January 19th, 2012
Review – Dusk
If the title art isn’t any indication of what this novel is about, Dusk is another kinetic novel that I was drawn to because it seemed to be a good Twilight parody. While Twilight has been parodied to death, this one was in the form of a kinetic novel. The author of this is also the same one that did Lucky Rabbit Reflex, which is a visual novel with all the proper dialogue trees and the like.
The good: Overall I found the novel to be funny. I’m not familiar with the books having only seen the movie, but this does a good job of pointing out the blatant contradictions, such as Ephraim (Edward) going up to Angelica (Bella) just to tell her that she shouldn’t hang around him or that he shouldn’t hang around her before zipping off into the crowd and such. Other parts are about how smart she is, that there are only ten kids that go to the school and sometimes Angelica has friends show up. Even Jared (Jacob), 
with his russet cheeks, is succinctly both blatantly stereotyped and troped to point out the problems with Twilight. Passion and constipation await you!
The bad: There’s only one music track, which repeats throughout the whole novel. Having a variety more would have broken up the repetition. The character only have a few expressions too, then again in the movie they didn’t have a lot of expressions either. I guess in part two of this novel he will get a chance to sparkle.
The extra: NASA level string theory! 
The nitpick: The novel cuts off in the middle of the “book”, at least compared to Twilight. It would have been nice to have a bit more story. Also we don’t get to see Ephraim’s hot and younger father.
Dusk ★ Freeness ★ Kinetic Novel ★ Otome Game ★ PC ★ Review
Hi Maverynthia
http://visualnovelaer.wordpress.com/2010/09/19/danzai-no-maria-maverynthia/ <— is this you?
I posted an interview of you a long time ago, it was a fascinating piece the complaints you made in 2010
Anyway you are one of the very very fewwwwww otome-ge people that I know who could be interested in this. I wanted to point you to a new project that I've been working on. It is a platform to gather talents from all around to work on visual novel fan translations by making that step/jump as easy as possible for the newbies.
http://www.fuwanovel.com
This is the design pitch, it's a website proposal.
The first person I proposed it to, 20minutes later they say they will code the whole thing for me… i was like… omg~~
anyway response has been very positive since then, one of the Main Objectives of Fuwanovel is to start an otome-ge Visual Novel translation scene, focused on bringing over hot hishies to the West.
The forums are here, forums.fuwanovel.com
and there is a wiki too wiki.fuwanovel.com
Anyway this is my twitter account https://twitter.com/#!/Aaeru_
and my email address is aaeru3 gmail.com
the community has really helped me proceed with this project. my website is being hosted by anime-sharing.com and they are used to handling Cease and Desist letters constantly from Japanese companies (they are a massive piracy site). Fuwanovel.com doesn't even compare a thousandth-to-one in terms of badness as anime-sharing's badness. we want to be honest about how people consume this type of media here in the West instead of retreating into the shadows and pretending to be moral all the time. get back to me soon~ :smile:
Aaeru
Looking at the fuwanovel site, it looks like a general bishoujo game site, the reservations I have about that is that it doesn’t look too different than a number of other bishoujo game translation sites out there. If there was a specific otome section with pictures of the “hot dudes” It would get it’s function across a lot more.
However I do like the sites objectives, I guess what I’m saying is that I’m scared the otome games are going to be shoved to side and “othered” by the, what some would say, “more important/more popular games” (bishoujo/bishoujo ero games). Like how Lemma soft has “Normal VNs”, read bishoujo VNs, and BxG section for VNs “abnormal VNs”. D:
If there is no separate site, maybe mix the images up a bit about 50/50, otherwise the common browser might get the feeling that it was a strict bishoujo site only or a bishoujo eroge site only.
Why this matters is that otome games are already shoved to the side and ignored by most fan translators, where only a few get finished because of a dedicated team or Google sourcing ;^; where bishoujo games have already been hacked and translated or there are a vast amount MORE websited dedicated to them (and/or they’ve already been licensed).
Also, I DO want it that if a novel does get licensed (like Hakuoki) that the links to the game itself will be removed (patches are fine as some corporate editors do trash the story/mood/add Wooleyism and some people don’t like that). Though I’m sure that’s what your going to do. :3 Support the US industry for it. Because you right going through Play-asia/Yes Asia and paying $110 (for the regular version) is not accessible at all.