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Hashihime of the Old Book Town is a VN critique, according to my creating resume.

Posted by: spicymatures pics Em | APR-10-2020

Anyone who has met me personally will know that this has been a common whine for me whenever a new ”ironic” /” critical ”/parody VN becomes a main topic of discussion for a short while: despite the long history, popularity, and measurable influence of the visual novel genre, one emerges is frequently framed as novelty, and press coverage of this is typically accepted. They are just so outrageous! I’m fascinated with sensory works, not just for their storyline but for their form and structure as application and gaming. Yet outlets that are generally more focused on, you know, videogamey-games tend to concentrate on storyline content and spicymatures pics comparison to non-VNs, also when they try to criticize or supply context for this tendency. I rarely ever regard myself an professional or a admirer, but rather a regular seeker and admirer of them. Even with just my brief understanding, I want to include something to this discourse( which may be a few months later at this point… but it always comes up once ), on essential features of the physical book type, from a Game Studies perspective.

The phrases” Physical Tale” and” Dating Simulator” are no strong versions of how Japanese individuals describe a particular type of game, but they were created especially to give the English-speaking universe an idea of what these games are, as Kastel points out in this blog post. They are frequently used interchangeably to describe video games with still-character artwork and a plot that is delivered via text boxes and where the player is occasionally given a choice, usually with the intention of achieving a particular romantic or sexual outcome.

Further, compared to the variety of games available in Japan, very few have been translated to English, much less have gotten an official translation, even fewer have become truly popular or well-known, maybe none at all depending on the level of ubiquity we’re describing. Whether or not this knowledge comes from references to dating sims in other media, such as anime series, or jokes about ”weird,” ”retrograde,” Japanese media that are still prevalent online, or whether it is the work of their attempts to parody, critique, or subvert conventions already results from a false or at least incomplete understanding of the genre. The point made by Kastel is that, in terms of the characters and plotlines that are presented in ”ironic,”” critical,” or parody dating sims, they are frequently working from a received understanding of what dating sims are like rather than actual experience.

But I don’t just think this is limited to issues of plot and character, making high school girls puke and stab each other, or making the player date inanimate objects or fast food mascots or whatever the next wacky and ostensibly ”interesting” thing in an attention-grabbing English-language VN is. There is also a lot of uninformed chauvinism about how some Japanese visual novels and dating simulators are produced formulaically and naively as if the format were just pre-received, despite how supposedly British VNs are structurally and conceptually innovative.

I think it’s obvious why the visual novel was viewed as a form that needed to be interacted with very Western Game Studies-infused concepts to become ”interesting.” A recent episode of Game Studies Study Buddies spends a lot of time discussing the influential ( for better or worse ) work Cybertext, by Espen Aarseth. The terms and ideas Aarseth defines in this book have had a significant impact on the values of game studies because it attempted to define game studies as an academic discipline rather than literary and film studies, and it has frequently been distilled down into” common sense” in terms of game design.

Despite this outcome, Aarseth does spend a lot of time discussing literature in the original text. However, texts that are ergodic may not also be” cybertexts\ Nearly every option in the beginning selection and the same set of general options are available during play are the same. Sometimes there’s an Extras menu, where you can unlock character profiles, video segments, and bits of the game’s soundtrack, and there’s almost always a gallery, where the CGs ( full screen illustrations depicting specific events in the narrative rather than the individual character sprites ) you’ve unlocked are kept in a grid, greyed-out squares always calling you back to search for more paths. You will be able to launch a new gameplay, or to fill one of your existing save slots, which are frequently very numerous, motivating you to conserve either right away or after a choice point to examine afterwards.

The majority of the camera is used for persona sprite, origins, and CG graphics while you’re playing, and a word box serves as both a description and a description of what’s happening. ”Skip” fast-forwards through text you have already seen and earnings to user-advanced words when you reach a option juncture or landscape that is fresh. Although one or more of these characteristics may be absent from an adult headline, they are all fairly common. The resources provided here are already strong proof that physical works are a self-aware structure. The spacebar, enter essential, or mouse click commonly advances the text, but you can even obtain settings on the fly, evaluate the backlog, skip away, turn on auto text advancement, and save and load at any time. This function is depicted with an available gaze in Hashihime of the Old Book Town, a aesthetic fiction I lengthy played and am purportedly reviewing in this blogging publish.

How they are produced and consumed is essential to the structure of visible works. It’s fascinating to me that the Vice post I linked to above cites Hiroki Azuma, a media theory specializing in examining Chinese popular traditions, but doesn’t take up the point from his book on Otaku that is most important to the discussion of visible novels. He asserts that otaku are just as likely to experience a game as a database, to jump around and through, grabbing onto what is interesting rather than presenting a continuous single experience or players taking in the game as such. Azuma discusses how the database’s format allows for the itemization, division, and organization of once-coherent media objects.

