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Happy Halloween everyone! Not a fan of spooky skeletons? Don't worry about! Even if you don't like to celebrate or observe the holiday, have a wonderful finish to the autumn season and remember that it's all about having fun. Keep being awesome, and enjoy the rest of the year everyone! PS - Here is a Halloween themed ass. Enjoy!

http://tlwiki.org/index.php?title=Little_Busters Fruitbat Factory apparently handling the release. Pancakes on Steam. What a time to be alive. God will render judgement on you sinners for wishing this on me.

Hello everybody! Ryechu here~ I decided to go ahead and do a monthly recap of all the FuwaReviews released by our in-house team. October's Recap will be up in the next day or so. I am interested in feedback in regard to how everybody would like to see this formatted. Should I use images with the Pros/Cons and the score and make the image clickable (which is mostly just a bunch of image copy/pasting on Paint.net for me), or would you prefer just an image of the game cover/title screen (In other words, the "Featured Image") with a link to the review without the spoilers? Let me know below! Anyway, I wanted to take a little time to talk about what we do, and who our members are (at time of writing). What is the Goal of FuwaReviews? Our goal is the same as the motto you see on the forums: "Making Visual Novels Popular in the West." We do this by presenting honest, thoughtful reviews on all sorts of visual novels, from the latest and greatest OELVNs, to the latest fan-translation releases, to the major releases from Mangagamer/Sekai Project/JAST. We want to be that one-stop shop for all things Visual Novels, and reviews are our way of doing that. Translated, untranslated, we don't care. If it fits the requirement of a Visual Novel, it's something that is on our list to review. We using a scoring system when it comes to our reviews, and our scale is on a 1-10. Some of our reviewers break that number down a bit further and translate their score from a 1-100 scale, so you may see a number like 7.8 or the like, but that's all the more specific we intend to get. This is how the reviewer rated the game. This number is based on their opinion, and their scores may very well differ from yours. Are your tastes different from the reviewer's? Quite possibly. Are you going to read the review anyway if you're genuinely interested in the game and regardless of whether or not you've played it? Quite possibly. Will fans of certain franchises/fetishes/characters get incredibly angry and locate their nearest pitchforks if we don't give their favorite game a 10/10? Quite possibly. Here's my answer to that: We are not going to please everybody. Honest reviews will never please everybody - that is the unfortunate truth about this business. For me, my review has the same score that I put on my VNDB profile, and if it doesn't follow the bandwagon average, then there will always be justification in my reviews. Well, there's always going to be a justification for my score in my review, but you get the point. Some of our reviews will tell you "If you like x or y, then you'll probably like this," but it's not required. If I play a game filled to the brim with gore or the like, it'll be the first one I play. I won't (and don't, to be perfectly honest) know other titles in the genre, and I can't provide suggestions, so I'm not going to. Many reviewing sites don't do that, because there's a chance that mentioning other titles may detract from the publicity of the game we are reviewing, though that is an arguable statement from either side of the coin. The information in the review should be more than enough to help you make a decision on whether or not you may be interested in the title being reviewed. We have two styles of reviews: Featured (which are full-length, 800+ words, multiple pictures, "complete" reviews), and Minute reviews (300-500 words, one-two images, "Overview" reviews). Most nukige and short OELVN reviews will end up being Minute reviews, while basically everything else is Featured. Virtually all of my nukige reviews are Minute reviews. We know we're gong to get the same flak as every other reviewing site, and that's fine. We appreciate any and all feedback about the site, even if we don't immediately acknowledge it. That much I can assure you. Who Are We? Ryechu - I'm the PR guy for FuwaReviews. I do most of the talking with companies to get review keys for the team, I run the nukige corner, and I handle Community submissions. I'm also the author of this blog!Flutterz - He's our editor. He's also a god. You will bow down to him.Full-Time Reviewers solidbatman - This guy was the one that started it all. He's also my bae. He handles a lot of newer, popular releases, and is often abused for his honesty.Palas - The OELVN god. He normally snags all of the OELVN keys, and puts out excellent reviews for them.Tyrael - The fresh meat. We just picked Tyrael up as a full-time reviewer. Can't wait to see what he has in store!Part-Time Reviewers Down - He had a soul once, then Batman ate it. Down still hasn't recovered since that day.Exenorate - He's hiding most of the time, but he's still shiny.Community-Submitters (that I would pick up in a heartbeat) OriginalRen - He needs to write more reviews. Straight up. C'mon Ren, you know you wanna~Zakamutt - #blamezakaThere are also other reviewers that I've spoken with, and they'll be mentioned once I get some reviews published by them! I hope you enjoyed this little post, and I look forward to hearing some feedback about how you'd like to see our Monthly Wrapup posts!

