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Review of DEAD END JUNCTION

SubjectDEAD END JUNCTION
Dead End Junction
ByHelpfulness: 0
Vote: 7
Ileca on 2020-09-10 last updated on 2024-01-29
ReviewThis is not the read of the year because the story is predictable and you can see the twists a mile away (are they even real? I mean, are they supposed to be twists? because to be able to predict them didn't remove the pleasure of their exposure and the writer didn't seem to have made a lot of effort in hiding them) but it doesn't mean it's not enjoyable. No, quite the opposite.
If you can foreshadow what is going to happen, you can't predict the direction, what is partly due to the fact that the constitutive elements of the story aren't (predictable). The story seems to be 100% western spaghetti but it happens to be western fantasy. Who would have guessed after the first chapter there was gonna be zombies?

In fact, less than the outcomes, the pleasure you get from reading DEJ comes from the lovable casting. Of course, the best is Josette but at the end of the story you will remember pretty much everyone. Being a VN focused on its story and dime adventure, the writer doesn't bother keeping the same characters from start to finish and you will miss some of them (Flannel) but welcome others (Tracy). It is sad but it's a proof the cast is alive and everybody has their own life.

I am not in Team Liberal. I think that, *most of the time*, a translator being liberal is either an incompetent or a narcissist. Last month, I finished Virtue's Last Reward and I had the feeling of reading something else. Tenmyouji says stuff like "you self-righteous dick" or "horseshit" even though the guy never says that, I mean it's not who he is, it's just the translator being a vulgar person.
I don't want to start a liberal vs literal debate, no thank you, because this introduction is just here to tell I bet you my cowboy hat that the original script is not filled with so much slang, and despite that and my disgust toward liberal tl, I really really liked the adaptation work of the translator here. It's a pleasure to read Josette and her strong country bumpkin accent filled with cheesy markswoman wannabe lines taken from her "dime novels", darlin'.

The circle did a good job with their meager resources. They don't have a lot of tachie but the Littlewitch kind of presentation, even if it's subpar in comparison, is enough to give a better dynamic to the whole. They should have filled the background of the frames (not the bubbles) with something because the white makes them look empty and cheap, moreover when they are wide and you really see the white. Not necessarily a complex drawing, just some abstract pattern or something.
What I liked the most with the presentation were the big FX. It matches the setting by giving the VN a more comic feel.

Dead End Junction should be the minimum requirement for all visual novels but it's a shame a simple story like that is a reminder that most VN can't even reach it.
This honest doujin deserves better than 36 votes on vndb and 23 reviews on steam when trash like Furebara already have 694 votes half a year after release, or Porno Clock...


PS: the story ends on a big cliffhanger and I understand why it pissed off some people that a sequel doesn't seem to be on its way apart from a RPG version of Inaho used as an avatar on a touiteur by the circle. Personally, it doesn't bother me because it's the travel which mattered so it doesn't really matter what would be the content of this another story made for another time and place. Yes, I sure wouldn't mind a sequel just to discover the Clover Isles and the meeting of Josette with magic but an open ending is fine by me because the story remains formulaic about its whys and wherefores and to resolve them won't bring any interesting revelation (something about how the bad guys think the world is bad and deserves to go back to the void blablabla who cares?).

Written the 2018-10-24 at 16:59.
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