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Rhapsody in Black
This essay is part of an ongoing series on Sakura no Uta. It contains spoilers for the content through Zypressen. To play on the words of Nakahara Chuuya, Zypressen is a fairy tale of two. Black and white, eternal and fleeting, male and female. Up until this point in the game, nowhere has the creator’s…
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Night on the Galactic Railroad
If you engage in any sort of Japanese media commonly exported to the West, there’s a good chance that you’ve been exposed in some way to the imagery in Miyazawa Kenji’s Night on the Galactic Railroad. Whether through the book, the movie, or the countless scenes inspired by them, the journey of Giovanni and Campanella…
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Finding a Better Estimate for Visual Novel Ratings
Over the past month, I’ve been working on a side project that investigated the Bayesian rating system of popular website vndb.net. It is somewhat well known that the Bayesian rating tends to underrate most games. Quite severely. The goal was to see if popular machine learning algorithms could be used to create a better prior…
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Sumadera, Keeping an Open Mind
For the handful of people keeping track of this project, the Sumadera route is complete. I think for many readers, Sumadera’s route leaves an especially strong impression, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the writing in this route was the only reason I wanted to start this project. Hopefully the words can…
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January in review
The Maho route is translated. It wasn’t my favorite route when I first read it, but having to engage with each line individually has given me some new perspective on what’s going on. It is an introspective route where Kida and Maho search for answers to the questions posed by the other routes in a…
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A December update
Translation of the Asuna route is finished. Having to effectively read the route 2 or 3 times over makes you realize a lot of things you didn’t notice the first time around. On the surface, it seems like the most galge themed route in the game, but it’s more inspired by Drama and Theatre. The…
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December when there is no angel – Translation Announcement
November 27.Too late to be called autumn, but just a little too early to be called winter, the season of beginnings and endings. Leaf has made so many different types of games that it would be a stretch to call December when there is no angel an anomaly. It is, like their other landmark games,…
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Learning, Memory and Knowledge
This is the first of a series I plan on writing as I read through Sakura no Uta. It contains spoilers for the Olympia route. All images are from the game and do not belong to me. “What is it you’re looking for?” “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”[1] We usually think of learning…