Freaking Ivar! That guy, seriously. >

Sure would be nice if they wouldn't make up new town names so I can work out where you're up to without googling it!

Feels good to get back into PSO2 and actually enjoy playing it this time.

Any chance you'd want to hang out with me on your braver?

I wouldn't count on it (:

Kind of difficult articulating this because I'm no literary critic, but I'll try. It's really... natural? It doesn't really have any of the issues you usually expect and accept in anime and games, which quite often read like a bunch of other anime or games mashed together, and because of that it's just a real pleasure to read. The writer's got a wonderfully wide vocabulary and the ability to express things really well, and he makes excellent use of the Japanese language in a way that would make the game an absolute nightmare to localise (it's also miles closer to natural speech). Scenes don't go on any longer than they need to and they're all there for a reason and add something rather than just being used to pad the game out. The dialogue is excellent and cleverly written, and the characters' personalities and motivations develop logically the whole way through while remaining in character.

Then in terms of non-text elements there's the fact the drama isn't really heavy handed, the characters are all surprisingly human (they do have 'cute' elements, but their interactions and personalities are a lot more realistic and flawed,) and the drama tends to come from that rather than plot twists, coma drama or whatever).

It seems to be something of a pattern with me and VNs/eroge that no matter how much I'm enjoying them, I can't help but glance at the clock a fair amount to see how far through I am because out of the genuinely great scenes the sheer amount of text in them can drag. I never did that with WA2. I didn't want to know how far in I was, I didn't want to know how close it was to ending. Not everything is perfect, there were a few bits I wasn't as fond of (all in the christmas cake logic route), but on the whole I can see why the writer seems to be one of the most highly regarded in the eroge industry and why the game pretty much crushed everything on review sites as soon as it came out.