Vulptalk

Hi, and welcome back to Seabed! This will be a very quick one since the scene itself isn’t very long, and only a few things really stand out in my mind about it. Back in the regular story, we join Takako and Sachiko at an airport, bound for Paris – city of culture and, of course, Parisians, who are known for being quite rude. And by ‘rude’, I mean there’s a rare culture-bound psychological condition, primarily afflicting Japanese people such as Sachiko and Takako, caused by the sheer disparity between the reputation of Paris as a place of art and culture, and the attitudes of the Parisian people at large. It’s called Paris Syndrome, and knowing about it probably isn’t going to help us analyse the story in any way, but since this is a psychological type of VN I thought I might as well bring it up. More significant, in a meta-narrative kind of way, is the fact that the two are travelling at all. We’ve already discussed ‘a town surrounded by mountains’, and the ‘closed circl...

I've mentioned  on Ko-fi  that I want to do an OJ VN and would be using my Ko-fi donations to pursue that goal, so I'd like to talk a little more about that project - what it involves, what the scope is, a very basic outline of the plot, how the plans have changed from the original draft, and a few other minor details. First, I'll talk about the original draft. I came up with it a year or two ago, and did some semi-detailed planning on the way the plot would flow. The setting would be a university/college setting, which retains some of what makes high school AUs so enjoyable, but allows for greater character agency and a wider range of experiences than a standard high school. The protagonist and viewpoint character would be Sora, for a range of reasons. Firstly, she's my favourite, which isn't a great  reason in the grand scheme of things, but it's still a reason. Secondly, my experiences with writing OJ fanfic have taught me that Sora adapts very  well to t...

A/N: Since this series stopped for a while and now is re-starting, here's some links to the previous parts if you want to review them: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Hello, and welcome back – at long last – to the Seabed Slow Read! For a few little administrative points: I wasn’t intending to let this sit for as long as it did, but sometimes life just gets the better of me, and the daily grind redoubles its efforts. I’m not great at picking things back up once I’ve started them and loss the thread, so please bear with me as I get re-acquainted with the workflow here. Part of my motivation for doing this is that I’ve enjoyed great support on ko-fi, and while I don’t feel good specifically saying ‘pay me and I’ll do this thing’ (a la patreon) because I wouldn’t want to disappoint people if I fail, I still wanted to have a goal to show some appreciation for the people who tipped me so generously. I spent some of the money on helping a friend afford a plushie in Wave ...

There will be spoilers contained within. Read at your own risk.

There will be spoilers contained within. Read at your own risk. 

There will be spoilers contained within. Read at your own risk.

There will be spoilers contained within. Read at your own risk.

I’d like to preface this review by saying that I’m not a professional, or even an unprofessional, reviewer; I’m doing this largely for fun and practice, and not really to influence anybody’s decisions when it comes to buying the game. Additionally, expect mild spoilers . Chuusotsu! 1 st Graduation is a game that sells itself on the premise of ‘wacky philosophy’; the mission statement, as given by the game, is that a bunch of oddballs are assembled, given a philosophy question to complete, and will be kicked out of their shared accommodation if they can’t answer it within a time limit . While this is true, I would probably say that anybody going into the story expecting heavy philosophical musing is going to be disappointed. Largely, the game seems content just to pose the question of ‘what is philosophising? What is philosophy in modern, day-to-day life?’, which, while not a bad question, it never quite seems to reach a resounding answer to. This is, however, a game tha...