Marcus and Anne have both played MangaGamer’s latest English BL game release, Room No. 9, so you know what that means… It’s time for a special spoiler-filled episode chock-full of our impressions! If you haven’t played the game yet, join us for the first half where we do a general overview and share our spoiler-free thoughts. For full spoilers of this intense psychological thriller, keep listening after the break!
08:45 – Start of spoiler impressions
New year, same podcast! Pixel x Pixel rings in 2020 with a recap of our vacations, what we’ve been working on, and all the games we’ve been playing and things we’ve been watching! Highlights include Anne’s return to a favorite video game series and Marcus swooning over an artisanal PS2 handheld console.
13:00 – Media Minutes: DJ Max Respect V, PS2 portable, Vampire’s Kiss, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Supernatural, Pokemon Go, Pokemon Shield, Monster Hunter World Iceborne
40:00 – Notable News: Final Fantasy VII demo leak, AGDQ on now, a bunch of BL game news, VisualConference 2020
Marcus’ Seven Days review
♫ “Willie Lomans,” “5 minutes pleasure,” and “6 pence and moon” from Alphabet Planet by Hiroki Kikuta
MangaGamer is celebrating Valentine’s Day with up to 50% off a number of their visual novels! It’s VNtines, get it? (I do love some good word play)
Titles on sale include the otome game OZMAFIA!! (check out my review impressions!), BL game No, Thank You!!!, yuri game Kindred Spirits on the Roof, and many more. They’ve also whipped up some adorable Valentine’s Day cards from all three games, plus a few extra! You can download them for free to hand out to your pals here.
MangaGamer’s VNtines sale ends on February 17th, so there’s plenty of time to line up a game to spend Valentine’s Day with!
This post contains Chic Pixel affiliate links. Thanks for your support!
I can’t believe how many amazing visual novel Kickstarters have been popping up lately! And let me tell you, I’m particularly excited for Hustle Cat, a romance visual novel taking place in a magical cat café. What more is there to love?!
Anyone that has ever been to Japan, and probably a few who haven’t, will tell you that Japanese cell phones are pretty much as awesome as they come. They’re always at the forerunner of the latest and greatest technology, with high-quality cameras and music downloading sites that made listening to music on your phone easy and fun even before the iPhone was released. Nowadays, “cell phone novels,” or keitai shousetsu are increasingly popular, and boys love/otome (for girls) titles are coming out left and right (ok, I admit my knowledge of how popular cell phone novels are is a bit dated, but I’m pretty sure their popularity hasn’t gone down in the past couple of years, anyway).
Well, famed BL game company Nitro + CHiRAL (why they keep the “i” lower case I’ll never know) is capitalizing on Japan’s mobile phone culture with its new cell phone site, called “CHiRAL MOBiLE.” You can click the link to view the PC site, which details the various downloads the site will offer, but the whole thing won’t be up and running until December 16th. Or you could just stick around here and I’ll detail all the cool stuff us non-Japanese residents are missing out on, since it only works on Japanese phones!
First of all, Nitro + CHiRAL announced, along with this service, an entirely new cell phone novel called World’s end Nightmare that will launch the same day as CHiRAL MOBiLE, with new chapters coming out every week on Tuesday and Thursday for an estimated total of 30 chapters. There isn’t much about the novel’s story available yet save the tagline “––A poor soul that has never known love. Let’s give him one more chance––” and a very short, vague description stating that the protagonist, Itto, was supposed to have died, but reawakens in an unfamiliar world. Below are the characters that have been revealed so far, from left to right: Itto, Faceless, Siegfried, Kai, and Baron. The story will feature at least some boys love elements, to be sure.
Nitro + CHiRAL will also be releasing a mobile version of their popular game Togainu no Chi, as well as a visual novel version of a boys love CD drama titled Itsuwari no Alkanet.
But even these 3 new releases aren’t what gets me really jealous of Japan today–it’s all the downloadable goodies from Nitro + CHiRAL’s three big boys love games that really make me wish I had a Japanese cell phone and lived in Japan. Check this out:
What you see before you is an array of “accessories” you can download at CHiRAL MOBiLE for Togainu no Chi and Lamento-BEYOND THE VOID-. The top left image is a wallpaper, while the top right is a menu screen, and then you have a text sending icon, signal bar, and battery display. So, if you’re big on BL and live in Japan, you can have your entire phone decked out with your favorite game or series! I’m sure they have things like this for all sorts of other famous games and anime, as well.
The service does cost a monthly fee of about $3, but for the amount of free downloads you get with the subscription, including World’s end Nightmare, I’d say it’s a pretty good deal! Too bad cell phones in America and Australia don’t offer awesome services like these…
For those of you interested in World’s end Nightmare, I’d be more than happy to do translations of the character descriptions posted on the CHiRAL MOBiLE website… Just let me know if you’d like to see them and I’ll dedicate a post to it! I won’t bother doing the work unless there’s someone out there who will actually read them (or if I get a burst of idle creativity, but don’t count on it).