Took a few days to relax after that busy stretch. Man, this lifestyle... sleeping in every day and staying up late every night. It's kind of idyllic and pathetic at the same time, right? But I'm more or less spinning my wheels, Dad's still recovering, and so long as the money's coming in...

Played some of the Utawarerumono visual novel / tactical RPG. The anime seems to have been very faithful to the game storyline, which is a little bad, since I've seen the former - so there's not really any surprises there. Hakuoro, the player-character, remains the world's most unlikely pimp. As a visual novel, it's almost completely non-interactive - there's not even "routes" or choices of which girl to focus on, but basically a single path with the occasional chance to see different scenes that don't materially affect the plot.

There are a few differences. Touka, who's always something of a fun character, is much more of a comedic character in the game than in the anime. (Turns out all the hilariously-inappropriate omake from the TV series were scenes straight out of the game... heh.) And, of course, the visual novel has porn included, though it's basically "one token scene with everybody" (except the loli) (unless you play on hard... ugh). Frankly, it's not adding much to the experience. Porn is porn; it doesn't work in non-porn contexts, and the work to porn ratio is terrible if you were just approaching the game as a porn container.

The tactical RPG portion is kind of fun, mostly because it's a "click to extend your combo" type. Not too challenging, strategy-wise, though a bad selection of units can hurt you on some stages; if you're heavy on ranged attackers with low defense on a level where you can't set up a chokepoint, it's gonna hurt, and there's at least one example of a waterfront battle where Aruruw is at a huge disadvantage. So if you're looking for a big challenge (or, ew, Aruruw porn scene), try it on hard.

I won't be finishing it anytime soon, however, because Mirror Moon just finished their translation of the second path of Fate/Stay Night. I'm going back through the first path (Saber, basically), partly because I enjoyed it a lot the first time, though also because installing the translation patch wiped out my saved games, and so I have to anyway. ;p Virtue out of necessity, and it's not like the Saber route isn't good on its own.

It's interesting to have played the two in close proximity, because Fate/Stay Night has much better presentation. It's still fundamentally a visual novel, so there's not full-motion video or anything fun like that, but Type Moon didn't skimp on the video and audio effects; the fight with Berserker -felt- like something huge and powerful and dangerous was happening, even if there probably weren't more than six unique pictures through the entire thing.

More Fate in the future, to be followed by the newly-translated Unlimited Blade Works (Rin route, basically.) And to hear tell, the third path, Heaven's Feel (Sakura route, dark x e¹⁰⁰) should be finished soon too. I tried to convince Author to try it out, but it seems he won't run it if it won't run under Linux. Definitely a mistake, I think - if you like the concept of visual novels as a format, you owe it to yourself to at least look at the best examples thereof. Makes me wish that this was a commercial product, so I could BUY it - but at the same time, it's pretty hugely translator-intensive and a tiny niche market to boot, not even considering the expense of licensing (and apparently Type Moon aren't the easiest fellows to deal with either...), so I can understand why that's not going to happen.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:07 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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