Shit just got real.

33 Hit combo, no specials used whatsoever. Sadly I didn’t get that one recorded, the best I’ve got saved it 26 hits, and it’s just repetitive and boring. This one looked cool! Some of the combo videos on youtube got me inspired, but some of the stuff people pull of is far, far beyond me. I saw a 100+ combo with White Len, thats insane.

So ever since I finished Saya no Uta, I’ve had the incredible urge to play this game; Cartagra. However, the english translation for it is either going terribly slow, or is just overall dead. I’d go with the second one.

Anyway, even though learning Japanese would be cool (and still faster than waiting for an English patch most likely), I don’t have the patience for that. So I turned to AGTH + Atlas for machine translation and the results were……actually alright.

I’m honestly surprised. The translations this thing spits back are horribly crude English, but despite that, it’s generally easy enough to follow along and know whats going on. Given facial expressions and character speaking combined with my extremely small, basic knowledge of Japanese does help quite a bit, it’s generally understandable nonetheless. The one thing that I wonder if I can correct is the fact that Atlas translates character names as their literal kanji meanings. So the main character, [5 in Autumn], escorts [Harmony Leaves]
to another town, the goes home and meets [the first sound]. Those are some amazing names. (The actual names are Shugo, Kazuna and Hatsune respectively).

Now given, there are some gems this translator comes out with. One scene your sister lifts up her skirt and smirks at you, and the translator spits out:

“The body has stiffened to the remainder”

That was an amazing translation.

First H-scene/flashback thing. Creepy.

As far as the game itself goes though, so far I’m really liking it. I don’t know too much storyline-wise yet, as I only played for about 2 hours. Which, with the translation times having a slight delay, probably only equals 1.5 hours into the game. However, I’m LOVING the artwork and music, it’s all fantastic. Everything is bleak, cold and miserable, and provides a good environment for a murder mystery. And judging from some of the pictures I’ve seen (Spoilers? :X), there will be quite the gratuitous amount of bloodshed to come.

So far my favorite female character is the first sound Hatsune. She’s cute and caring, and just seems generally lovable. This could be because she’s the character that’s just generally been around the most as well, but I’ll probably like her most anyway. There was one other character who appeared in a flashback thing of sorts who sort of reminded me of Kiri from SZS or her lookalike from Hyakko. I love that character design, and that’s no exception here, but she had about 1 line, and is apparently a minor character. Oh well.

Anyway, this game looks really promising, though it’s gonna suck going through it without a guide or anything. Atlas flips out whenever I get to a choice scene as well. Oh well, lots of saving, trial and error. Considering I’m in this for a good bloody Visual Novel, bad ends could be just as satisfying as the good ones…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZCX72VvU5k

Jesus christ.

After about 10-ish months of having Tsukihime installed on my computer, I finally managed to sit down and finish the damn thing. This happened a few days ago, hence the title, but it’s not exactly like I’m some up-t–date blogger or anything. I’m not exactly sure why I’m writing about this, because I don’t exactly have much of a desire to blog about anything anyway, but whatever, it’ll kill some time.

Sadly I wasn’t all that thrilled with the ending, because unknown to me, the spoilers that I knew about the ending ended up being, uh, the entire ending. That’s not to say the ending was bad by any means; it was satisfying and concluded it all fairly well, but I guess I had just expected more or something. Short story; spoilers suck.

That aside, I finished it up and suddenly felt fairly empty inside! For the past 10 months I had been able to say ‘Yeah, I’m playing through Tsukihime’, and now it’s done! What was I to do?! Well, the answer was either one of two things; start on Kagetsu Tohya, or Ever 17. I chose the latter, just to take a break from the Nasuverse for a bit. So far I’m a decent way through the Tsugumi route, although apparently I should have saved that for 2nd-to-last, but whatever.

I also downloaded Cartagra, even though there’s no english translation for it yet. I figured I might try out that atlas translation thing, but if it ends up being too engrish, even if I can figure out what it actually means, I probably won’t play it. This probably will happen, as I can’t see a machine translation being too great, and I don’t want to ruin a potentially great experience by having horrible language. I should just attempt to learn Japanese, it’d make all this easier, but I’m most likely too lazy for that.

Anyway, that’s all for now, and from past experience, for the next month or so.

Hey, the longest it’s been without a blog post here ever! I think the space between these sporatic posts gets wider every time; I’ll write something, write something a day or two later, and then not do anything for about a month+.

Anyway, that aside, I finished Saya no Uta yesterday, and oh man, what a ride. From my (few) experiences with visual novels (and hell, even regular novels), it takes me FOREVER to finish them. Simply because once I stop to go do something else, i’ll get distracted and before I know it, i’ve forgotten all about the novel, and it’s 4 hours later. This was different.

