Recent reviews by NanaEverlasting

Disclosure: At the time of review, I have 4700 Sunstones and 3100 hours of Tactical Nexus played.

This is a four-stage DLC that contains several towers that are among the best experiences you can find in the genre.

Ephemeral tactical epic
Fill tactical epic
Glacier tactical island
Aurora tactical garden

Ephemeral tactical epic has a clear sense of *exploration* and aesthetic ingenuity.

Fill is, as promised, a juggernaut of a tower. The hardest tower we currently have, with many restrictions on advancing play and power acquisition.

Glacier was voted the number one most fun tower by the community. It has a number of very satisfying mechanics and impeccable stage design. The unlocks are also quite fun and challenging.

Aurora has been a more contentious stage than Glacier, but is overall well received. The pride of TeamNexus, this stage contains some of their most ambitious iterations on design with Instance Magic scaling that allows myriad approaches to the same problems. This tower has several high scoring routes that are completely different in execution--it has introduced a level of variety in play that we have not seen often!

While Ephemeral, Glacier, and Aurora are very accessible at low resource counts, Fill is emphatically not. I recommend at least chapter 6 & 3 DLC before this one.

Play the demo, and if it hits your weak spot, say good bye to your friends and family for a few weeks, months, maybe even years.

The staff are very communicative about their plans and incorporate feedback readily, however, they are ... particularly eccentric. It takes a certain sort of dedication to make a game so thoroughly tuned to a very small audience.

EDIT for Update#2:
They fixed the most basic of errors, but the more fundamental issues I described still remain. The stuff that I gloss over near the beginning of my review is what they fixed, and did nothing to address the rest. It still isn't English prose. The sentences are still constrained to Japanese grammar. It's a shame. It looks like they aren't going to completely dump this version just yet, and instead, we're getting a patchwork abomination of basic corrections over fundamentally broken prose.

Here we go:

If it wasn't for this demo, I would pre-purchase this game without much of a second thought, purely on the merits of the original Japanese release. It is everything that I want in a Visual Novel--this game looks AMAZING.

However, they forgot half of it: the novel part.

A lot of people will be able to readily pick apart all of the abundant typos, grammar mistakes, and general lack of basic AutoCorrect screening... I'm not going to get into that. Anyone can get into those mistakes, and they are intrusively clear. Believe me, they are there in force.

The problem is that this wasn't written by someone who writes or edits fiction, and I have a hard time it was looked over by anyone who has ever worked with the English language in a professional capacity. I'm having constant flashbacks to reviewing high school essays and creative works, and it's completely killed any hope of me enjoying this visual novel.

In addition, I've seen some testimonial from Japanese speakers who have experience with the original game that the translation is straight up incorrect or missing information. I can't attest to that too much--I only hold basic conversational Japanese skills.

Now onto some proper English, of which you will not find in this 'novel':
Dialogue isn't reasonable. When a character decides to say more than the most simple of phrases, it quickly falls apart--the ideas presented are simply not presented that way in English, and seem to have been pigeonholed into fitting into a 1:1 translation of the original Japanese. The Japanese voice-over allows me to quickly find this pattern--Japanese word for English word, you end up with some abomination that lacks the nuance of English prose.

When you look at the environments, at the title, and listen to the music, you're looking for something altogether different: a gentle work, one with deliberately careful movement and elegant language. You'll find nothing of that sort, instead you're listening to gentle melodies and reading a staccato of mixed verbs, inconsistent tenses, and only the most passive tone.

When I think of Flowers, I think of ballett. Of the powerful but gracefully flowing movements that make it an art.

JAST USA imported some visual art, and left out the rest. If you want a nice slide show, get this visual novel. If you want to engage with a work, if you want to connect to characters, to suffer through their pain and share in their joy--you won't be able to do that in any capacity. This is an affront to all writers everywhere that have honed their craft, and a colossal migraine for their editors.

I'm going to first talk about facts, then get into my personal thoughts on the game. Spoiler-tags are used liberally, and I'm not going to bring any big spoilers into the review whatsoever--I want you to experience the game on your own!

