Tag Archives: Kira Kira

The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: Ten Years, Ten VNs

The MoeGamer Awards are a series of β€œalternative” awards I’ve devised in collaboration with the community to celebrate the sorts of things that never get celebrated in end-of-year roundups!Β Find out more hereΒ β€” and feel free to leave a suggestion on that post if you have any good ideas!

–

It’s nearly the end of a decade, and you know what that means: looking back over the last ten years to arbitrarily decide what was “best” from that equally arbitrary length of time.

I was just going to do a “games of the decade” sort of affair, but I realised while putting my provisional lists together that I had enough visual novels to do them in their own dedicated, separate list. So the “Ten Years, Ten Games” award will be following next week, and for now let’s talk visual novels!

For each year of (English language) release, I’m picking a visual novel that I found personally significant. This doesn’t mean that it was necessarily the “best” that year had to offer — whatever that means — but it was important to me. So let’s delve in… and note that at the time of writing, there are holiday sales going on all over the Internet, so you can pick up many of these for pretty cheap right now!

And the winners are…

Continue reading The MoeGamer 2019 Awards: Ten Years, Ten VNs

From the Archives: Kira Kira Hikaru

Today I’d like to talk specifically about one of the narrative paths of Overdrive’s visual novel Kira Kira.

Specifically, I’d like to discuss Chie-nee’s path. There are spoilers ahead, so be warned if you’re planning on playing this. (And you should β€” it’s really rather good.)

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

Continue reading From the Archives: Kira Kira Hikaru

From the Archives: Meaning in the Madness

With a lot of the games I’ve played over the last few yearsΒ β€” including many of the visual novels that I’ve read β€” I’ve found myself thinking β€œgosh, I really wish I had this when I was a teenager.”

Not just from a technical standpoint β€” though naturally the games of today look and sound considerably better than those of 15 years ago β€” but from the perspective of subject matter and the willingness to tackle issues that simply would have been unthinkable to see in a video game of the ’90s.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

Continue reading From the Archives: Meaning in the Madness

From the Archives: Twinkle, Twinkle

Back when I first started reading it, it became clear that the visual novel Kira KiraΒ was something special.

It raised a bunch of interesting things to talk about, even before I’d seen the whole story. So with that in mind, here are my reflections from my early hours with Kira Kira, with more to follow in the coming weeksΒ regarding the specific narrative routes through the game.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2013 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been edited and republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

Continue reading From the Archives: Twinkle, Twinkle