Just curious what the oldest game is that you’ve played, and whether you enjoyed it or not. I’m less interested in the technical experience, so you can use the original release date, even if you played a more modern implementation.
For me, Fate/stay night just barely beats Clannad, by a few months. Both were released in 2004, and both show their age a little bit (Clannad in its convoluted branching, Fate in its resolution options), but are perfectly playable. But of course both are super popular classics, so I wonder if you all had similar experiences with more obscure or older titles.
really good VN, I loved it (especially the far side routes which isn’t an unpopular opinion) it has it’s rough edges, but if you can manage to look past those you get something truly amazing. I don’t know if I mentioned it earlier but I do have this thread which goes over where you can start reading, a big thing to keep in mind though is that the translation for the original VN is very much one by fans for fans (even though it’s been cleaned up quite a bit on the readtsukihi.me version) and that some things may not make a lot of sense due to how well the translation works and some things in the original VN (damn you SHIKI).
at the time I had emacs installed which would open the file; but that wasn’t really a good option as I wanted to split the script into individual blocks using a rust program and decided the easiest route was convert from SHIFT_JIS to UTF-8 and replace
¥with\(it made sense to use the same byte)Hmm, at this point I’d look at the file headers using a hex editor to see if there are any magic bytes (readable as ascii text) and see if that gives me anything. maybe also see if there are any additional resources packed into the .exe file (you can open those with any archive manager or the
unzipcli tool) and see if there are any files that can help trace what engine it is or who made it. another thing you can try is to run the binary throughstringsto see if there is any text inside it (although I don’t know how well this works on windows binaries) and finally (although this will be quite a bit harder) is to use something like Ghidra to look at the assembly and decompiled C code; but that’d be something you best keep as a last resort.No problem, it’s refreshing to be able to talk about this with someone after spending hours of my time acquiring knowledge trying to extract sexy vampire sprites.
I’ve seen most of the various Fate anime series and all the Garden of Sinners films and I…wasn’t a big fan of either of them. I thought the 6th Garden of Sinners film was pretty good, and definitely my favorite of the Anime in the nasuverse I’ve seen. But I still want to give Tsukihime a go, because I’m sure I’ll like these stories more in visual novel form.
Thanks for the links. I had a look on Mandarake and amazon.co.jp and…yeah, those prices are steep for a 25-year old game. I hope Type Moon sells the original again sometime, but it seems unlikely considering they’ve remade it for the Switch, not including the original game with it. Maybe it’ll eventually get an anniversary release with all the versions like Subahibi did.
I’ll be playing the game in Japanese when I do get around to it, so I’m not concerned about translation quality.
Thank you for sharing this with me! I’ll keep it in mind for when I go poking around the Sonohana files, and other games.
A noble cause.
I haven’t read the KnK novels so I can’t speak for them, but in Fate/Stay Night there’s an awful lot of inner monologue that got cut because it doesn’t really fit the anime format, Shirou’s actions make sense when it’s there; but when it isn’t it feels like he’s downright stupid rather than chase an ideal he’s hold so high thanks to Kiritsugu.
Not a lot of people like it, it has quite a tonal shift from what the rest of the series it but it fits closer to what Nasu does in other works like Mahoutsukai no Yoru. The VNs tend to highlight the slice of life aspects of the series more than the anime and coupled with their writing style it seems to work best in Tsukihime where all these aspects flow together to form one coherent whole.
I don’t think they ever will, Type Moon has tried to distance themselves from some aspects of their earlier works and those shine very brightly in the original. I haven’t read the remake yet so I can’t say how things hold up there; but I’ve heard people say that it’s a thing on it’s own because of the changes made.
When you do, make sure to look for all the extra stuff along with the Plus Disc, it might be hard to find but there’s a lot of stuff that’s interesting but untranslated and never shared with the english audience (I have yet to check it out myself actually).
