Katawa Shoujo Forums

I strongly recommend Otoboku and its sequel Futari no Elder. Although I haven't played the games yet, I've watched the animes and watched some Japanese LP's on YouTube.
Without spoiling too much, I can tell you that the setting is pretty much unique; being a disguised male attending an all-girls school. I especially like the more complex characters you meet in Futari no Elder.

I don't think there have been a complete English patch for the game(s) yet, but it's fully enjoyable in Japanese too.

Flutterz wrote:Oh, and a few things unrelated to the story. It has a nice, albeit somewhat difficult, rhythm mini game, and the game sometimes has a tendency of abruptly crashing at certain points. A few of these crashes can be avoided by downloading an updated scr_qc.pak file, but some, I'm guessing the less common ones, don't have a fix, and the only thing I've found that works is to load a previous save in the Japanese version of the game, and to save slightly past the crash.

I only got a crash halfway through the Phorni route, which can be fixed via the patch on the TLwiki site. The English patch has made the VN very buggy however, so it ain't too surprising. Anyone who wants to play SR should probably get that patch before playing it, it can be found here under the "Announcements" section.

Mysterious Stranger wrote:Somehow I was under the impression that Symphonic Rain had a linear storyline without any choices. Maybe I'm thinking of a different one.

Yeah, you are definitely thinking of another one. As Flutterz pointed out there are both choices and some gameplay so it is a bit more interactive than your average VN. Gameplay was rather fun too.

Nobody in Particular wrote:

Flutterz wrote:Oh, and a few things unrelated to the story. It has a nice, albeit somewhat difficult, rhythm mini game, and the game sometimes has a tendency of abruptly crashing at certain points. A few of these crashes can be avoided by downloading an updated scr_qc.pak file, but some, I'm guessing the less common ones, don't have a fix, and the only thing I've found that works is to load a previous save in the Japanese version of the game, and to save slightly past the crash.

I only got a crash halfway through the Phorni route, which can be fixed via the patch on the TLwiki site. The English patch has made the VN very buggy however, so it ain't too surprising. Anyone who wants to play SR should probably get that patch before playing it, it can be found here under the "Announcements" section.

I had a ton of crashes, 1-4 per route >.>

Speaking of Symphonic Rain, isn't that Torta on your avatar?

Mysterious Stranger wrote:Somehow I was under the impression that Symphonic Rain had a linear storyline without any choices. Maybe I'm thinking of a different one.

You might be thinking of Planetarian, it does have a lot of rain, and is a kinetic novel(one with no choices).

Weird. Didn't have a single crash in Symphonic Rain. Rhythm game worked perfectly. Are you sure you got the latest patch straight off TLWiki?

OtakuNinja wrote: I don't think there have been a complete English patch for the game(s) yet, but it's fully enjoyable in Japanese too.

I think (I've been out of the VN scene for a while so I may be wrong) that the first Otoboku game actually has an English patch now, it came out quite recently.

Flutterz wrote: I had a ton of crashes, 1-4 per route >.>

That can't be normal. Perhaps it was because you were using a netbook? Although that being said VNs don't use much so even a netbook should be able to handle it.

Flutterz wrote: Speaking of Symphonic Rain, isn't that Torta on your avatar?

Yup, because I really like the artwork in this picture. Actually I really like the artwork in Symphonic Rain, although it seems to get a fair bit of criticism.

Nobody in Particular wrote:

OtakuNinja wrote: I had a ton of crashes, 1-4 per route >.>

That can't be normal. Perhaps it was because you were using a netbook? Although that being said VNs don't use much so even a netbook should be able to handle it.

Well except for Rewrite which I did a the trial benchmark test on my netbook and it crashed my netbook so hard it wasn't even funny. I ended up have to force shutdown because it was completely unresponsive. As for my regular laptop I managed to get a B with Sandy Bridge Intel Core I5. Supposedly the fight scenes later on is pretty hard on the computer. So I would reccomend to not use a netbook for that unless its a really good one. As for old VN's I think any old computer can handle them if its compatible

acewing905 wrote:Weird. Didn't have a single crash in Symphonic Rain. Rhythm game worked perfectly. Are you sure you got the latest patch straight off TLWiki?

