When I talk to myself in my head, I usually find that I’ve outgrown my visual novel phase, a phase that co-existed with the high-school me’s arrogance that after watching anime for a few years and studying Japanese here and there I really knew the language. The kanji alone humbled me, but that’s another story.
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Anyway, Utawarerumono’s pretty awesome actually. It’s mostly a straight up visual novel paired with a simple, yet entertaining SRPG backend. You’ve still got your mountains of text and static backgrounds and character portraits, but the setting, characters, and slowly unfurling plot are all pretty entertaining. There hasn’t been a whole lot of really risque art yet either, a plus for those of you uncomfortable with hentai and a minus for those who “play” vis. novels and eroge for it. Uta’s awesome enough to justify the sheer amount of timesink that any normal vis. novel enjoys, not to mention the extra time spent playing the SRPG half of the game.
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It’s why I love that vis. novels let you save and pick up anywhere, although Uta won’t let you save during a battle sequence or when the game does a scene in the battle engine rather than the standard vis. novel static backgrounds. Timesinks aren’t quite so painful to the rest of your life if you can pick it up and play whenever you want, and something like Uta would be really nice on the DS or PSP I think.
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The fan localizers did a pretty good job on the game itself, some slight Engrishy-ness and grammar quirks aside. It makes the game that much better when you can understand just what the heck peeps are saying this time around.
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Also: Music’s pretty good.
It’s an odd sort of question really.
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For those of you who don’t know, one of the “innovations” that Japan wrought upon the computer scene was the visual novel. If you compound the original words’ meanings, you’ll be pretty close. If you think of a more traditional adventure game or something along the lines of the Myst series with about a metric ton of text you’d have a visual novel as well. Some focus more on wandering around and “player” choices, while others focus far more on the storyline. Others focus more on undressing the ladies and having your virtual way with them. Sadly, with Japan there are a lot more of the porno “hentai” games (actually visual novels with a lot of porn content). In Japan though, they don’t use the “hentai” title for porn, “hentai” being the nicer JP word for “pervert.” Anything with “ero” attached to it is likely gravure or straight porn of some sort, and given that Japan doesn’t have a sexually repressed culture behind the wheel, there’s a lot more of it out there. Read more
…On a 160 GB external HD from Seagate no less. I could have gotten one twice the size for about the same price at the local Best Buy, but Seagate stuff is generally pretty reliable and the drive itself is a tad smaller than my DS. That’s nice, since a lot of the larger storage size PHD’s are like carrying bricks around, apparently.
Now I get to stare at it lovingly and hope I don’t need to restore my backed up data. Sigh.