#(visual novel with no choices -- higurashi when they cry)

[cat-madhouse]

salmon’s always a safe bet!! oh! minecraft is fun but yeah it might be easier for you (and less stressful) to play a game at a time, axolotl slugcat my beloved

Mhh yeah I think I'll stay with one game out a time until I find something I want to finish less than Celeste (like. minecraft for example,,) I tend to prefer 2D games but minecraft does sound pretty fun. I'm not sure how the sushi will go but I'll keep you updated sldhskh

[arimiadev]

recommendations of visual novels on sale for the steam winter sale 2023

steam's winter sale just started and will run for the next two weeks, so if you're looking for a new visual novel to try (or want to get into them), here's a lot that I've played that are on sale on steam.

umineko when they cry

the ushiromiya family returns to the family head's home on an isolated island for their annual conference with the intention of settling how his vast amount of wealth is divided. instead, though, a letter is left from someone claiming to be a "witch". with the ushiromiyas dropping left and right, the mystery behind everything remains to be solved.

I can't make a recommendation list without mentioning umineko. it's life changing. it might even trans your gender. it's hard to describe umineko, but just know that it's absolutely deserving of the "cult classic" tag.

notes:

kinetic/linear - no choices

VERY long

divided into two games on steam - Questions Arcs is the first 4 episodes and Answers Arcs is the last 4 episodes (8 episodes in total, play Questions Arcs first)

created by Ryukishi07, creator of Higurashi

fantasy mystery

ace attorney

follow phoenix wright as he embarks on his career as a lawyer to help people. meet a variety of clients and prove their innocence by collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, and exposing lies in court.

ace attorney is one of the classic mystery visual novels, being a blend of point-and-click elements via investigations and visual novel storytelling. the steam port is a massive collection, combining the first 3 games (the original phoenix wright trilogy) as 1 game.

notes:

investigative gameplay segments, a good chunk of the story is point-and-click parts

VERY long for the whole trilogy- each game is around 20 hours long and the steam edition is 3 games

modern mystery with supernatural elements

ai: the somnium files

play as detective kaname date as he hunts down a serial killer using a cutting-edge technology which allows him to "psync" with a person, diving into the memories of others to solve crimes in a limited amount of time with the help of his AI assistant/eyeball Aiba.

aitsf is a lot. it's probably the raunchiest non-eroge game I've ever played and despite my low tolerance for dirty jokes I found most of it to be laughable and a fun experience, though I did play this with friends. if it's a miss for you, it's gonna miss you by a wide margin, but if it's a hit for you, you're going to be recommending it nonstop. either way you'll want to hit kaname date with a car.

notes:

long, around 25-35 hours

this game heavily relies on going back to prior choices via their branching menu to try other options in order to get the full story (and true ending). there are several endings to this game but you're meant to play through them all, not just one or two.

a lot of gameplay and interactive segments

sci-fi mystery

english voice acting

witch on the holy night

aoko aozaki is a highschooler who has to balance her class president, perfect grades life with her secret afterschool life of being a mage—a secret she has to keep at the risk of death. keeping this balance already isn’t easy but one day she gets a wrench thrown into it with the introduction of a transfer student, soujuurou shizuki, a country boy so out of touch that he’s never seen electricity before.

I love witch on the holy night so, so much. it's one of the most beautifully directed visual novels ever made with so much love and care put into each frame. the cast is wonderful (touko my beloved) and it's a must-read for anyone who likes modern-ish fantasy.

notes:

kinetic / linear - no choices

long, around 25-30 hours

originally written by kinoko nasu, one of the co-founders of type-moon and creators of fate/stay night. has some relation to tsukihime and garden of sinners but you don't need any knowledge of those going in

modern-ish (1980s) fantasy with lots of talking about magic

ghostpia

a snowy town filled with "ghosts" is where the young woman sayako finds herself trapped, feeling like she doesn't belong and wants to leave this town where no one dies.

it's hard to describe ghostpia. it's a surreal-ish story about "ghosts" where every character is quirkier than the last but every part is made with so much heart behind it. you never really know where the story is going, but unfortunately only 1 season is currently out on steam.

notes:

medium length, around 10 hours

very innovative and unique use of visuals and paneling

surreal-ish (sometimes violent) fantasy

please be happy

as a shapeshifting fox called a "gumiho", miho has traveled the world in search for a traveler who showed her kindness many years ago. afraid of sticking around in one place for too long, miho has never stayed anywhere for more than a few nights- but all of that changes when she arrives in wellington, new zealand and meets the barista/writer aspen and the vampire archivist juliet.

okay okay I had to recommend at least one visual novel I worked on. please be happy was a labor of love for our team that took over 3 years to make and is a slice of life story about love, trust, and what it means to be human.

notes:

medium to long, about 20 hours

2 romanceable ladies, aspen and juliet, and a plethora of side characters to meet via a map system

modern slice of life fantasy

english voice acting

WE KNOW THE DEVIL

find yourself back at summer camp with all the queer religious horror of it.

WE KNOW THE DEVIL is a short, atmospheric and slightly surreal story about 3 teens at a religious summer camp waiting for the devil. if you want something that feels familiar and otherworldly at the same time, this is right up your alley.

notes:

very short, about 2 hours

3 endings and 1 true ending

isolation, psychological horror

------------

this is just a handful of recommendations of visual novels I've played and enjoyed that are on sale right now on steam.

some of these titles, like please be happy and WE KNOW THE DEVIL, are also available on itch.io which is a website for indie games! they're also currently having a winter sale so a lot of indie visual novels are on sale over there too, if you want DRM-free versions of games while also giving a better revenue split to devs.

[8bitsupervillain]

Higurashi When They Cry Hou Ch. 5 Meakashi pt. 22

Skipping ahead a bit, we rejoin Keiichi and Shion in the torture shack. Or as the manga refers to it: the Saiguden. Which I can only presume means ritual storehouse, but that's fan translations for you isn't it? All according to keikaku and so on. Shion takes Keiichi through the torture basement where at some point between last time she was here and now she decided to dispose of the bodies of Kimiyoshi and Satoko. Which seems an odd choice if her aim is to convince Keiichi that Mion is a vile killer, but hey, the bodies weren't there in chapter two, so they have to go this time around too. Shion is giving him the guided tour when gadzooks! It's Mion in the cell! Shion gives him the ol' stun gun treatment and drags him to the rack to begin his painful torment. In between reading this part of the VN and typing this I watched this scene play out in the 2006 anime. In the anime rather than stun gun him, Shion just clonks him over the head with a big rock. Which is funnier, but it's another weird deviation from the visual novel I don't quite understand.

Actually, let's a brief digression here. In the visual novel itself it describes Satoko as lying on a cross shaped table, which I took to mean just one of those X shaped torture racks you occasionally see in media featuring medieval torture devices, or a Saw film maybe. What I didn't expect from both the manga and anime is Satoko is just crucified.

Just for fun there's a million dollar Shion smile. Odd changes between the mediums but there it is. You'll just have to take my word for it about the anime though.

Also I don't know if I mentioned it in an earlier part but Shion has come to terms with the fact that she's now nothing but a demon because she failed to keep her promise to Satoshi. Also she's just plain vexed by the fact that Keiichi is a willfully blind fool for refusing to see his best friend for the vile murderer she's trying to portray her as.

Shion, pal, I really think you should have Kasai try to get you a refund for this stun gun. It seems to be pretty useless against everyone lately. Maybe you used up all the juice when you accidentally killed Oryou with it, but that thing doesn't seem to be any use whatsoever these days.

Anyway the whole business about how the demon awoke because Keiichi was an insensitive clod gets brought up, and demon demon demon demon demon demon demon demon demon.

YES!! YOU FUCKING PUTZ! YOU HAVE TRIED TO TRANSFER THE BLAME TO EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER YOU HAVE COME ACROSS IN THIS ENTIRE CHAPTER! THE ONLY PERSON YOU NEVER ONCE TRIED TO ASSIGN BLAME TO IS YOURSELF! YOU EVEN WENT SO FAR AS TO SAY SATOSHI HIMSELF WAS TO BLAME FOR SOME OF THE HARDSHIPS THAT BEFELL HIM EARLIER IN THE CHAPTER!

This character is exhausting.

Anyway Shion decides to not kill Keiichi. Because... and zaps him with the stun gun, so two seconds later she does it again and again and eventually just beans him with a giant novelty hammer that actually puts him out of action for longer than it takes to scratch your nose. She locks the door and goes back to the cells where Mion is. Where she decides to free her and takes her to the top of the corpse well.

Mion seems to realize there's no chance she's actually going to walk out of this alive so she tries to talk to Shion about her motive. Also to just completely crush her motive like a bug really.

