The Blind Griffin [Historical] [Otome] [NaNoRenO 2015]

[FjärilPrincess]

Boohoo! I'm late! Well,no matter. This game was...WOW 😍😍. It left me wanting more,safe to say. The characters had so much personality to them,I found myself getting a little too attached to the gang. They really made me crack up every now and then. I had played Alexei's route (because he reminded me of this other otome character,Ivan Chernenkov). However,Alex was nothing like I had expected! He had me rolling on the floor (internally),secreting an earth river from my human tear ducts (internally. Can that even happen internally? Uh. No?ok *scratches head). Anyway,he was so cute!:-) The way he got embarrassed easily just made my day,awe. Also,the minor details that was put into this game really made me appreciate it more! I even enjoyed the little dictionary,so to say,that was there for the 20's slang! Also, MC wasn't whiny and was a true bearcat! I enjoyed her reactions:-). My sister had ended up playing Gio and,wow,I think,she's obsessed... Well,congratulations on this game,in general. It was simply the berries. Copacetic! xx AND LIKE I SRSLY LOVE ALEXEI LOL HE GIVES ME THE GOOD CHEST PAINS

[KaiyaEvans]

Hi!

After reading the lovely reviews, I'm super interested in playing this game! The only problem is, I cannot play it because it says it is missing "The Blind Griffin.exe" and it asks me if it's missing.

I've tried downloading the zip file a bunch of times (the windows file and the All file) and neither have worked.

Please help me, I'd love to play this game!

[tantivy]

Hi Kaiya,

I'm not sure if this is rude to answer questions on someone else's thread (sorry Asphodel Quartet! -_-;;) but I had a problem similar to yours recently with another type of file.

It sounds like you may not have extracted the zip file before trying to open it. If this is the problem, instead of opening the zip folder, right click on it and choose "Extract All." Then open the program in the new folder that appears.

Sorry if the problem is something else. Good luck!
It really is a great game! I'm still working on getting the endings...

[KaiyaEvans]

Hi Kaiya,

I'm not sure if this is rude to answer questions on someone else's thread (sorry Asphodel Quartet! -_-;;) but I had a problem similar to yours recently with another type of file.

It sounds like you may not have extracted the zip file before trying to open it. If this is the problem, instead of opening the zip folder, right click on it and choose "Extract All." Then open the program in the new folder that appears.

Sorry if the problem is something else. Good luck!
It really is a great game! I'm still working on getting the endings...

Thank you so much for the suggestion!

I actually figure out the problem! It turns out, my antivirus software (Norton) has deemed "The Blind Griffin.exe" a threat and deleted the file without telling me so. However, once I did some updates and whatnot, I was notified that the .exe file had a questionable reputation and I restored the file.

I hope this helps if anyone encounters a similar problem or if Asphodel Quartet want to resolve this problem.

I'm super excited for the game, it looks BEAUTIFUL.

[Auro-Cyanide]

Sorry so much guys! I missed these messages. Thank you so much tantivy and KaiyaEvans for posting their solutions for getting the game to work, that was really great of you two ^_^!!

[dasea]

You guys did a great job with this game!
I love the historical details put in it. I liked how the difficulties of being an immigrant were addressed in this, which I feel isn't done enough. Being a Chinese myself its great to see some diversity in the cast.

Beautiful art. I'm always amazed by how great the GUI looks.

I loved all the characters. They all had unique character traits and plot lines. I have to say the heroine was my favourite.

[Fox Lee]

I AM FINALLY PLAYING NANO GAMES and now I am gonna write a WAY TOO LONG opinion on this one~

...It was really, really fun! XD It was exactly what I was hoping - beautiful, stylish as hell, and I loved everybody. You did a great job of crafting a family; I could tell how much they cared about each other, both when they were getting along and when they were fighting. And the heroine was definitely something special - I've never seen a POV character like her, and I really enjoyed guiding her. I love her bob haircut! XD

Alexei was my favourite of the guys, so I guess I'm a bit boring <XD I chose him the first time because I thought I had the others pretty much figured out (boy was I wrong about Giovanni!) but I didn't quite know what to make of Alexei. When it turned out he was

the overly serious guy who works too hard and feels guilty about being hugely jealous of naturally talented people

I really had to laugh, because I had essentially chosen my RL-husband completely by accident <XD

Oh yeah, this game is freaking gorgeous all over. Just, wow. I am humbled by the level of detail and skill in everything from the characters to the BGS to the interface. And even alternate costumes! Holy cow, you guys crammed a lot of work into this. However, I did have one visual problem - the dark-blue inactive menu text blended in so well with the text box background that I literally couldn't see it at first ^^; No kidding, when I opened up a glossary window in the tutorial I couldn't work out how to close it and I thought the game had frozen. It must be a monitor balance kind of thing, but I can't imagine my kind of cheapo monitor is all that uncommon, so you may want to tweak that a bit ^^;

Like some folks, I preferred the friendship endings to the romantic ones. It's not that the romantic ones weren't cute (I liked Emilio's the best) but the heroine felt a bit less like herself, somehow. I think they seemed a bit sudden to me - Gio was the first romance I got, and that was almost by accident; I didn't even realise he was interested until testing day! And I actually though Alexei didn't have a romance ending at first ^_^; Emi, OTOH, telegraphs his affection waaay more, being so adorably "tsun" all the way through, so that's probably why I prefer his. That, and I liked everybody staying together! In the end, that was much more important to me than romance - which honestly feels quite appropriate here <XD

