One think that I keep thinking of but am not sure what to make of is that the upside down house seems to share some similarities with the Pareidolia mall from a general conceptual viewpoint. People Trapped inside for a long time, things get a bit strange and messed up, feels like time itself no longer exists there, etc. So I wonder if maybe the upside down house is terminal 22's Pareidolia mall and vice versa. Maybe they are the end states of their terminals. They eventually got so messed up somehow that they could no longer be fixed and just slowly degraded into whatever the mall and house are.
Obviously there is some possible time paradox stuff in that seeing as we have already been to the mall. But I guess there are already a few time paradox things in the game so maybe that's not too far fetched. Plus the question of what or who caused the Terminals to degrade to that point and was it the same thing for both of them?
One think that I keep thinking of but am not sure what to make of is that the upside down house seems to share some similarities with the Pareidolia mall from a general conceptual viewpoint. People Trapped inside for a long time, things get a bit strange and messed up, feels like time itself no longer exists there, etc. So I wonder if maybe the upside down house is terminal 22's Pareidolia mall and vice versa. Maybe they are the end states of their terminals. They eventually got so messed up somehow that they could no longer be fixed and just slowly degraded into whatever the mall and house are.
Obviously there is some possible time paradox stuff in that seeing as we have already been to the mall. But I guess there are already a few time paradox things in the game so maybe that's not too far fetched. Plus the question of what or who caused the Terminals to degrade to that point and was it the same thing for both of them?
From my understanding, terminals naturally degrade and eventually everything is set on fire. At least if Yasu was talking about terminals when she recounts the story about the angel (or something) that told everyone that the end was coming, and he was the only one that slipped away in time (to another terminal I'd assume).
The first three girls are from Nothing is Beautiful, and Kyoko and Ai are referenced as residents of the upside down house both in game and on the twitter. Balaam the prophet is a mystery, however.
I think there's one other time that Balaam has been indirectly referenced, and maybe it will give a clue to his (or her?) identity. When a panicking Ami calls Sensei from the old district, there's a flashback to the bus ride backwards and a narrator says they're giving us a "password".
The 23:19 on the negative image could be a bible verse, especially given the following discussion of God. As it happens, there are actually two verses of that number with connections to LiL, and I'm guessing Sel intended to refer to both of them.
Numbers 23:19 is by far the top result if you search for "bible 23:19". It's a message from God that is spoken by the prophet Balaam and has similar themes to the bus ride discussion.
Exodus 23:19 gives an injunction forbidding cooking a kid (goat) in its mother's milk.
I also have a question: do we have any idea what password the narrator is referring to? This happens before the reset with Ami's laptop password "mom", which I never figured out how we were supposed to know without guessing, so maybe it's that - but how are we supposed to get "mom" out of the image? "23:19 -> Exodus -> mother's milk -> mom" seems far too convoluted, but I can't think of anything else.
Of all the English Ren'py games I played after LiL in search of something which captured a modicum of its greatness, Eternum probably faired the best. By the point I reached it I was happy just to see something written in what felt like native English, and it has nice production values to boot. The problem for me was that (as is so often the case), the character psychology ended up just a bit too underbaked to be engaging for a long period of time. The protagonist himself being a nothingburger was a big negative, but the heroines getting blander over time (or perhaps - not introducing any freshness after their introduction) was of course the real killer. A cloud of grimness fell over me as I trudged further and further into the game realizing that, far from learning more about the characters, I was simply observing the author shift gears into romance and sex mode dot exe. The clearest demonstration of this shallow writing, though, is best observed in the side characters rather than the main characters; there we consistently see cruel, bully-ish depictions of cardboard cutouts meant to be nothing more than stepping stones for the protagonist to grind the heels of his feet into. You can tell a lot about an author by how they treat side characters: are they jokes or do they feel like believable parts of the world? (With some consideration given to parodies and one-offs and so on). It is only with a roll of my eyes I point to Sara in Lessons in Love here, although I really do not want to fellate Selebus on this matter in particular: imagine a world where Sara is like a comical milf stereotype and then over 3 million words she is basically only used for sexo if not immediately forgotten.
All of the above is merely a preface for what I find a fairly funny happenstance, though. As it happens I was detailing my English VN journey to my fellow Japanese VN fans as a sort of farcical, ahem, 'kino journey' as the lads may call it on Discord (though far be it from me to spam such an uncouth word). And remarkably, almost every Japanese chad was FAR MORE intrigued by Eternum than Lessons in love. In the end, by brokering points (a sort of trade system where you offer X amounts of points for completing a game, and then those points can be brokered to force you to play a game), I was successful in coercing three Japanese gamers to play Lessons in Love (thereby, I might add, securing Selebus a smooth $15 extra in revenue a month, though he would thank me for that with a swift banhammer if we ever met eye-to-eye as men), but that is another matter entirely.