I managed to play through the whole thing in two sittings, and it probably would have been one if I hadn’t started so late the first night. The storyline is just GRIPPING. Everything in the main character’s world is completely fucked up, and he’s completely helpless to change any of it. Because the stuff that’s fucked up isn’t even real; his perception on reality is completely distorted due to brain trauma, and it causes him to see everything in the world as a sort of hell-on-earth. Everything he see’s is made out of flesh and organs, smells of rot and filth and garbage, people look like gargantuan flesh beasts, and speak in a tone that’s just horrific to hear while playing the game, let alone having to live with something like that every day. The one thing he doesn’t see in this distorted way is a little girl who visits him in his hospital room nightly, calling herself ‘Saya’. I don’t want this to turn into a synopsis of the plot through, so we won’t get into that too far.

First, my personal favorite part of this game; the music. Oh man is it creepy. It sets the tone for every scene perfectly, and never quite lets you forget that everything that’s happening to this guy is utterly miserable. And that’s just for the ‘normal’ scenes. Any time something important or scary is about to happen, the music hits perfectly, and doesn’t so much seem like music as it does a literal atmosphere that the game immerses you in. It draws you in, gets you tense, and then scares the crap out of you. Not to the point where you’ll jump out of your seat and start screaming, but enough to get you on edge, and probably turn the light on if you were playing in the dark.

Another thing I liked about Saya no Uta was that it didn’t focus on choices a lot. Now, some people like choices, and having 37 different possible ends to the story, but honestly, I don’t see the appeal in having to read a book 37 times just for the last 20 pages to be different. Simple, direct, and with a few different endings to choose from seems to me like the best format, simply because you can actually enjoy the story, not worry about the other 16 possible ways it could have ended.

The artwork was impressive, and at some points was honestly just creepy to look at. I’m no art expert, so I don’t feel comfortable criticizing it on a level where I sound like I know what i’m talking about, but it was well done. Everything was gritty, dark, cold, and easily let’s you know that this story won’t have too many happy moments. H-scenes were done well, but usually only had 1-2 actual CG’s to them. I think vocals play more of a part than visuals in making the H-scene’s ‘better’ overall, but honestly, you most likely won’t care too much. If you’re playing this SOLELY for the porn and nothing else, there’s better alternatives out there.

One other thing I’d like to point out is that the whole story doesn’t play out from the perspective of the main character. You go back and forth between him and many other characters, and it honestly makes it a LOT better. Hell, most movies don’t follow one character around the entire time. It gives you insight into stuff the main character doesn’t know (or realize) yet, and makes for real “Oh wow…” type reactions. The first death in this wouldn’t be NEARLY as good if you didn’t see it from another point of view first, and that’s not the only point where it makes a difference.

I had always thought the yellow devil was fairly easy from looking at the videos of him on youtube and whatnot. Man, was I wrong. Although I still technically cheated, using the emulators Save function right before the fight started, so if I died I could just reload there and not have to worry about lives or continues. I can’t imagine how insanely frustrating this must have been without that function back on the NES.

In other Megaman-related news, Okkusenman gives off an entirely different feeling when you have lyrics to go with it.

http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2008/12/07/blatant-kannagi-lucky-star-cameo/

And Lucky Star crossovers = instant success^2. The show has featured random references to other shows before, and even had Haruhi made a small cameo at one point, but this is way more emphasized than any of that.

Can’t wait for this episode now though. Hopefully the rest of it is good though. The show started out awesome, and it’s been consistantly good, but not as good as I had originally expected it to be. Simple things like complete lack of “Nice pun” past the first two episodes are saddening. I liked nice puns :(

That felt good. I’ve been bashing my head against hard mode on perfect cherry blossom for a while now. That finally paid off tonight:

Not sure what any of that other stuff means, but it probably showcases how terrible I actually did. I mean, this is the condition I was in when I finished. No continues left:

Yeah, exactly. I probably couldn’t have done it with anyone besides Sakuya(a) either. The fact that her focused fire locks on to enemies is insanely helpful, if not just for the fact that you can focus on dodging stuff more.

I think theres an english patch for this game as well. I should probably go download that sometime.

*Bonus*: Now maybe when I post this it won’t give me a 404 error and ERASE MY ENTIRE POST.

Ctrl+C Ctrl+c Ctrl+C Ctrl+c Ctrl+c

When I first made this blog on WordPress I was aiming for something that looked REALLY clean and simple. The layout I had before this looked exactly like that (and generally what it had looked like before I had a wordpress account). However, after staring at that for a while, it came to my attention that it looked REALLY FUCKING BORING.

So now it looks like this. I don’t even have to worry about designing some terrible banner for the site. Well, I usually like the way my banners come out, I can just never get them to match a webpage. Example of something I made fairly recently because I have nothing better to do with my time:

Too bad I don’t visit any real forums to use that on.