This blog is all about owning my mistakes and putting them on public display, so let’s do this. And yeah, I knew this one was going to come back and bite me in the ass. This was my albatross. This was my giant ass-biting albatross. The great “tricky” debacle of 2015 So there’s this word that shows up in the English translation of Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort. If you’ve read it, you might have noticed it once or twice. “Tricky.” Umi, the main heroine, falls back on this word a lot to describe the protagonist. She uses it when he’s being nice. And when he’s being a jerk. And when he’s chewing food. And any other opportunity she can think of. Basically, I think she gets paid 100 yen every time she manages to work that word into a sentence. And let me tell you: girl is pulling down bank. Of course, this is a translation, so she’s not actually saying “tricky.” She’s saying something similar in Japanese. And therein lies a tale of woe and sorrow. The backstory But let’s rewind a bit first. When I came aboard the KoiRizo team, it was to edit a single route: Nagisa’s. Makes sense — I was a first-time VN editor, and Nagisa’s route was the shortest in the game. Moreover, it was an unlockable, which meant that comparatively few people would end up reading it. Other editors were already hacking away at most of the remaining routes anyway, so that was all fine by me. As I worked my way through Nagisa’s scripts, I saw the word “tricky” pop up once or twice in Umi’s dialogue as a personal insult and it just seemed ... odd to me. Tough math problems are tricky. Opening a stubborn jar of peanut butter is tricky. People? Less so. I’m an editor, though, not a translator, so I did what I was supposed to do: flagged it for TLC review, left a comment with my concerns, edited the line as best I could, then moved along. The translator on the project had made it clear he wouldn’t be reviewing any edits until all the routes were finished being edited, so that’s about all I could do at the time. When I finished cleaning up Nagisa’s route, I was asked if I wouldn’t mind tackling Shiori’s scripts as well, which no other editor had gotten around to yet. “Sure,” I said, and set about tidying that up as well. The word “tricky” popped up a couple more times, so I did the same thing: flagged it, reiterated my concerns, then kept on editing. I finished Shiori, and was asked if I’d pick up the common route and Umi’s route; the editing on both of these had apparently stalled. Okay, what had started out as a quickie project for me was slowly turning into something much more time-consuming. I could see that. But I was still having fun, so I agreed. I started with the common route, where Umi has more screen time, which meant I started seeing the word “tricky” a little more often. And I started to worry. I flagged it, left a comment along the lines of “See my earlier notes on tricky,” and kept editing. I was determined not to get hung up on one silly word. It was becoming clear that this was sort of a catchphrase word for Umi, and I didn’t want to change the translation in my scripts if all the other editors’ scripts were keeping it as is. It’d be like if a screenwriter on The Simpsons decided that “D’oh!” sounded dumb, so Homer should say “Ooops!” instead — but only on the episodes he/she worked on. Anyway, I finished the common route and moved onto Umi’s. And lo, I gazed into a bottomless abyss of trickiness. You sly dumbass, you. Now let’s talk about the actual word. In Japanese, it’s “ずるい” — “zurui.” And, true to its definition, zurui’s a tricky word to pin down. It’s often translated as “unfair.” (Or so I’ve been told. Again, I’m an editor, not a translator. I took a Japanese class or two a few years back, so I have a basic familiarity with the rudiments of grammar and vocabulary. I’m good for: “Hello, I only speak a little Japanese. Sorry! What time is it? Where is the train? I am a very cute peach.” And that’s about it.) But there’s a little more nuance to it than that. Getting cancer is unfair. Having your advisor take credit for your thesis is unfair. “Zurui” implies a level of deviousness, impishness, slyness, craftiness, and yes, even trickiness. Someone who’s being “zurui” knows they’re getting away with something — and they’re okay with that. Moreover, it has a secondary meaning of being miserly, which is something that definitely applies to Soutarou, the protagonist of KoiRizo. I have to imagine that wordplay was not lost on the writers ... or the characters. There’s