For some extremely thought-provoking reason, almost every screenshot or clip of Lessons in Love I sent inspired ire and mockery. I am no amateur when it comes to live-blogging; I knew to pick the best angles and best lines to give a biased picture of the game. I even have 10 VNDB screenshots lined up which would be sure to triple the turnover rate from the VNDB page, but at the last moment I saw that Selebus had hand-selected the existing screenshots, and although I have implied this in the past I would like to re-emphasize that the selection is totally garbage in what I can only imagine to be an intentional effort to filter out potentially judgmental players, but I'm getting ahead of myself again. The point is, almost every positive aspect of Lessons in Love is something that seems to exist only in context; as a base example, to laugh at spaghetti jokes one has to go through Sana's events and spend like 50 hours in the ambient mind space of 'the spaghetti incident' to finally laugh when the food competition happens and she cries at spaghetti. You can't just link the spaghetti incident. Similarly, perhaps we can say that Maya events in Chapter 2 are "high cinema" that belong in a museum along other works of art, but they have of course NO IMPACT out side of context - without having played LiL for 70+ hours, it will really mean nothing when Maya tears up and says, 'Even though you're the most disgusting person in the world,' positioned in front of lights in a very meaningful location. This is to say that it is an EXCRUCIATING EFFORT to convey to Japanese chads the quality of Lessons in Love, especially with little aid from the big man himself. Everything comes off as "cringe" or "meme humor" (to say nothing of how they have 0 exposure to Koikatsu graphics used in this manner, although big leaps were made when the comic 愚かで勤勉な私たちは blew up in Japanese twitter). That's why I ended up brokering points; there's almost no other way to convince them but by physical force.
Eternum, on the other hand, caught on like fire. Everybody fucked loved it. I couldn't believe it. From my perspective I had just shot blood from every pore as I strained to hold up the world like Atlas, then in the next moment had a horde of duders offering to share the burden. Every single clip I posted engendered mass attention and laughs. Every single screenshot had at least one person asking 'source?'. Humiliatingly enough, some would even make comments like, 'Why did you have that whole Lessons in Love arc for a month if you could have been playing this.' I like to think that if Selebus were present to witness it he would have tightened his hand into a fist and trembled for at least three seconds. It was that distinct, and in fact one guy even came from the woodworks to say he was a long-term fan of Eternum, which was crazy since of course Lessons in Love had existed in beyond obscurity; some still doubt its existence.
This proved to be a matter of deep contemplation to me. What exactly was the difference here? I could remove myself as a variable since I came to this with the same expertise and methods to the same audience in the same climate. The difference had to be the games. So I thought and thought and... honestly, it's not that complicated. Eternum's own shallowness is what made it so much more universally appealing at a glance, and while that seems like a salty or backhanded insult, that is not my intention. Rather, there are basically no jokes like the spaghetti, and there are minimal long-running contextual sources of humor or pog that you have to be immersed in the game to understand. Everything is immediate, direct, in-your-face, and so on. Alas, I do not believe F95 handles clips well, but I will attempt to link 3 streamable examples.
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
What we see here are instances of what in the Japanese community we refer to as "high quality 演出," with 演出 being like a mix of 'scene direction' and 'production value.' Essentially a scene that looks high-effort and good will be said to have good 演出. Anyway, what Eternum lacks in deep or meaningful characterization it has in spades in 演出, and an outside observer will need little understanding of any lore or contextual humor to appreciate this. Link a picture of an artful discussion between Nodoka and Sensei, you run a fine line of people rolling their eyes. Link a clip of the camera spinning like crazy as dark souls music plays, people pog. This is somewhat of an oversimplification on all sides, but I think the point is clear.
It sticks with me so much, though, because by my own measure (and forgive me for the arrogance with which this will come of), I think Lessons in Love is way better than Eternum, but hereby I am bound by the fact I can effortlessly sell people on Eternum while it's an immense struggle to even get someone to acknowledge that Lessons in Love isn't EOP trash. An easy jab here is something like 'where there's smoke there's fire' but it really goes to show the value in marketing that animated sequences and so on has. It's come to the point that when shilling Lessons in Love I link that one youtube video of the Room with Clocks somewhat begrudgingly because I've found it to be the most effective way at cracking that outer layer of doubt and mockery.
As a final word I will post a (somewhat erotically charged) screenshot of Eternum to discuss one interesting exchange I had.
