Week 6 of マルコと銀河竜 ✨🐉

Week 6 October 28 2023
Character count 15061 characters
Stopping point CG image percentage 100%
Stopping point description Play until the VN ends
Previous week Week 5
Next week -
Home Thread Home thread for マルコと銀河竜 :sparkles::dragon:

We’re playing this VN as part of the Visual Novel Reading Club.

How to see your current CG image percentage
  1. Go back to the title menu (via settings window “TITLE MENU” or via File->Back To Title on Steam in windowed mode). No need to save, you can easily continue.
  2. Click on “Extras”.
  3. Click on “CG Mode”.
  4. At the bottom you can find the “Acquisition rate”. This is the total amount of CG images you’ve seen, completely unrelated to the current save file.

Discussion Guidelines

  • Please blur / hide any major events in the current week’s portion (however early they occur), like so: text here (that’s: [spoiler]text here[/spoiler]).
  • Don’t hestitate to ask questions! I know that some of you might be feeling shy, or don’t want to bother others with their questions, but you don’t have to worry: People love answering questions. You’re making the thread more lively, and you’re also helping anyone who has the same questions. So please, ask a lot of them!
  • Join the conversation — it’s fun!

Participation Poll

  • I’m reading along
  • I have finished this part
  • I’m planning to catch up later
  • I’m skipping this VN
  • The club has already finished, and I’m reading this VN now
0 voters
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So. No one posting anything this week? Will there be another thread for the whole game? Or is this it? Where do I put my concluding thoughts and overall impressions?

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This has been an awfully quiet club in general, apart from the first week :confused:

I’m still reading this last chapter, but I’ll post my thoughts later too!

This is it, and the best place to do put those would be right here!

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Club participation always drops off pretty sharply, book or otherwise. Congrats to those finishing the game!

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My thoughts on the game (no real spoilers): I think that has been one of the strangest stories I’ve ever read. Especially when excluding short stories. I enjoyed it, but I don’t exactly want more of that style. There was a lot that didn’t make much sense. Both in individual sentences and in the larger plot. And it probably wasn’t the language barrier, as I had both Japanese and English text active.

I feel like the voice acting made this game. The over the top character voices made it fun. Withoug them, it would have been just stupid.

Despite it’s silliness, it managed to move me at times.

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And I’m done too! What a trip.

Because it doesn’t feel right to put this at the end, let’s start out with a grammar question :laughing:

I wonder what the だけ is doing there. It doesn’t seem to fit (if this is the only thing she has faith in, what else does she not faith in?), and it’s not in the translation either: “I’m confident the taste hasn’t changed since then.”


Alright, with that out of the way, chapter/game thoughts!

Ha, I’m glad that I’m not the only one who felt that some things just didn’t make sense.

Spoilery thoughts and confused questions on the chapter / the game

So, things end. Not on the happiest note, considering that Arco and Marco are separated, but nobody “good” died, the evil is no more, and there is hope that our main cast will meet again! At least they are still connected by auction/bank account :laughing:

One thing that really confuses me is the whole “Marco’s family on earth” thing.

  • So, Mitsuko wasn’t a Love alien after all? She actually still lives and exists and then was just impersonated by a Love alien or something at the time Marco killed “her”? (She seems to be actually Marco’s mother, but has forgotten everything about it because apparently when Arco eats memories it’s more like she simulatenously eats it from everyone related, huh.)
  • Okay, so Yuko and Sakurako are Marco’s sisters. How did Arco know when she said “マルコが姉妹に遠慮するのは、ボクがいるからだと思うんだ” (while Arco was preparing to leave fight Asterot)? And also… doesn’t that imply that Marco knows too?
  • While we’re at it… doesn’t that mean that Yuko and Sakurako are Mitsuko’s daughters too? Even though they never meet, never talk about each other, seem completely unrelated, and Mitsuko only mentions having a little son when talking about herself, but conveniently forgot two daughters?
  • Also, what’s with the completely unexplained “kill her” / *gunshot* red herring at the beginning of the VN when Mitsuko is evidently not dead after all?

