Also, funny how they treat noriko carrying a pocket knife like, oh yeah she is a yandere she is crazy, where i come from is normal for a highschooler to carry a pocket knife, southamerican things i guess XD
It's normal for normal people, but Noriko is anything but normal. It isn't just the pocket knife, it's how she acts toward to possibility that she isn't the only girl he has. She acts extremely possessive and even does things behind the backs of the other girls even at times she's supposed to be doing something else, like the time
she attempted to seduce player Sensei instead of escaping while Ami had Maya distracted as she was supposed to.
I carried one to school (USA) regularly when I was a kid (late 70s/early 80s), I need it for my Cub Scout meetings where we did a lot of whittling and stuff. (Go back 40 years before that and carrying a penknife to school was *required* in a lot of rural areas.) Then in about 7th grade it was suddenly was considered dangerous and it went from "nobody cared" to "automatic 3-day suspension". A few years after that it was expulsion, because "zomg the children will stab each other to death with their 2-inch pocket knives, they are all aspiring murderers and the only reason this hasn't happened yet is because they can't find anything sharp at school".
Had they never heard of using scissors or even pens and pencils? Those can be just as dangerous with the right amount of force applied.
Ok, one more try, and this time I'll crack it. Yeah, probably not, but let's try anyway, just for fun:
This is not my first game/VN and it's probably true for most players. So based on previous experience, I don't expect that I'd have to remember tiny details (keep reading until the end before you react), because it's
almost never the case in other story-based games or VNs. Usually it's that "MC remembers", i.e. some option is presented only after he learns about something. This assumption may of course be wrong, because all games/VNs don't have to be the same.
Now let's take this game. Is there any warning
at the beginning that it should be any different in this regard? No, there isn't. And I'm
not saying that there has to be such warning. But it means that nothing tells me, that my initial assumption wouldn't be correct. So I'm going through the game,
reading everything, but casually, not like a medical report or something, where I need to pay attention to every little detail. And only after
several hours I'm told to write down
one thing (address). Let's mark this moment as
X.
It's only after
X that player can be expected
at all to look for possibly important things to remember. Although since the first one was very clearly presented as something to write down (so there's no way you could miss it, if you read everything), expecting players to look for much less obvious secrets from now on is quite a leap. But ok, it was at least a hint.
Second thing (port) is (I think) in same scene as address and you can't miss it,
if you're playing with sound. Which I and probably most people do, but some don't. I don't remember any hint that sound is mandatory, but it's possible that I missed it. But if there really isn't any, then it's exactly the same thing, a completely unexpected requirement. If there is, I take this part back.
And that's not the worst of it. What about the username and password? Yes, there were some usernames mentioned, but they looked like completely random thing. There was also mention of Sensei's password, which looked like small unimportant funny bit. Unfortunately, I don't remember whether these two things came
before or
after X (and I'm not replaying whole game to find out, as you might do
; if someone knows for sure, feel free to add it). If it was
before X, then there's absolutely no reason why anyone should remember it. If it was
after X, then maybe, but still...
Then what
Sensei's own password has to do with this
<whatever it is> thing, that's whole other matter. Assuming it's not a mistake and it's for story purposes, then ok, but I still think it's asking too much from player to figure out.
It isn't my first, either, by far, but it is only my third Denpa game. This is not like other VNs and it should NEVER be expected that any game in any style will be like existing games. This one REQUIRES you to know certain details. It even specifically says to write them down in at least one case.
The player should ALWAYS pay attention to what is being said, warning or not. You do know that the game has consequences beyond getting stuck at that specific point, right? If you aren't paying attention, you could choose the wrong option out of multiple choices and lock yourself out of an entire character. Also, if you are paying attention to the story for the purpose of making the correct choices, you WON'T miss the details needed for the puzzle. The information needed is given in a way that is extremely arbitrary and sticks out like a sore thumb. It should already be making the player question why they were told that in the first place, which should be a giant red flag that it might come up later as needed information. Why else would we need to know an IP, a password, or a username but to input it ourselves? And yeah, at least one piece of the answer was specifically given and the player was specifically told to write it down when it was, if that's not a warning, then warnings don't exist.