Azuma uses the example of freeware programs distributed online which extract and sort all of the character, setting and CG images of a visual novel to reveal the variety of ways otaku engage with visual novel games, both experiencing the VN as a total narrative, and a system made up of many different parts. In her study of Neo-Baroque aesthetics, Angela Ndalianis discusses the unintended playstyles of players who discovered ways to directly access the files for cutscenes and assets of FMV games like Phantasmagoria. The VNs, via the ”skip” option, as well as many other common features of the interface, provide the player with the tools for its own partial disassembly, though not quite the level of access that the software Azuma mentions creates. Azuma notes that players who approach games with this ”hacker” mindset are explicitly aware of, and perhaps enjoy the fact that videogames ( broadly, not just Visual Novels ) do not offer true” choice” or ”agency” but rather are just a series of recombinations of existing assets.

So after about 2000 words, I finally have the context to explain what is so incredibly compelling about Hashihime. Tamamori, the protagonist, is trapped in a time loop, a typical visual novel plot device that demonstrates a sense of self-awareness regarding the player’s ability to choose between time and choice. The first route, putting Tamamori through the same three days ten times, does not present the player any choices. The Higurashi games, as well as some VN dev Ebi-Hime works, fall under the category of ”kinetic novels,” which is sometimes referred to as a ”kinetic novel.” In this situation, the reader simply controls the rate with which the text and visuals advance.

Hashihime is a text of repetition. He gets sidetracked because he’s so consumed by his monotonous day to day life and internal fantasies that it takes him a while to realize that he’s in a loop. Despite this, he repeatedly miscalculates his attempts to avert the passing of his friend Minakami and avoid being killed by a enigmatic masked giant. He repeatedly tries to finish writing the same stories and bring about resolution for the same characters who compose his vivid hallucinations. not great. In the 1920s, Tamamori tries to fail the entrance exam to the Imperial University once in Japan, but he also spun his wheels in the capital for a year before failing once more. The first path comes to a bittersweet conclusion when he finally persuades Minakami to travel back to the city by train to get rid of all the disasters that lie ahead for them if they remain there. All the other characters ’ fates are implied to remain…

Then you start over, fresh, a Tamamori completely unaware of being stuck in a time loop again. Additionally, this is where the Skip button starts to be useful. In various guises, Tamamori appears in an older version of himself who has witnessed not only the Great Earthquake of 1923, which decimates the capital a year from the events of the game, but also the eventual use of the atomic bomb against Japan in World War II. Now, in each subsequent route, Tamamori will be offered one inflection point, where he can make a different choice. The game will continue to play after the first option’s conclusion if you choose the option that leads to the same result as the first. Each of the alternatives must be completed in a predetermined order, making the routes accumulative rather than being completely independent. This loop between the loops of older Tamamori’s experience and the player-character Tamamori’s experience is another scale of time loop that exists in the game.

In terms of form, the stories juxtapose the unavoidable reality of embodied existence with the infinite inexhaustibility of the digital ( and of the portion of Tamamori’s life that can be reloaded, reloaded, and reloaded ) against change over time. A straightforward childhood friend romance, a typical” true” route scenario in many romance VNs with some supernatural intrigue under the form of a straightforward time loop and the spirits that enable it, are the next steps in the process.

Breaking with this story takes Tamamori down paths towards crueller, stranger, and more outré forms of romance, as multiple characters gain time looping powers, and they overlap in increasingly complex ways. Tamamori has essentially evolved into the older, wiser version of himself who enigmatically appears in previous movies and has established an unconventional partnership with the masked giant figure; only by partaking in the increasingly unconventional alternative romances are the scenarios that produce elements of the most conventional romance.

Tamamori pleading or wishing that all the characters would return to their innocent friendships and daily lives, despite it being an increasingly unrealized dream, is a common scene across several routes. Rather than a consequence-free regeneration at the beginning of each route, character relationships and political and supernatural intrigue irreversibly shift, colouring the player’s interpretation of events they already experienced several routes ago. It encourages skipping and a completionist mindset so that you can experience the routes as they are inevitably cumulative throughout the entire narrative. In this way, Hashihime constantly winks and draws attention to its structure as a BL romance VN while neglecting to mention the Visual Novel’s format as a barrier to overcome. It tells us which choices matter, the points where you must do something different than before.

And then, without even mentioning that this is a porn game, that each route ends with an uncensored and fully voiced gay sex scene. And I’m not really referring to the writing, voice acting, or the quality of the artwork in terms of a subjective assessment either, despite the fact that I thought most of them to be ”good.” It was a visual novel that I found engaging, formally inventive, and interesting to play, though this is how I feel about many of them. It’s specific to a particular group of interests within the already particular group of people who read visual novels. This review isn’t typically written, in that it’s obvious that I don’t strongly advise anyone to go out and play this game right away.

Wanting to write about Hashihime as a videogame despite its structure made me think of how even positive discussions of visual novels tend to apologetically preface that these games are ”mostly reading\