no one good English word to capture all those layers of meaning. When Umi uses this word to describe the protagonist in KoiRizo, it’s clear from context that her emotional shading varies from line to line. Sometimes she’s straight-up pissed at him and is telling him off: “You jackass.” Other times, she’s more of a late-game tsundere and says it playfully, even affectionately: “You sly dog you.” But she uses the same Japanese word every single time. Sometimes she’ll even say it six or seven times in a row without taking a breath. “Zurui. Zurui. Zurui. Zurui. Zurui. ZURUI!” It was her catchphrase. And in pretty much every instance, it had been translated as “tricky.” If the word only appeared once or twice in KoiRizo, I could have swapped in the contextually appropriate English replacements and been done with it. (I actually did this in a handful of places throughout the VN, usually when it was clear she was at one extreme of the word or the other.) But given how often it showed up, I felt somehow obligated to honor authorial intent. This was Umi’s pet phrase for this guy she’d fallen in love with. At one point, I think she even uses it as all the parts of speech in a single sentence. If I started changing “zurui” to different words every time, she’d lose a fairly important character quirk. After looking at all the options, the translator’s choice of “tricky” started seeming like it wasn’t a half-bad compromise after all. It got across that Umi thought the protag was dealing from the bottom of the emotional deck, but it also had a playful, teasing quality. It was never the best word in any particular instance, but it seemed like it might be flexible enough to be just sorta kinda okay in all instances. That argument makes sense, right? I thought so at the time, anyway. And so I left “tricky” as it was. Boy, was I wrong. Mea culpa I overthought it, plain and simple. I forgot my personal rule of writing and editing: Make the journey as frictionless for the readers as possible. Don’t let them get snagged on odd phrasings or slightly off words. Keep them immersed in the story. I’d forgotten how jarring that “tricky” word seemed those first few times I saw it in translation. As the months passed, some sort of editing Stockholm Syndrome set in and I actually started thinking it might be an acceptable option. In short, I messed up. When I read Umineko for the first time, Battler’s use (and abuse) of the word “useless” seemed so ill-fitting to me in English prose that I almost gave up reading the VN right then and there. But now, I sort of understand how the Witch Hunt team might have, over time, come to see this ungainly adjective as the best compromise for their main character’s catchphrase. It doesn’t make me like it much more, but I can see how they ended up there. (But don’t get me started on “turn the chessboard over” vs. “turn the chessboard around.” The latter works; the former leaves you with a bunch of chess pieces on the ground.) So here's the deal: It doesn’t matter that I had to make literally hundreds of judgment calls like this over the course of editing KoiRizo — what to do with Yuuhi’s numerous nicknames for the protagonist, as just one example — and 99% of them turned out okay (I hope). What matters is there’s a big lump of tricky sitting in the middle of the visual novel. And it doesn't work. I signed off on it. And I take full responsibility for that. So what to do? Not much, to be honest. It’s one of those things I’d love to revisit if given the chance, but a 2.0 KoiRizo patch seems unlikely at this time. MDZ keeps his own counsel, but he seems to have moved onto other pursuits. And that, as they say, is that. Postscript As I mentioned, the original intent of this blog was to put a spotlight on my many missteps as a first-time VN editor. That hasn’t changed. I might also try to throw in some helpful life advice from time to time, but I’m mainly happy to let my blunders serve as good object lessons for other aspiring editors. That means you should feel free to discuss any boneheaded decisions you think I might have made. Odds are I’ll own up to them. I've got a very thick skin, after all. I just ask two things: 1. This blog is about editing. If you have issues with someone’s translation choices, I kindly ask that you take it elsewhere. I hear Fuwa has really nice forums for that sort of thing, y'know? But if you have issues with how I edited someone's translation, then bring it on. 2. Please don’t be a giant pixelated dick about it. No one likes a pixel pick.