The player is expected to look for important information from the first sentence of the game. It actually makes sense that it wouldn't be a one time thing, especially not when dealing with computer info like in the puzzle. There is always a username AND a password to deal with, there is always an IP to deal with once the internet is involved, and the port nummber bears absolutely no excuse thanks to that madness inducing, at least after multiple hours, repetitive voice. If someone is playing without sound, they are already missing a good chunk of the whole experience and that begs the question of why they are playing it in the first place if they aren't going to play it in full. That one is tough luck, they made a choice not to play with sound, they face the consequences, just like in the game. That one has no warning, but there shouldn't need to be as the music is part of the experience and, if they have the music on, they have the voice telling them the port.
Again, completely random things should be throwing giant red flags, only things that make sense to the story at that point should not. There IS a reason all of it should be remembered, because it SHOULD be throwing giant red flags. In ANY game, information that throws a giant red flag should be written down, that's just common sense from way back in the old puzzle games and text adventures.
It is not asking too much for the player to write stuff down when that stuff should be throwing giant red flags. Again, this is all common sense dating back to at least the time of comparatively primitive graphics and a prevalence of actual puzzle games, like Myst, and text adventures. This common sense has been around almost as long as computers in the homes of the general public, in other words.
Just going to interrupt the flow of this conversation to ask... is "cheese pizza" actually slang or acknowledged code for that or did you somehow figure it out using your brain, which has been trained by LiL?
Just asking, since I got confused why his random question about cheese pizza was answered like that.
Now, back to your discussion about There is nothing.
(Also Sensei's password was logical (to me) after getting the username right.)
I suggest taking the first letters of each word out and looking at them. What kind of adult content do those letters also happen to start spelling the term for? I'm not sure about it being slang, but it works as speaking in code for a piece of content that may or may not be legal/illegal in his area.
The only thing I did remember for that scene was terminal 23 and User2 as it was in nearly ever hope seen and repeated so many times that it just stuck. That was the only thing I did remember but the user name and IP address was a no go for me. So basically only those two that were repetitious was remembered. Them two were also right near the first sentences for them strange Happy scenes and were in the early happy scenes.. after about the second happy scene I pretty much skimmed them because they were just so non-sensical that I did not think they were that important.
Kind of like the Stromboki scenes from another game.. some of them scenes are kind of funny others no so much. So basically when scenes start to make no sense to me and get really weird I tend to stop reading all of them in detail and just skim over them to get back to the game. Nothing in the first scene got my attention that I needed to pay attention for clues especially after watching 2 of them.. I basically started to skip much of it by 3rd or 4th one.
Again, NEVER skim in this game, that's a recipe for disaster. The 'happy' scenes are the main story under the surface that the main events make up, so that automatically means 'happy' scenes are extremely important to read in full.
It is definitely poor game design. Perhaps you misread my second comment, but to clarify further i speak of scenes missed not because the player made a conscious choice, as in Rin's case, but simply because they viewed an event before another, without clear communication or suggestion from the game that scenes will be locked. I don't remember any such scenes existing in-game, so if you know of any I'd appreciate the info.
My reason being due to the player's lack of choice in what scenes will be played, in combination with their inability to know the prerequisites for certain main events that lock you out of others. To explain, i don't mean players literally can't choose what event they will see, but in the context of the topic at hand their choice is meaningless. If event A locks event B and i have no way to know (or guess) that, without consulting a third party, then i don't realistically speaking have a choice, it's all up to chance whether i happen to do A first and lock B. In the case of main events it's worse, since you can't postpone them or know when they will trigger, so if a main event locks another you don't even get that illusion of choice.
Unless "proceeding too far" means proceeding in the case the game warned you not to, such as in Rin's case, that is exactly the kind of poor design I'm talking about. The excuse of "you are no longer in the part of that timeline where the character or lust events take place and the events are skipped and marked as missed" is nonsensical, the dev has already used prerequisite scenes in order to unlock others multiple times so obviously the player's freedom to miss scenes and "write their own story", if you will, isn't a priority. Why not just add those scenes, that can be locked from viewing other random scenes, as a requirement to get those other scenes in the first place? If i remember correctly the ending of chapter 1 had an extensive list of required scenes, specifically so the player wouldn't miss them and the dev wouldn't have to account for any missed scenes.
Incidentally, that is also the reason I'm doubtful there even are any scenes that can be locked because you viewed others, without any hints from the game. Hence why i asked the question in the first place.
