(Part 2) Top products from r/visualnovels

There was a similar question here a year ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/78tr3b/jops_of_rvisualnovels_tell_us_your_stories_of/), and I should probably re-post my reply from there, considering it apparently was well-regarded.

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I was introduced to anime at around late 2007, and by the first half of 2008 I noticed that I started to understand some simple words and phrases. That seemed like a chance to learn a language with minimal effort, so I gave it a try. The other factor was that kanji were always mysterious (and therefore attractive) to me, and I was really curious how a writing system like this works.

So I went to a nearby bookstore and bought a few Japanese language textbooks. Immediately I fell in love with the grammar, which was much more logical and structurally-beautiful than anything I have ever seen before that. Unfortunately though, all the textbooks that I bought had the same big flaw: they required you to learn a lot of words and kanji by heart to be able to read the example texts even in the early chapters.

Since my visual memory and lexical memory are really weak, that was like hitting a wall. I wanted to learn more grammar, but couldn't move forward because of arbitrary lexicon requirenments. So, at around 2009 I gave up on the textbooks I had and started googling for alternatives, and quickly stumbled on what I to this day consider the best language textbook ever: "Japanese in Mangaland".

https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Mangaland-Learning-Marc-Bernabe/dp/4889961151 https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-MangaLand-Basic-Intermediate-Level/dp/4889961860 https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-MangaLand-Intermediate-Level/dp/4889961879

It is brilliantly well-structured, gives all the "conversational grammar" that is completely ignored in "textbooks for serious people", but is dominating the Japanese found in anime and manga. It also gives a lot of examples, which look like taken from anime/manga situations, which makes it even more fun. And, most importantly for me, it does not ask you to learn 50-70 arbitrary words every chapter just to understand the grammar examples.

If you are anime/manga/VN fan, and still below N3 level, you should absolutely check Japanese in Mangaland out.

At around the same time I also stumbled upon a very efficient method of learning kanji: mnemonics. Instead of trying to remember each of the characters visually of mechanically (by writing it many times), you can look at its components (called 'radicals') and derive (or at least associate) the character's meaning from them. It does not work for all the kanji, but for those it does, it is so efficient, that you can easily learn 400-500 basic kanji within 2-3 weeks.

Unfortunately, the book that I was using for that is not available in English, but I've heard that "Kanji in Mangaland" and "Remembering the Kanji" are somewhat similar to what I've been using, so you should check it out also. Even if you know more than 500 kanji, you should try the mnemonics just to understand the method and be alble to apply it yourself.

After that I became very confident in my language skills. To the point that I ordered Suzumiya Haruhi light novels from Japanese Amazon. That was a mistake. I spent like two days deciphering the prologue (4 pages), and had to give up for some time. The problem was, despite knowing most of N3 grammar, and around 500 kanji, it was not nearly enough to read unadapted text by Tanigawa Nagaru. There were too many unfamiliar words and kanji. And the fact that the senteces were insanely long didn't help at all.

Thus I needed a way, to learn more words and kanji. And I found it in writing song lyrics by memory. The technique is like this: you take your favorite anime/VN song. Since it is your favorite, you should remember it somewhat well. You find the lyrics online and go through it, looking up all the unfamiliar words and kanji. And then, when you have free time, paper, and a pen (boring university lectures are especially good for that) you try to write the song's lyrics by memory. After repeating this several times, you should know all the song's lexicon and kanji quite well, and can move to the second favorite one. After doing for 5-6 songs, your vocabulary should become much bigger and your kanji count would probably be around 800-900.

For me that was the point when I tried to read some manga (for me it was "Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai"), and by the end of the 3rd volume I suddenly realized that I AM ACTUALLY READING IT UNTRANSLATED. Reading as in "reading without looking into dictionary every few minutes". That was one of the happiest moments in my life.

Unfortunately, it was still not nearly enough to read Suzumiya. Nevertheless, it was enough to start reading simpler LN: "Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai". That made me feel that I AM ACTUALLY READING IT feeling again.

