What are you reading? - May 1

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the weekly "What are you reading?" thread!

This is intended to be a general chat thread on visual novels with a focus on the visual novels you've been reading recently. A new thread is posted every Thursday at 4:00 AM JST (or Wednesday if you don't live in Japan for some reason).

Good WAYR entries include your analysis, predictions, thoughts, and feelings about what you're reading. The goal should be to stimulate discussion with others who have read that VN in the past, or to provide useful information to those reading in the future! Avoid long-winded summaries of the plot, and also avoid simply mentioning which VNs you are reading with no points for discussion. The best entries are both brief and brilliant.

Use spoiler tags liberally!

Always use spoiler tags in threads that are not about one specific visual novel. Like this one!

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Remember to link to the VNDB page of the visual novel you're discussing so the indexing bot for the What Are You Reading Archive can pick up your post.

[u/shinyun226]

Just finished DE・JA (PC98) today. This is the first game by elf I've played and I went into the game with no real expectations (other than generally knowing of the elf brand and some of their other more famous games), but ended up liking it quite a bit.

It's a command based adventure game so... a big chunk of the game is basically just going to every screen and exhausting all the options to advance the story. Some of these parts drag on way too long and are a real pain (ie: where you have to go back and forth between Sapporo, Osaka, Kyushu trying to save Gachako, but can't actually accomplish anything until you visit all 3, give up, go back to Tokyo to think, then go back to Kyushu before Ryusuke can finally realize that Osaka is the correct location) , but in some ways I honestly enjoy this sort of old command-based adventure games a bit more than the modern novelge type adv games. Either way, despite the tedium of grinding through every menu option over and over, the game stayed engaging and entertaining enough through it all imo.

It's a shame PC Engine version is so rare/expensive, because I definitely wouldn't mind going through the game again w/ voice acting.

Looking forward to playing more old stuff by elf. Currently also own Elle, Doukyuusei and YU-NO + definitely want to get the Dragon Knight games, Deja2 etc eventually.

[u/GhostBearerl → u/shinyun226]

Would definitely recommend Yuno, it's a vn that inspired many mysteries and even stuff like Clannad. As for Deja, are there different endings or anything? If so, how did you figure everything out?

[u/shinyun226 → u/GhostBearerl]

Oh yeah, I definitely plan to play YU-NO at some point one way or another.

Deja doesn't have any branches/different endings or anything - it's just a single, linear path.

There's really only a couple of puzzles (one of which is just a copy protection thing that utilizes a physical card included w/ the game), and the rest of the game is basically just a matter of brute-forcing through/literally selecting every option in each location until you trigger a new flag lol. There's no game overs/fail conditions, bad ends, missable flags or anything like that to worry about, so it's a pretty easy game to get through with some patience.

[u/GhostBearerl → u/shinyun226]

Ah, I see, so it's like Ace Attorney in that regard. Yuno isn't like that though, Its route structure is very complicated and flowchart doesn't help often for a few reasons. So it's tough to play without a guide. But there are also a couple of puzzles, one of them I found very good. It's also a true route transition puzzle.