Thanks everyone who volunteered, I should have closed this way earlier but got caught up with some issues regarding some personal projects, sorry about that. I'll eventually PM everyone back, don't worry. You can still read the recruitment OP in the spoiler below if you feel like doing so for whatever reason.

Why the hell is Fruitbat Factory handling it? Wonder if Sekai Project wanted to do another kickstarter and Visual Arts didn't this time around. I'd be very interested in finding out how this business partnership for Little Busters actually came about and what reason Sekai Project is getting dropped. Did they not like the translation of Clannad or did Sekai Project refuse since they have too many other games in the pipeline right now? Perhaps they had no wish to create physical versions of their games again? I'd be very curious what happened here. I find it quite interesting how very different japanese visual novel companies are to other businesses....they don't really stick with one particular company and they don't just go for the more popular companies in a particular area but will randomly go with a new company if it means getting their product out quicker. Very interesting.

Maybe they hired translators that don't live on air

boo

No, no, you are entirely mistaken. My interest in male genitals increases threefold per giant, blurry pixel. As for the translation choice, I'm not a native, tricky sounds as English as any other word to me. Same goes for useless. If anything, I found it curious how it had been translated as "tricky", which I hadn't seen before, but that's about it.

I've never seen a company/developer new to the Western market so engaged with its customers and fans. Wish some of these companies I really like werent so arrogant and would follow your example MiKandi Japan.

hi there! i'm a 20 year-old autistic Dutch joinery student who started to get into visual novels about 5 months ago, first from seeing the usual clickbait bollocks on youtube, then watching a few let's plays out of serious curiosity (reject demon toko, fault milestone) after that, i decided to try one for myself. that first one was planetarian, which moved me more than any book or film had ever done and completely changed the way i look at stories. since then, i've done a lot of research and played(/read?) a few more: kanon, narcissu, air, fault milestone 2 and an octave higher. none of the supposed 'flagships' yet, though i'm anxiously awaiting the steam release of clannad. i don't really have any preferred genre yet, as long as it has a strong enough atmosphere, which i have always cared about i've been reading on this forum and listening to some of the podcasts for about two weeks now, and i decided it was time to try blending in. i hope my sluggish but deeply philosophical mindset can be of use here, and equally, that i will be able to gain experience from what seems like a group of friendly and open-minded people yours dreamily, me

