I suspected something like this when I first read it. But after messing around with character studio trying to get the lighting to look better I coincidentally can now confirm it. The "zmr_005_LUT32 with that heavy left slider" line from "Soliloquy (Wearing Someone Else's Clothes)" [Ayane event]. Is referring to what is basically the dark/night lighting colour effect that presumably Selebus would have used in the game many times by now.
I noticed the same situations with Ami but I interpreted them differently. To me, they were rather showing how oblivious the early game Ami is and how she reacts relatively naturally to Akira's situation (given her general character). I don't feel like she is manipulating him into any direction at all.
Some sentences and wordings do seem like foreshadowing, but in my opinion they were deliberately placed by Sel (I mentioned some of them in one of my earlier Replay posts) and not something Ami was supposed to be consciously aware of.
I'm no expert at psychology, but wouldn't you say a lot of these instances could fall under the concept of confirmation bias?
What I mean by that is that once you obtain future knowledge, looking back into the past, you jump to conclusion and interpret situations fitting a pattern that you already established in your head.
I'm not saying that all of your examples apply to that, it's possible that some of them might really be Ami being aware of resets and decides to hint at that fact. But why would she even do that? What's there to gain for her, other than risking Akira recalling prior memories and Maya becoming even more suspicious of her?
It doesn't really sit right with me and I personally registered them as either coincidences that I just forcefully connected with current theories and knowledge or simply as Sel being an egomaniac Sel who wants to prove to people who replay the game that he was so wise and mindful to hint at future events and developments early in the game.
Now in terms of Maya, definitely, she is hinting at that stuff constantly, almost teasing Akira with it in the hopes to awaken his memories and challenging him to become more than the boring niece-fucking husk of himself that she had to endure for the past GODgod-knows-how-many cycles.
Anyways, keep the posts coming!
I will try to continue my run hopefully today as well.
I think what makes this feel like good writing is that Ami and Maya can each be read both ways: certainly, as you're playing through the first time, Ami seems completely oblivious (and strangely obsessed with her uncle) and Maya comes across as bitchy/tsundere and more than a bit weird. But looking at it with our current understanding of the two girls, it's also possible to see much deeper layers of intention and meaning beneath their actions. Maya is clearly playing a completely different game than we're seeing on the surface when we first meet her. That could, as Moonflare suggests, be true of Ami as well.
Or maybe Ami is really as empty-headed as she seems at first and her later... complications are the result of other beings (Sekai, various gods, etc.) messing with her mind. I'd want to go back and compare the pre-rewrite Ch. 1 scenes with the ones we now have to see what Sel changed, to find the breadcrumbs he's laying out for us.
third replay has started, this post deals with an old goth chick crying at some words, and the identity of the first narrator of the game, and why her name is Ami/Amy the second.
In the past I have talked about how it was only during my second playthrough that I started to love LiL, but that is incorrect at least regarding my first impression of it. Sure, there was a lot that I scoffed at during my first time (like Yasu and the gods' nonsense), a lot I skipped entirely (like Chika's storyline), but this, this had me from the start:
I remember reading every sentence out loud, because the music captivated me so much that I decided to really give my all this time. Rarely would I would this with a porn game, hell, it's even rare for me to do it with a proper novel. But here I was reading word for word out loud, with no idea what would come next and we have first the idea of perception, how the correct angle of light can make invisible things visible; then we have the romantization of death (which spawned so many theories that Akira jumped to his death at the beginning of the game), but here's where all the hairs of my arm never fail to stand up: "the third thing I can never understand is you".
Man, what a strong start to a narrative. I wonder how many times Selebus rewrote this. It's just so powerful! "because where you're going is somewhere special. Somewhere with so much strangeness in every single one of its proportions that you'll be forced to understand how truly beautiful life can be, even during its darkest moments." It's haunting.
Then as we get to the "I'm supposed to tell you that nothing is real. We're all just air. So, how about we breathe together?" I start crying like a child. This is one seriously amazing start.
On another note though, yet again, upon seeing the entire event I'm convinced this is Himawari, here is my evidence:
That was my first thought as well. After "yay, DnD will make a comeback, with another potential prophecy "
But her crashing at (what I assume to be) Molly's dorm room with most likely other girls during a DnD event kind of makes it unlikely
Bleh... dnd... i will never understand the fad of putting it in AVN's, none of it's canon, it's all make-believe and wastes dev time on something that could've been spent developing characters or the story... i've never enjoyed it, not once in the innumerable times it's popped up in a game i follow. DnD is fun to play, it's boring as fuck to watch... like, swap it out for golf or something, same situation, boring as hell and adds almost nothing to the story...
Bleh... dnd... i will never understand the fad of putting it in AVN's, none of it's canon, it's all make-believe and wastes dev time on something that could've been spent developing characters or the story... i've never enjoyed it, not once in the innumerable times it's popped up in a game i follow. DnD is fun to play, it's boring as fuck to watch... like, swap it out for golf or something, same situation, boring as hell and adds almost nothing to the story...
hey I want to switch back to original white textbox from darkmod one.
Could someone kindly share the textbox.png file from the game\gui folder, so I wont have to download whole game again :/