Shuffle: The Visual Novel

That might be interesting, yeah. She doesn't have a route like the teacher does though.

Then again, her route probably sucks.

What makes me curious about the Mayumi route is the Itsuki/Mayumi dynamic. She's also fairly funny.

edited 11th Feb '12 10:48:51 PM by Arha

Yeah. I think if Rin actually started to date Mayumi, the chances of Itsuki getting an actual girlfriend would rise. Well, either that or disappear completely for some time.

Kaede's popular? I can't stand her. Especially after what happened while I was making my liveblog (link in sig). /blatant plug

Asa on the other hand... yeah, definitely my favorite character in Shuffle!.

edited 11th Feb '12 11:40:11 PM by Sabbo

Where in that liveblog?

I'm not sure she actually is popular, but she appears to be from what I've read, here and a few other places. Could just be a couple of die-hard fans.

I wrote that in the review, but I think she's a lot more interesting when she has other characters to act against, and not just Rin as in the VN. That's probably one of the downsides with those games, as they have a tendency to isolate the main character and the girl from all other love interests, and build more on secondary characters. In the anime, Kaede worked a lot better as a character, simply because of that. Also because it actually followed through what can happen with that mentality, as deconstruction of the character type.

I would like Asa a lot more if she wasn't so stupid with that little problem of hers. I mean, it doesn't take much to realise that her mother would rank having a daughter far above having a human daughter. The only reason she was upset about it in the first place was because Asa fared ill. If she would use magic to get better it would be better for all involved. I had half a mind to just remove Rin's Idiot Ball entry just because it was far less stupid than what she did.

Edit: Actually, I'm doing that anyway. It worked. Edit 2: When Arha's done with the page...

edited 12th Feb '12 1:05:12 AM by Feather7603

Yeah, done editing. I needed to touch the page up a little. And yes, I do notice that a lot of visual novels don't have the characters interacting with each other much rather than the MC. Like in one of my favorites, Cross Channel. They never interact with each other apart from a few basics like Miki and Kiri.

It was a developing thing starting from around when I did her route (starting at the installment after the one titled "Primula". I think). At first she was fine, but after I'd actually done all the routes things started to go bad. By the end of the liveblog I was just plain fed up with seeing her C Gs.

That said, you're welcome to read the whole thing. I'm not certain of course, but I think (other than me) neobowman was the only person to have read every installment.

edited 12th Feb '12 2:59:20 AM by Sabbo

<3.

Much appreciated.

Tick Tack is out. I decided to cruise directly towards an Ai related bad ending if it exists. I'm not sure what you can and can't do in this. All I know is that Ai keeps getting flirty scenes.

I'm not supposedly to be laughing really hard at Rin screwing everything up, am I? I might be a sadist.

Rin made his saving throw against karma. Nerine is apparently a saint.

So in other news, I like Ai. Shit isn't working out? Fine, do something different.

Game is complicated. I think I'll need a walkthrough to get everything since two endings I've gotten didn't seem to resemble each other much in the fundamental details. But it turns out to be because that's just how it works. I think I've have stumbled across everything apart from the two three way scenes on my own.

Anyway, all done. I think I might like it better than Shuffle. Ai was a pretty good character.

edited 15th May '13 5:37:51 PM by Arha

Going through it right now. I need a walkthrough XD. I've got one ending already. Regular one I think. No clue how to get the other endings though. Not sure what I'm trying to do either.

Yeah, you're going to need a walkthrough. Jugglign the values properly can get rather confusing. Try this. It's ugly as hell to read but it'll get you through things.

edited 21st May '13 8:31:30 PM by Arha

Okay, after a few days of fiddling, I have a decent chunk of the routes I think. I think. I have Sage's and Ai's with all the C Gs except the last two for both. I suppose I get those in another route.

