An app came out on iOS a few weeks ago called "Banshee's Last Cry", it's published by Aksys and is described as "a thrilling visual novel that takes readers on a deadly thrill ride of murder and deception". It's a free download where you pay £2.49 as an in-app purchase to unlock the full game.
It's actually a localisation of an old game by Chunsoft for the Super Famicom, called "Kamaitachi no yoru", or "Night of the Sickle Weasel". I guess they primarily called it "Banshee's Last Cry" to make it look a little bit related to "Virtue's Last Reward" - well, enough to lure fans into spending their £2.49.
They've changed the location of the original story from a ski lodge in Japan to a ski lodge in Canada, made some technological changes to bring it into 2014, re-recorded the soundtrack (some music is the same, some different - some so it doesn't sound so traditionally Japanese, I suppose), gone to an actual Canadian ski lodge to take pictures to replace all the original background images, changed all the names of the characters, and changed the folk mythology from Japanese to Irish.
I've been reading it, and here's what I have to say:
The story is perhaps more "Choose Your Own Adventure" than you might expect from something described as a visual novel. It's what they used to call a "sound novel" - basically a light novel with atmospheric background images, music and sound effects. No character portraits or voices.
The main story really feels like a murder mystery from the 1990s. The murders and descriptions are really quite gruesome sometimes. The plot actually seems really familiar to me, perhaps similar methods were used in some Kindaichi manga I read, or some Detective Conan anime I watched. As such, it was fairly easy for me to pinpoint the correct suspect and details about the initial murder (though I certainly didn't get it on my first play-through). The main difficulty for me was finding the choices in the story where I could express my thoughts in order to trigger the ending.
Another comment on the 1990s feeling of the game - the attitude of the male protagonist and other characters is pretty much that females in the story only exist to be protected. They're rounded up together, and the way they don't seem to be suspects seems dismissive. Any attempt by them to be useful on their own ends up disastrous. I don't think they really even notice.
After my first play-through, certain new options appeared in the game, which is an interesting way of doing things. Your reasoning in previous play-throughs brings you closer to being able to solve the mystery. However, the player does not know - if I use this option it appears to be a short cut of a few pages, but is that relevant to any in-game path change?
Having said that reasoning brings you closer to the correct mystery ending... it's also the case that some endings completely diverge; one ending you can trigger very early in the story has you leaving before any murders take place - and so in that timeline the murder doesn't take place that night (why is that?). In the very worst ending (which is also the first one I saw), I still don't fully understand who committed all the murders at the end.
After I solved the main murder mystery and the credits rolled, a lot more options open up in the game. They lead to far more light-hearted stories, joke endings, and a lot of puns on the word "banshee". It is clear why they are not present when the game is first started. Two of the new endings also had end credits rolling, so they must be the "Occult" and "Spy" endings mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Kamaitachi no Yoru. One is just funny, the other a secret code message which I managed to decode straight away (but it was still fun to read the story). There's also a path with a reference to Chunsoft's "Mystery Dungeon" line of games. Oh it would have been nice if there really was a roguelike built into the app, hahaha.
Issues I have with the localisation - very few. One comment near the beginning about how silly it is to say "cheese" for photos because people end pulling an "ooh" face only really works if you consider the Japanese pronunciation of "cheese" ("chi-zu-"). There are some errors; in the "Snow Maze" path, there's a mistake where they give the incorrect name for one of the characters, accidentally marrying her to the wrong character ("Colleen Buchanan"). In the end of the path with the secret code, the font size messes up and you're left scrolling the page left and right to read.
It would have been nice to have something telling me which endings I've seen so I know if there's anything left to aim for. It would have been nice if like the original Super Famicon version, we could see silhouettes of each character in order to feed the imagination. It would have been nice to unlock some sort of diagram of branching paths for the after-story so I can see the last few things to do. It would be nice if there was a "clear data" option in the menu so I could compare the options available at the start to the ones available after many play-throughs.
Best of all, it would have been nice if it was on Android so I didn't have to borrow an iPad to read it! (I think that's "coming soon").