There is exactly one individual whom I know who recognized LiL's quality without any artful deception and was offput by anything I shared of Eternum. This one individual is someone I respect above almost all others for his sharp mind and cutting insight, though I say this now only for performative purposes. Upon seeing the above screenshot of Eternum, they were offput because there was no physical interaction between the heroines; despite living together and mostly being a family, they were visibly posed separately and placed separately. They stare at the protagonist with ghoulish eyes and slack jaws while totally lacking cognizance for any of their family nearby. There is no sense of place or family or character here; there is only dolled-up and posed Honey Select models. Contrast this with say the former title screen and oft-referenced class photo in Lessons in Love, where Ayane hugs Sana, sana looks back at Ayane, Maya averts her eyes, Makoto has a hand on Miku, Ami has a hand placed on Makoto, and the one portion of the photo palpably unblemished, noticeably uncovered by dust, is the indeed the face of Ami looking directly at the camera, ghoulish smile on her face... That, I would say, is the level of insight it takes to appreciate Lessons in Love at a glance over Eternum. Isn't that a funny thing?
The answer is really simple. Peeps just wanna self-insert. You don't need high-artistic value if you have enough sex and a self-insertable character. Sex sells, and regardless of anything, the great majority will only be moved by their first impressions.
BTW, what Room with Clocks video are you talking about?
The answer is really simple. Peeps just wanna self-insert. You don't need high-artistic value if you have enough sex and a self-insertable character. Sex sells, and regardless of anything, the great majority will only be moved by their first impressions.
BTW, what Room with Clocks video are you talking about?
As a spoiler-averse person I don't really like linking it since I think it lessens the impact of seeing shota Sensei for the first time in-game among other things but people unfamiliar with the game respond better to this than anything else I've tried by far.
Of all the English Ren'py games I played after LiL in search of something which captured a modicum of its greatness, Eternum probably faired the best. By the point I reached it I was happy just to see something written in what felt like native English, and it has nice production values to boot. The problem for me was that (as is so often the case), the character psychology ended up just a bit too underbaked to be engaging for a long period of time. The protagonist himself being a nothingburger was a big negative, but the heroines getting blander over time (or perhaps - not introducing any freshness after their introduction) was of course the real killer. A cloud of grimness fell over me as I trudged further and further into the game realizing that, far from learning more about the characters, I was simply observing the author shift gears into romance and sex mode dot exe. The clearest demonstration of this shallow writing, though, is best observed in the side characters rather than the main characters; there we consistently see cruel, bully-ish depictions of cardboard cutouts meant to be nothing more than stepping stones for the protagonist to grind the heels of his feet into. You can tell a lot about an author by how they treat side characters: are they jokes or do they feel like believable parts of the world? (With some consideration given to parodies and one-offs and so on). It is only with a roll of my eyes I point to Sara in Lessons in Love here, although I really do not want to fellate Selebus on this matter in particular: imagine a world where Sara is like a comical milf stereotype and then over 3 million words she is basically only used for sexo if not immediately forgotten.
All of the above is merely a preface for what I find a fairly funny happenstance, though. As it happens I was detailing my English VN journey to my fellow Japanese VN fans as a sort of farcical, ahem, 'kino journey' as the lads may call it on Discord (though far be it from me to spam such an uncouth word). And remarkably, almost every Japanese chad was FAR MORE intrigued by Eternum than Lessons in love. In the end, by brokering points (a sort of trade system where you offer X amounts of points for completing a game, and then those points can be brokered to force you to play a game), I was successful in coercing three Japanese gamers to play Lessons in Love (thereby, I might add, securing Selebus a smooth $15 extra in revenue a month, though he would thank me for that with a swift banhammer if we ever met eye-to-eye as men), but that is another matter entirely.
For some extremely thought-provoking reason, almost every screenshot or clip of Lessons in Love I sent inspired ire and mockery. I am no amateur when it comes to live-blogging; I knew to pick the best angles and best lines to give a biased picture of the game. I even have 10 VNDB screenshots lined up which would be sure to triple the turnover rate from the VNDB page, but at the last moment I saw that Selebus had hand-selected the existing screenshots, and although I have implied this in the past I would like to re-emphasize that the selection is totally garbage in what I can only imagine to be an intentional effort to filter out potentially judgmental players, but I'm getting ahead of myself again. The point is, almost every positive aspect of Lessons in Love is something that seems to exist only in context; as a base example, to laugh at spaghetti jokes one has to go through Sana's events and spend like 50 hours in the ambient mind space of 'the spaghetti incident' to finally laugh when the food competition happens and she cries at spaghetti. You can't just link the spaghetti incident. Similarly, perhaps we can say that Maya events in Chapter 2 are "high cinema" that belong in a museum along other works of art, but they have of course NO IMPACT out side of context - without having played LiL for 70+ hours, it will really mean nothing when Maya tears up and says, 'Even though you're the most disgusting person in the world,' positioned in front of lights in a very meaningful location. This is to say that it is an EXCRUCIATING EFFORT to convey to Japanese chads the quality of Lessons in Love, especially with little aid from the big man himself. Everything comes off as "cringe" or "meme humor" (to say nothing of how they have 0 exposure to Koikatsu graphics used in this manner, although big leaps were made when the comic 愚かで勤勉な私たちは blew up in Japanese twitter). That's why I ended up brokering points; there's almost no other way to convince them but by physical force.