It's kind of surprising just how easily Shion accepts what Mion says at face value. Perhaps she's simply taking it as the words of someone who knows they're dead regardless, but it's surprising how she just grabs on to the idea that Mion and Oryou aren't lying about the disappearance of Satoshi. But it does raise a good question, if Oryou really isn't behind the disappearances then who is?

But alas such questions will have to go unanswered. Shion's a demon Kaz, and as such kills Mion by zapping Mion in the head while she's on the ladder leading down the well. I like how for a split second it looks like Mion might have got through to her murderous sister only to crush that faint hope and have Shion kill it along with her sister.

Not quite the end of the chapter as yet, but we finally got a "please solve this mystery for me, Maria Usihormiya" that we didn't get from chapter two. I have to admit to feeling a certain amount of irritation when it came to this section of this chapter. I don't know if that came across at all, I can be pretty inscrutable at times. I don't know if it was just residual annoyance I felt from this section of Watanagashi come back to poison this section for me, or if my tolerance for the characters' bullshit just hit its limit. I wish to circle back to the very start of the chapter for a moment.

And this might be one of the dumbest questions I can ask, but Shion isn't the perpetrator they mean here right? I can only assume that this is referring to the one who is behind the Oyashiro curse killings, Hinamizawa, the whole damned affair. Because if it means Shion, her motives aren't too terribly complex to figure out. I just disagree with them and think they're not particularly great.

[davekat-sucks]

i was doing some research cause i wanted to get into indie dev cause i want to make one of my ideas into a visual novel, came across a video called Why 96% of Indie Games Fail on youtube and so much of it was about market optics. understanding your target demographic is really important when it comes to marketing and it got me thinking about homestucks current devs and how they dont get what made homestuck fun to begin with

The Homestuck devs probably only know the basic surface levels such as cool character designs and music, but don't know the deeper stuff such as the adventure dos game style the original comic was inspired from. Or the premise was more simple back then before it got big. After all, the beginning of Homestuck was just about 4 kids playing a game. Another is that some take the easy route, which is using visual novel gameplay as a means to pump it out faster. Not realizing there is a market to visual novels and there are different ways it is appealing to others, despite it's simple nature. There are ones that have mixture of other gameplays such as seen with Ace Attorney or Danganronpa. Another is story tied to it that invokes readers emotions such as crying whenever someone reads CLANNAD. Even something like sound novels, visual novels that only have music or sound effects in the background with no voice acting, can leave a lasting impression with a good story, as that's what made Higurashi successful despite having few resources. As well as the time and placement the series was released in. Homestuck was made with old flash in years 2009-16. They should have a better understanding of people who played flash games on sites like Newgrounds. How can you bring something old to new people who have never seen it? Henry Stickmin Collection was able to do well because they were able to weave the separate flashes into one. And the different choices of each one gives a lot of replay-ability as well for people who want to see every possibility. The most important thing that Homestuck devs struggle with the most as well is something that has been going on ever since Hussie had even released the Kickstarter game. And that is PR. Public Relations. I get that the series is based on fandom interactivity. But the problem lies when stuff like Andrew Hussie starts to antagonized the audiences. It may work for some, but not all, especially if you want to draw in new readers or players. This extends out to members of WhatPumpkin and HICU too. Certain members do not have self control on what they want to say or do on social media. Thus, they may end up looking bad or unfavorable to the crowd. Nobody is told to not post or share certain shit. Freedom is speech is one thing, but it's another when you are working on a project that needs to make money that whatever your post is tied what you are working on that people know. Even stuff like a political posts that is unrelated to the project, will make audiences assume of what the person is like and how it could affect the game. PR in a way, does go hand in hand with Marketing. Not only you have to research the right audiences, but you also have to have a good image too when showing off your project.

[chuunijianghuyuri]

I think part of the reason my RSD riddled brain can handle When They Cry mysteries like Higurashi, Umineko, and Ciconia is that they're mysteries that don't slap your hand every two seconds whenever you get something wrong by virtue of the fact that they're visual novels with minimal dialogue choices that respect players who don't actively try to solve the mystery with pen, paper, and all while they enjoy the story. You can enjoy them the way you want to, you can treat them fully like novels but also treat them like games during and after you read to enhance your enjoyment and experience with the work.

Other mystery visual novels and games on the other hand actively have incorrect options because they're much more directly like games and puzzles, puzzle games if you will. Unfortunately for me, the whole getting a mystery or logic puzzle wrong triggers the same neurons in my brain as getting a math question wrong in that it makes me feel EMOTIONS that are BAD and I either look up a guide or quit.

[gdevan]

I'm working on getting into Umineko myself, so some notes:

It is 100+ hours of visual novel.

Like, no choices or gameplay, just click to advance.

It's apparently a closed-circle murder mystery/death game(?) with supernatural and meta elements, which sounds awesome.

The protagonist's name is Battler. I'm not sure why???

It features a character that I've seen described as 'a Vriska'.

From the stuff I've seen about it, I gather there is something special and maybe meta about red text.

I haven't started it yet; I'm reading the prior work by the publisher: Higurashi, which is a murder mystery time loop(?) set in a small town rumored to be cursed.

I've been taking a break, actually, because I've been sick and couldn't think too hard :(

The full names of the VNs are Higurashi: When They Cry (higurashi = cicadas, not sure why it's untranslated) and Umineko: When They Cry (umineko = seagulls). Together they're referred to as the When They Cry series (there's an ongoing third one, Ciconia, which is about child soldiers in a steampunk future or something???).

They're available on Steam but sold separately by chapter- Higurashi is 8 chapters plus some bonus content; Chapter 1 is free as a sort of demo and the rest are like $6 each.

The Steam version lets you switch between original and remastered graphics. I play with the original but check out the remastered whenever they bust out a new sprite.

IMO the remastered (on Steam, found out that console is different just now) Higurashi graphics are clean but kinda soulless. The original ones are dynamic and charming but they're also... well, see for yourself.

^ That's Rena Ryuugu. One of the first things we learn about her is that she loves cute things. When she sees something cute she goes into a hypercompetent baby-talking trance state (second picture).

'Cute things' includes a life-size Colonel Sanders Statue she found in the illegal dumping grounds.

That sort of kickstarts the protagonist's involvement in the mystery.

Also part of the setup is that the protagonist is in a games club with four schoolmates of varying ages and they give everything the 5D chess treatment, from Old Maid to zombie tag to Clue. Cannot wait to see how this energy extends to the main mystery.

I'm not sure what else I can say without spoilers, but I really liked chapter 1!

Have you ever considered reading umineko? Its a murder mystery vn with some Bonkers metanarrative elements, a killer soundtrack and a really interesting way of handling its narrative in general

I didnt know anything about umineko until this ask outside of it being nerd shit so now I think I have to check it out and inevitably be embarrassing about it

[kageyama-ritsu]

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Screenshot Let’s Play and Transcription

Since June of last year, I’ve been doing a mostly-on-sometimes-off playthrough, transcription, and Let’s Play of the Steam and GOG port of Higurashi When they Cry/Higurashi no Naku Koro ni on Something Awful. Someone else actually already made a forum-based, screenshot Let’s Play of this game years ago (and finished it!), but half of the images in the first arc are broken and it’s a little hard to parse.

So I thought, why not kill three birds with one stone? I can create a proper transcription of Higurashi that will be saved on its own dedicated server (the LPs in Something Awful are archived both on SA and lparchive.org, the latter once it is completed). I can also reread this sound novel that I am incredibly fond of.

Most importantly, I hope that this LP gets more people to read Higurashi. For people who either don’t want to pay 50 dollars on Steam/GOG for all of the arcs or sit down and commit 60 hours to watch video footage of a game released in 2002, this format lets you read it at your own pace in just a couple of days.

This is how the LP is presented. People who are familiar with and/or fans of Higurashi will notice a few things about this— and my choices are explained in the masterpost (which you can see as soon as you click the link to the LP). I also recorded every update in video form and put a link to it at the top of every update. (Higurashi is a sound novel after all, not a visual novel.) The recordings also have some fantastic voice acting, so check that out if possible.

I update three times a week on Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday.

Here’s the link.

My sales pitch, for those uninitiated to Higurashi or do not know why they should read it, is under the cut.

Some people may know of Higurashi because of its rather infamous Studio DEEN anime adaptation. The yandere anime or whatever.

(This is the cover of a Higurashi video game released in 2014 but the art is pretty similar to the anime’s ssshhhhh)

In the game, you play as Keiichi Maebara, a city boy who recently moved to the peaceful and close-knit village of Hinamizawa. While he initially spends his days playing various games with his new friends, the discovery of a string of disappearances and murders that happen in the village set him on a path towards conspiracies, paranoia, and a fight for his own life.