But overall, it's been a fun read, it was a good price, and it's been a pleasure to experience this little piece of sound novel history so long after the game originally came out. I hope they decide to bring more visual / sound novels out in English on mobile / tablet devices, because it's a very convenient platform for reading interactive fiction.
Showing posts with label visual novel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label visual novel. Show all posts
Saturday, 8 February 2014
Sunday, 7 July 2013
If my heart had wings
"If my heart had wings" is a visual novel on PC, and it's supposed to be really good. A translation is out in English, and Play Asia have been advertising it to me for months. Today I notice it's also made its way to Desura, which to me means it's almost mainstream.
Things hop from Desura -> Steam Greenlight, and as it's got modern, high definition graphics, it could do well.
However.
I found out that it's been heavily censored. Excerpt from: http://visualnovelaer.fuwanovel.org/2013/07/why-i-wont-be-buying-if-my-heart-had-wings/
To put the scope of the cuts in perspective:
- H-content: The original game had 17 H-scenes: 3-4 per heroine. Obviously these were cut entirely.
- Written content: The localized release has 12% fewer lines, reflecting a considerable content gap that was not filled.
- Art: An estimated 50% of the CGs were discarded or modified. This is based on a breakdown of ero / non-ero CG in the original, and includes small variations on the same CG. Take it with a grain of salt.
Now, censored images leave the story intact, but missing 12% of the text... well, that's a large chunk missing when you think you're going to get a full game.
I also read this page with someone complaining about the translation: http://imgur.com/a/pA57s/noscript#0
And it does contain some typos, but mostly this came across as an American reader outraged by the fact that the localisation is not from Japanese into American, but Japanese into English. As spoken in England.
Here, it is normal for someone to say they are moving house, or that they are in two minds about something. Normal, everyday speech. Many of the screenshots highlighted as bad grammar seem perfectly natural to me.
It made me wonder, "does this person complain about the grammar used in Fable games? Do they complain about Stephen Fry's poor grammar when he's narrating Little Big Planet?"
But it makes me want it. So badly. To have a game localised from Japanese into my flavoursome and colourful native language rather than American dialect.
In the page complaining about translation, the writer says they would have translated "in two minds" to "torn between". To me, there is a distinction - "in two minds" means you could go one way or the other and logically they are both equally good/bad outcomes. "Torn between" means you have a emotional conflict between two outcomes, and that's why it's difficult to make a decision.
I'm torn between wanting to buy a critically praised visual novel that's been localised into English for non-American people, and choosing not to support a localisation company that would cut 12% of all lines out of a VN.
Perhaps I should download the demo.
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
The Japanese rape game controversy and getting round website blocking
There was a big hoohah in the news a few weeks ago about some British MP being really offended that 3rd party sellers on Amazon.com were selling copies of the (rather offensive) Rapelay computer game, where players rape women and girls, and, well that's the whole game. Horrific and distasteful and wholly unerotic stuff, imho.
That started a huge controversy, and the initial outcome was that one of the main videogame ratings bodies (EOCS) decided to ban games from having "rape" in the title, as well as banning games containing mostly rape. Hooray! This stopped Rapelay from being sold, and other knock-on positive effects are:
* Rape victims really suffer in Japan as it's not seen as a terrible crime, and the victims are not given much help, and are stigmatised. I read some articles citing government reports saying that although the official crime rate of rape appears low, estimates are that 10 times as many rapes are unreported. It's a really bad problem there. A lot of these games trivialise rape (e.g. "that was a surprise!" then they go about their normal life), and/or show women appearing to have really enjoyed it when it's over, so it's good to stop the positive reinforcement of rape that these games give.
* Rape has become a worn-out cliché of the adult-only erotic game genre in Japan, and there are often a lot of unavoidable rape scenes in games. I am thinking that maybe if makers are forced to stop using boring old rape scenes, they might be forced to dream up new pleasing erotic content using only consenting adults, and attract a bigger and more mainstream audience. I know that when a PC erogame proves popular enough to warrant a mainstream release, all sex scenes are removed for a home console version. I'm thinking that if erogames became less extreme in content they might appeal to more people, and if they clean themselves up they won't have such a bad reputation. So I'm thinking that in the long run, the industry could actually benefit from this action.