Really, just try it.

Nukige being defined as a game where the plot only exists as a vehicle for sex. If you're looking for graphic content, this is probably not the game for you.
Spoiler includes the length of time before reaching the first 'erotic' scene:15 hours

How partial? Well... about a fifth. From my estimation (not looking at raw files, but simply from my experience playing the game...) it seems to be somewhere around five to six hours of voice acting. That's more than any single season of anime will have, anyway. All of the funniest, most exciting, or most painful moments are acted--it is a slight disappointment that it all isn't, but, they made sure they got the most out of the performances, and they are well-done.

They're somewhat modest about mentioning it, but there are over a dozen tracks, not including the opening and ending. Their usage and application in each and every scene are great and help reinforce the writing and bring it to it's fullest emotional potential. Some of the tracks you WILL connect to emotionally by the end.

There's more details about this throughout my review, but, putting it here as well. After getting the 100% completion, I had spent 26 hours myself.

There are some choices to be made, and some alternate scenes and dialogues to be had, but you're mostly along for the ride. There is some non-linear experience, and plenty of perspective changes, but the story is pretty much set. There might be an alternate ending--I don't know yet though, and its definitely something you should experience for yourself! Gameplay is mostly just taking the story at your own pace, and choosing what parts you want to see first.




I played the demo before playing this game--it's available from the developer's website and is roughly 2 hours in length (at least, for my reading/emotional engagement speed)

I played the game immediately upon release from the developer's website, some many hours before the official Steam release. I slept around 4 hours after making it through a decent bit, and then finished it. I imported my save into the Steam version by simply copy+pasting the save directory.

I spent 19 hours playing through the main scenario after speeding through the identical demo scenes, leaving me with a 21 hour playtime. After completing the main scenario, extra scenes were interspersed throughout--a large amount, actually. I would estimate at roughly a quarter of the main scenario in length--you're getting closer to 30 hours than 20 with this game, at my speed.

EDIT2: I finished all of the extra scenarios. They are VERY numerous (78 in all!) and well written and fill in every gap. It took me an additional 5 hours to read them all, so that raises my time spent to 26 hours before full clearing the game. And even if the main scenario is over, the extra scenes are VERY much worth your time.


!!NOTE!! This review is a work in progress. This concludes my fact-based guide. I will be updating this review with my full thoughts on the game shortly. It'll be pretty long, so I'm writing a TL;DR (even though you can't read it yet...)

TL;DR: This game is an amazing piece of media, of fiction, of art. Of love, of what love is, and the hardships that come with love... well-written characters that are engaging, genuinely funny jokes and seamless localization. Kindred Spirits on the Roof is a bittersweet treasure.

EDIT: There has been some misunderstanding stemming from my opening lines. The key point is that the development team behind the game has tuned the game to target a unique player experience that makes Darkest Dungeon unique and rewarding to play.

Darkest Dungeon isn't just another RPG, and I don't blame anyone for approaching it like one. There are plenty of on-screen cues and tips that guide the player, but for players who have played since the beginnings of Early Access, it's easy to overlook them and not start from square one. Players who are completely new to Darkest Dungeon are likely to heed these in-game suggestions and warnings at face value, and may have a better experience as a result.

I do not think the game is perfect, but it's pretty great and worth your time and money to experience.


There are a lot of negative reviews gaining traction with a severe misunderstanding of the way the game is currently intended to be played, and I want to shed some light on why this game is actually AMAZING, and has CHANGED over time to become BETTER. There aren't going to be ANY story spoilers here, just basic mechanics--more or less just the hamlet's features and how they interact with the core gameplay.

It is a difficult game, and it is an RPG. When the going gets tough in a traditional RPG, there's usually a couple ways to deal with that: grinding monsters for money, gear, and experience, completing sidequests, and so on.

In Darkest Dungeon, you have a variety of resources at your disposal.

