Update Two Hundred and Seventy-Nine: 12 February 2019
Seduce Me 2: the Demon War
95 hours playtime, ~8.5 hrs actual, 50 of 50 achievements
4/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
Yeah, this wasn’t good.
I don’t remember being so irritated with the first installment as I was with this one. I probably have it a pass because its free - having to pay, what, 10 US American dollars for this one is just galling. (That’s, like, a FULL HALF of a Yakuza 0!)
The art style improved a lot - I believe they got a new artist, and they’re pretty all right at what they do - but the writing is just… painful. This prose is so fuckin’ purple it’d be at home in a barrel of eggplants. There is SOME literary grasp of the language in there, but it’s hidden under clumsy handling and language that takes me right out of the story, passive and repetitive. Look, I know it’s called Seduce Me, for god’s sake, I know I’m getting into pulpy, trashy territory - but this is just ridiculous. Everything is told TO you rather than built or shown organically, and nothing’s compelling.
I was really, really tempted to skip through this, but I know it’d make BLAEO user Giselle sad and an angel would lose their wings and etc. etc.. It was a pain not to, though - and, at least, I’m finally free! Skip this one, folks.
Next up: Hell yes hell yes hell fuckin’ yes! Talk about a palate cleanser!
See you soon!
Sorry you had to struggle so hard to get this one done D:
This is reminding me that I need to get back into Higarushi, though >3>
At least it was done! And I can save everyone else the pain.
Yes! Yes, do so! Apparently the 7th one is going to be released soon! The Answer arcs are the ones that really, truly shine.
I’m still only on the second one, jeeze :,) I still need to buy the answer arcs….
I’ve always thought that a prospective angel gained his/her wings when somebody looks at a title like, “Seduce Me 2: the Demon War,” and decides, “y’know, I don’t think I need to buy/play this game.” ;-P
PFFT TRENT u fuckin’ madman you got me laugh-cryin’ over here
YA GOT ME I am far past the point of granting angels their wings.
Keep this between you and me, RNGesus offered up ‘Demonheart’ as my next VN to read… and I was like ‘I need to take a break from demonfucking VNs’ so I pressed ‘random’ one more time.
I’m disappointed that this sequel is not worth it, I don’t see myself spending money to read this.
I am still alive and lurking here, I appreciate the thought despite me never making an appearance :D
But one of the reasons I haven’t read almost any vn in the past year has to do with a shift in my attitude towards the mediums I am consuming. I’ve been wanting to find the words to express what I am feeling and the fact I haven’t written any post yet is because it has been difficult to put this into writing.
To anyone who knew my firm believings to not skip stuff in visual novels, please I was mistaken. I have changed my mind. (gay gasp)
I had come to the acceptance that it was okay to drop the books I had been reading or the tv series I had started I didn’t like, because our free time/life is limited and why should we spend it consuming something we do not enjoy? That sometimes is of so little quality that it makes us angry even?
And yet—despite making the decision to not bother reading some books that came into my possession because I have never been interested into reading them—I was somehow persisting into spending my free time into reading some vns just because they came into my possession.
I have become aware, and more aware of the lack of quality in the whole majority of vns I own (especially those published on Steam where they refuse to do quality control).
The ones I am interested in are few, and I know I will be enjoying them. I have been stubbornly somehow trying to dilute them with all the other ones I own and knew I wouldn’t enjoy. Why did I ever bother to read to completion things like A Detective’s Novel or True Lover’s Knot?? It’s bad. I even had to go back to my profile to look for the titles, since this is the kind of +1 stuff that’s made to be forgotten the day after touching it.
On Steam, particularly, it’s been a trainwreck this past year for vns. For example, they keep allowing fishy developers like SakuraGame and such to exist and sell on their store, they haven’t done anything to stop them because $$$.
The other BAD thing for vns Steam has done in this past year has been lying about allowing adult games because they said they were not the moral police and later, this statement was proven wrong when they started censoring and banning any vn they didn’t remotely like, because they are really trying to be the moral police now. It’s come to the current trainwreck where they are banning sfw stuff. It’s ridiculous!
Steam might have done much for visibility for vns in the past, but it’s actively hurting developers and their customers now. It’s not good anymore, it cannot be the preferred platform for vns anymore when they are pulling this shit on us now.
So… tldr: I know where I am writing this and we are on BLAEO and this might go against this whole community’s plan, that is to kill your backlog, but what I believed for the longest of time to be my own laziness not to play has changed into the thinking “90% of the games suck and are shovelware and made for achievements, why should I even bother to copypaste the appropriate code and write a post about this stuff here on BLAEO if the game creator didn’t bother putting the same effort into the game?”
Okay, I have no idea if I’ll copypaste this stuff into a whole new post and add on this, I hope I was able to properly explain my thoughts ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Awww, Giselle! I’m glad you dropped in to comment. I do think about you regularly, and missed seeing you around.
All of that is very well put - I’m typically like that with most media, just not with VNs. You’ve inspired me to keep my ideology consistent and Marie Kondo my VN playing as well. If I’m not enjoying myself, ‘skip all to 100%’ it is.
I’m trying to be more stringent about what I put on my wishlist and what I ultimately buy. I’ve split it into three distinct sections and buy mostly from the top section, the games I actively WANT to be playing, rather than whatever’s the cheapest/on sale for the most. The next two sections, games I think are interesting but have a reservation about and games I’d like to try but have BIGGER reservations about, I don’t pull from as much.
I get your frustrations. There ARE gems out there, they’re just harder to find. I think itch.io is the new wave for fostering good VN (or, at least, OELVN) content…. but then, there’s so much THERE, too.
lol I am glad you mentioned marie kondo because her books have helped me declutter so much stuff these past few years… it’s just that I used to be a little stubborn about books and stuff to read like vns
IT IS difficult to put up with bad games after things like fata morgana and such, one just can’t go back and pretend everything is normal after this :D
“at home in a barrel of eggplants”. This made me laugh. I’m going to have to find a way to use this expression. I’ve never heard of describing writing us purple before though. DuckDuckGo says it’s flowery language, which makes me think of The Great Gatsby. shudders.
My initial impulse was ‘so purple it was almost as if it were throttled to death’ but, uh, I was worried it’d be too graphic. I’m glad the eggplant one landed better!
Yep, that’s correct! (though I blissfully don’t recall the language in the Great Gatsby, I believe it. F. Scott (the F stands for ‘Fuckboy’) was a hack whose best material was stolen from his wife)
I can take a LITTLE bit of purple prose, but it’s gotta be good! This was SUPER SUPER not.
Lol IIRC Gatsby just went on describing the most irrelevant things; I was amazed when it was made into a movie. I was supposed to study it for English way back in high school but never actually finished it. The teacher let us choose between that and Frankenstein. I was the only person who voted for Frankenstein.