However, the controversy continued beyond the subject of rape and some online shops decided to stop selling certain games with other types of extreme sexual content, and it's all still a hot topic and various other things could stop being permitted by the two main ratings bodies.
One way that a few Japanese game companies have decided to react is to block all access to their official websites by all people outside of Japan. Instead, we get holding pages telling us to go away, or perhaps write to the Japanese government in support of erogames. Unfortunately, this action is even being taken by some companies which don't make or sell extreme pornographic games. This is highly annoying, as an official website is often the only (reliable) place to find information about games, and it appears to be nothing but an unhelpful xenophobic overreaction.
If you want to get round the blocks to Japanese websites, use this intermediate website to access them: http://www.ijapan.org/red/
That started a huge controversy, and the initial outcome was that one of the main videogame ratings bodies (EOCS) decided to ban games from having "rape" in the title, as well as banning games containing mostly rape. Hooray! This stopped Rapelay from being sold, and other knock-on positive effects are:
* Rape victims really suffer in Japan as it's not seen as a terrible crime, and the victims are not given much help, and are stigmatised. I read some articles citing government reports saying that although the official crime rate of rape appears low, estimates are that 10 times as many rapes are unreported. It's a really bad problem there. A lot of these games trivialise rape (e.g. "that was a surprise!" then they go about their normal life), and/or show women appearing to have really enjoyed it when it's over, so it's good to stop the positive reinforcement of rape that these games give.
* Rape has become a worn-out cliché of the adult-only erotic game genre in Japan, and there are often a lot of unavoidable rape scenes in games. I am thinking that maybe if makers are forced to stop using boring old rape scenes, they might be forced to dream up new pleasing erotic content using only consenting adults, and attract a bigger and more mainstream audience. I know that when a PC erogame proves popular enough to warrant a mainstream release, all sex scenes are removed for a home console version. I'm thinking that if erogames became less extreme in content they might appeal to more people, and if they clean themselves up they won't have such a bad reputation. So I'm thinking that in the long run, the industry could actually benefit from this action.
However, the controversy continued beyond the subject of rape and some online shops decided to stop selling certain games with other types of extreme sexual content, and it's all still a hot topic and various other things could stop being permitted by the two main ratings bodies.
One way that a few Japanese game companies have decided to react is to block all access to their official websites by all people outside of Japan. Instead, we get holding pages telling us to go away, or perhaps write to the Japanese government in support of erogames. Unfortunately, this action is even being taken by some companies which don't make or sell extreme pornographic games. This is highly annoying, as an official website is often the only (reliable) place to find information about games, and it appears to be nothing but an unhelpful xenophobic overreaction.
If you want to get round the blocks to Japanese websites, use this intermediate website to access them: http://www.ijapan.org/red/
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni - doujin game translation - Onikakushi complete
Okay, I'm nearly a fortnight late on this but updates had become few and far between. The fan translation of the "Higurashi no Naku Koro ni" (When They Cry) visual novel has come so far that they have completed the whole of the first story in the game! :D
Their website: http://sonozakifutagotachi.blogspot.com/
Hooray for Sonozaki Futago-tachi! ^_^
Now I can happily read this and make myself go O_o aaaaaahhhhhhh!!!! >_<
[tenshi_a hides under a duvet or something]
(well, I will do if they've done it right!)
Their website: http://sonozakifutagotachi.blogspot.com/
Hooray for Sonozaki Futago-tachi! ^_^
Now I can happily read this and make myself go O_o aaaaaahhhhhhh!!!! >_<
[tenshi_a hides under a duvet or something]
(well, I will do if they've done it right!)
Thursday, 5 June 2008
Narcissu
This evening, I started to read the first Strawberry Panic light novel, out in the park behind my house. It was a beautiful sunny day and was so quiet that I could clearly hear any human conversation 50m away. Adults walked their dogs, children rode their bikes, police patrolled on horses. I sneezed. And I sneezed. And I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed.
Argh, hay-fever. My body's defenses are too high!