It was around 2012, and at around the same time I discovered the VN medium, starting with F/sn. I did not dare to try it untranslated yet (remembering the Haruhi fiasco that happened twice), but in about a year of reading simple manga and LNs I decided to try some simple VN as an experiment. So I went to VNDB in search of well-rated untranslated simple VN (for the metric of "simplicity" I chose it being a SoL nukige), and found Kanojo x Kanojo x Kanojo. It was even easier to read than I expected.

So after imprinting a lot of anatomic vocabulary into my brain, I finally tried a much more challenging task: F/ha, which was yet untranslated at that time. And... I actually managed it. I cannot say it was easy, but I was still understanding what was written.

After the realization that I can read untranslated Nasu, it was a matter of time untill I completely stopped bothering with any translation for any Japanese media that I watch or read.

Happy End

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It was in late 2013. After that I basically stopped "learning" Japanese and started "using" it. Everything becomes super easy when you can google Japanese words and grammar structures in Japanese. By now I have finished a lot of untranslated work including notably hard ones like Muramasa and Monobeno, passed JLPT N1 (it was my first JLPT lol) two years ago, and am researching ways of relocating to Japan.

Think about it this way: Reading primary sources that require previous knowledge to understand before you have that knowledge removes an entire level of appreciation you could be having for the work. Almost to the point to where reading it now would likely be just as valuable as not reading it at all. You're effectively paying your respect to their work by learning it properly.

I think it's important to distinguish your reasons on why you want to learn philosophy. If your main goal is to learn as quickly as possible, then contemporary books are the best. In anime/VNs/storytelling, it sounds cool to say "I've read the entire works of Plato, Descartes, and Kant," but in real life it's usually the single worst way to learn philosophy, and definitely won't do their knowledge justice.

Aristotle's teachings are over 2300 years old. We've had a lot of time to think about what he's said (much of it incorrect). On top of this, different philosophers have studied different fields. Just jumping from philosopher to philosopher won't do you any good, since each are likely going to be talking about very different topics. For the record, it takes about 4-8 years of university study to really digest everything that's happening in a single field, and there are over a dozen of them.

That being said, "The Problems of Philosophy" is a good general introduction to the concept of philosophy. A Little History of Philosophy is a personal choice of mine. Just remember, there are no shortcuts.

Not stuff that necessarily came out in 2015, but things I read/saw/discovered in the last year:

• Favorite game: H1Z1 (Battle Royale). Me and a couple buddies been having a ton of fun with that one.
  
• Favorite movie: I finally got around to watching Spirited Away for the first time only a few weeks ago. Such a fun movie.
  
• Favorite book: Memories of Ice. Slowly chipping away at the rest of The Malazan Book of the Fallen series.
  
• Favorite song: Inchlings of the Shining Needle ~ Counter-Attack of the Weak
  
• Favorite anime: Ah, jeez. It's a lame answer, but One Punch Man was my favorite of the year. It even beat out Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso and Shinsekai yori and I really liked both of those.
  
• Favorite show: Hands down Rick and Morty's second season.

Are you looking to incorporate VNs with gameplay or no in your presentation? This will affect the type of VNs you look for.

I find research on communications history will aid your presentation. For reasons stated by others at length here, VNs represent a medium of communication that marries the high-fidelity audio-visual content of television and movies (with particular emphasis on communicating facial expressions) with the information-dense communication abilities of the written word (i.e. books and transcripts). As a result, it combines the best aspects of various communication mediums.

This is a pretty good resource for inspiration if you can find it.

For a school presentation I would avoid 18+ material. You don't want to bring surprises to the presentation that would distract the audience from your points.

Text extraction is easy. You can find programs that read the in-game text as you play the game.

As for text replacement: Grab a hold of someone who is either familiar with VN engines or a reverse engineer.

As for translation at your level: Knowledge of Japanese grammar is more important that Kanji recognition since you can look things up. If you want to learn more grammar, I would recommend picking up these three grammar dictionaries ([1], [2], [3]) and reading through them.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789004546

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Intermediate-Japanese-Grammar-Seiichi/dp/4789007758

[3]: http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Advanced-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789012956

I've read a few books on the matter and sat through a few GDC workshops. The odd thing is, outside of this, I've only ever heard /u/Arcanus44 refer to the concept as 'Juice'.