How do you eat an entire whale? One bite at a time. Preferably with Cholula. How do you edit/translate/whatever a visual novel? One line at a time. Preferably with bourbon. Whether you’re a fan of the final product or not, one of the things that impresses me most about MDZ’s fan translation of Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort is that it got released, period. As in, if you were so inclined, you could download the installer right now, patch the original Japanese game, and go play the thing on your new-fangled Windows Pee-Cee. No demos, no one-route partial patches. The whole damned VN in English, finished on schedule and out there in the world. The project didn’t stall. It didn’t wind up in no-updates-in-six-months-but-we-think-they’re-still-working-on-it hell. It didn’t climb into that white panel van with Little Busters EX, never to be heard from again. The nice man was lying to you, Little Busters EX — there were no cute little puppies in the back. What were you thinking?! The KoiRizo team did nothing particularly special to make this happen. We just ate the whale one bite at a time. The rhythm method By his own account, MDZ worked very methodically on the project, spending an average of 30 minutes every day translating scripts into English. Not when he felt like it. Not when inspiration struck. Not when enough people harassed him with all-caps emails asking why the HELL hadn’t there been any progress updates on the KoiRizo tracker lately. He made it an expected part of his routine, like brushing his teeth or eating dinner. He scheduled regular translation sessions between classes or before heading out in the morning. He did a little bit. Every. Single. Day. There’s a word for that: consistency. That’s what gets things done in the real world, not 48-hour marathons every random.randint(1,6) weekends fueled by Red Bull, Hot Pockets, and intense self-loathing. Consistency keeps you from getting burned out. Consistency lets you make reasonable schedules and estimates, then stick to them. Consistency is like goddamned black magic. Over the course of the project, MDZ had consistency in spades. If he can maintain that approach to life, I have a feeling he’ll be successful at whatever he puts his mind to after college. When I came on board as an editor, I kept a somewhat similar schedule. I resolved to set aside my commuting time each workday for editing. And so for 40 minutes in the morning and 40 minutes in the evening, Monday through Friday, I’d park my butt in a train seat, break out my laptop, and just edit. Weekdays were reserved for my family. If you’re married with kids, you know there is no such thing as free time on weekends. If you’re not married and don’t have kids, please tell me what the outside world is like. I hear they came out with a PlayStation 2? That’s gotta be pretty awesome. Anyway, that’s what I ended up doing. Edit every single workday. For six months. Until it was done. (Six months? That long to edit a medium-length visual novel? Yeah, that long. KoiRizo weighs in at 36,000+ lines. Over six months, that works out to about 1,400 lines a week, or 210 lines per hour. That’s an edited line every 17 seconds or so, with most of the lines needing substantial polishing/rewriting. I have no idea what pace other VN editors work at, but I felt like this was one I could maintain over the long haul. Call it the distance runner’s lope.) Special topics in calamity physics So why all this rambling about whales and consistency? Because I just got back from vacation a few days ago and I’ve been surprised at how long it’s taken me to get my head back into the various projects I’ve been working on (or even writing this blog). And then I got to wondering how often something small like that snowballs into a stalled or even failed project. A missed day turns into a skipped week turns into a skipped month turns into a dead translation. Which then got me thinking about the coefficient of friction. It’s basic physics, which I excelled at (failing repeatedly). In layman’s terms, it’s a ratio (μ) that gives you a sense how much force two surfaces exert on each other and, therefore, how much force you need to exert to get something moving from a dead stop. Wooden block on ice? Low coefficient of friction. Wooden block on shag carpet? High coefficient of friction ... and a senseless crime against tasteful décor. Once you overcome that initial friction, it takes comparatively little force to keep an object in motion. I can easily imagine there’s a coefficient of friction between us and our work, some quantifiable level of resistance that needs be overcome before we get our asses in gear and be productive. And unlike the one in Physics 101, which is constant for any two materials, this one is different every single day. It depends on a bunch of different factors: how interested we are in our projects, how appreciated we feel, what other projects we’ve got going on at the same time, how much sleep we’ve gotten, what else is going on in our lives, whether or not the Mets are currently in the World Series, etc. Let’s call it the coefficient of slackitude. Once we get started on a project and make it part of our everyday routine, we can largely ignore this number. We’ve overcome the initial slackitude and, with moderate effort, can keep things rolling along fairly smoothly. But each time we let things coast to a stop, even for a few days, we’ve got to overcome the slackitude all over again. And since that value is variable, it might be much harder the second time around. In fact, it probably will be. Eventually, we’ll fail to do so. And our project will die. The takeaway So other than the fact that I had no business being anywhere near a physics classroom, what can we take away from my incoherent ramblings? A couple things: The easiest way to make sure your project gets finished is to stick to a regular schedule. Eat the whale a little at a time — every day if you can. Minimize the gaps. Avoid having to face off against that nasty coefficient of slackitude more than once.The easiest way to make sure your project gets started at all is to pick a time when that coefficient of slackitude is low — when you’re excited by the prospect, when you’re well-rested, when you have relatively few competing interests. When you can focus. Use that time to build your momentum, so when your interest wanes or real life intrudes — it always does and it always will — the project is so embedded in your routine that you can just ride it out.We need more finished translations in the world. So pull up a chair and eat your whale. Do it for your team. Do it for yourself. Do it for poor Little Busters EX, drugged and ball-gagged in a basement somewhere, forever wondering when it’ll finally get to see the puppies.

So far, the protagonists of this story are its biggest downside. I don't say this to be mean... I just felt I needed to be frank with you all. The story itself is generally interesting, as is the cast of side-characters... but both protagonists definitely leave something to be desired. Kai Kai's side of the story would probably be best referred to as the 'Light' side of the first part of the VN. Why? Because, for all the horrible things that happen during the course of his story, none of them really tarnish or dirty him personally. That is fairly typical of a jrpg protagonist, as the 'natural hero' types tend to never really get dirtied by all the horrible things that go on around them or the people they have to kill in the course of the game. Oh, early in the game he is a little bit more pathetic, but when he loses a comrade, it drives him to 'resolve himself' to the fight to come with the typical guilt-driven passion you see from any number of similar heroes. To be honest, the degree to which his personality and character development is cliched is startling. Most writers make an effort to at least move the protagonist a little away from the 'middle of the road' archetypes... Shizuma Shizuma is a problem for an entirely different set of reasons. Number one is that he is a resurrection of the 'angst-driven anti-hero protagonist who is always irritated with or angry at something'. As I've gotten into his path, I don't see this quality fading all that much. Worse, he seems to have the fatal character flaw of being a smart idiot. He is intelligent, but he is blind to the obvious pitfalls around him. He fails to even consider that a certain delusion early on might be wrong, due to his obsessive personality, and he fails even more to choose an intelligent path to his goal, despite apparently being fairly smart. A lot of this comes from the impatience that is endemic to this kind of protagonist... but that doesn't change the fact that he looks like an idiot through almost the entire first quarter of his path, despite having the typical elitist arrogance of the naturally capable ('What, you can't do that? It's easy though.'). Edit: For those who are interested, Eternal has released an update fixing the bugs stated in the previous post, as well as rebalancing certain aspects of gameplay - the general weakness of combined mechpeople and a few other issues. 11/01/2015 1:33 AM, US Central Time

