mDuo13

Well, here we are. Deep into the holiday season, it's time to deliver an update on pretty much everything I'm watching. It's an interesting time to do so, too, because a lot of shows are nearing the end of their run and showing signs of reaching a finale. I've fallen a bit behind ever since Thanksgiving (finals didn't help) but the things I've chosen to prioritize may or may not be indicative of what I think about them.

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Finally, after everything I've been through, I managed to finish playing CLANNAD. I installed the game on September 1, so that puts it at exactly 3 months to finishing the game, though realistically, I wasn't playing for most of those. And, the last few paths, I played in marathon sessions, roughly one night each. So it's not unrealistic to say that this game has been consuming my life for quite a while now. Yet, now that I'm finished, I don't feel relieved to be over it or anything. I just have this drained, anachronistic feeling: I feel like I lived my entire life last night, and the "after story" is what happens now.

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UPDATE 2: I figured out what was causing the game to freeze up in After Story, and fixed the patch. Skip to the bottom for the updated link. I still haven't tested it on the school life section, but I can now confirm that it is possible to finish After Story, including the True Ending. If you've already unlocked After Story using a previous unofficial patch, you can definitely get 100% CGs and music this way.

UPDATE: The patch uploaded here still has some glitches (it freezes up fairly early in After Story) so it's probably best not to use it until further updates.

As I've mentioned before, I've been playing CLANNAD recently. To be more precise, I've been using an incomplete patch that was compiled from the CLANNAD Translation Project. However, after finishing all 10 routes, I discovered that the unofficial patch doesn't include the translation for After Story (the concluding arc of the game). That's pretty important for me, so I created a patch that provides an updated translation of the game, including After Story.

Currently, the team translating Clannad has posted their translations on a wiki, but they have not officially given out anything that can be used to play the game. So, I downloaded their translations, learned how to use RLDev, and created a new SEEN.TXT file that is (for the most part) up-to-date with the project's translation as of November 11, 2008. For those who are curious how I did it, read on. (Otherwise, you can skip ahead.)

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More and more each year, I find coming home for Thanksgiving to be a surreal experience. It occupies a strange space in my life: it's too short to get used to being at "home", but it's not like it's a vacation, since I'm spending it at the place I used to live. Instead, I get this strange impression that I've driven some untold hours through a portal into the past, and arrived in the life I lived up to four years ago.

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So, here we are. An actually kinda bloggy blog post. The topic? Anime that's airing this season. More specifically, I have some things to say about CLANNAD ~AFTER STORY~, Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens, and Xam'd: Lost Memories (also known as Bounen no Zamned and a few other variations). There's actually a lot more I'm watching besides just that, but those comments will have to come later! So, hit the jump for my more detailed meditations, and don't worry - spoilers are properly tagged as such within.

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