You have Heirlooms (used to upgrade your Hamlet facilities), you have Gold (required to use your Hamlet facilities and stock up on supplies before an expedition), you have trinkets(a way of customizing your heroes and buffing their abilities), and you have the Heroes themselves--a renewable resource. Each of your heroes has their own set of resources and attributes: Resolve Level, Sanity, Quirks, Disease, Equipment, and Spells.

Here's the part where people go wrong: they try to min-max, they try to save their heroes, they'll make sure their heroes have all of their gear and spells upgraded before sending them out. This game restricts your resources far too hard for that, and makes your gains from doing so miniscule--you do make a profit, but its tiny and takes a long time. The profit margin of gold on maintaining perfectly geared heroes and sending them on optimal missions is almost non-existent, and players see this as being the 'grindfest' as they slowly approach the endgame, often trying to circumvent this game's difficult mechanics (popular Steam guides are guilty of this!) by 'grinding it out,' using strategies such as suicide-gold runs (which are a time sink in and of themselves, adding to the grind illusion)...

Those narrow margins of profit? The seemingly unending grind? Its a losing strategy that was made worse by the developers to discourage that style of play, and those players aren't adjusting their gameplay.

Progression through this game's intense difficulty isn't made by grinding out the perfect heroes, its by taking what you have and going for it. You're going to fail. You're going to lose heroes. You're going to hit brickwalls. But you're going to learn the absolute limits of every hero, the absolute limits of your style of play, and you'll push those limits. Your profit margins will double or triple as you start to play every situation perfectly, taking advantage of good luck and avoiding the bad luck from having an opportunity to take you down.

Brute-forcing a grind through the game is technically possible. But you shouldn't do it.
This game wants you to face its depths head-on, and as soon as you do, it drags you further down and constricts you even more.

When you finally get it though--when you finally make your way through the most difficult sequences of the game--there is very little more rewarding. It doesn't happen because you grind. It doesn't happen because you followed a strategy--it happens because you got dealt a hand of cards and made the absolute best of it.

Are you searching for meaning in life? Tired of pondering the intricacies of the greater universe unfathomable?

"A Kiss For The Petals" or Sono Hanabira is the answer. It is the shining beacon of respite in a world without enough yuri. When you may have troubled yourself as to life's mundane purpose, you smile, knowing that you must trouble yourself no longer, for it is done, and Sono Hanabira is on Steam.

Notes:

This was originally a mobile/iPhone supplementary game in the Sono Hanabira series, and this is clearly an experimental English license. Fans will be supporting this release wildly for further localizations, and for newcomers, it may seem a bit overblown. This is not a long visual novel, nor is it entirely representative of Sono Hanabira as a whole. With that said...

"What's with 'Sono Hanabira?'"

For long-time fans of the series, this is the seventeenth game, and one of two that are 'all-ages' (the other being Hanahira, for those of you interested in continuing your adventure into Sono Hanabira while staying within the 'all-ages space). Sono Hanabira started as a doujin nukige (doujin: amateur work by a small group of individuals; nukige: visual novel where the plot is only around to allow for 'plot') that was very well received for its tone, atmosphere, and high-quality character designs.

"Finally, yuri done right!"

A core cast of couples was developed, and multiple releases furthered the story between each of them. The success was too much to ignore, and after ten doujin releases, the company 'Yurin Yurin' was founded and it became a professional endeavour. "St. Michael's Girl's School - Maidens of Michael" was released as a full length visual novel that connected, expanded, and meaningfully explored the characters in a way that previous entries didn't have room for. A shorter sequel was released, focusing on the new couple Risa and Miya (the ones featured in this game!), as were wholly original ventures (such as ones focusing on a post-high school Nursing School) and even a "New Generations" series re-boot with an entirely new cast, as 'Yurin Yurin' was replaced as developers by 'St. Michael's Girl's Academy' (again, a company founded entirely for this venture).

At this point, fans are dying to play Sono Hanabira in its wholly professional and full length visual novel glory, but, it has far outpaced the fan translators and official English licensing and releases are wanted. So, with everything we've got, fans support Sono Hanabira in its fullest with this game! With enough support, the more lengthy games will be licensed, and the age of yuri can be heralded!