Heya John. Welcome to the Fuwanovel Forum! Enjoy your stay and share in your love of VNs and animes!

Prepare to be spooked

In the case of Tomoyo After, there is an (all-ages only) Memorial Edition that is much expanded and has a new ending. People tell me it's much better than the original. If that's the version they're bringing over, then that's a pretty big benefit for us since only the original has been translated until now.

My wallet can"t handle all those awesome VN to buy / back...

Hm, might as well answer. Well, i'm not really into NXT at this point because it seems the main title picture is only gonna really advance once Itami comes back. When it comes to the main roster, the shows are really boring, so you might as well just watch the highlights on youtube, but i'm interested in the Reigns vs Rollins and Wyatt vs Taker storylines. Hopefully Reigns gets the title in november so that more shit can start happening regarding the world title. On a sidenote, i find it kinda funny that no one in this "visual novel aficionado" website has any interest in japanese wrestling.

Actually, this is already God's way of punishing you, you silly 4/10 lovely bats you

I'm a social media marketer in real life so it's kinda what I do...

Of course you can't get a job Ren, when you go to job fairs in that outfit

Thank you! Favorite color huh? It's blue! Yours? White! Blue is a pretty stellar color too, though.

After playing enough of them, if there is one thing you learn from VNs it is what your fetishes are. Even ones that you had no idea even existed... Of course, the exact opposite is also true - you find out exactly what a lot of your turnoffs are as well.

Gameplay, they went in a completely different direction. As I said above, it is a straight-out srpg. After playing both sides... the one thing I noticed is that there is very little advantage to using the mech-people, whereas using the sword-people is usually a pretty good one. Both cost you in experience gain, but considering that you can stack the benefits of the sword people with items and you can't with the mech people... it isn't worth it. Early in the game, there is an advantage in a few thousand extra hp, but late in the game it gradually grows to be close to worthless, outside of the Kai/Alfaria/Veridadear combo. Unless they seriously rebalance the game in a future update, I honestly can't say that the system was a good idea as a whole. Story-wise... any game without Yumina as a character is a good one? lol More seriously... I honestly thought that Corona's story was the most solid of the three. It had its problems, but it was a lot more interesting than Yumina, at least to me. To be honest, the angsty psychopathy of Shizuma in his path (yes, he's that bad) is making me more than a little tired. He has only gotten worse as the story has gone on. Kai was at least manageable, but Shizuma is like a neurotic dictator driven crazy by paranoid distrust of everyone around him. Being in his mind is exhausting, especially since it has been like this to one degree or another for the entire path (enemy levels are approaching those of Kai's path, so I assume I'm approaching the cut-off point).

Mmm... to be honest, it is hard to tell if they made the game world consistent with Yumina and Corona (which are based in the same universe). While Yoopshilla, Veridadear, and a number of other characters from the previous games are major characters in this one, I honestly can't tell how it is chronologically related to this one. Logically, because of a certain event that occurs with Veridadear, it should be after Corona and Yumina, but a lot of other things are going on that make it confusing.