Glad to see someone agrees
I remember being very bored by the second season of UBW but also kind of liking it. I’ve seen the original Fate series (yes, yes I know), the UBW series, the UBW movie, and Fate/Zero. I think I liked UBW the most.
I actually meant the 5th movie, haha, sorry! But the 6th movie is my second favorite, and I remember very little about the other ones. I’ve been wanting to read Mahoutsukai no Yoru for a long time, ever since I saw the cover. I like Slice of Life stuff a lot!
That’s a crying shame. I wish more companies preserved their work for future audiences, though if they don’t want it preserved, I can understand why, haha. Even if I don’t agree with it.
Will do!
If you haven’t already go watch the Heaven’s feel trilogy or read the route in the VN (I do think it’s coded so you’d have to finish Fate and UBW first though).
Mahoyo is mostly slice of life and it’s done pretty well, it has the occasional action but the majority of it is about Aoko (she has a brief appearance in Tsukihime) and you get a really good intro to the magic of the Nasuverse (Fate also tries to do that; but after the second explainer from Rin you’ve kind of had it) Tsukihime isn’t going to spend it’s time infodumping (except a couple scenes near the end of the Arcueid and Ciel routes) and you’re just expected to know things like KnK. I recently finished the Mahoyo VN (thanks to the re-release actually offering an english translation even if it has a couple issues (although I’ve read worse)) and it’s pretty banger even if the slice of life scenes didn’t entertain me all that much (although they are used really well to build the characters and their relationships). It is a pretty short VN though (at least compared to the other Nasuverse works) and definitely worth a read.
I don’t know what engine it uses though as it’s hidden behind the switch executable; but I suspect they’re using some form of kirikiri as it is very similar to Fate/Stay Night.
It is a shame, especially with Tsukihime where the far side routes are currently only available through the original game with the remake coming™. Although I have heard that there is some interest in a proper translation if they were to do a PC release (and let’s hope it won’t take them another 10 years to do so). That said I am looking forward to the scrapped Satsuki route which would no doubt be a complete banger (at least from what I’ve been able to gather with the content from the original and what we see on the Plus Disc)
I don’t watch that much anime anymore, but I will definitely give the Fate VN a go. I’ve been curious about Heaven’s Feel for a looong time.
Okay, you’ve kind of sold me on Mahoyo as my first Nasuverse VN. That sounds right up my alley, and it’s a bonus that it’s short, haha. That’s not something you can say about most of Nasu’s games. I keep seeing this game pop up everywhere on VN sites! Maybe I’ll have to give in soon and buy it.
I do hope there’s a PC release for either the remake or the original, since that would make acquiring it much easier for me. I do own a Switch, but I don’t really want to play VNs on it… But it’s good that there are reasons to be excited about the remake.
I’m not gonna stop you, I’ve had my fair sare of fun with it and the beauty of the nasuverse is that you can start anywhere and still have enough context to figure out what’s happening (except when they start pulling out magic, that shit still hurts my brain). Personally I prefer the longer format of Tsukihime as it is used really well to build up your knowledge across routes and throw new things at you at a reasonable pace (fate does the same, but I find the execution of it done better in Tsuki)
if you can get your hands on the NSP file (which you can do by dumping it using a modded switch) Yuzu should run it just fine and you can read it that way, it’s how I read Mahoyo and it’s come a long way performance wise that I managed to do it on a 2015 toshiba satellite. I would recommend using some sort of controller (if you’re on Linux you can use pretty much whatever you have on hand) I tried using keyboard mappings and it isn’t really that great even after setting them up as best as I can.
I usually prefer longer visual novels, but I’m looking for shorter ones at the moment. I want to see more of what’s out there rather than spending months on a single work, even if that’s fun too. I mean, one of my first visual novels was Umineko, lol…
Thanks for the tips regarding emulation! I might find them handy one day when I tackle the Tsukihime console release(s). I’ve never really done emulation before, although I do know a little about it.