It is NOT poor game design, it is game design you personally don't like, but not poor generally speaking. It is a game specifically being designed to be as realistic as it can be given other elements within that prevent true realism.
What I meant by proceeding too far is doing too many events in the main line before certain events in the character lines. When the in game time frame of the character event passes because you did too many main events, the game marks the character events as missed because it no longer makes chronological sense to allow the player to see them. There doesn't need to be clear communication from the game, the player should have been raising each character as evenly as possible in the first place because some main events require events from certain or even every character, none of which are missable, but that doesn't matter because you should still be able to get the events that are missable this way. I know because I am working off a save that has no missed events that I replayed the game to have, going through every little detail and writing down anything that jumped out in the process.
I wouldn't know what events are missable based around not going too far on the main events before doing them because I do tend to just stumble into events. However, I know there are multiple.
There actually isn't a lack of choice in what scenes will be played, surpisingly enough for a game with moments where a choice is not yours to make and not even the MC's choice to make, though the surprise is not unwelcome. You can very easily control when events play based around their requirements. With only a few exceptions that require previous events, you can limit the amount of affection you grind and that will slow the progress of the main line of events. This is why it has been suggested on multiple occasions not to get too crazy with grinding the stats, except lust, that one seems to be fair game since it only deals with the lust events. This is also how you avoid running into situations like the one with Rin. As long as you fill the requirement for the one that would have been locked first, you won't get locked out of any events. As there are only lust and character events that get locked, it only requires grinding that character with the rare requirement of another character. Every event is in increments of 5 points per stat, so that tells you what you need to know on that front.
The "excuse" you refer to isn't nonsensical, it's how time works. Time waits for no man and that includes in the game, we're lucky the game is basically turn based or that could pose a problem. With every main event, the game progresses further in time, and certain character events happen around certain points in the story. Let's use an example, it would not make sense to allow the player to see an event that takes place during the winter, where we are now with all the snow in game, once it is time for the snow to have melted and the scenery to change as a result. It would be EXTREMELY jarring to see grass, flowers, and trees when in the free roam element of the game only to be met with the town covered in snow in the next event. For that reason, it is locked once the snowy version of the town representing winter is gone and whatever scenery replaces it is active.
There is no freedom to "write your own story" in this game, Selebus is making whatt he wants and we are along for the ride. The ending of chapter 1 required anything and everything that was not missable. An event being missable is a consequence, which is one of the themes in this game, consequences are everywhere, every action has one. There are consequences for every little thing you do whether those consequences have come up yet or not. To make the missable scenes required negates that consequence.
There are events that lock because you viewed others, but the only ones that lock based on that have a time limit that, when it expires, they are safe to view. If it wasn't obvious, I meant the Rin thing. The only ways to lock events are 1) Say something to upset a girl beyond any hope of recovering by making the wrong choice, 2) Do a main event that would push the game's timeline too far for a character or lust event to make sense (Ex: can't see the Halloween lust event AFTER the Halloween event), and 3) Do an event that it is required you wait to do until a bit later (Ex: Rin at the beach event).
Darklord13, yes if your lust is not high enough from what I found out you WILL miss scenes.. as some of these scenes HAVE to be done before a main event happens. So in that aspect it's a poor design.. missing not because of a choice you made but because your lust for that girl was not high enough. With the number of girls it's hard to make sure to get there lust up enough.
Now one question I have is if you tell truth to Karin about you and Kirin does that lock you out of any scenes at all with Karin or will it just take longer?
Actually, not grinding a stat enough is a choice made on the player side. The only thing it is not is a choice made by the characters. Choices have consequences, so it is not poor design because it perfectly fits one of the themes of the game. It isn't difficult to maintain the stats with the number of girls in now, it needs maybe 15 each, which is not that hard, especially on the girls that can be invited over, which will eventually be all of them, and, if you really think it is, I've got news for you. We haven't seen all the characters added yet even now.
Yes, you lock Karin out if you tell the truth. I don't know how long it will last, it may even be permanent. She was already having issues with guys and then you did that to her and blew any semblance of trust in you as a guy she had gained to smithereens not to mention any she had in you as her coach and as a teacher.
Heh, I thought the weirdness was just for weirdness sake, but there's a weirder story weirdness behind the weirdness!
LiL goes from funny to weird to "is Selebus OK? Does he need help?"
Yep, that happens.