2.15/10 would bang, Nosebleed's the killer /ad *[a]ttractive [d]istractor

One thing I didn't see addressed: with what you know now, what would you have done differently? The two choices I see are: - accept that this is the character's catchphrase, and stick with always using a consistent translation, but maybe change that one word (and maybe in that universe we'd be looking at a blog post about your "unfair" translation) - given that seeing any single word repeated to that extent is going to be too jarring for English readers (apparently more so than for Japanese readers), use contextually-appropriate word choices instead From the perspective of an English reader with poor, but non-zero, Japanese comprehension, I'd probably favor the former approach, but I expect the preference is heavily audience-dependent. If you assume a completely non-Japanese-speaking audience, the latter makes much more sense, but the audience for a VN translation probably leans towards people with a modicum of Japanese comprehension, who will be listening to the Japanese voice acting and mentally judging you. Compounding the problem here, I expect, is the Japanese tendency to use adjectives as entire statements; this is going to lead to a strange experience for English readers, regardless of the translation choice for that one word, unless you take substantial liberties with the translation. I haven't read KoiRizo (yet), so maybe that angle is nicely addressed already, but it certainly seems problematic, given the more literal translation which is common with fan translations. Anyway, given your newly-endowed benefit of hindsight, how would you approach this tricky dilemma if you were facing it now?

You actually believed him?

(You're welcome.)

eh, you could call it a trademark word gag of hers Like Monogatari girls (I think each and every single one of them has a catchphrase of some sort.) I don't speak or read moonrunes but perhaps "Zurui" is more like "meanie" in most instances.

welcome to fuwa zerocraver enjoy your stay ~ you should play katawa shoujo and sharin no kuni if you are new to this world of vns

I understand what you mean but for some reason this one translation is the worst I've ever seen imo. I'm not saying there aren't worse translations out there but this one suffers from choosing weird word choices. Sometimes I even had to look up uncommon words used. They're not hard words but uncommon enough that I forget what they mean. What kind of fan-translations are you playing? At least from what I've played, most have glaring mistakes. This game read 10x better than most fan-translations I've read. The only problems being the translation choice that's currently driving you insane, some wording choices I felt were wrong, and the few translation errors I caught. The norm for fan-translations is stuff done by Ixrec or TakuJun which read stilted as ever-living hell. If you think this is a horrible translation I'm not sure you could read through something like Fate/Stay Night and actually survive.

Welcome! What's your favorite color?

Hey all, Does anyone remember when I posted details about an Akihabara tourist guidebook I wanted to create a few months ago? Well, I have been diligently working on that for some time now, and by the end of this December I hope to have it finished so I can start getting feedback. I never actually mentioned this, but depending on how well it's received, I really wanted to launch a Kickstarter for the rest of the world to enjoy. Specifically, I want to launch a KS so I can fund certain elements and expand the guidebook to a more professional level. I won't go into all of the details at the moment since this is something I want to start considering for next year, but I will give you an idea of what sorts of things I was hoping a KS campaign would help fund. Through fundraising, I hope to do the following: Hire a professional editor or editors who can check most of the material written in the guidebook.Hire a professional photographer who can get permission to take pictures of buildings in and around Akihabara.Hire professional translators who are willing to help translate the guidebook's articles into a multitude of different languages.While the list seems small, there are probably other things to consider as well, such as hiring an artist who is willing to draw me pictures and a possible mascot for the project. Also, obtaining rights for using certain images may also be something I need to look into. Overall, I don't have a lot of information on this yet because I don't know how well the "rough" version will turn out. Still, I wanted to make this thread for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to talk about why I think this Kickstarter can be successful. I was originally planning on contacting Danny Choo (the president of Culture Japan) in order to help promote the campaign. Who would have guessed I met the man standing alone with nobody around him in Shibuya the final day I was about to leave? To be honest, I was quite surprised. We ended up chatting about localized PC games and how companies like MG, Sekai Project, and JAST are affecting the market. Turns out Danny is familiar with Fuwanovel as well, or so I gathered, though I'm not 100% sure on that. Anyways, after telling him about my KS in person he ended up saying that he would proudly support it and that I could use the photo shown above as a way to promote it. He also gave me his card and said to email him when and if the fundraiser was launched. If you aren't familiar with who he is, check out his homepage linked below. Hopefully things can work themselves out! http://www.dannychoo.com Second, I also wanted to make a request to the community of Fuwanovel and its surrounding members. I am in desperate need of some assistance on this project. While I totally thought it could be tackled by myself, I realize that using InDesign to create layouts is proving to be extremely taxing; any help would be greatly appreciated. So how can you help? All I would really need help with is design ideas. If anyone is good at creating magazine-style layouts or has any ideas they can describe to me on paper, that would be awesome. I used to design newspaper layouts back in high school and I often look to the internet to see some awesome design ideas and award winning templates, but it's still difficult to come up with something unique and appealing. Not good at layouts? That's okay! I would love to hear your input on color choices if you have any, and of course if you have any ideas for a mascot I can use to promote the project (artists, I am looking at you), I would greatly appreciate it. As you may realize, I am very serious about launching this KS and seeing this project become a huge success. If there are people who are willing to assist me in that dream and help me out, please PM me or post in this thread. Again, any assistance goes a long way. Thanks again all!