It's just not dignified to sit and read something outdoors with so many bits of soggy tissue paper, so I returned home, closed the doors and windows and showered all the pollen off of me, and decided to stay indoors and read something. Goodbye, sunshine!
I decided to start reading the DS port of the free visual novel Narcissu. I'd avoided it for a long time because I have a medical phobia. It's about two young people whose bodies have also failed them, but in a far more severe way than mine - terminal illnesses.
There's a voiced and unvoiced option for the story, even on the DS port, so I chose to read the voiced version. There is only one voice - a whispering girl, and she doesn't say too much, but it's good to hear her. She's played by "Ms Rino Ayukawa", whom I have never heard of, nor had I expected to recognise her name. But, it's good to hear her.
The music playing is also very beautiful, and fitting.
It's good, a touching story. Something about it, about halfway through the story... something about the two characters, reminded me somehow of the young mute walking couple in the film Dolls, which is one of my all-time favourite films.
Both pieces manage to be somewhat... distressing, never really stop being saddening, but are calming and beautiful at the same time.
It's short enough to read in an evening.
I may come back and read the unvoiced story sometime. It's a separate translation of the story, for one thing.
The DS port is ok, the pictures are possibly too small to clearly see, and there are a few typos in there and sometimes square characters in the middle of some words, but it's cool. It is listed as version 0.0.4, after all. Nice not to have to sit at my PC all evening. (I say, sitting at my PC typing this).
The VNDS is really good, possibly my favourite application for DS. ^_^ It's still receiving constant updates and new stories are being ported to it and released for download every few days! ^_^
Argh, hay-fever. My body's defenses are too high!
It's just not dignified to sit and read something outdoors with so many bits of soggy tissue paper, so I returned home, closed the doors and windows and showered all the pollen off of me, and decided to stay indoors and read something. Goodbye, sunshine!
I decided to start reading the DS port of the free visual novel Narcissu. I'd avoided it for a long time because I have a medical phobia. It's about two young people whose bodies have also failed them, but in a far more severe way than mine - terminal illnesses.
There's a voiced and unvoiced option for the story, even on the DS port, so I chose to read the voiced version. There is only one voice - a whispering girl, and she doesn't say too much, but it's good to hear her. She's played by "Ms Rino Ayukawa", whom I have never heard of, nor had I expected to recognise her name. But, it's good to hear her.
The music playing is also very beautiful, and fitting.
It's good, a touching story. Something about it, about halfway through the story... something about the two characters, reminded me somehow of the young mute walking couple in the film Dolls, which is one of my all-time favourite films.
Both pieces manage to be somewhat... distressing, never really stop being saddening, but are calming and beautiful at the same time.
It's short enough to read in an evening.
I may come back and read the unvoiced story sometime. It's a separate translation of the story, for one thing.
The DS port is ok, the pictures are possibly too small to clearly see, and there are a few typos in there and sometimes square characters in the middle of some words, but it's cool. It is listed as version 0.0.4, after all. Nice not to have to sit at my PC all evening. (I say, sitting at my PC typing this).
The VNDS is really good, possibly my favourite application for DS. ^_^ It's still receiving constant updates and new stories are being ported to it and released for download every few days! ^_^
Thursday, 29 May 2008
DS Visual Novel Reader
There's a visual novel reader for Nintendo DS, you know. I had heard of the demo of Fate Stay Night and some of Tsukihime (English translations) being ported to the DS, but had not looked into it.
The site for the reader is here: http://digital-haze.net/vnds.php
That includes the reader, and ports of that demo of FSN and Tsukihime, as well as Narcissu (which I hear is good from the PC version), and something called "Anon's Nice Day" which I admit I haven't heard of before.
It seems to use its own format - some .scr files that describe the background image to use, sound files, music, text, choices etc, as well as needing those visual/audio files separately.
EDIT: Wow, this Fate Stay Night DS download is 73MB whereas I thought the demo for DS was under 10MB... maybe it's the whole game after all!
The site for the reader is here: http://digital-haze.net/vnds.php
That includes the reader, and ports of that demo of FSN and Tsukihime, as well as Narcissu (which I hear is good from the PC version), and something called "Anon's Nice Day" which I admit I haven't heard of before.
