I'll talk about Piofiore: Fated Memories first since the intention was that I start my seven part VN Talk series (overview, 5 love interests, and finale) today, but after spending far too much time combing through screenshots on my Switch I realized I wasn't going to finish trimming my library down to a manageable level in time for posting.
When I first started blogging about games, there wasn't a lot of screen capture support, particularly for the portable units I favored, so it wasn't until I got my Vita that I could begin transferring things. At first it was just key scenes I thought I might use in my blog, but then I started taking screen caps of dialogue to use as plot references, screen caps of characters' last names or minor character names that might be hard to find online.
It started becoming relatively common for me to take a couple hundred screenshots per route (of which at most 5-6 will be added to the blog) and for some reason that I'm sure I'll understand once I get far enough through the gallery, I ended up taking several hundred (rough estimate of 700-800) of Piofiore's Finale route. I suspect most of that is plot material. Since the Finale isn't going up until seven weeks out, it might seem strange to postpone the first installment of the series while I clear out the entire library, but the thing is, when I have so many it becomes incredibly hard to figure out which are the best to use and I want the overview to be a look at the game as a whole. Which in a way is the opposite problem I had when I first started with Vita games, where it was more common for me to not have an appropriate screenshot at all.
Out of the 2300 screenshots, I started with, I only managed to get down to 2000 in the time I expected to do my blog editing. And it wasn't particularly hard to do either. I have a lot of stuff I don't need to save. One problem particular to Piofiore is that some of the details I screenshotted for reference turned out to be lies or misdirection so I ended up deleting what are the equivalent of my notes for plot points that don't actually matter. I'm about halfway through my third route, and as mentioned, the finale seems to be hogging the lion's share. By the time I'm done I expect they'll still be in the hundreds, but better than two thousand. Fingers crossed for next week.
The other thing I thought I'd bring up is that I played Detective Di: The Silk Rose Murders as a quick palate cleanser after Piofiore. I wouldn't ordinarily play two of the longer otome back to back, but Radiant Tale has been my most anticipated game this year so I didn't want to leave it lying around. Detective Di was the perfect point-and-click mystery adventure game to jostle me out of visual novel land before diving back in.
I've noticed that point-and-click adventure games have been enjoying a renaissance among indie developers, and this is the first I've played of the modern variety. The pixel art definitely sent me back to my time playing King's Quest V on the family Mac. However I know that the character sprites in Detective Di, though not much more detailed than in days of old, are significantly larger.
I would have liked a bit of quality of life when it came to walking from one end of the screen to another when backtracking, as the titular Di cannot be bothered to walk faster than a stroll (maybe a fast travel to the map), but otherwise it was a blast to play.
The historical Di has been used in pop culture media before, so this has hardly his first fictional outing, though he seems to be considerably younger than he would have been at this point in history. He's described as young and a new magistrate, when historically he would have been pushing fifty by the start of our game. But I think given that he's likely unfamiliar to most players, having them play as a younger Di makes sense, and by choosing the year they did, they can bring in Wu Zetian (the only woman to rule China as emperor in her own right) as his patron for the majority of the game.
Though I was initially annoyed that all the murder victims are women, once I knew the story I understood why it had to be that way. And there's a little Chinese cultural tidbit that turns out to be important to the story that I'd known about but had never seen used in a game before, and I really liked it.
There's some of the usual getting stuck at a puzzle you can't figure out that seems to come with every old school adventure game, but for the most part they're solveable as long as you're good at spotting the right things to click on. There's no minute pixel hunting, but you do have to be observant. I completely missed one clue because my eyes glossed over it as part of the background art, but after I consulted a walkthrough I couldn't believe I hadn't seen what now looked so obvious.
It's only about 5-6 hours to play through, and I can't express how much this encouraged me to give it a try. (Games that are both excellent and short are an easy win.) If you can get it on sale it's only a few dollars, and it's available on any gaming platform (including mobile) with the odd exception of the Playstation systems.
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