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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.

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