One of the game’s more memorable aspects is how it endears you to the characters through the slice-of-life aspects of the story, until those idyllic days slowly morph into something much more sinister. That in and of itself is nothing new in the horror and thriller genre— pretty much every dime a dozen horror movie starts with a peaceful suburb being threatened with a serial killer or monster on the loose, after all.

Where Higurashi differs is that it doesn’t stop there, but starts pulling the reader in, makes them want the horror and thrill to stop, for the idyllic days to come back. They start off engrossed in the wonderfully unsettling atmosphere that the author, Ryukishi, crafts with nothing but images, text, and sound. As they read one arc after another, they gain more questions even as some are answered.

Because, surprise— Higurashi is a slife-of-life, comedy, horror, suspense, thriller, murder mystery.

Every arc takes place in the same timeframe: June of 1983, but things are different. Something that happens in one arc doesn’t happen in another arc, and vice versa. Even though the characters do  not retain their memories of past arcs, they still perform different actions at different times as strings are pulled behind the curtain. As someone with an omniscient viewpoint of the entire story, it is your job to piece together the puzzle and figure out just what is causing the deaths in Hinamizawa.

If that interests you, I’ll link the Let’s Play once more at the end of this post. The first post is the masterpost, which has even more information on the game as well as the LP itself. If nothing else, please read the trigger warnings. Higurashi is not a kind game to those who are squeamish. This may only be Ryukishi’s first big work— his writing and pacing is fairly rough for the first two arcs— but there’s a reason this game so thoroughly took over the fandom consciousness in the 2000s. His writing is, if nothing else, completely his own and paints vivid depictions of the cruelty humans have to live through every single day.

(A tidbit to note is that the author used to be a social worker. He writes about the topic with great skill but it is all very hard to watch/read.)

The game is also uh…very anime. It was initially sold in Comiket, after all. If you have a low tolerance for anime bullshit this might be a hard read for you. But underneath everything, the story is, at the core, a very touching one about the bonds between friends. Higurashi has a heart, no matter how ugly its exterior may seem at first glance, and I urge you to give it a shot.

Here’s the link again.

By the by, if you’re interested in a more “straightforward” murder mystery (more of an actuual murder mystery, much less straightforward), you should check out Ryukishi’s next work, Umineko no Naku Koro ni, which someone else already LPed. If you want to see how he might be like, trying to, solve…world conflict…?, the person who LPed Umineko also did one for the first arc (or Phase as it’s called) of Ciconia no Naku Koro ni. It’s all a bit vague for Ciconia, we really only have one chapter to go off of. None of these “sequels” require knowledge of the former entries to enjoy them.

[arznersfishingrod]

Tagged by @fursasaida to list my 7 most listened to songs on the streaming service of my choice. I admit I’ve mostly been using Bandcamp or actual personal collection lately, though I do miss the usefulness of Spotify in this regard. Anyway, here is my approximation of what I believe the top 7 to be of late, based on how many times I remember listening to these songs recently.(also my consumption of new music has slowed to a crawl so it’s mostly old stuff)

1. 31 Today by Aimee Mann (this is a gimme as I’ve been listening to it basically constantly since I turned 31)

2. Call Me Little Sunshine by Ghost

3. Come on Up To the House by Tom Waits

4. Your Disco Needs You by Kylie Minogue

5. Life During Wartime (Stop Making Sense version) by Talking Heads

6. Working for the Knife by Mitski

7. Anybody’s Girl by Color TV

Honorable Mentions to the albums Station to Station, Invasion of Privacy, the soundtracks to the visual novels in the Higurashi When They Cry series, Daddy’s Home, Bandana, and Rumors.

@pastel-petticoats @explosionshark @maeveshade if y’all want to here you are

[scoutception]

A look at: Moon.

Writing reviews is always a learning experience for me, and one of the important things I’ve learned is that, sometimes, it’s pretty hard to write about certain individual games, visual novels, or such considering the kind of detail I like to go into. Therefore, this will be the first in a new series of mini reviews, or as mini as they get with me. Maybe there’s just not enough to a game to really give me details to dig into, or maybe it’s difficult to talk about without giving away more than I wish, or maybe there’s just something related to it that I’m more interested in talking about than the actual product; whatever the reason, these will hopefully be less rambly and excessive than my usual reviews, while still giving enough of an overview that they stand as proper reviews on their own. Either way, the subject of this post is an old, obscure visual novel from 1997 with a bit of history to it, called Moon.

Moon was developed by Tactics, a humble developer of adult visual novels, and was the second one developed by them, with the first, Dōsei, seemingly just being, well, a plain H-game, and the third, One ~To the Radiant Season~, while still obscure, is actually fairly notable for being a prototype to Kanon in a lot of ways, as many key staff at Tactics would later break off to form Key afterwards, with them having also worked on Moon beforehand. Thus, Moon is in a very interesting spot when it comes to the progression of the developers that would change VNs as a genre with the release of Kanon, and that’s really the only reason I checked it out.

Moon follows Ikumi Amasawa, a girl who joins a mysterious organization called Fargo, which recruits others with the promise of acquiring an alleged “invisible strength” that can put one far ahead of ordinary humans, in order to investigate their possible connections to the murder of her mother, and if possible, take revenge on the ones responsible. Upon arriving at the Fargo facility, Ikumi quickly befriends two other initiates with ulterior motives of their own for joining: Haruka Mima, a determined girl with a cool attitude who keeps her goal to herself, and Yui Nakura, a cheerful, but naive girl who’s seeking to bring home her older sister, who joined Fargo several months prior. Though the three agree to become allies and help each other achieve their goals, they are quickly separated in different “classes” housed in different buildings, with Ikumi being assigned to Class A, the most prestigious of them all. Settling into her new life as a Fargo initiate, which mostly consists of “training” with the Minmes and Elpod, machines that confront her with various parts of her very troubled past for the purpose of “mental reinforcement” in the form of a vengeful doppelganger of herself, Ikumi gradually discovers many strange things about her situation, such as there only being one other member of Class A, that being Youko Kanuma, a quiet, cold woman who has been part of Fargo for many years. Additionally, Ikumi is forced to share her room with a strange boy who doesn’t volunteer his name, who, though part of Fargo itself, is quite low ranking, and more than a bit dim witted at times. Worst of all, upon finding a passage that allows her to access the buildings where her allies are kept, Ikumi finds that the other classes are subjected to horrific abuses by Fargo’s personnel in order to further their mental reinforcement. As Ikumi struggles to aid her allies however she can, the confrontations with her past begin to put a heavy strain on her mind, and the existence of the invisible strength Fargo claims to have starts to become more and more plausible.

Needless to say, Moon isn’t exactly Clannad. I did not know much about this VN before I got into it, and finding it to be a psychological horror VN was a bit of a shock. Even more of a shock was just what form the majority of the horror came in. You see, even though One ~To the Radiant Season~, Kanon, and Air were all released as adult games, the h-scenes are very disconnected from the plot, most of the time, to the point of losing nothing from skipping them or even removing them from the game, and were pretty much just obligatory inclusions to help them sell better. From Clannad onward, most Key VNs have been clean to start. With Moon, on the other hand, you can’t go 5 minutes without running into some explicit scene, the main source being the Elpod sequences and the abuses the Fargo personnel inflict, and it wastes no time getting to them, at that. This is the biggest thing that drives off many of the few who go out of their way to experience Moon, and even with me having just watched an understandably censored playthrough of this on Youtube due to its shorter length, I almost quit very early into it, and definitely would have if I had actually played it. The Elpod is one thing, as the sequences are used for the purpose of developing Ikumi, but even then, most of them are just excessively disgusting more than disturbing, and that goes doubly for the sequences outside of it. Instead of really changing things up, they’re just content to get gradually more and more depraved, and outside of disgusting, the main thing I can even call them is repetitive. This is one of my biggest problems with Moon, and it was pretty hard for me to get into it because of it.

Another major problem I have with Moon is how it handles its cast. Moon is pretty short for a VN, only around 10 or 11 hours if you go straight for the true ending, and even though there are 7 endings in total, they don’t add much more time onto that, with two being worse variants on the true ending, and the rest being bad endings gotten through making bad choices. Having as small a cast as it does should naturally work fine with that, but they really aren’t balanced well. While Ikumi gets developed across the whole game, and Yui gets a good arc pretty early on, Haruka only gets a short arc that ends as quickly as it starts and doesn’t do a lot for her, Youko barely has any screentime despite establishing a good dynamic with Ikumi, and the boy doesn’t have much presence or relevance until late in the story. The pacing is just bizarre and rushed feeling.

