Feeling a bit better today. Some reasonable quality rest helped, as did the fact that the day was relatively uneventful. Got some stuff done, got some stuff ready to make my life easier tomorrow, had a chance to relax — job's a good 'un.
Tomorrow's The History of Lewd piece on Rice Digital should be a good one — I played through all of Three Sisters' Story today, a game I haven't played for a good 20+ years or so. I'd forgotten how genuinely good it was — particularly after revisiting Ring-Out!!, which was just as uncomfortable an experience as I remembered it being back in the day.
Three Sisters' Story represents a few things I'd love to see modern independent developers make a bit more of: firstly, homage to the PC-98 era of visuals, which is just gorgeous, and secondly, visual novels that play like adventure games. We do still get a few of these — with notable examples being Root Letter, the Ace Attorney series and the upcoming Root Film — but for the most part, visual novels these days tend to be mostly passive. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but the illusion of "gameplay" in adventure-style visual novels definitely adds something special to the mix.
I'll talk more about this tomorrow, but Three Sisters' Story also sticks in my mind for being an eroge that ends up punishing you if you blindly charge into too many erotic scenes. There are some you can get away with over the course of the narrative — and some that are mandatory — but there are also several along the way where if you think with your dick rather than your head and heart, you'll get yourself into trouble later. And I mean later; the consequences of careless sexual encounters don't become apparent until the very end of the game!
I remember really respecting Three Sisters' Story for this back in the day, and I still respect it greatly for it now. To be fair, the game provides you with plenty of clues as to what the "right" thing to do in terms of the story should be, so if you go "wrong" you really only have yourself to blame. But it's still cool to see a narrative-based title follow through so conclusively on the consequences of your actions like that.
Anyway, I'm getting into things I want to talk about tomorrow now, so stop by Rice Digital for another installment in The History of Lewd and I'll tell you a lot more!
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