Visual Novel

On December 25th (Merry Christmas!), Light released the final (and supposedly complete) version of its Dies irae game, Dies irae ~Acta est Fabula~.

The complete version comes with two new routes, including the long-awaited Kei route (yay!), but is still missing a Rusalka route (boo!), which can't really be helped on some levels. However, due to the various release of this game, it seems which version contains what is becoming a bit confusing... so here is a small post that will hopefully clear things up.

First of all, let's take a look at all the versions of the game currently out there:

Eh, super busy as usual, so much for regular updates.

Anyway, while browsing the web today, I stumbled upon something fascinating.....

NARCISSU 3 IS COMING OUT THIS MONTH!

When I first saw stage-nana's website, I was like wut, it's coming out when? April? Wow I sure missed this one. The official title is narcissu 3rd -Die Dritte Welt-. In case you haven't played the first two games in the series, go do yourself a favor and play them now, and don't complain about you can't because they are free and are available in English, Chinese, Korean, and apparently Thai (thanks to fan translation, of course). Edit: Oops, totally forgot the English patch for Narcissu 2 isn't out yet!

When speaking of Japanese visual novels, probably the first thing that comes to mind is H scenes or something similar, and most of them are fairly expensive to get if you live in the U.S. (of course no one would ever get them through some torrent site or anything like that!) So, being the poor gamer that you are, if you're looking for a meaningful story, quality artwork and good sound track, look no further than Narcissu, a free visual novel by the doujin group stage-nana.

What You can't read Japanese? Worry not, the game has already been translated to English by insani. As for the story, here's a brief summary:

Gish 2's official website was recently updated with something of an intro. Although it's not clear who's the creature that's doing the talking, it sure seem like something out of a Lovecraft novel. From what can be seen so far, comparing Gish 2, which looks dark and adult-like, to Gish 1, which seems cute and cuddly, is like comparing Silent Hill to Serious Sam (um how does that work out anyway?). Also, after having recently completed Nitro+'s Saya no Uta, I have reasons to believe that the creature on the frontpage is a distant relatives of Saya's.

Which brings us to the topic of this post (yes, it's actually not about Gish 2). Last night, staying up till 3am or so, I finally finished a extremely short but thought-provoking work called Saya no Uta (Song of Saya) from Nitro+, a Japanese eroge game maker known for works like Demonbane and my personal favorite, Phantom of Inferno.

After a long wait, visual novel translation group mirror moon has finally finished translating the second story arc of Fate/stay night!

The new patch, appropriately titled Fate/stay night English v2.0, not only contains translation for both the Fate route and the UBW (that's Unlimited Blade Works for those non-Type-Mooners) route, but also come with the option of adding voices into both the Fate and UBW routes, that is, as long as you have a (legal) copy of the PS2 version of the game, Realta Nua.

Download links: Direct, RapidShare, Megaupload, BT

And some places to purchase Realta Nua.

For those of you not in the known, Fate/stay night is a eroge (adult) visual novel made by Type-Moon. The game has three different "storyline" the player can play through, "Fate," UBW," and "Heaven's Feel."

Great to see a 66%-Complete English patch for the game coming out, considering a few years ago the only way to understand what's going on in the game is to read story summaries...it'll also be fun to see which patch reach the final version first, the English patch or the Chinese patch? (For those who doesn't know, the Chinese fan community has also made their translation patch that come with voice add-on, coincidentally, it's around 66% complete as well)

While on the topic of Fate translation...check out Multiple:Option's wonderful abridged version of the Fate/stay night trial demo and the Fate/hollow ataraxia Prologue (both translated!) to the DS, as well as the Fate