That’s not to say there aren’t a number of good points to Moon’s story. Ikumi is very well developed throughout the story, with the Minmes in particular leading to many melancholic scenes that make her quite sympathetic, and were definitely the high points of the normally rigid daily schedule much of the story takes place during for me. Despite the story’s flawed handling of some of them, the cast is still decent on a whole, with Youko’s gradually developing friendship with Ikumi and Yui’s development during her arc being some of the more memorable parts for me. The atmosphere is very well done, with the cramped, depressing corridors of the facility always feeling like they’re hiding something awful just around the corner, especially since you need to manually navigate the place using a map screen, and once the plot really kicks into high gear things become much more compelling, with the final days containing many high points in characterization and an infamous mindscrew of a sequence that, once looked back on with a more understanding eye, is actually quite fascinating in its own right.

Visually, Moon’s art was done by Itaru Hinoue, the same artist as the majority of Key’s VNs, and it’s a lot rougher than the art of, say, Kanon. It’s not outright bad, but it looks very dated, with the designs and sprites not really sticking out. The CGs vary in quality, as some look pretty ridiculous, but others are quite good. Most impressive, though, is two animated intro sequences included in the DVD version, which happens to be the only version with an English patch anyway. They’re fairly brief, but do a great job of setting up the atmosphere and premise despite that.

On the sound side, the soundtrack is great. It’s not a very big one, with only about 16 tracks, and the use of them can get a bit repetitive, but most of them are just a joy to listen to. From the electronic and tense Closed Space, to the wistful, yet peaceful The Place Where the Sun Shines, to Youko’s ethereal theme, to the credits theme, Sorrow, and especially the nostalgic music box theme, Memory, it’s worth looking up even if you hold no interest in the VN itself. There’s also voice acting, also added in the DVD version, and most of it is just average, with not many performances standing out, with the exception of Kahoru Sasajima as Ikumi, who delivers a very solid performance, especially during the more intense moments.

Overall, Moon can be a pretty hard sell. While I thought it was a decent experience by the end, its very offputting content, lack of similarity to any other Key works, and bleak atmosphere can make it pretty hard to go through even if you’re prepared for what’s to come. Even if you wanted a horror VN, there’s plenty others out there, like Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child, Higurashi: When They Cry, Wonderful Everyday, Raging Loop, or just about anything from nitro+. That said, if you can stick to the end, I definitely feel it becomes fairly satisfying, and when I got to thinking, I realized something that actually boosted my opinion quite a bit just by itself. As much as Moon is a story about cults and psychic powers with a somewhat unclear point to it all, it’s even more so just a story about a very troubled youth struggling with her grief, irrationally falling in with a bad crowd, and being forced to face her past and actions if she wishes to accomplish anything. Looking at the story that way, it’s actually quite well done, and going in with that in mind may even make it a bit more palatable. Still, I wouldn’t especially go out of my way to recommend it, and ultimately it’s still very far from being one of my favorite visual novels out there. Either way, that concludes my first mini review, which still turned out longer than I thought it would. My next post will be something unusual for me as well, but that’ll take a bit to come. Till next time. -Scout

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE: Visual Novels Strike Back in Fall 2020

  Content Warning: While otherwise safe for work, this article discusses games made in Japan's 18+ visual novel industry. It does not talk about individual games in-depth, or detail any offensive content contained within; nevertheless, curious readers should expect those games to be suitable only for adult audiences.

  One of the more memorable first episodes of anime this fall was Talentless Nana, a thriller series starring a young student with a dark secret. Curious to see why my friends were excited about it, I did some research of my own and found something bizarre in the process. Talentless Nana was based on a manga whose story was written under a pseudonym: looseboy. "Could this be the looseboy I know?" I posted on Twitter in a daze. "looseboy, the porn game writer?"

  Like the main character of Talentless Nana, as a young student, I too had a dark secret: I played visual novels. I read all three routes of Fate/stay Night. I soldiered through Muv Luv. I sought out the anime Humanity is Declined specifically because the source text was written by visual novel luminary Romeo Tanaka. These games could be overstuffed, repetitive, and deeply sexist. But don't underestimate visual novels. YU-NO upended conventions in 1996 in such a way that modern games steal its twists and are still labeled forward-thinking. Infamous video game auteur Hideo Kojima cut his teeth working on spin-offs in the hugely influential Tokimeki Memorial series. And Hajime Isayama, the creator of Attack on Titan, admitted in this interview in Brutus Magazine that he had been inspired by the 18+ mecha epic Muv Luv Alternative.  

Image via Funimation  

During my student years, some of the most popular games in the field (at least among English speaking fans) were those with scripts by looseboy — most famously, Sharin no Kuni and The Devil on G String. Games remembered for their memorable protagonists, tear-jerking melodrama, and shocking twists and turns. They also had sex scenes in them (not very good ones) because that's what games of that type were supposed to have. It had been years since I'd thought about Sharin no Kuni — I wasn't even sure if I still liked it. But here looseboy was again, in a completely different medium, shocking a whole new audience of readers and viewers.

  For visual novel fans, this fall season of anime is a bonanza. You have a remake (or is it) of rural horror epic Higurashi: When They Cry, masterminded by creator Ryukishi07. You have a new original series, The Day I Became a God, scripted by crying game grandmaster Jun Maeda and his buddies at PA Works. Then there's Akudama Drive, an explosive SF grindhouse series based on a concept by Danganronpa scribe Kazutaka Kodaka.

  Image via Hulu

  It hasn't always been like this. In the past few years, light novels have outstripped visual novels as the source material of choice in the adaptation coal mines. Series like Higurashi or Clannad that were popular in the 2000s were gradually replaced in the popular imagination by newer works like Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- and My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU. Kyoto Animation, a studio once known for producing lavishly animated renditions of games made by the studio Key, pivoted years ago to adapting light novels and manga (not to mention its own original works). It's not difficult to see why; light novels, manga, and even proper novels are easier to adapt to the medium than visual novels. It's already difficult to squeeze the multi-route structure of often stupendously long video games into the time limitations of anime — not to mention their sometimes deeply gross and problematic content, sudden perspective switches, and even total changes in genre. It took years for the creators of Fate/stay Night to figure out how to make its full story comprehensible to a wide audience. What hope could anybody else have?

  Meanwhile, the visual novel industry is changing. Some of the talent I followed in the 2000s are doing just fine. Fate/GO, a phone game written by Fate/stay Night creator Kinoko Nasu and his team of former industry luminaries, became popular not despite the long and convoluted visual novel bolted to its gambling simulator but because of it. STEINS;GATE and its progeny continue to thrive, and Ryukishi07 — the creator of Higurashi and the later Umineko: When They Cry — toils on his new magnum opus. Other creators in the field are struggling. The visual novel company light — producer of chuuni games like dies irae — folded last year due to poor management. OVERDRIVE — known for music-inspired visual novels like Kira Kira — labeled its newest title Muscius! as its "Final Project."In the United States, an early boom in Kickstarters and English translations — with former fan translators gladly pitching in with their expertise — gradually stalled under claims of exploitative working conditions and Steam's hot-and-cold relationship with the medium as a whole. In the face of the popularity of anime, manga, and even light novels, it's hard not to see much of the visual novel industry's old guard as a tiny, stagnant niche.

  Image via Hulu

  But the medium's heart still beats in all-ages visual novels, thanks to the sudden success of two new stars. Kotaro Ucihikoshi — co-writer on cult visual novel Ever17 — found surprising success in the United States with his twisty pseudoscientific thriller 999. Kazutaka Kodaka's hilariously crude and violent (yet deeply heartfelt!) Danganronpa series has built a hardcore fanbase willing to grapple with each entry's whiplash-inducing twists and turns. It's no surprise, then, that the two of them have found their way into the anime field. Uchikoshi contributed the script to MAPPA's underrated sex comedy PUNCH LINE, while Kazutaka Kodaka worked with hardcore games nerd Seiji Kishi to produce anime-original sequels to the Danganronpa games. Uchikoshi and Kodaka now work together at the company Too Kyo Games, one of Japan's most promising "middleware" developers. Their name is front and center on this fall's Akudama Drive.

  The anime industry itself has become steadily riddled with former visual novel writers. Gen Urobuchi, the scriptwriter of 2011 smash hit Puella Magi Madoka Magica, got his start writing shock-horror games like Saya no Uta. His work on PSYCHO-PASS (and love of martial arts) is foreshadowed by his earlier writing for cyberpunk games like Kikokugai: The Cyber Slayer. Then you have the creative lead on popular visual novel White Album 2, Fumiaki Maruto, who went on to script Classroom Crisis together with the director who went on to adapt My Hero Academia at BONES. And my favorite episode of schoolgirl horror anime SCHOOL-LIVE! — the third, from the perspective of the teacher Megane — was scripted by visual novel writer Hikaru Sakurai, now busy writing for Fate/GO.