It seems to use its own format - some .scr files that describe the background image to use, sound files, music, text, choices etc, as well as needing those visual/audio files separately.
EDIT: Wow, this Fate Stay Night DS download is 73MB whereas I thought the demo for DS was under 10MB... maybe it's the whole game after all!
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni - doujin game translation
Over the last few weeks I've really been getting into the anime version of "Higurashi no Naku Koro ni". It's a really brilliant series, excellently executed in such a way that it's richly layered, unfolding in the most gripping and entertaining way. It's fairly gruesome in a few places, though, so not for the weak-stomached... I'm up to the 23rd episode of the first season so far...
This first season of this series started being released on DVD in the US by Geneon, but they've since stopped releasing DVDs, so that's a pity. It's only possible to legally buy half of the TV series in English.
The series was based on a multi-part doujin visual novel (or, sound novel, the box says - which means it's mostly text, not so visual) by "07th Expansion", and a group of fans are working on translating the text into English. Their work is available here: http://rapidshare.com/users/MQK6IW
So far they've done the first five days of the Onikakushi arc game (the first story in the anime series), both for the free demo version of the game and for the full version of the game. I haven't tried it yet. I've placed an order for what I thought was a copy of the Higurashi no Naku Koro ni game, but if the pics on wikipedia are anything to go by, that may just be the Himatsubushi arc game (which is the "time wasting" arc, the last of the "question" arcs in the game and the middle of the TV series). Which, on its own, would be a waste of time. But then, the fan-translators point towards instructions on buying Higurashi online to download and play, and it has the same boxart. So, I'm a bit confused. It mentions on wikipedia that each of the answer arcs contains the previous game, so maybe the final question arc did too? Oh well, I'll see how it goes. I also ordered a CD at the same time so I expect I'll be happy with whatever turns up. I want to finish watching the anime series first, and go onto viewing the second season (Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai).
BTW there's a live-action movie coming this year as well. The very idea makes me somewhat afraid.
EDIT - 2008-02-11 20:30: My copy of the Higurashi game arrived today, hooray! It says on the fan translation site that their patch is made for the Himatsubushi-hen version of the game (maybe I didn't notice before), so it'll be the right one. I need to clear up some space to install it. I've listened to the CD - the Yukino Satsuki version of "you" - I really love it. I like this tune, it's so addictive. ^__^
This first season of this series started being released on DVD in the US by Geneon, but they've since stopped releasing DVDs, so that's a pity. It's only possible to legally buy half of the TV series in English.
The series was based on a multi-part doujin visual novel (or, sound novel, the box says - which means it's mostly text, not so visual) by "07th Expansion", and a group of fans are working on translating the text into English. Their work is available here: http://rapidshare.com/users/MQK6IW
So far they've done the first five days of the Onikakushi arc game (the first story in the anime series), both for the free demo version of the game and for the full version of the game. I haven't tried it yet. I've placed an order for what I thought was a copy of the Higurashi no Naku Koro ni game, but if the pics on wikipedia are anything to go by, that may just be the Himatsubushi arc game (which is the "time wasting" arc, the last of the "question" arcs in the game and the middle of the TV series). Which, on its own, would be a waste of time. But then, the fan-translators point towards instructions on buying Higurashi online to download and play, and it has the same boxart. So, I'm a bit confused. It mentions on wikipedia that each of the answer arcs contains the previous game, so maybe the final question arc did too? Oh well, I'll see how it goes. I also ordered a CD at the same time so I expect I'll be happy with whatever turns up. I want to finish watching the anime series first, and go onto viewing the second season (Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai).
BTW there's a live-action movie coming this year as well. The very idea makes me somewhat afraid.
EDIT - 2008-02-11 20:30: My copy of the Higurashi game arrived today, hooray! It says on the fan translation site that their patch is made for the Himatsubushi-hen version of the game (maybe I didn't notice before), so it'll be the right one. I need to clear up some space to install it. I've listened to the CD - the Yukino Satsuki version of "you" - I really love it. I like this tune, it's so addictive. ^__^
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