/jp/ - Otaku Culture

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This thread is for the discussion of untranslated Japanese visual novels.

What are you playing? What are you looking forward to? What have you finished? You know the drill.

Playing Clannad and it's actually like stepping into a strange kind of portal to a universe where school life VNs are good. I know an excess of choices is seen as tedious in today's market, but I think I'm convinced now that they add a lot to immersion, especially when the choices change so much - it feels less like marching through a common route to get to a route and more like doing your own shit with the world changing as a result. To be specific about what I'm talking about here, the things that happen because of your choices change future scenes dynamically for a lot of variety. So maybe you do a joke choice, and then a day later it's called back to - it wasn't just forgotten after the joke is over, it was an actual event that happened and is remembered by the characters.

There's also a clear amount of effort put into the 演出, which is something that I've started thinking about more often lately. Stuff like Tomoyo's chain combo kick on Suzuhara is actually reflected in game and there's even little "COMBO CHAIN" effects etc to sell it. It's nothing mind-blowing or anything but it really strikes me just how many VNs simply stone cold do not give a fuck about adding these touches, and are content to just plop up the sprites at equidistant locations and occasionally throw up a CG.

Also, Clannad is actually funny as fuck. I'm busting my gut with laughter at the jokes in here. Maeda's actually a solid writer and does a good job at being funny while progressing the game along. I've decided not to use the word "pacing" so much when referring to VNs, so instead I will say that Maeda keeps individual scenes brief and is always fast to get to the point. It keeps things moving along at basically a lightning pace, despite what you would expect from Clannad perhaps (note: still in common route).

There's also a quality to the characters that I feel like I've noticed before, but have never really put into words. I don't want to say realism, but like... It's like a sort of depth, where they have stuff going on in the inside, and what you're seeing is just what they're putting out there. Modern moege as it were has the opposite of this, where characters are nothing beyond their appearance and just put everything out there at once. Maybe it could be described as the faith that the character is an actual character and not just an otaku cumsleeve moeblob, as it were. Pic related, you won't see a moe blob casually talking about getting BFs unless they're in the fake-gyaru-slut archetype.

tl;dr Clannad seems pretty good, excited to dive into a route soon.