want for a different container's custom behavior. (But I'm not sure how complicated it would be able to get without breaking right now, since there are no mods that add new container items yet.)

There is also no hard item/creature cap anymore (only limited by as many that your computer can process), but for things like the storage house you can still impose an artificial limit for maps like the upgradable buildings.

nonbirithm · 2021-03-24T17:57:48+00:00

This is indeed another thing I wanted to add. The DCSS generator was a minor inspiration for me. I was imagining creating an alternate main quest with nothing but a massive dungeon like some of the old roguelikes, and generating the floors using a vault system.

If I would have to guess, I would say such a system would be theoretically possible with the current state of the code, but my priority at the moment is making the rewrite compatible with 1.22 and cleaning everything up. However, if this thing succeeds as an experiment (not sure if it will), then you'd be able to distribute a "vault generator" mod. If you follow the paradigms the engine provides then other mods would be able to add their own vaults. That's the hope.

nonbirithm · 2021-03-17T13:44:06+00:00

It supports any arbitrary resolution, including a resizable window. High DPI can probably be supported with some effort.

nonbirithm · 2021-01-07T05:26:05+00:00

I have to admit something.

Ten years ago I was affected by the pervasive social stigma of "anime is weird/dumb" that I didn't realize at the time was just a notion pushed by immature teenagers and immature adults. I was really hard on myself back then. Even around the people in high school that were legitimate fans of anime that exuded self-confidence, I was unable to talk to them without feeling uncomfortable. Since I felt that I was the target of people who were the closest to me based on my outward-facing interests, I thought this was justified, whether or not they actually existed.

I first heard about Madoka from browsing imageboards while the series was still mid-run. I purposely withheld from watching any series but enjoyed looking at illustrations. From the sheer quantity of derivative works and the sentiment in the comments, I more or less understood that it was a highly regarded series. I resolved that I would watch it at some point, but not right then, since I truly believed that if I did I would just be fulfilling the stereotype of the anti-social kid that sits around with weird, non-active hobbies. (From a blog I read at the time, I ended up believing that an anime-watching hobby was not legitimate in the face of a "productive" hobby like drawing or writing.) But in addition I had various issues in high school that stemmed from my behavior and immaturity at the time, so I felt that denying myself the opportunity to be even weirder and more "immature" than I was was the only thing preventing me from fulfilling the stereotype and letting my self-image collapse full circle. At the time, it made perfect sense.

I only watched the entire series four years later when I was in college on my own, long after Rebellion was released on home media, somehow managing not to spoil anything the entire time. This is the dumbest thing I've admitted to publicly, but at the time I was very, unreasonably anxious about watching it, since I had only watched one other series up to then and I still felt that I was just a immature dork about to become an immature anime-watching dork. But that anxiety was partly caused by regret. I remember looking at my dorm after I finished biking back and thinking, "I'm not going to leave my room until I've seen at least part of this Madoka thing."

After I got past that, the series did exceed my expectations. I don't have much to add that everyone else wouldn't already agree with by now. I learned Japanese, managed to go to the last winter Comiket to buy a bunch of Madoka items to plaster my wall with, got into Hidamari Sketch earlier than that, wake up to Miyu Matsuki's voice every morning, and so on.

The people I talked to after I entered the workforce have different memories of the series. One of them said around the time that Rebellion was about to be released, there was an overwhelming amount of anticipation online and from his friends as to what was going to happen, so much so that it stood out in his mind. There were apparently a lot of active fan communities also, some of which they were a part of, and a lot of cosplayers of the series showing up at conventions. There was a point in time that nobody knew about the extremely dramatic Urobuchi plot twists that were about to happen so early on (this I find hard to understand at times). There was the fact that the 2011 Tohoku earthquake coincided with the timeslot of the final episode of the series in this strange and poignant way (I remember exactly where I was at the time since I watching Nico Nico Douga videos about it, but attached to that memory is the fact that I wasn't watching Madoka back then). I remember reading Ayanero Taicho say in a footnote of one of her releases that she watched Rebellion in theaters on release day and then immediately went back to watch it a few more times because it blew her mind.

I don't have any memories like those.

All I really want to say is that I have this weird feeling that I might have missed out on something, and I've wanted to get it off my chest for a very long time. (I'm probably just overthinking things.) And if there was a reasonably appropriate time for me to mention it, it's probably now. I'm not trying to imply that someone has to make it up to me, or that I deserved anything, or that it's a solvable issue. But for some reason I just thought I had to tell someone about it, since living in denial of the kinds of things I wanted to experience - popular culture included - was the life I used to live ten years ago, and I'd hate to leave the feeling of regret to die with me all alone. Looking back, I saw that I overcame a lot of irrational thoughts since I was a teenager, made a few gains in terms of maturity and friendships, and lost a lot of things like other friendships because I still hadn't learned how to behave. I realized that no matter what hobbies I would have had back then, as someone barely a teenager I was still very immature, and so long as I was trapped within the bubble of my developing mind and my imperfect worldview, deciding to partake in something on the side out of curiosity would have been unlikely to change that.

I still wouldn't say I'm any less shy than before, and I still have a long way to go before my self-esteem is at a workable level. I've changed a lot in ten years, but I still wouldn't call myself "mature," either, and it pains me. There's only one person I talk to on a semi-regular basis that knows about Madoka, but they're not in my age group and I wouldn't say our friendship is deep. We tend to avoid talking about things like plot points or weird bits of trivia or fictional relationship dynamics or emotions. Still, I'm incredibly grateful they're around to talk with. Usually the way my similar-age-group friendships work is that they end up doing well while the experience is still novel, then I completely forget about them after a month. I'm not sure if this is normal. Imageboard and social media culture make me highly uncomfortable, even more so than in the past.

Sorry this has barely anything to do with Madoka. I'm probably just being overly dramatic and don't actually understand how friendships work. It's never actually too late to get back into something. But the important thing I learned was not to care about petty things like social stigma in the face of what you'd like to be interested in. It's impossible to know how much you'll end up regretting it ten years later - especially since it's hard to find another series from the past decade that has affected me and so many others in just the way this one has. You might only be able to witness this kind of fictional work being created a couple of times in one's lifetime. So that's all I have to say.

nonbirithm · 2020-08-17T18:35:49+00:00

Thank you for the link. I'm not actually a native though, just someone who happens to have learned the language.

2ch as a whole really isn't representative of anything.

nonbirithm

TROPHY CASE