Yeah, I saw that walkthrough before but gave up on it because I didn't want to go through the formatting and grammar. No choice I guess though.

edited 25th May '13 9:15:09 PM by neobowman

I hadn't realized it until yesterday, but Lucky Star's first half has about as many references to Shuffle as it does to Haruhi (perhaps more, even).

Of course, the only reason I hadn't realized this was because excluding yesterday, I hadn't watched Lucky Star since before I read/played Shuffle. Even excluding Konata's direct reference to Mayumi's line about flat chests being a status symbol (Which I recognized upon hearing it in Shuffle itself), there's still a lot of background images.

Really? Really! is out. I'm not sure I'm going to bother since Kaede is incredibly boring.

It's been 3000 years...

Seriously, that's how long it feels like.

And I'm on a trip and I can't play it for another month and a half.

Fml.

Any chance somebody here knows how to trick my copy of Shuffle into thinking I haven't finished any of the routes? I've finished it 100% already, but there are a couple of things I want to check, but can't. Even drastic measures such as removing all save data would be fine, although I'd rather not have to refind and install it again.

Deleting your save data folder should do it, yeah. Usually there's something like a master save file at .000 or whatever that notes your game completion rather than referring to an actual save of yours. The game will generate a new one when you restart.

edited 16th Jun '14 11:51:30 PM by Arha

No luck. There was a 000 file, but it seems that the entire UserData folder is just saves - even removing the entire folder didn't help. :/

(Although doing so didn't stop Shuffle from working; as you said, it just made a new one (although in this case a folder rather than a file). Opening Shuffle with a fresh UserData folder had no effect on unlocked content such as the entire Extras menu; that was exactly as it was before.)

edited 17th Jun '14 2:51:29 AM by Sabbo

Turns out the solution was to remove the BGI.gdb file. A new one was created upon opening the game... program... file... whatever it's called.

As for what I was testing, it turns out that you can read all the backstory for the Kaede route without going into it, as Asa is for some reason an option at the start despite this. By contrast, whoever told me that doing Primula's route required doing Nerine's route first was correct, even though the relation plot-wise is similar between the routes.

testing method: I aimed directly for Asa successfully the first time, although saved before finishing it. I then tried to get to Primula in three different ways (unsuccessfully) before then finishing Asa's route, in case Primula's requirement was to beat any other route, not specifically Nerine's... That said though, I haven't actually ruled out yet the possibilities that either just one of the princesses or both Nerine & Lisiathus' routes have to be finished before Primula's can be accessed, although I'll be doing that some other time.

EDIT: And just tested Lisianthus; didn't work. I wonder how this alters the odds of each route I figured out in my liveblog for first time players? Lisianthus & Kaede would go up by the same number, but Nerine has conflicting requirements to Primula, and Asa has no conflicts at all (meaning that you can aim at both entirely; the result for those two with the only variance being the first choice, which doesn't lead to either specific sets of choices is always Asa.) Or at least I think that's how it went.

edited 22nd Jun '14 12:20:29 AM by Sabbo

I thought this game was a boring piece of crap. Even the sex scenes were completely lame.

Not that I disagree with you or anything since Shuffle is kind of dull, but leaving such confrontational opinions with no reasoning behind them without being asked is unlikely to leave anyone taking you seriously. Or, worse yet, people might assume you're a troll and report you when you have so few posts.

edited 30th Jun '15 1:30:22 PM by Arha

Explain my opinions? Well, let's see: the heroines were all walking stereotypes, the main male protagonist was blander than a bowl of lard, the whole demons and angels setting was completely wasted, the art was unimpressive, and the drama was nonexistent. There, that good enough?

Yup!

Though Shuffle is mainly just forgettable. Why did you force yourself to play as much of it as you apparently did if you disliked it so much?

I didn't play the game very long at all. I did the orange and green-haired girl's paths and that was it (they were such wonderful characters, I can't even remember their names).

Seems like a substantial time investment to me. Anyway, sounds like you picked a bad VN to start with. Are you going to try one of the better ones out there to make up for it?