Yeah the English release of Flowers is PC only. The console releases are jp only so if you want to read on switch/psn you can do that.
JAST didn’t want to pay for the rights to include the jp text unfortunately so its a bit harder for people that want to read on PC.
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Okay マルコと銀河竜 / Marco to Ginga Ryuu won the vote we will start reading that on the 23th September.
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Aw yeah! Glad it’s something I might actually have a chance of getting through!
So, how will we continue? Will there be a separate thread? Who will be in charge of it? In other clubs I’ve been in it has usually been the one who nominated the thing that won (which would be @bbo) or whoever steps up if they don’t have time.
And I’m pretty curious what the schedule will be, not least because it’ll make a big difference in how much I’ll have to struggle to keep up…
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The scheduling is going to be a bit of an issue; Marco doesn’t have a progress counter of any kind, nor does it have a chapter structure. The closest thing it does have is a percentage count on how many CGs you’ve seen which could be used as a crude way of tracking progress, though that would require everyone to either continually back out the the menu and check their percentage, or be given descriptions of the CGs that may contain mild spoilers.
I’m around 35% collected with 4 hours of slow play, and according the the VNDB time entries that mention reading in JP it takes around 8-11 hours, so it might make sense to try and do around 25% to 33% every week depending on how much time people have.
I don’t think anyone will struggle too much with this VN unless they’re below an N4 level. Pretty much 100% of the text is fully voiced dialogue, and the language used is pretty easy. It’s also text hookable with textractor, and supports hot-swapping and or multiple active languages, so you’ve got the full suite of tools to keep up.
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Good question I’m not sure if we need a separate thread.
But we will definitely have weekly threads I suggest that we finish it in 4 weeks max.
Who should be in charge? They person who nominated it should be the one who decides that. Either @bbo will run the threads or I can do it. Of course I am always happy to offload work on other people. 
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Hmm… I think the ideal solution would probably be to find low-spoiler CGs/scenes like “they just left the restaurant”, but of course that would mean that someone has to read ahead. Checking percentage doesn’t sound like the worst either, but might leave us at weird breakpoints.
I’m not worried whether I’m able to read this at all and more about the pace. This seems similar im difficulty to Loopers, which I managed to read at 3k characters/hour. Marco has around 82k, so possibly around 27 hours in total for me, give or take. Doing this in 4 weeks is challenging for me time-wise (with 1h every day), albeit maybe doable, but I’m not sure I could do it in for example 3 weeks.
I definitely don’t expect people to go slower than reasonable for me, but yeah, that’s why I’m wondering about the schedule.
Home threads are nice for keeping a the main club thread cleaner (e.g. you can find and make proposals without them getting buried and talk about the club), they’re good for attracting people, and also easier for anybody reading the whole thing later. And they can be easily linked in the Index List of Book Clubs. I think pretty much every book club here does it this way. I’m not sure we “need” one, but I think they only have advantages.
(Although either way we would definitely need to figure out who’s in charge first, because they’d create the thread.)
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Just another voice chiming in re: home threads and scheduling.
In the VN club on the WK forums, we utilize home threads for each pick (in addition to the weekly discussion threads)
It just keeps this main “organizational” thread a bit cleaner and easier to follow. It also means that it future-proofs a little bit for people. If somebody comes in later and wants to read along with an old pick, they have a single home thread they have to go to that they know will be just for that pick; instead of having to scroll through a potentially ballooning and busier and busier main organizational thread, where things could easily get lost.
For example:
This is the organizational thread on WK (similar to this one we are speaking in now):
It’s used for organizing votes, accepting submissions, etc, and is otherwise only there to get all the “behind the scenes” bits taken care of.
And then we have the 9-Nine home thread:
(Visual Novel Book Club, offshoot) // Reading 9-nine-ゆきいろゆきはなゆきのあと (Episode 4) - Japanese Language / Book Clubs - WaniKani CommunityHere, everything related specifically to 9-Nine happens. This is especially useful for VNs that are split across multiple episodes (like 9-nine). Now you have one thread to organize however many different episodes from, without adding noise to the main organizational thread. It’s kept things really clean and smooth.
The same format is used for the book clubs, and again, it just keeps things cleaner and easier to follow, especially for anybody who comes in after the fact.
As for scheduling, 9-Nine follows the “club leader reads ahead each week, picks an appropriate endpoint within a ballpark range of character amount per week,” and it works well. I’ve been running the Fatal Twelve club on a similar scheduling method (though I also went ahead several weeks to frontload the work). It works well enough, and keeps things running well for picks that don’t have perfect chapter dividers.
…which is a lot of words to say I agree completely with what @Legato is suggesting. 
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I’d say it’s easier than loopers, so if you were comfortable reading that then you’ll be fine.
Since I’m already ahead I could read ahead some more to try and work out some pacing, though I actually realized that there might be a better way:
According to the steam achievements, there’s a total of 6 animated cutscenes (not including the OP) over around 8-12 hours of reading, so we could use those as our weekly benchmarks and would be around 1-2 hours of reading a week depending on your speed. The first week would be quite a bit shorter since the first animation plays at the very beginning, and the OP plays after about 45 minutes if I recall correctly, but after that the spacing between the OP and second animation would be very doable within a week. I can’t speak for the other gaps yet, but I’m probably gonna read ahead anyways since I was reading marco before the VN club was even proposed.
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Can’t see a homethread for it yet, so just going to drop the jpdb deck link here: Marco to Ginga Ryuu – Prebuilt decks – jpdb 
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I’m sorry I didn’t have time to make a home thread yet.
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It should probably be made by @bbo (or whoever will be in charge of the club) anyway so they can edit the first post with the schedule, add links to the weekly threads etc.
Apropos, if @bbo doesn’t want to do it, I’d also be up for it. I’ve organized two clubs over in the Wanikani forums already, so I’m pretty used to it by now.
(The only thing I can’t do is read ahead to figure out exact break points for the schedule, but looks like @senkuma has that covered.)
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I don’t want to organize anything. Never participated in a bookclub here or on WK, and I’m not good with the discourse software.
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No problem we were just asking if you wanted to run the threads that’s all.
If there are no objections we will let @Legato run the threads for マルコと銀河竜 / Marco to Ginga Ryuu
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Since there was a couple of people who voted for Flowers, I thought I’d mention it here but we are reading it informally as a club starting next month on WK in case anyone is interested in joining us then 
We plan on reading the entire series and spending 12 weeks on each game.
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It’s time to start a new round of nominations.
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bumping this, cuz I was wondering where the club went…
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Well I opened the nominations but nobody made any. I thought people were maybe not interested in continuing the club. Actually I wanted to nominate some visual novels myself but I was very busy and forgot about it. 
Okay let us run the nominations until saturday. Saturday evening I will make a vote.
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If nothing else, there’s still the nominations from the previous round. I don’t think I’m up for nominating anything, but might wanna join, depending on the VN
(It’s a maybe bc I’m already gonna be doing two LN clubs in 2024… So not sure how much time I’ll have)
(sry for the typos before…)
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