My personal oddities aside. 'Game Feel' is one of the reasons I opted to use Unity over RenPy for my VN development. There's a lot more to an experience beyond the words we use and the plot points we show.

I don't read a lot of VNs on mobile devices, but I would expect that(especially for 3DS/DS/PSP/Vita titles) to be more common than on PC releases.

Though, I think if you would like a great example of game feel in high-text environment on the PC, Undertale would probably be one of the best examples I have. Take a look at the sprite work during combat. And then how the text animates on. How the text read s l o w s d o w n and the blips deepen during dramatic moments, and is fast and big during more light-hearted moments. Sometimes, even after the text has been written the screen, it gets animated. The way the sprites animate throughout the combat (and non-combat, yet combat like) scenes screams high game-feel.


Edit:

Higurashi has a few good moments with color-shifting the screen, adjusting the text read speed, and sounding that creepy-ass music right when things start getting crazy.

Editx2: And for any devs interested in my reading material, check out Steve Swink's book 'Game Feel'

In my experience, the difference between comics and graphic novels can be pretty blurred, and is often more about the presentation (in terms of paper quality and cover thickness) and quantity (the contents of several comics may be printed in a single volume to create a graphic novel) - for example "Preludes and Nocturnes" can easily be considered as a graphic novel, however its contents were originally published as eight comic issues.

Slightly better than the $287.49 it's currently going for on amazon

Do you have enough swords?

How about this?

The Majikoi S OST is comparatively cheap on amazon and generally easily available - it's even on itunes. The Majikoi OST is sadly more difficult to find, I quickly could only dig up cdjapan and amazon.co.jp if that helps.

Except it's totally in the realm of possibility because Japanese people isn't good when dealing with unexpected disaster, given the context that this game came out in 2012, right after nuclear disaster in Fukushima. There're so many evidences that point to the lack of accountability of human rather than nature disaster got out of hand. In Japanese media, there're also many works that criticize this symptom, the more popular example are the anime Your Name and Shin Godzilla movie in 2016.

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Subahibi is very critical about the paradoxical nature of peaceful everyday life. People that seek the world that has no friction (>!Mamiya and his followers!<), people that turn blind eye to the truth just for the sake peace ( >!Kiyokawa and Senagawa!< ), even the prologue >!has 2 dead end because Yuki accepts her Wonderful Everyday!<. It is so peaceful that it becomes toxic-ate, and when disaster hit nobody knows how to react, it is the paradox of harmony. I highly recommend a book called Japan: the paradox of harmony, it is a very nice read if you interesting in the topic that i just discuss, it isn't a must read to enjoy Subahibi but it could enhance the experience a bit when you could understand Japanese's sensibility.

> Most of the VN's aren't available there. Availability is a little fuzzy when it comes to these things. I don't know where else they're even distributed.

He did mention Amazon. You'd have to buy the Japanese version and then apply a translation patch afterwards. A bit of Googling turns up a few other shopping sites as well.

For games that have not been officially released in the west:

• Rewrite: Amazon, JBOX
  
• Kanon: Amazon, JBOX
  
• Air: Amazon, JBOX
  
• Clannad: Amazon, JBOX (soon to be released in the west by Sekai Project)
  
• Fate/stay night: Amazon, J-List
  
• G-Senjou no Maou: Amazon
  
• Muv-Luv: Amazon
  
• Muv-Luv Alternative: Amazon
  
  Games with official western releases (or OELVNs):
  
  
• Dangan Ronpa: Amazon (also available on the PSP)
  
• Katawa Shoujo: free from the website
  
• 999: Amazon
  
• Long Live the Queen: Steam
  
• Steins;Gate: JAST USA
  
• Saya no Uta / Song of Saya: [JAST USA] (http://www.jastusa.com/saya-no-uta-the-song-of-saya.html)