And like @bbo mentions, a fair amount of individual sentences didn’t make sense either. But other than that, I could mostly roll with it from a “making sense” perspective. Stuff’s weird, things happen. It’s hardly weirder than my beloved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Although with a lot more plot holes.)

My main two problems with the VN are how unfocused it seemed for the first half, and how the non-stop slapstick made it hard for the characters to feel like actual people with more than one dimension. Plot-driven, character driven? It felt more random-driven than anything else. Sooner or later we got concrete goals the characters worked towards, and characters actually thought and talked about more serious topics and hardships, but too little and a bit too late.

I mentioned this in an earlier week, but I think I would’ve enjoyed this a lot this more in English, where I could read quickly, and didn’t feel like I invested so much effort into a funny and entertaining, but ultimately not very substantial experience. (But I guess I did get some language learning along the way too for my troubles, and its features did make it a fantastic game for a language learner.)

In the end, I think it’s a 3/5 for me: Something that was “okay”. While I wasn’t happy with everything I did enjoy myself at times, and I don’t regret reading it, but I wouldn’t recommend it either.

…but, that being said, now that it’s over, I kind of feel a bit lonely, and finding myself wanting to read more from some of the characters. So maybe it got me more than I than I thought it did. :smiling_face_with_tear:

But, well, that’s it, I guess. バイビーーー!!

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answer to spoiler

I think the Galaxy Dragon (actually already forgot her name) actually visited the mother and ate her memories. Either because she wanted Marco for herself or so that the mother wasn’t sad.

And somehow she must have forgotten about her other daughters, too.

I mean, is doesn’t really make sense to me how the sisters never were shown in the past with young Marco. Or how the sisters and mother all have brown hair and Marco has black. Or how there is no father.

It all makes me think that, while there might not be contradictions or potholes in the stricter sense, it still feels like several people made it up as they went and started producing the CGs and voice overs before there was a finished coherent story.

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Answer to answer

I’m not sure Arco would care much either way, considering how she says she even has trouble understanding the desire to make people you care about happy - obviously not true considering her relationship to Marco, but I can’t see her caring much about whether Marco’s mother is unhappy without Marco even knowing about it. And she’s probably considered too far away and too powerless to be a risk. I might be wrong though… it’s a bit hard to gauge Arco’s motivations.

But I don’t think it would be necessary either way. Towards the end Arco says:

And it doesn’t sound like she has a choice there, or plans to eat her own memories. To me it sounds like she doesn’t eat individual instances of memories, she eats every instance of the memory simultaneously.

…which doesn’t explain how the sisters didn’t forget Marco (but Marco forgot them?), but I’ll just park that thought in the plothole section if I find a free spot.

Haha. That would explain a lot! :laughing:

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So I finished this a couple of days ago and waited for it to soak in a bit.

I did enjoy this in parts and it was a great choice for my first VN. The voice acting was great and some of the animated sequences were worthy of a TV show.

That said, the story did seriously drag for me in the second half. The bonkers storyline just killed any investment I had in any characters. The 3/5 mentioned earlier seems fair.

I wouldn’t rush to read a sequel but I will give another VN a go.

As a language learning exercise it was useful - hours of listening practice, dual subs and I learned some useful vocab. I didn’t know 非常食 before and I will never forget it now!

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My thoughts…
I liked the visuals.
I liked the music.
I liked the cartoons.

But I did not get along with the VN overall.
The story was all over the place.
The pacing was off.
I found myself just rushing through, hoping for it to end soon. :see_no_evil:

I don’t regret having read it, but I don’t think I will remember it in a few months. :sweat_smile:

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answer to grammar question

I have encountered this type of construct quite often. It just acts as an emphasis. “At least” or “If nothing else” - it’s not quite natural for English, so the translator probably thought it wasn’t necessary - which, tbf, it isn’t. :slight_smile:

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