  Image via Hulu

  If visual novels are often overlooked by the mainstream games press, their influence on pop culture is stronger than ever. The Persona games, an inspiration on everything from Fire Emblem: Three Houses to Supergiant's recent indie classic Hades, take heavy influence from dating sims. The deeply weird action-RPG Nier Automata, which made a legend of its director Yoko Taro despite being released in the shadow of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild back in 2016, takes undeniable influence from visual novels and the denpa (a person who feels disconnected from those around them) aesthetic. Even developers outside of Japan are paying homage with vaporwave mystery drama Paradise Killer seeking to beat Danganronpa at its own maximalist game.

  Yet it's projects like Talentless Nana that stick with me — looseboy made his name working on small games highly prized by a few. But he jumped ship to the manga world and now a comic popular enough to receive an anime adaptation bears his name. How many other visual novel writers from the old 18+ market are out there working under pseudonyms on manga and in other fields? How far does the influence spread? Will we see Shumon Yuu or SCA-JI writing for anime? Only time will tell.

  What is your favorite series airing this year from former visual novel talent? What visual novel would you love to see adapted into an anime? Did you know that you can now pick up The House in Fata Morgana at the incredible price of 0 percent off? Let us know in the comments!  

    Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he isn't fervently praying that Girls' Work still has a chance of being made, he sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? You can find him on Twitter at: @wendeego

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[operationrainfall]

Higurashi When They Cry! releases May 14th, and is now available for pre-order through MangaGamer and Steam. This is the final conclusion, and is “do or die” for Rika, Keiichi, and the others with their final chance to break free. Do you have enough of the fragments needed to reach the ideal Hinamizawa?

  Those who order today will enjoy a 10% savings.

  PRESS RELEASE

April 9th–MangaGamer Opening Pre-Orders on Chapter 8 of Higurashi When They Cry Hou!

This is it. The final conclusion. It’s do or die for Rika, Keiichi, and the others. This is their final chance to break free of the relentless cycle around them. Have you learned enough from the chapters thus far? Do you have all the fragments needed to reach the ideal Hinamizawa? It’s time for the curtain to rise on this chilling finale to Higurashi When They Cry!

Matsuribayashi will be available on MangaGamer and Steam this May 14th. Order your copy today and get 10% off!

  Higurashi When They Cry Hou

The 58th year of Showa, early summer.

It’s June, and the summer heat has arrived earlier than it does most years.

By day there are crickets, and by night there are cicadas.

We’re in Hinamizawa, a small village in the countryside.

There are fewer than two thousand people here. But every year, there is an event.

This event is a mysterious death.

(The series has run from 1979 to 1983)

On a certain day in June, someone dies, and someone else goes missing.

The series of deaths is connected to the upheaval surrounding the dam construction project.

A murder case that was covered up is being reenacted.

Is it a conspiracy? A coincidence? Or perhaps a curse?

A different choice… reveals a new end.

A different path… unveils new truths.

  What once was thought to be certain, proves malleable, and patterns begin to emerge.

  There is no way to avert this tragedy. There is no choice but to give up trying. 

  But don’t. Fight. 

  For the days after the end.

  Higurashi When They Cry Hou Ch. 8 – Matsuribayashi

Developer: 07th Expansion

Genre: Adventure Price: $7.95 OS: Windows 7, 8,10,  Mac OSX, Linux Text Language: English, Japanese Age Rating: Teen Release Date: May 14th, 2020

  ABOUT MANGAGAMER.COM MangaGamer.com is the world’s first legal download site for English translated Visual Novels. Since its launch in July 2008, it has offered services where fans can download and enjoy popular Visual Novels such as minori’s ef -a fairy tale of two and OVERDRIVE’s Dengeki Stryker right from their home. Don’t forget to visit us on Facebook, Twitter and Discord!

Pre-Order Chapter 8 of Higurashi When They Cry Hou! Higurashi When They Cry! releases May 14th, and is now available for pre-order through MangaGamer and…

[96percentdone]

if you don't mind me asking, what problems do you have with the Higurashi anime adaption? I also prefer the visual novel but can never really articulate my criticisms with the anime, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts

Well first for a start it’s just ugly as sin. Let’s just get that out of the way. Season one in particular looks like it was made on a budget of ten dollars. It looks bad even for 2006 standards, but y’know I could live with an ugly adaptation if it was at least faithful to the source material. But that’s just it…it’s not. 

The Higurashi anime isn’t unfaithful in a technical sense. Many of the events that happen in the original visual novel do happen in the anime in some form (even if enough was taken out that they had to add a new arc but WHATEVER). That isn’t the problem. The problem is the entire focus of the anime adaptation, particularly in the first season, is centered on making higurashi into super horror, that in doing so it cuts out the emotional core. This will be long, so under the cut.

Let’s use Onikakushi as a case study. Now if we go by steam achievements, the original visual novel is around 12 chapters, although chapters are usually split in halves. Each chapter, for me and most people I know, takes about an hour to read, so about 12 hours of content. The anime adapted all of onikakushi in 4 episodes. Twelve hours of content shoved in four 25 minute episodes, give or take. That is 3 hours worth of content expected to be in one episode. You are already seeing the start of a problem.

Now, to be fair, a lot of the length of the higurashi vn can be attributed to the fact that it is a book. Much of what you read is just Keiichi’s inner monologue where he describes events or his own thoughts and feelings, and in adapting those in anime, you can show them taking much less time. But even with that said, three chapters of onikakushi is still too much to reasonably shove into a 25 minute frame, and it shows. 

Let’s start with the prologue of Onikakushi in the anime. It’s 30 seconds and already everything is wrong about it. 

That is obviously Keiichi. See, in the original vn, the prologue is a monologue that starts in complete darkness before cutting to a shot of the evening sky. We never see who is killing, or who they’re killing. We can only infer that’s what’s happening based on the sounds of a baseball bat and some of the phrasing in the monologue. 

This first scene is entirely ambiguous in the original VN, which works in it’s favour. You start off confused and concerned, and gradually forget as it progresses and more things start happening, until finally Keiichi wakes up from a dazed trance later in the arc to find Rena and Mion on the floor, and you realise “oh fuck so that’s what that scene was.” Everything you experienced was building to that, and it makes so much sense now.

But again, this is obviously Keiichi in the anime. And there’s shots of Rena’s hat, or her hair, or her and Mion’s dead bodies, and there is no ambiguity. The start of this scene is alright, as it’s entirely silhouettes and the room is dark, but shortly after you just see everything. Immediately after this scene when you meet Rena and Keiichi for real you realise “okay he’s gonna kill her” and there’s no suspense. You already know how it ends. 

But that’s not even the biggest problem. The problem is the focus of this scene has entirely changed. You see everything he’s doing, you can hear his heavy breathing, and get shots of his crazy eyes–emotionally it’s just “wow look at this crazy guy kill some people.” It’s entirely horror centered.

But the original visual novel was not like that. Take the first two lines of the whole thing:

This is entirely about how Keiichi feels in that moment. Sure, Keiichi is behaving like someone insane, but the scene wasn’t about that at the start. It was about the emotions he felt. His despair and his regret–all of his turmoil. It’s an emotional scene because the only sounds you hear at the bat and cicadas, and you know a murder is happening, but it’s also tragic just from the narration alone. Unnerving, and sad.

This doesn’t just set the tone for the arc, this sets the tone for the series. Higurashi is not just a horror visual novel, it is largely a series of tragedies. Of friends who fall so deep into their paranoia they start killing each other despite how much they care. The center of Higurashi as a series, is the emotional investment the core cast has in each other. Higurashi is about bonds, and tragedies, and overcoming them, with a horror setting. It is not about horror. 

And from the opening scene of the anime, I get no sense of tragedy whatsoever. Nothing about those first 30 seconds reads as tragic. I don’t get the sense Keiichi cares about the people he killed, I don’t get the sense I’m even supposed to care. Immediately I’m told to treat this like a horror gore fest, and so I do. The anime starts by setting the entirely wrong tone, and then continues with it.

Immediately after this they skip the “someone is apologising” scene, which yeah sure anime, go ahead and skip a scene vital to clueing us in to Keiichi’s mental state and sets up the big words of the arc sure why not, and cuts to happy fun shenanigans. Except club games and the like in the anime adaptation are either severely cut down for time, montaged like every watanagashi, or skipped entirely.

In Onikakushi, the only club event we even see in any meaningful way is the Old Geezer game, and that’s abridged to hell and back. We hardly spend any time actually getting to know or having fun with the characters. Sometimes events are fun events are fused together too, so the character introductions for Rika and Satoko happen on the day Keiichi is getting his tour, vs earlier in the narrative in class.

And hell those introductions are also egregious, because Keiichi monologues in them. His internal monologue describing how he just moved here is fine, but instead of like seeing the attributes of Rena and Mion like he describes, he just…talks over scenes of them actually doing the things. In effect, the anime has both show and tell happening, but tells you to focus on him telling you about Rena and Mion etc. Again, it’s hard to get invested in Keiichi’s friendship with the club if instead of showing it to you, they just tell you about it.

