If you've been around the 07th scene for long enough, you might have run across this edit: It first started popping up around the time Gou got released, and while on the surface it's just making fun of anime onlys being secondaries, it speaks to a real problem with adaptations of visual novels - mainly that it's extremely difficult for them to fully capture the same experience of reading one yourself. When I was younger, I didn't read visual novels, or dating sims really, besides the imfamously bad SimGirls flash game (that barely counts if we're being honest), but I also didn't watch much anime or read manga in general, so instead of knowing a secondary experience, I just didn't have one at all. It was in May of 2024, at the tail end of my senior year of college that I took my first real dive with the Doukyuusei remake, which took me about a week to finish. From then I chose to read Higurashi... and that took a much, much longer time to finish. Partially, this was because unlike Dokyusei, where all you need is the pretty easy to find uncensoring patch, I knew that the MangaGamer releases of Higurashi were kind of... flawed, to say the least, and so I tracked down 07th mod and read through Onikakushi. By this time, I was on the road for DCI, which meant that I was typically reading on a hot, sweaty mattress in the deep south in an old RV on my MacBook. Now it worked... but I realized I was reading it all weird afterwards. I was using original backgrounds, switching between original and console sprites, but using ADV mode the whole time. The main reason for doing this originally was that I didn't have any idea who was speaking without the names popping up (clearly I didn't think to use context clues). So after I finished reading it... I went back and read it again. Then I read it again in NVL, then finally Wataganashi and started Tatarigoroshi. But one day, July 16th to be exact, when we were driving