visualnovels

New month, new post. First, the official business: I've updated our VN Patch List with links to fan translations for Kurai Heya and Schrödinger's Nekomoto-kun. Both released last week so we got them fresh.

Now for the personal portion. Small warning: this post contains minor spoilers for the first 15 or so minutes of Miniature Garden. Probably won't be a problem but I might as well point this out beforehand.

Last month was filled with some unexpected family situations so I wasn't able to focus on VNs (or reading in general). As things have finally calmed down a bit, I decided to jump right into my remaining backlog before anything else grabs my attention. I was initially planning to go with Chuusotsu 1st Graduation - Time After Time but started with Miniature Garden instead, since it was suppose to be the shorter of the two titles on my "read before moving on the big titles" list. So, how did it go?

I posted this in my February comment:

I know absolutely nothing about this story as I grabbed it completely at random (translator released it for free on itch.io for limited time) so I hope I’m not about to step on a surprise emotional landmine.

Well... Miniature Garden opens with a young girl talking about murder, followed by multiple conversations about school rumours (one of them also includes murder) and then a question whether one of the characters would be willing to erase their memories, especially if they were extremely painful.

I expected a cute school story and this is what I'm met with right at the start... You'd think that even looking at the cover would give me a pause but nope - no thoughts, head empty, school kids on the cover so it should be fine.

Joking aside, it's a pretty interesting read though I only reached 2 endings so far so I'm not 100% ready to talk about it. It's not my usual approach (I generally stick to a few routes I'm the most interested in) but it's a mystery so I'd rather go through as much content as possible to know what's what. Doubly so since playing through it once can be a bit of a messy and kind of disjointed feeling experience.

Both routes were somewhat interesting, even if neither of them finished in a completely happy or satisfying manner. There are just too many missing pieces to walk away after two endings so I guess I'll keep trucking through more of them (there's 7 in total, I believe). Looks like it'll be a longer experience than I initially thought.

So yeah, first impressions: not perfect but definitely surprising and interesting. I want to read more, will report once I'm done with it.