Oh dear, looks like I'm in for a tricky time. Gotten a bit into Umi's route, but not really close to finished considering there hasn't even been any sex yet. I'll try to keep an eye out for the supposedly strange word choices though, since Sango's route didn't seem to have any of that - and I want to see whether Rooke's theory is correct .

I'm pretty sure translators are being paid a little bit more these days than they used to. And if they aren't, they should be, because MangaGamer's wages were downright exploitative and dirty. So I'm okay with them asking for more on that front. $170k though, that is a TALL order. This is an unknown game from an unknown company (in the west) being brought to us by an upstart localization company. I am very highly skeptical that this can actually reach that goal.

Heya ZeroCraver! Welcome to the Fuwanovel Forum! Enjoy your stay here with us! :3

*Slow claps* I can see how zurui being used in every which way being problematic when it had become a character quirk. It's one thing if you could swap them all out for more appropriate words to fit each situation, but of course you couldn't. This may be getting into translation territory, but, I do think "unfair" or "that's not fair!" might have been enough to make do with in most of the situations. MC is being nice. "That's not fair (why are you being so nice all of a sudden)". MC is being a jerk. "That's not fair (I shouldn't have to deal with your idiocy)". MC is eating. "That's not fair (you get to eat when I don't? maybe?)" "Not fair, not fair not fair! That's NOT FAIR!" ......Just a thought. *disclaimer - I haven't played Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort so my examples may be waaaay off

Confession: So I went to the Otorhinolaryngologist for the first time in years, and as it turns out, I've got quite a bit of allergies, I suppose you could call it. I've got Rhinitis, which would be the main cause of my constant nosebleeds. Additionally, I've got eczema in my ear canals... somehow. I had no idea. Just to add more salt on the wound, I had ungodly amounts of ear wax in my ears, to the point where the doctor was wondering how I could even hear anything at all. How did it get to this point? My father insisted on cleaning my ears because, admittedly, I have a large amount of ear wax. The results of his zealousness were as follows: Most of the wax was pushed even deeper, making removal and normal function of the natural ear cleaning mechanisms impossible. Possibly, my hurt inner ear canals may have resulted from his efforts as well. I just knew that sticking things in your ear isn't good.

4 more hours until I take a vacation. Can't wait. Comic Con and a week spent with friends gaming and enjoying ourselves. We rarely see each other because they are studying in another city. I am going ot buy some awesome posters at Comic Con though. I got space on my walls in my new apartment. I can feel the money cry in agony.

I feel like a VN that is best described as "not bad per se" isn't the best idea for a starter VN - why not use the best VN you know of in the genre your audience is interested in, with maybe one or two other restrictions (mainly, not too long)? Either Fate/Stay Night or Symphonic Rain would be my starter VN recommendation, depending on the person's interests; I'd go with a Key game instead of Symphonic Rain, maybe, but at least the recent ones are probably a bit long for a starter.

Sadly, I wasn't able to order a lot of VNs before returning home, but I guess this collection over 3 years is worth mentioning? There are some very light NSFW stuff in this album. A couple of notes about everything. Obviously reorganization needs to occur as the small room has most of that stuff crammed in it. I have yet to purchase my glass cases for most my figures, and as you can see in some of the images, I haven't unloaded all of my figures yet. In addition, the Love Live cosplay uniform is not worn by me. What I want to do is put it on something for display purposes. A culmination of the past 3 years, and with another 4 figure orders on the way so far and a full order of VNs (about 22+) planned for the beginning of 2016, it will only continue to grow larger. Please weeb responsibly.

The World Ends With You is the fucking tits (SPOILERS INSIDE) edit: Also the fucking OST, don't know where to begin. Finally got to where Twister pops up in the game, and it's glorious.