In the visual novel, Keiichi’s monologuing about the kind of person his friends are for a bit was fine, because it’d spend waaayyy more time actually showing them as people and their dynamics. Him telling you that was backed by scene after scene after scene, except the anime abridges, cuts down, or cuts out entire scenes for this, so again, how am I supposed to care when things go badly?

The anime priorities the horror aspects of Higurashi. Most of the run time of the second episode is focused on the horror scenes. The festival shenanigans are montaged, the president club game was entirely skipped, and the clue one (which granted much of it didn’t happen) was made even shorter to prioritise Ooishi. Again, this makes the show feel like it’s not about the characters and their connections, but it’s about creepy shit and horror, and none of that was ever the point of Higurashi.

Season 2 is better than season one, because they aren’t trying to cram 6 arcs in 26 episodes but 3 in 24, which gives them more time to expand on characters, but the damage is already done. Six entire arcs were already adapted with the entirely wrong priorities, so it ends up feeling unbalanced when suddenly in Kai what matters is how good friends they are and how much they want to fight fate and all that. It’s already far too late.

Even the horror scenes in the visual novel, have a level of emotional turmoil and conflict you don’t see in the anime because the anime is too focused on scaring you, like the scene in the prologue. You never get the sense Keiichi is conflicted about how to view his friends, that he’s hurt by it. You don’t see him cry, or debate if his friends are just possessed, or if they care about him at all or not. In the anime, when Keiichi killed his friends for real this time, I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t know I was supposed to care, because no time was spent making me care by showing who they are when it’s not creepy, or even making me even think Keiichi cares through his reactions.

That’s why it fails as an adaptation.  The Higurashi anime is bad because it gives you the entirely wrong sense of what the show is about. It’s not about the horror, or even about the mystery: it’s about the people in it, and the emotions they feel. And those people, those emotions, that connection that is so essential to why Higurashi works and the story it’s trying to tell, is lost through a reprioritizing. 

And honestly I could go in harder about how this affects pacing, because shifting the focus to give more time with the horror messes with the balance of how the horror is even supposed to hit you. Or how they cut out key details to the mystery through poor adaptation choices, or how the lack of time and budget seriously hampers it’s potential, or it’s crimes against specific characters like Satoko just because of how it’s adapted, but I don’t really need to. Those are all just a result of changing what the focus of the series is. That’s why the anime is bad. Because it doesn’t actually carry the essence of what makes Higurashi Higurashi.

[zerochanges]

Night of the Banshee

With less than a week or so to go, Halloween this year is fast approaching. So now’s the time to get in the last few frights and scares before we all start our unnecessarily long 3 month celebration of Christmas (What? Don’t try to tell me your January isn’t full of Christmas decorations that just refuse to die; like a zombie’s death-grip on some poor background character). Last year I was encumbered with a busy work schedule and really didn’t get to enjoy the frightful holiday, at best I think I saw maybe 20 minutes of Cujo on cable TV and that was pretty much the extent of my spooks that year. So this year I wanted to do something special and check out something truly horrifying. Which leads us to today’s subject: Banshee’s Last Cry.  

Now what is Banshee’s Last Cry, I hear you asking. Well it is a sound novel released for the iPhone in the US during January of 2014. So then what’s a sound novel you ask. Well, that can be a bit complicated. Similar to a visual novel, a sound novels usually forgo character sprites and CG art and instead focuses more on the novel aspect. It’s much closer to the novel nomenclature and essentially feels like reading a digital book with music and sound effects to amplify the experience. Of course like a visual novel there are still moments where you get to make choices in the story that lead to different endings.

The easiest western comparison would probably be text based adventure games, a genre that similar to the much more popular point ‘n click adventure games faded away a lot as technology advanced but is making a comeback, especially in the indie scene on Steam and the Mobile phone market. For the sake of this article, that’s pretty much all you really need to know about sound novels, but yes, any nerd I may have just upset; you are right, it’s much more complicated; a lot of games will use that label and have just as many visuals as visual novels, and it also started life as more of a brand of games for Chunsoft (the developer of today’s game) but yet nowadays some of the most famous sound novels like Higurashi When They Cry have nothing to do with Chunsoft. Basically, the more you try to categorize things the bigger of a cluster duck it becomes (quack). But really, all you need to understand what the game play in Banshee’s Last Cry’s is like is to just think of classic text adventure games!

(The original Super Famicom box for Kamaitachi no Yoru - 1994)

In Japan Banshee’s Last Cry was originally named Kamaitachi no Yoru (かまいたちの夜 / Night of the Kamaitachi) but the localization company, Aksys Games, renamed it something a lot less Japanese. In America it’s pretty easy to have missed this game but in Japan when it originally released in 1994 for the Super Famicom it was a huge hit and has remained to this day a cult classic that has spawned off numerous sequels, ports, remakes, reimaginings, and even its own live action TV drama (that’s when you KNOW you made it!). Now obviously this mobile phone release is one of the many rereleases for the game, but for us in America this marks the very first (and at the time of this writing -- only) time we have ever seen a release. This is quite momentous considering despite how incredibly popular Kamaitachi no Yoru was in Japan no one has ever tackled translating it for 20 years until this point, not even fan translations; any real attempt or interest shown in the fan community had always fizzled out until then.

This release while momentous however was also met with some concerns, the most obvious of which was its Americanization (or maybe Canadianization?). A lot of fans weren’t incredibly sold on this aspect of the English release when it first revealed. The plot was moved from Japan to Canada (Nagano to Whistler, British Columbia to be precise), and all the characters were renamed to match. The protagonist Toru became Max, and the heroine Mari became Grace, for example. The good thing is you can rename these two to whatever you like--I personally kept Max’s name but changed the heroine back to Mari because her English name also happens to be the name of my pet dog, and that’s weird--I don’t wanna romance a character with my dog’s name (plus I am too unoriginal to think up any other girl’s name for Grace/Mari). You cannot however rename anyone else in the story, and more importantly for those who took issue with this decision, the location change will stick no matter what.

In Japan they have a lot of folklore creatures, or yokai, who have a very long and rich history. This complex hierarchy of creatures, monsters, ghosts, and ghoulies all help to make for incredibly unique literature you just can’t quite recreate in English. That’s not to say the English world does not have its fair share of great horror writers who could conjure up their own parthenon of fantastically terrifying Lovecraftian horrors, but culturally the things that go bump in the night are really quite different between us. While in Japan yokai may seem like a fun part of their own local folklore that kids to adults all have, at the very least, a familiarity with, not much else like that is true for America.

You may have your occasional local legends like the Headless Horsemen (insert Christopher Walken gif here), but there really isn't any cemented creature folklore that everyone just “gets” in America. At least, not anything nearly as rich and complicated as a lot of Asian or even European folklore creatures. The best alternative I can think of off-the-top-of-my-head would be Big Foot, and ‘Night of the Big Feet’ sounds about as menacing as it does sensual. It’s because of this that veteran translator Jeremy Blaustein (Metal Gear Solid, Snatcher) decided to go in a different direction. Americans don’t really have a great set of creature folklore, and obviously outside our own little niche communities of nerds, don’t know Japanese folklore either--and thus would not get much out of the material presented that way--but that isn’t to say there weren’t plenty of other folk creatures out there that are well known to Americans. While Blaustein’s choice of the Banshee has some awkward work-arounds (mainly an Irish ghost being in Canada and all that), it’s something pretty much everyone knows--a part of popular culture that has stayed with us all, and was a really great stand in for a Kamaitachi, or Sickle Weasel.

Not everyone knows what a Kamaitachi is, even anime nerds might not, as it isn’t the most popular yokai (sadly not enough people have read Ushio & Tora), but pretty much anyone knows what a Banshee is. Both creatures also work quite nicely together, setting the right winter horror atmosphere. In the middle of a terrible blizzard, the howling winds have enough force to knock down tress, shatter glass, and even flip over cars. You can feel the cold down to your bones, it’s bitter and resentful, and while it might just be your imagination, the thought that such fierceness could even be enough to cut through you doesn't seem too ludicrous while out there in the storm. In the original Japanese text we had the Kamaitachi that are known for riding on dust devils, and their sickles that can easily be associated with a wind so fierce that it may even scratch you, while in the English text there’s the Banshee, known for their howls--like that of the howling wind. Anyone who has ever been trapped in a fierce wind storm can attest to the truly demonic, otherworldly sounds fierce wind can make--a howling Banshee’s does not seem far off during a terrible blizzard.