Eternum, on the other hand, caught on like fire. Everybody fucked loved it. I couldn't believe it. From my perspective I had just shot blood from every pore as I strained to hold up the world like Atlas, then in the next moment had a horde of duders offering to share the burden. Every single clip I posted engendered mass attention and laughs. Every single screenshot had at least one person asking 'source?'. Humiliatingly enough, some would even make comments like, 'Why did you have that whole Lessons in Love arc for a month if you could have been playing this.' I like to think that if Selebus were present to witness it he would have tightened his hand into a fist and trembled for at least three seconds. It was that distinct, and in fact one guy even came from the woodworks to say he was a long-term fan of Eternum, which was crazy since of course Lessons in Love had existed in beyond obscurity; some still doubt its existence.
This proved to be a matter of deep contemplation to me. What exactly was the difference here? I could remove myself as a variable since I came to this with the same expertise and methods to the same audience in the same climate. The difference had to be the games. So I thought and thought and... honestly, it's not that complicated. Eternum's own shallowness is what made it so much more universally appealing at a glance, and while that seems like a salty or backhanded insult, that is not my intention. Rather, there are basically no jokes like the spaghetti, and there are minimal long-running contextual sources of humor or pog that you have to be immersed in the game to understand. Everything is immediate, direct, in-your-face, and so on. Alas, I do not believe F95 handles clips well, but I will attempt to link 3 streamable examples.
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
You must be registered to see the links
What we see here are instances of what in the Japanese community we refer to as "high quality 演出," with 演出 being like a mix of 'scene direction' and 'production value.' Essentially a scene that looks high-effort and good will be said to have good 演出. Anyway, what Eternum lacks in deep or meaningful characterization it has in spades in 演出, and an outside observer will need little understanding of any lore or contextual humor to appreciate this. Link a picture of an artful discussion between Nodoka and Sensei, you run a fine line of people rolling their eyes. Link a clip of the camera spinning like crazy as dark souls music plays, people pog. This is somewhat of an oversimplification on all sides, but I think the point is clear.
It sticks with me so much, though, because by my own measure (and forgive me for the arrogance with which this will come of), I think Lessons in Love is way better than Eternum, but hereby I am bound by the fact I can effortlessly sell people on Eternum while it's an immense struggle to even get someone to acknowledge that Lessons in Love isn't EOP trash. An easy jab here is something like 'where there's smoke there's fire' but it really goes to show the value in marketing that animated sequences and so on has. It's come to the point that when shilling Lessons in Love I link that one youtube video of the Room with Clocks somewhat begrudgingly because I've found it to be the most effective way at cracking that outer layer of doubt and mockery.
As a final word I will post a (somewhat erotically charged) screenshot of Eternum to discuss one interesting exchange I had.
There is exactly one individual whom I know who recognized LiL's quality without any artful deception and was offput by anything I shared of Eternum. This one individual is someone I respect above almost all others for his sharp mind and cutting insight, though I say this now only for performative purposes. Upon seeing the above screenshot of Eternum, they were offput because there was no physical interaction between the heroines; despite living together and mostly being a family, they were visibly posed separately and placed separately. They stare at the protagonist with ghoulish eyes and slack jaws while totally lacking cognizance for any of their family nearby. There is no sense of place or family or character here; there is only dolled-up and posed Honey Select models. Contrast this with say the former title screen and oft-referenced class photo in Lessons in Love, where Ayane hugs Sana, sana looks back at Ayane, Maya averts her eyes, Makoto has a hand on Miku, Ami has a hand placed on Makoto, and the one portion of the photo palpably unblemished, noticeably uncovered by dust, is the indeed the face of Ami looking directly at the camera, ghoulish smile on her face... That, I would say, is the level of insight it takes to appreciate Lessons in Love at a glance over Eternum. Isn't that a funny thing?
Might be the first time I read one of your long posts. Cant say more, than that I agree. Also based. BTW, what was the reaction of the three japanese GAMERS who actually played Lil, to the game?
As a spoiler-averse person I don't really like linking it since I think it lessens the impact of seeing shota Sensei for the first time in-game among other things but people unfamiliar with the game respond better to this than anything else I've tried by far.
It makes Sensei look like the main character, the one character that will go against unsurmountable odds. Meaning, the stuff most would find appealing at first sight. It's dishonest marketing, but, guess what? It just works.
