Status TheTheory Dec 28, 2017
I got this via a recent Humble Bundle and thought I'd give it a go. I always enjoy visual novels more in concept than reality--I got spoiled by VNs like 999, which had plenty of dialogue options and puzzles to solve--as simply clicking "next" for more dialogue gets a bit tedious.
The biggest problem with your average VN isn't the …
I got this via a recent Humble Bundle and thought I'd give it a go. I always enjoy visual novels more in concept than reality--I got spoiled by VNs like 999, which had plenty of dialogue options and puzzles to solve--as simply clicking "next" for more dialogue gets a bit tedious.
The biggest problem with your average VN isn't the sea of text, it's that the translation is dry as fuck. (Or, just as likely, the original Japanese is dry as fuck.) Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~ is about as dry as it gets. Look--Japan has always used anime and manga for non-fiction means--you can find manga about a ton of non-fiction subjects. You'll sometimes find this in the US, too, as I've seen comic crash courses in philosophy and whatnot, but by-and-large, serious subjects get serious treatment: articles and books.
Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~ is basically a travel guide. There seems to be a loose narrative (that I suspect will become a basic dating simulator), but the purpose behind this "game" is to give a future visitor to Japan a crash course. It's played from the perspective of someone who is just landing in Japan for the first time, so we're experiencing everything from their eyes.
It's actually a cool concept. But it seems like the writers, in trying to envision Japan from the eyes of a tourist, erred on the side of "has been stuck in the 1700s," which leads to awkward bits of dialogue like this:
Wow... this is a train station? I guess it must be since we got here on a train, after all.
Wow indeed. If that shocks you, let me introduce you to motherfucking taxi cabs (possible dialogue: "Wow, it's a car...? That takes you where you want to go? For a fee?") or toilets that flush (possible dialogue: "You sit down to go poo.")
To be fair, much of the information given during this early stage is probably helpful for travelers. It outlines the different train passes and how to buy them. How names aren't necessarily genderized in Japan, which is why one of the female characters is named Akira. How the Tokyo airport isn't actually located in Tokyo. It's good stuff (if a little too detailed at times), though--so far--mostly limited to people who actually intend to travel to Japan (or, perhaps, for people who are writing a novel and want to get little details correct).
I'll probably end up pillaging a lot of the above for my official review when all is said and done--assuming, of course, I actually bother to finish it.