Leaderboard

http://reviews.fuwanovel.net/2016/06/08/rose-guns-days/ It's pretty good. You should take a look into it.

Winged Cloud's girls-love focused dungeon crawler Sakura Dungeon packs in solid gameplay, decent characterization, and ample ero into a 20+ hr experience. [In-Depth Review] Sakura Dungeon

Let’s not mince words here. The ellipsis is a blight upon English translations of visual novels. It must be uprooted and killed with fire. Before the slaughter begins, however, let’s review some basics. As the name suggests, the ellipsis represents an elision — that is to say, omitted content. It functions as the “yadda yadda” of the English language. It is the “Step 2: ???” before the all-important “Step 3: Profit!” A writer deploys those three little dots to indicate either the intentional removal of something that once was there, or the pointed absence of something that should have been there. That’s it. That’s what the ellipsis is supposed to do. You wouldn’t know this, however, by reading nearly any English translation of a Japanese visual novel. Ellipses are scattered across the text like so many rhinestones on the sweatshirt of a Midwestern mom. They’re at the beginning of sentences, the ends, stuck randomly in the middle — sometimes even chained end to end like a writhing Human Centipede of punctuation, each little dot in the chain crying, “Kill me now!” into the anus of the next. It’s an absolute abattoir in there. This particular road to hell is paved with good intentions, however. You see, all those ellipses are also present in the original Japanese and, in an attempt at faithful translation, the TL teams have left them all sitting there for you to enjoy. The original writer had a reason for putting them in, the reasoning goes, and it’s our job to offer the purest translation of his/her vision possible. This, of course, is bollocks. Punctuation operates differently in different languages. Japanese ellipses are used much more liberally than their Western forbearers, particularly in popular culture (e.g., manga. light novels, etc.) Want to indicate a pause? Ellipsis. Silence? Ellipsis. Passage of time? Ellipsis. Need to fill some empty space? Ellipsis. Is it Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday? Ellipsis, ellipsis, ellipsis. When ported over to English, most of these usages look less like carefully crafted sentences and more like a transcript of a particularly drunken Snapchat session. Put simply, what works in one language doesn’t always work in another. When I’m translating a Line of Text from German, for Example, I don’t capitalize all the Nouns because that’s how it was in the Original. I normalize it for English. The same needs to be done in any VN translation. My current rule of thumb while editing — I’ll bold it for you in red here — is as follows: Remove/replace all ellipses in a line of Japanese text unless doing so irreparably breaks the sentence or significantly changes its meaning. Luckily for us, English has a toolbox full of punctuation to get the job done. Commas, semicolons, periods, dashes — they’re all your friends. So let’s discuss some common situations in VNs and how we might handle them. The trailing ellipsis You’ll see lots of these littering the ends of sentences and lines, mostly to little effect. More often than not, they indicate a thought closing on anything other than a 100% full and decisive stop. Since they don’t hold the place of omitted text, we can almost always replace these ellipses with periods. There are a handful of situations, however, where keeping a trailing ellipsis makes sense. These include: The Pregnant Pause: When something’s strongly implied at the end of a sentence/line, but left unsaid for dramatic effect. The ellipsis fills the place of the implied content, so it gets to stay. (Fun bonus fact: pauses are the only things that can get pregnant in VNs.) The “And So On”: When a statement is implied to continue for an unspecified length beyond the end of the sentence/line. The ellipsis here indicates there may have been a few more beers after Michelob, but the writer has decided to spare us and jump straight to Bob’s objection. Had this been more interruptive in nature, with Bob cutting Joe off immediately after “Michelob,” the ellipses would have replaced with an em-dash (—). The Trail-Off: Similar to the “And So On,” but with the character choosing to let a statement taper off into nothingness, rather than the author. The opening ellipsis You’ll see these slightly less often, but they’re by no means infrequent. Typically, they indicate some slight hesitation at the beginning of a line of dialogue. But again, the nuance ends up being so slight and the impact so watered down through overuse that you’re almost always better off removing these ungainly beasts. An exception can be made for: The Reverse Pregnant Pause: Just like the original Pregnant Pause, but it appears at the beginning of a sentence. Often holds the place of something a character doesn’t want to say. Rather than just pausing in passing, Joe is actively not admitting he thinks Joe is a jackass. That makes this line a strong candidate for an ellipsis. The mid-sentence ellipsis So, so many of these. You’ll close your eyes at night and they’ll haunt you. They’re almost always meant to indicate a slight pause in speech or thought, but trying to the read the resulting text is an exercise in frustration. There are... just so... many unnecessary... gaps. (Full disclosure: When writing scripts for TV, I’ll use ellipses like this