What’s important here is that the original essence of the story is coming out for the audience, and in that regard Blaustein succeeds remarkably, creating a very enjoyable reading experience that is truly on par with the Japanese writing. The text is a pleasure to read, and flows incredibly well. The utter horror and sense of being trapped truly leaps off the ‘page’ and it’s a genuinely harrowing experience while also not missing any of the charm and unique humor the original Japanese version is so well known for as well. In his own words Blaustein talks about his decision for such a strong localization as opposed to keeping the original folklore and setting:

“When I asked myself if the idea of small weasels with scythes strapped to the legs would resonate with a Western audience that has no such myth, I had to answer no. Furthermore, even the word "weasel" brings to mind shifty Steve Buscemi-like personalities as opposed to something supernatural and scary. In trying to make a true localization that would capture the essence as opposed to the trappings of the story, I decided Banshee would be more in keeping with the original SPIRIT of the game. From that POV, I feel that I am actually closer to the reproducing the feel of the original for a Western audience than I would be if I had kept it Japanese. It is hard perhaps to explain, but I feel strongly about it.”

So let’s finally talk about this story, as really it’s the whole meat and potatoes of the game and is what it’s all about. Banshee’s Last Cry has a simple premise at first: a group of people are trapped in an Inn during a terrible snowstorm, things soon become suspicious when three of the guests find a note slipped under their door that reads “TONIGHT@MIDNIGHT=DEATH”. The characters initially try to write this off as a prank but it doesn't take long until people go missing and their corpses show up: the first of which is horribly mangled in a grotesque, almost implausible manner, that leads to the cast wondering if perhaps something supernatural is at play. It’s a Whodunit, with a spice of the potential paranormal. Think old dark house, but with snow.

There are 43 different endings in this particular version of the game, however many of these endings are death related bad ends. For example, let’s say you are given three options when it comes time to confront a potential murderer: one of these options will probably lead you to confronting the wrong person and accidentally escalating the situation until you through your own actions or the actions of another ends up getting an innocent person killed resulting in a game over. The second choice then might result in you choosing the right person but messing up how you confront said person and being killed yourself. That’s two bad endings right there, and 41 more endings to go. The third choice then is the actual right choice to keep the story moving down its natural progression. A lot of the branches in the story can work like this example I just made up, but don’t be disheartened as you can always skip ahead after the game restarts and get right back to where you were and try again. Plus completing endings may unlock new dialogue choices given to you and can lead to endings you could not have seen otherwise at the start of the game.  

Despite the many death related bad endings out there to haunt you in your mystery solving there are plenty of other actual story progressing endings as well, and lots of different stories even to boot. Once you solve the main mystery and finally figure out the murderer and how they pulled off their killings, the game is not over yet. There are other stories that get told with the same basic setting and characters. Sometimes some character’s backgrounds and personalities change completely, other times some characters might be swapped out with new characters! This is especially true in a gag story you can unlock where the first victim who dies a particularly gruesome death is replaced by an overly flamboyant cross-dresser (or maybe it’s an anthropomorphic goat?) and hijinks ensue.

Yes, there also happens to be tons of comedy in this. Probably half the game is really hard edged and full of gruesome horror with crazy high death counts, while you white knuckle your way through it trying to find the bastard who did all this, if it’s even an human to being with, while the other half of the stories are gut busters that turn everything you know on its side and deconstruct horror tropes leaving you laughing the whole way through. Sometimes people are murdered horribly, sometimes you are caught up in a James Bound movie between a war of spies, and sometimes the game just goes absolutely nuts. There is honestly nothing quite like it, you can say Banshee’s Last Cry is an expert case of a video game that both terrifies and trolls its audience, and that’s the best part about it.

Out of all the crazy endings in the game I think my personal favorites have to be the one where you can decode a hidden message in the dialogue presented and learn that Chunsoft is behind a conspiracy to take over the world by brainwashing you and everyone else who plays their games, and the ending that pokes fun at Chunsoft’s other big series: The Mystery Dungeon games. If you ever played a Shiren the Wanderer, or the many, many, many other mystery dungeon flavored games such as Chocobo Dungeon, Etrain Mystery Dungeon, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, Barbie’s Dream Dungeon, or even Call of Dungeon Medieval Warfare, you’d get a real kick out of exploring the basement of the Inn and discovering it’s actually an RPG Dungeon that you can dungeon crawl through, fight classic fantasy monsters like Goblins in turn based combat, and try to find treasure chests. This game is just an absolute marvel that keeps giving in how it messes with your expectations.

And this is truly the most horrifying thing about Banshee’s Last Cry, there’s nothing quite like it out there in English, and it’s already about to fade away forever. Banshee’s Last Cry launched in January of 2014,  and since then has only had one update, about a week later after it came out and has never been updated since. This September (2017), Apple has launched their newest update: iOS 11 that moves their devices from 32-bit to 64-bit, in the process breaking a lot of past games and applications. A lot of developers have been prepping for this and have updated their products, but a lot of other apps have been left to wallow in oblivion (much like Shin Megami Tensei I -- another miracle of the mobile market now dying with iOS 11). Banshee’s Last Cry has not yet been updated and very likely never will be. This is another game lost to the harsh reality of a digital market place. If you’re thinking maybe the Android version can still be saved, well unfortunately even though Aksys Games advertised an Android version. one never materialized. The only way to play Kamaitachi no Yoru in English is to have an iPhone that hasn't yet converted to iOS 11, an update that is already a month old now at the time of this writing.

There may be hope in the future, as Spike Chunsoft has since shown some interest, a previous Twitter poll from last year over what games people may want to see localized saw “Kamaitachi no Yoru” (yes, not Banshee’s Last Cry) show up in it. While it did not win the poll there still might be a chance for it yet. Another sound novel in that poll, 428, lost as well but was announced for an English steam release. Perhaps if 428 can make it maybe Kamaitachi no Yoru can eventually too. There also happens to be a really nice and shiny new PS Vita remake to work off of for Kamaitachi no Yoru, that converted the game into a more traditional visual novel which will most likely have greater appeal to the English speaking market nowadays.

The future is hard to really tell, but such a fascinating and important game like Kamaitachi no Yoru deserves a better chance for an English audience to enjoy. It shouldn't be stuck on a dead platform that won’t work on modern phones and just the few YouTube Let’s Plays that are out there of it. I cannot think of anything more horrifying than the lost of game like this.

Fun Facts:

1.) Kamaitachi no Yoru was originally made using photographs of the real world location it was set in as the backgrounds. The developers added in some digital effects where they were needed such as pixelated snow moving across the screen and the silhouettes of characters talking. When the developers could not get a background they wanted in real life they created miniature models for them, such as the wine cellar. The Mobile version of the game again does the same thing, but interestingly the English localization Banshee’s Last Cry, retook a lot of the photographs of the Inn setting by using a real Inn you can actually visit in British-Columbia. While some of the interior shots are the same, some are quite different. The miniature models and digital effects seem to have all stayed the same though. You really have to appreciate such workmanship in keeping everything as real and practical as possible. Here are some comparisons of the Japanese and English Inn used:

Kamaitachi no Yoru iOS Comparison

2.) The music in Banshee’s Last Cry is just fantastic. I couldn’t really think of a spot to properly talk about it above but I really loved this particular version of the soundtrack. If you want to check it out you can should be able to find it on YouTube. I also uploaded the music to my Soundcloud as a back-up.

3.) While I didn't want to go to the monstrous task of hunting down EVERY version of Kamaitachi no Yoru I did at least take some comparison screenshots between the original Super Famicom version, the localized Banshee’s Last Cry iOS version, and 2017 Vita remake that turns the game into a visual novel. Check below:

Kamaitachi no Yoru - SuFami - iOS - PS Vita Comparison

[8bitsupervillain]

Higurashi When They Cry Hou Ch. 7 Minagoroshi pt. 4

Shortly after this scene at the Irie Clinic Rika and Satoko are off to the local game store to play their board game tournament like they did at the start of Watanagashi.

Seriously, the original art for Hanyuu makes her look like such a pathetic creature, just a real sad sack. Which I guess is a perfectly in-line look to have given her character is a rather gloomy apathetic individual. Hanyuu throughout the early stages of the chapter is constantly telling Rika to not get her hopes up and to basically assume that nothing about her fate is going to change at all ever.

A good portion of the board game tourney here is spent with Rika just overcome with a despair over how repetitious and pointless it all seems. It doesn't really get into it, but there's the distinct impression that she's lived through this tournament a fair number of times throughout the hundred plus year span she's been stuck in the loop. Also for some reason there's an odd change in the dialogue during this section. Rika tells Keiichi that he'll wind up playing the game Billionaire with his group, but when the store owner brings out the game it's a copy of the Game of Life. Which Rika acts like is normal, telling Keiichi that this is how fate always seems to shake out whenever they do this gaming tournament. Keiichi then decides basically, nuts to that and requests a different game for him and his group. Instead of Billionaire/Game of Life, the three play a game called pop-up pirate. Which is a game where you stab little swords into a barrel that has a pirate guy in it. This small change in fate inspires Rika to request a change to her groups game as well. It doesn't say what they change it to, but they do.