I didn't word that right, the part about the rhythm game and the crashes are separate. Rhythm game worked fine, but I had a lot of scenes where the VN would crash.
I did get the latest patch from TLWiki, so I guess it must be something to do with me using a netbook. Regardless, good to know that that isn't what everybody has to go through.

stanman237 wrote: Well except for Rewrite which I did a the trial benchmark test on my netbook and it crashed my netbook so hard it wasn't even funny. I ended up have to force shutdown because it was completely unresponsive. As for my regular laptop I managed to get a B with Sandy Bridge Intel Core I5. Supposedly the fight scenes later on is pretty hard on the computer. So I would reccomend to not use a netbook for that unless its a really good one. As for old VN's I think any old computer can handle them if its compatible

Interestingly enough, I installed Rewrite just today, and it seemed to run fine. Admittedly I only went 2 lines in past the initial cutscene, and it was perhaps just a bit more sluggish than other VNs, but it certainly didn't crash. Maybe my netbook is just picky.

Rewrite can hog your CPU at times. Terrible Japanese programming. What're the specs of your netbook, anyway?

acewing905 wrote:Rewrite can hog your CPU at times. Terrible Japanese programming. What're the specs of your netbook, anyway?

It's an asus, this one to be precise.

Flutterz wrote:

acewing905 wrote:Rewrite can hog your CPU at times. Terrible Japanese programming. What're the specs of your netbook, anyway?

It's an asus, this one to be precise.

Well, the minimum CPU requirement for Rewrite is a 2GHz P4, so you might be okay with even the Atom, as your one is a dual core variant. Still, I won't be surprised if certain points hogged your system badly.

acewing905 wrote:

Flutterz wrote:

acewing905 wrote:Rewrite can hog your CPU at times. Terrible Japanese programming. What're the specs of your netbook, anyway?

It's an asus, this one to be precise.

Well, the minimum CPU requirement for Rewrite is a 2GHz P4, so you might be okay with even the Atom, as your one is a dual core variant. Still, I won't be surprised if certain points hogged your system badly.

Thanks for the heads up. As long as it only hogs the system and doesn't completely crash it, it should be fine, I'm more or less used to it by now.

If anything the Siglus engine is quite nice on how smooth it runs if you can handle it, so far the comedy fight scene in the common route was nice and smooth on my laptop. On a side note, they overdid the quality of the opening because its freaking 200 MB for a two and half minute video.

Either way, the CG's in this game is actually really nice including the background ones because of the detail and shadows.

stanman237 wrote:If anything the Siglus engine is quite nice on how smooth it runs if you can handle it, so far the comedy fight scene in the common route was nice and smooth on my laptop. On a side note, they overdid the quality of the opening because its freaking 200 MB for a two and half minute video.

Either way, the CG's in this game is actually really nice including the background ones because of the detail and shadows.

Siglus Engine is not much different to Real Live as far as optimization goes. It runs nicely if you have a decent rig, but it uses way more processing power than something of that nature should.

And the opening video size is a very common thing with Japanese games, especially VNs. They leave videos in raw MPEG1 format so that the user's computer doesn't need to have any additional codecs installed.

Either way supposedly Siglus doesn't have the problem of corrupted save files when repatching it which is definitely nice. I personally think they could had updated the RealLive Engine to be HD. At least Reallive is open in Japan now.

stanman237 wrote:Either way supposedly Siglus doesn't have the problem of corrupted save files when repatching it which is definitely nice. I personally think they could had updated the RealLive Engine to be HD. At least Reallive is open in Japan now.

Well, the new version of RealLive that runs Little Busters! Perfect Edition does run in HD resolutions. (Still 4:3, sadly.) The CGs/sprites are simply upscaled, but it looks good enough.

(Click to see full image.)