Hey, welcome to the last entry in this weekly blog! Yeah that’s right, this is the end, the last time I’m going to talk about videogames and visual novels, so let’s make it a good one!
Or rather a short one because I'm pretty tired.
VVVVVV
Vehveevehvehveev is a game that I think is now tied with Street Fighter 4 for how many times I’ve bought it. I got a copy when it first came out, got it again when it was ported to Steam, bought it technically a few more times via bundled, gifts to friends and stuff like that, and now finally I went and got myself the 3DS version too.
V^6 is one of my favourite indie games, from the great soundtrack to the amazing aesthetic and graphics, to the insane level design, this game is pretty much perfect to me. I at some point ended up trying to speed run the game even, coming close but not reaching my goal of beating the game in under 15:24, the length of the game’s quick look. I think my best time was 15:48 and I couldn’t find any more places to cut time and eventually gave up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5IAsHen7GA
So what’s cool about the 3DS version? Well there are custom made levels and a level editor... That was also added to the Steam version at some point. So really I don’t know what is actually new, if anything. Regardless, the game is still pretty dope, and part of me really wants to try that speed run again.
To be fair I hadn’t actually played the custom made levels yet, and there are quite a lot of good ones available, ranging from pretty cool to downright sadistic. Seriously, some of these custom levels made Veni Vidi Vici look easy by comparison. I didn’t get around to playing all of them but it’s nice to know there’s more content to a game that I already love.
True Remembrance
I talked before about how difficult I find explaining why I like the things I do. This is also super apparent when it comes to visual novels, as all of the good ones I usually just resort to some variation of “you should try it I dunno”. This brings me to what I consider my favourite visual novel to date, True Remembrance. Let’s see how long I can go before I just say you should go try it yourself.
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You should go try it yourself. It’s completely free!
The story of True Remembrance takes place in a future in which suicides have become a pandemic. The pandemic has been dubbed “The Dolor”, and there exists a city full of doctors capable of treating the pandemic. These doctors are known as mnemonicides and they are able to treat patients by erasing their memories. Mnemonicides are ranked from Epsilon to Omega, the latter being so rare they exist only as rumours. The story stars an Alpha rank mnemonicide, which is one rank below omega, called Blackiris, who returns home one day to find a new patient, a young girl called La, whom he has to treat.
Much like Planetarian, the story doesn’t feature any branching paths or anything of that sort. Instead, it’s just a simple story, and it truly benefits from that. I consider this to be one of the best, if not the best story in any visual novel I’ve played. Riddled with interesting characters, a really cool concept and a fair amount of twists, what the story sets out to do it achieves effortlessly.
Unfortunately that’s really all I can say about the game. The art isn’t that appealing and the music is pretty good, and that just about covers all of what this visual novel has to offer. Though the weird thing about this one is that it was ported to the 3DS e-shop, by Arc System Works no less, featuring a much more anime art style which, in my opinion doesn’t really suit the game at all. The odds of that version being translated and put out over here are incredibly slim, but who cares because, like I said, the PC version is completely free! Completely free! You’d be crazy not to try it out!
This is the final entry in this silly blog. Or at the very least the final entry of this blog as it has been over this past year. I started writing this piece of crap in the first week of June last year, so it’s only fitting the last entry would be the last week of May. I had planned almost from the start just to go a year and see where that left me. It also happens to be the 50th entry in this series, because I missed two weeks due to illness, so that’s also a thing.
There are a few reasons for this, but the biggest one is the weekly format is pretty much killing me. Sure I have a lot of free time on my hands but playing one visual novel a week can really get a bit tedious. In some cases to actually be able to write about a visual novel per week I’d start playing a few at once, which can get pretty confusing at points. A month ago or so I started playing Kamidori Alchemy Meister and I still haven’t finished it. I think at this point I could write a thesis on that game and still have no idea what I actually think about it. Will I ever talk about it? Yeah probably, but I have no idea when that’d be. The format was also a disciplinary thing, as I’m always pretty terrible at meeting deadlines. I figured setting an arbitrary deadline myself and trying to adhere to it every week would help in that regard.
I feel the mission I set out to do at the start of this blog has been achieved. Visual novels were always seen as something you’re not meant to talk about in my group of videogame loving friends. Even if I would try to convince them there are great stories and great games in this format, none of them would have it, with one of my friends saying rather abruptly “no-one plays porn games for the story”. This blog covered a fair variety of visual novels, ranging from non-pornographic, to strategy games, to simply some amazing stories. What I wanted to emphasise while doing this weekly blog was, in fact, there are great gems in this medium, and you shouldn’t just look at the entire medium as a whole and condemn it. Hell, if you looked at videogames as a whole, it’s the budget games and mini-game compilations that’d take up the broader strokes, and of course we know that isn’t what makes the medium great.
The reason I got into visual novels was rather interesting, I say that knowing full well it isn’t actually interesting but I’m going to tell you anyway. I was present during the original Katawa Shoujo thread on 4chan’s /a/ board, but at the time I was also like “who the hell wants to play a game that’s basically a book?” and didn’t pay much attention. A few years later the demo came out and, after being stunned people actually went through with it, tried it out. Obviously I was a huge fan, and instead of just waiting for the official release, I decided to find more visual novels instead. The first visual novel I read after that was in fact True Remembrance, and as I said above it still remains my favourite, which is the reason I left it until the last entry.
So yeah, thanks for reading my blog and I hope it convinced at least some of you to try out visual novels. I’ll see you next time I can be bothered typing my thoughts into a browser, but who knows when that’ll be.
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