Could it possibly be…?

Like Rule of Rose, “Another” combines horror with lots of mystery as to what is actually going on. I was rather reserved as to my opinion about this anime at first, but now that more explanations have been given in recent episodes I must say that I am finding the plot more and more intriguing, and I’m starting to re-watch the series from the beginning to re-examine earlier “clues” in light of later revelations.

There isn’t too much that I can say about the plot without giving spoilers.

I CAN say that it has some creepy dolls. Not necessarily supernatural dolls (will they become so?), but creepy none-the-less. And well-suited to an anime with some strange dolls, the opening song for “Another” is performed by ALI PROJECT, who did opening songs for the various Rozen Maiden anime series.

If you have a craving for more mystery horror, you might want to take a look at “Another”.

Future comments relating to the trade demo finds should go here rather than to the Fortyfourth Month-iversary comment thread. And comments or links already placed there can be re-posted here without any worries about redundancy.

Thanks BrYaN55! Thanks Grandpaf! I look forward to exploring and discussing all the new Rule of Rose clues coming to light!

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From a comment posted by BrYaN55:

Anyway, I was finally able to upload the actual demo on my server, so if anyone is interested in it, you can download it here:

http://www.quebecgamers.com/dossiers/rule-of-rose-trade-demo/index.html (go to the bottom of the page and click on “Download”) For whatever reason, the direct link leads to a 404 page.

Files contained in the archive:
Rule of Rose [Trade Demo] [NTSC-U] [SLUS-28063].mdf
Rule of Rose [Trade Demo] [NTSC-U] [SLUS-28063].mds

Please, feel free to upload it anywhere you want and share it too! And don’t forget to let us know if you find something interesting like a debug room or anything else!

The novel is set during an alternate history World War I in which living creatures have been genetically-engineered to perform technological functions. The “airship” Leviathan, for example, is a living whale which has been “fabricated” to have odd features such as external cilia and the ability to be filled with hydrogen gas produced by other “fabricated” creatures. In the novel, the Leviathan is famous for having made a trip from England to India and back (the intended route of the airship in which Jennifer was flying when it crashed).

Many players of Rule of Rose take the giant flying koi of the pre-game video to be a flying whale (visually associated with a giant airship over the orphanage), and Wendy’s drawings depict children aboard an airship that looks like a giant flying fish. I can’t help but wonder if Westerfeld had seen this imagery from Rule of Rose.

There isn’t much else in the novel that resembles Rule of Rose, however. There IS a girl who is disguised as a boy (in RoR, of course, Wendy disguises herself as Joshua), but this is more reminiscent of Jacky Faber disguising herself as a boy to join the Royal Navy in the “Bloody Jack” series of novels (a big favorite of mine).
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This is the first Scott Westerfeld novel I’ve started. Have any of you read other novels of his that you’d recommend?

Sorry, everybody, for slacking off with it. Hopefully, it will now be easier for people to better access the recent blog-posts.

As usual, use the comment-section of this month-iversary blog-post for off-topic comments, inter-personal chat, or Rule of Rose topics that you don’t know where the appropriate place to post them is.

A word of caution! Links tend to cause my spam-filter to block comments. The more links in a comment, the more likely it is that the spam filter will block the comment, but sometimes even one link is enough. And I get much too much spam for me to search through the spam folder for comments that shouldn’t be there, so I won’t do that.

Here is what I suggest that you do: if you need to do so, post links that are broken in some way so that the spam filter doesn’t block your comment, but make it obvious to me how to fix the links. I’ll check in frequently and fix the links.

Don’t worry about double-posting (or more).
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I’m looking forward to seeing your favorites!

But maybe The Gaming Pixie’s video-review will succeed in pulling off that feat. It got the facts right; it’s very creatively made; it even succeeded in getting me a little misty-eyed: it’s THAT good.

You can watch the video here: http://www.gamingpixie.com/137/all-videos/gamereviews/game-review-rule-of-rose/

The Gaming Pixie is “Rochelle” as a commenter here.

On a different note, in response to a YouTube “Wanna Shamelessly Promote Yourself?” project, I submitted a shameless promo for my new YouTube channel (a channel that has no regular videos uploaded as of yet). You can see that promo here: shameless promo. This channel won’t be about gaming, so it may not have any crossover appeal to the Rule of Rose fans that come to this blog. The only shared theme will be that I will still be exploring mysteries, but these will be mysteries of the real world (not the criminal-investigation type of mysteries, however) rather than the mysteries of a fictional world.

As the other YouTube channel gives me more and more practice with my overly user-unfriendly editing software, I expect I will eventually be able to return to making some Rule of Rose Mysteries YouTube videos as well.
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As usual, the Month-iversary comment threads are the right place to put off-topic comments or comments that you don’t know where they should go.