This small change in destiny made the visual novel then proceeds to skip over the game tournament. Presumably it happens the same as it did previously. I know Hanyuu is trying to keep Rika's expectations low so she doesn't get hurt by the lack of significant changes in her fate, but I do wonder how she perceives the small microscopic alterations to events like the above. Later on Hanyuu acts like these changes of events won't actually affect anything in the long run, and she advocates a "let's just let nature run its course" type of approach to Rika's situation. But I wonder if she's secretly slightly thrilled at the minor changes because it drags Rika temporarily out of her deep gloom.

It's now after the tournament, when the shop owner gives everyone, sans Mion a doll. I was surprised here because the visual novel offers a choice between whether Rika should try to influence events and convince Keiichi to give Mion the doll, or to observe.

I don't know if there will be ramifications further down the line, but choosing either option results in the same dialogue playing out for the most part. If you go with the try to influence Keiichi option there's a few lines extra about how he seems somewhat aware of your interjection, but otherwise it plays out the same.

I like the insinuation here that Hanyuu might not actually be Oyashiro. Who she would actually be is an interesting question I think, I'm pretty sure she is actually Oyashiro, but the idea that she's just some random horned weirdo who hangs out with Rika is also pretty amusing. Just some divine entity hanging out with the reincarnation of Oyashiro for a lark.

Oh yeah, also in this version of the universe Shion is in Keiichi and so on's class. It seems to be taking place in the hallucination Shion had before she died at the end of Meakashi.

Something that's been slightly bothering me since it came up in Tsumihoroboshi, and gets brought up again here is the change of the food they put the needle in from Onikakushi. They mentioned it was Ohagi, and it just struck me as wrong, because it was something else originally, I thought. So I went back and checked, sure enough in Onikakushi Mion mentions that they made mochi for Keiichi. Now I know this is a really extremely minor thing to get distracted by, but I am just sort of curious about the change here. According to the release dates on GOG and Steam there was four years between the chapters, and maybe it's more accurate this way or something. But there's been quite a few little changes in various aspects of the plots from chapter to chapter. The difference in the corpse tunnel in Watanagashi to Meakashi still being the largest one. It's not really affecting my enjoyment of the series, just a little oddity I've noticed.

Also did I mention Shion's back? She's back, in supporting cast form. And boy howdy do I have some opinions about some actions she takes later on.

[8bitsupervillain]

Higurashi When They Cry Hou Ch. 8 Matsuribayashi pt. 31

For some reason, it just occurred to me that outside of those two crashes way back at the start of the chapter I didn’t run into any more issues during the rest of it. Not that I’m complaining the game wasn’t crash happy, just a vague wondering of why the first few hours of the chapter were prone to crashing. Of course, visual novel, don’t really know why it would have significant bugs anyway. Ah, but then I don’t know the first thing about programming, so who the hell knows. I had just as many crashes with Firefox as I had with Matsuribayashi.

A roll of a one (continued)

Thinking about it that is kind of an obvious thing isn’t it? Sure Irie wants to cure Hinamizawa Syndrome, but that really is dependent on the larger research Takano has been doing. Assume C117 does cure the symptoms they’re aware of, there’s always the chance that by curing these symptoms it might make some other unknown symptom significantly worse. You could reasonably argue that even the weapons research Takano has done could tie in to the search for a cure. But then that’s a rather common story trope isn’t it? Government, or the money man just doesn’t see the true value of their research, and so they’re shutting em down.

So Takano will gather up all of her research and samples, and just as she’s about to escape a squad from Tokyo is sent to retrieve the samples, and she winds up shot and dying so she injects herself with a sample, and become a giant clawed monstrosity and kill them. Happens all the time really, and not just in five separate retellings of the same event. There are almost as many games about the destruction of Raccoon City as there are chapters in the mainline Higurashi series. Crazy.

Also, there was a small grammatical error in one of these screenshots. “We we’re.”

I know that this is a government funded research endeavor, but I do wonder if some venture capitalist swooped in and offered to bankroll the research after the government shut them down if they’d be able to just continue from where they left off. Or if since they’re sworn to secrecy if Takano would have to go all the way back to Hifumi’s old research, if she was even allowed to have that much.

Disappointment

Resisting the urge to make the obvious joke.

It’s probably because I’m not a research scientist, but nearly a decade to research a thing sounds like a pretty large amount of time to get results. I’m going with the time scale of roughly a decade because we don’t know exactly when the institute/clinic was set up, but I’m going to assume it was finished around early 1978. There’s circumstantial evidence that the news they’re going to be shut down in three years time was given to them in either late 1982 or early 1983. So they’d in theory still be up and operating in 1986, so it’s kind of surprising they act like they achieved basically nothing in that time.

What a peculiar choice of phrase there. “No matter how hard she pushed herself to act villainous…” Was Tomitake aware of her support of dissecting the dam murderer and Satoko? Or does he just mean villainous in how she has to act cold and unfeeling in these meetings with the bureaucrats and money-men in Tokyo?

I find it kind of funny that while Takano’s life is falling apart Tomitake is just like “but what about me though?” It is a surprisingly realistic writing of a character.

I find this is also a surprisingly realistic look into Takano’s mind. They made a lot of noise about how she thinks that in addition to be an ace researcher she needs to also be a bit of a social butterfly. Yet despite her aspirations on that front you see here that she doesn’t really understand how people function. There are a surprisingly large amount of people who assume they can just study how to act and behave around people, and that they absolutely get it. Yet small human traits just completely fail to register with them. This fragment was a surprisingly humanizing one for the woman who is meant to be an irredeemable monster.

Also I find that this is just a very nice and subtle set up for what is probably the core thesis statement of the chapter, if not the whole series. The idea that you shouldn’t try to shoulder the burden of everything all on your own, and that you should rely on other people to get you through the most impossible of times. It’s subtle now, it will become significantly less subtle before the end.

[8bitsupervillain]

Higurashi When They Cry Hou Ch. 7 Minagoroshi pt. 28

Time to choose. It’s time to choose.

See, what I didn’t tell you is that you don’t actually get to choose. It doesn’t play very well with the screenshot format, but when it was highlighting the choices? That was entirely the visual novel, I didn’t get the choice.

Again, please ignore the seemingly random characters in the background. I’m not an expert screenshot taker. It was all a deceptive ruse you see! Despite saying they were going home, good old Eagle Eyes Rena saw the Mountain Dog and convinced the others to hang around. For two hours. In the dark. But hey it worked out. Also once again I enjoy the little glimpses that prove the deception to Mion saying the Sonozaki family isn’t a suspicious nefarious organization. Guess Ooishi was right after all that they do have a secret cache of illegal guns at their estate.

Kind of a boneheaded oversight on the part of the military kill squad to not have all of them similarly armed like the ones who snuck into Rika’s house. Also, don’t worry guys, unless the plot demands it, you’ll be out for like two seconds tops, her stun gun is more like getting shocked by a faulty light switch than anything.

I’m not going to lie, this part legitimately gave me shivers.

The fact that Hanyuu seemingly froze time just so everyone can truly appreciate how well and truly fucked they are sent such a complex wave of emotion through me it was mystifying. I know this probably isn’t Hanyuu’s doing, but the fact that everyone for some reason is able to look at the bullet about to put Keiichi down was jaw dropping.

God bless you anime time, for letting scenes like this happen.

It’s screens like this that makes me doubt the earlier claims that Hanyuu doesn’t remember Rika’s deaths. That the idea that she doesn’t is just Rika’s own faulty conclusion she’s jumping to.

One of the things I appreciate about Takano’s turn to villainy is the fact that they didn’t decide to ham it up. They very easily could have had her start becoming the ojou-laughing mustache twirling villain with her voice acting, but they didn’t. And I really like that about this chain of events. I try not to make comparisons to everything all the time, but they could have very easily had her pull a Junko Enoshima here, but instead they just kept it straight. Too many pieces of media, when the villain gets revealed just become a parody villain.

Another thing I appreciate here is the sheer brutality of crushing their hopes and dreams. It could have danced around for a while with both sides getting the upper hand on the other until eventually Takano and the Mountain Dogs overcome them. Instead it decided to just cut straight to the point and have the evil military character just do the realistic thing and just shoot her problem. It is a surprisingly realistic outcome amidst all of these other fantastical elements.

Bonus manga pages:

I really like how in the manga version of Minagoroshi Hanyuu's clothes are similarly ghostly like herself. The flow upwards and have that spiritual effect where it looks like parts of it are breaking off and floating upwards.

In some scenes anyway. Also given what is revealed about Hanyuu in Matsuribayashi I can understand why the manga gave her a larger chest.

She is a delight.