choice?

[marantana]

Towards the end there seems to be a choice for Rika regarding Satoko.
Is this just kind of a 4th wall joke or is this actually a choice?

"A" is bound to "Auto" anyway, and after a few seconds the game advances with selection B, so I suspect that. Anyway, I found no way to select a choice, so if there actually is one, pls tell me ;-)

[fllthdcrb]

That's not a real choice, it's just Rika's thought process. I'm not sure why it's presented that way. Maybe Ryukishi07 was trolling us. 😁 Or maybe he's making the point that Rika refuses to abandon Satoko, even at the risk of losing the memory.

[marantana]

Yeah, that's what I thought. thx

[fllthdcrb]

In any case, of the very few choices this series does have, none actually affect anything beyond giving slightly different text. The one back in "Himatsubushi-hen" (ch. 4) was in a TIP, and gives essentially the same result either way; if you go back after choosing one option and choose the other, it finishes the little lecture about real life choices and such, and the story doesn't change at all. The one earlier in this arc only determines whether Rika tries to influence Keiichi's decision about the doll, but he ends up doing the right thing either way.

[marantana]

yes. I couldn't even remember there were any choices at all. it's basically a kinetic novel.
Do you know if the fan translation of Matsuribayashi (CH.8) was good? Or should I wait another 6 months for the worked over mangagamer translation?

[fllthdcrb]

Although there were partial fan translations of Higurashi, what you're probably referring to is MangaGamer's previous releases, from 2009 and 2010. Though the translation quality was originally rather rough, it got pretty good by the time they started on Kai, although it was always a little rough around the edges (occasional, minor things like typos, missing articles, adding "s" when it shouldn't be there or omitting it when it should be there, questionable diction, etc., but nothing that makes it hard to understand). They redid the translation when they started the project to release it on Steam, and also made a new engine based on Unity, whereas before they used BGI/Ethornell (07th Expansion's own releases use NScripter), and they included the Japanese text, which they didn't do before. Their developer for this, Doddler, also added those 3D animations of the Fragments you see in the prologue of this arc.

If you're really impatient to see the end of the story, I can (mostly) recommend the BGI version. You'll probably want to set the text speed close to maximum (the timing is per character, and the default and range is based on what is reasonable for Japanese text, which has fewer characters, so it's way too slow for most people in English). I can't tell you where you might get ahold of it, though, for... reasons. Certainly not directly from MangaGamer, which doesn't sell that version anymore.

One other thing: the BGI version had the original music replaced with inferior stuff. If you want the original music (highly recommended), there are patches available, which you can extract into the installation directory. Here's my own patch[ipfs.eternum.io] that I made from individual patches that I found + my own question arc patch (see explanation for the latter, if you're curious); it has a directory for the question arcs as well as each of the answer arcs. Note that the patches aren't (and can't be) perfect, since the BGI version replaced multiple tracks with a single track in several cases, so decisions had to be made which ones were most important. The Unity version shouldn't have that problem.

[marantana]

thanks a lot for the detailed reply! I got hold of the old mangagamer version, so I'll read that for now.
oh man... ~1400 unread visual novels... and one to translate in the next 4 weeks (en>de)

[fllthdcrb]

Wow! Just looked at your VNDB profile. You're not kidding. That's quite a list.

[marantana]

yeah, obsessive collector...
I'm already retired, so I've got time...