Disappointing areas were... well, with so much of the spotlight being on the boys, Viv and especially Marie kinda lost out. I wanted to get to know them better, especially Marie, and I get the impression that was planned but had to be left out for time/narrative flow/come on it's a one-month game. Still... I wanted Viv to have a romance so bad :< Marie less so, because she felt so much like my mum, but Viv and I would have been tremendous together! C'est la vie, I suppose <:)

I felt, sometimes, that the endings had kind of been sprung on me - like, my first time through the game, I saved Alexei, but failed the test, apparently for congratulating him for his choice? Everything seemed to be going well, so that really came as a shock. Okay, so some "bad choices" are easier to distinguish than other (*coughEmiliocough*) but I like to pick choices in games that show the POV character's flaws, since those usually have more interesting results, so I was a bit disappointed that being a little stubborn right at the beginning of training could make the difference between failing or succeeding right at the end. I get why it needs to work that way - you have limited opportunities for "wrong" responses when there are almost as many endings as choices! - but, I wished I'd had more chances to be "wrong" without failing.

That aside, I still love this game all over. Great concept, amazing execution, charming humour, top-notch writing and editing. I had a great time (and immediately went to get all the endings, even the horrible ones that made me cry AUGH). Actually, as tragic as the others are, I think the Lethe ending may be the worst of all. It's so subtle/simple, it requires no detail whatsoever to be one of the saddest damn scenes I've ever read. Anyway, GREAT WORK!

(Oh, and if I'm wrong about Arrow being a reference to the most awesome dog in gaming, I don't wanna be right! XD)

[Feral Phoenix]

Finally got around to playing this! I'd been meaning to give it a look since my friends who played it all seemed to have favorable impressions, and I had a pretty good time getting all the endings.

The atmosphere y'all built up was fantastic; the art and shiny GUI and character designs and music (and the glossary!) built up a lot of polish and nuance that definitely helped to sell the world of the game. It was a very, very nice package. And I was happy to find the link to the extra worldbuilding tidbits because I was really curious about the setting, since it didn't get very much attention in-story! My favorite of the backgrounds was definitely the protag's room. I would love to have a bed wedged into a wall-sized bookshelf.

Alexei wound up being my favorite of the guys; I loved how sweet and patient he is with the protag despite the first impression he gives of having a bit of a stick up his bum. His reaction in the fanservice scene was really cute too. :3

My favorite characters overall were the girls, though!!! I'd love to get to know more about them. my kingdom for marie and vivi routes tbh; they are so beautiful

I think the only place the game suffered was the kind of bare-bones and rushed-feeling writing... I kinda wanted more detail and insight instead of having events summarized with just a couple sentences. I wasn't really sold on the romances given how short the game is and how Alexei and Gio's routes kinda leap from the teacher/student relationships to these really intimate scenes in their romance epilogues years later, which was personally a little offputting for me. Aside from getting to see the team stay together (which other folks have brought up anyway), I liked the friendship endings better for that reason. So... thanks for including those!!! They were fun!

also despite that alexei is Best Boy imo im gonna give gio props for bringing us the Cello End, because mmmmmmm yas that's what im talkin about (ok sign emoji)

And any problems with the writing are easy to shrug off because of the time constraints, anyway--you did a good job with what you had.

Ummmm, what else... I like that you went out of your way to have a diverse cast, since a lot of period fiction (as far as my experience with it goes anyway) tends to use its own genre to explain off its overwhelming whiteness/cisness/straightness and what have you.

After going through the character profiles and seeing that Gio's got OCD, I got a lot more interested in him as a character; that brought a lot of extra perspective to him that I wouldn't've considered otherwise! yaaaaaas mentally ill main characters

And also in light of my romance nitpicks, I agree with everybody else:

the POV changes were fun and help a lot! Emilio's New Year one made me laugh because son, you have got it So Bad, what a dweeb :3

All in all I enjoyed The Blind Griffin and will be looking forward to the team members' future work! Good job!!

[Fox Lee]

My favorite of the backgrounds was definitely the protag's room. I would love to have a bed wedged into a wall-sized bookshelf.

OH YEAH I loved that too! I am totally gonna steal that next time I have a setting where it would fit nicely. How much I would have looooved one of those when I was single! XD

[phoebehhh]

I can't play past the part where the heroine says Alexei's cape is silly early on where she meets alexei and giovanni in the beginning. Is there a way to fix this? I really wanna keep playing ;u;

[JBShields]

I have to say, the Blind Griffin has got to be one of my favorite visual novels.

[flor18]

Hi! so i finally got my way around for playing this game (kinda late for the party i guess) and i really love it. The music, the scenes, the story and the animation are really good, congrats! I only have two problems, the first one is that i wished it had been longer (not really a problem but whatever) and the second one and most important: the relationship between the MC and Emilio felt really rushed, which is really sad cause Emilio was my favourite character and i wanted them to be my favourite ending. But yeah, the storyline there felt quite rushed and not really polished, it would have been nice to see more character development while playing the game and to actually see his "mask" fade away so we could see him fall in love with her, that's the only thing i would change cause the other two dudes was really well done!