Following up the recent reveal of two new trailers, Kaga Create has now published a video that will serve as the new opening sequence for their complete collection of Higurashi: no Naku Koro ni visual novels, which will release in Japan soon.
The video itself is not too great, but marks the first time that we see sequences from Higurashi: no Naku Koro ni Kizuna and Matsuri in the promotional material for this game. The clip is accompanied by a song from Kanako Itō, who has also done music for other big multimedia projects like Steins;Gate, DRAMAtical Murder, and School Days, as well as earlier visual novels in the Higurashi franchise. Still, I am not a big fan of this new song and some of the visuals on display here are pretty mediocre, so to overcome my disappointment (and because everyone is curious about it), I decided to check on the Steam port that is being developed by MangaGamer.
Now, Mangagamer can be a bit awkward to deal with, since they produce a lot of novels and a lot of them are pornographic, so I got to see plenty of genitalia as I browsed around for new information. The company’s staff blog states that the first chapter is about 15% done, but I have visited this page a few times since the original announcement and it has always stuck around that percentage, so I assume they never bother to update this for some odd reason. The company’s Twitter and Facebook were also a bit occupied with hentai, but their ask.fm was more useful. Apparently, the game suffered a recent delay because, some way in development, it was decided to change the way Japanese honorifics are used in the translation, meaning a lot had to be redone. While that is pretty annoying, especially since I personally dislike it when translations retain honorifics, there was also some good news to be found: due to a switch to the unity engine, the novel will also support other platforms besides Windows.
A steam page for the first chapter is already up and showcases the amazing new art and some of the translated lines. The release date is vague, but “coming soon” at least sounds pretty positive.
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