Welcome, one and all, to my blinder than blind liveblog of the Visual Novel Shuffle, wherein I learn what's so great about visual novels, Dating Sims, and not having a life. And maybe I'll be lucky and learn whether I should be referring to it as "reading Shuffle!" or "playing Shuffle!".
To begin with, this is the official English translation of the original visual novel. This doesn't mean I can't still laugh at any shoddy localization I may find though. Woo!
Next, I suppose I should let my dear readers in on exactly how blind this liveblog is:
- I have never played/read a visual novel before. (Although I am familiar with manga, anime & Light Novels)
- The most I know about Shuffle other than that it is a male-oriented dating sim visual novel is a brief glance around half a year ago at the introduction of its trope page. I forget essentially everything I had read there.
- The closest thing I have ever played to a dating sim was Persona 3 and Persona 4. I don't know how these compare, but right now I'm gonna guess that unlike in Persona, the Tenchi Solution is not an option here... not that it was really an option there; they never really addressed how the protagonist was essentially a male slut. :/
- And finally, I have never done a liveblog or anything like that before, so excuse me if this isn't up to standard (And I welcome advice regarding this).
All that said, I really should get on with this now, shouldn't I?
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I open up Shuffle, and it seems kinda standard for any computer game - A couple of company logos, and a couple of blocks of text... but wait; why did the first block go away in a second, while the second (much smaller) block take several? Time to go back and print screen this, methinks...
Ah, it was a parental advisory notice
◊. A bit suspicious that something three reasonable paragraphs long was only visible for mere moments, no? I bet Manga Gamer don't even really believe what they wrote there, for the most part.
As for the other block of text, that told me to go read a translation note pdf, which turns out to include nothing I, as an avid manga reader, didn't already know. Almost. I suppose I'll learn the rest as I go along.
The opening menu has a bunch of options, and I spy "Config"... Woah. So many options, and I have pretty much no idea what any of them would do. I think I'll leave it all default.
.
That said, the only thing left to do is start up the game/novel/whatever it is, which can wait until tomorrow morning. Time to exit then, I suppose.
...And I hear a Japanese girl say... something... when I click Exit. She spoke a bit quick for me to hear what she said, so I cancel my exit and click it again, only for someone else to speak. Hm. After cycling through what I assume was all of them, I only understood one: A quiet girl, not unlike Yuki Nagato, saying "owari".
The End, huh? I suppose it is. Until next time!
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