a lot. But that’s for a very specific purpose: helping to communicate the particular rhythm of a line to the actor(s). I always avoid this in audience-facing text.) In almost all cases, unless there’s a marked pivot in thought, a comma will suffice. If the ellipsis is holding together two complete yet interwoven thoughts, a semicolon will do nicely. If the ellipsis is holding together two complete and independent thoughts, a period should be used. If ellipses are used to indicate an interruptive thought, one that breaks the main flow of the sentence, em-dashes can be used. Again, there are a couple situations where these mid-sentence ellipses can remain: The Ta-Da: When a pause is used for obvious dramatic effect, the ellipsis should be kept. The Shatner: When halting or stilted speech is intended for dramatic/comedic effect, ellipses may be retained. The empty line ellipsis You’ll see a lot of these. Holdovers from manga and light novels, they are explicit indicators of silence, being at a loss for words, holding one’s tongue, etc. In English prose, these silences would normally be held with narration — e.g., “Baconator just sat there, dripping ketchup.” You’d never see a sentence such as: ‘Harry Potter said, “...” and continued looking out the window.’ That’s because, unlike most VNs, traditional novels don’t have the crutch of character sprites and name cards appearing alongside dialogue. Due to such VN conventions, along with the technical limitations of translation — it’s frequently impossible to replace character dialogue with unvoiced narration — you should almost always leave these ellipses in place. Based on your best judgement, you can also choose to leave such variants as the questioning silence ("...?") and the excited/alarmed silence ("...!"). It should be noted that such empty line ellipses can also be used outside of dialogue. Often, these will just indicate time passing. There’s also a long tradition in Japanese art of the “pillow” — a held moment of contemplative emptiness. It’s the bit of formal textual throat-clearing at the start of a poem. It’s the 10-second cutaway to a babbling brook that connects two scenes in a movie. In a VN, this pillow can evidence itself as a single line of narration, empty save for an ellipsis. There’s no good English alternative for this, so it should be kept wherever you encounter it. Extra credit: The multi-line ellipsis I saved this one for last, because it’s a bit of a special case. Against all my better instincts, it involves adding ellipses in places where the original text has none. It’s painful but it’s for a good cause. Sometimes, when editing or translating a VN, you’ll run across sentences that spill over onto two or more lines. Unlike in poetry, which uses line breaks to very deliberate effect, these multi-line monsters are almost always the result of the VN writer just running out of highway and choosing to keep on driving. Whenever possible, you should attempt to restructure such sentences so they don’t break across lines. Often, splitting an overly long sentence into two smaller ones will do the trick. If it resists your best efforts, however, maintain the break and indicate it with ellipses — one at the end of the first line, the other at the beginning of the second. How many dots? ALL THE DOTS! Another peculiarity of ellipses in Japanese VNs is that they don’t always have three dots. Depending on context and the arbitrary whims of the writer, you’ll typically see anywhere from two to six dots at a time. I’ve even seen 27 in a row once. I think it was a sex scene. Or a fight scene. Maybe both. Don’t let this worry you. If you’ve been following my advice, you’ve already purged most of the ellipses from the text. Of those that remain, almost all can be reduced down to familiar three-dot English ellipses. But as always, there’s at least one exception. Content-bearing pauses: In most cases, it’s of little concern to us whether an ellipsis consists of three, four, five, or even six dots. They’re all slight variations on the standard pause, but since English punctuation doesn’t make any such distinction, neither will we. An exception comes when the length of a pause not only adds flavor, but provides content. Consider the case of an ever-lengthening silence: The lengthening of the line suggests the passing of increasing amounts of time; the scene isn’t the same without it. Or consider an explosive outburst after a deafening silence: If you opt to stretch out an ellipsis like this, only do so in increments of three. If you’re musically inclined, think of three dots as a quarter note, six dots as a half note, etc., each one holding the silence just a bit longer than the last. Following the rule of threes keeps the text visually streamlined and helps if you ever need to convert a bunch of soft ellipses ( “...”) to hard ellipses (“…”) late in the translation process. A quick note about spacing I opt to keep things simple. If an ellipsis is at the start of a sentence or line, put one space between it and the first word. If it’s anywhere else, use no space before the ellipsis and one space after. If it’s a string of ellipses, it should be an uninterrupted series of dots with no spaces in between. There are also differing schools of thought as to whether an ellipsis at the end of a sentence should also be followed by a period, resulting in four dots total. Again, I opt for simplicity here and advise three dots in all cases. The mark of the beast It’s easy to tell professional translations from fan projects, it’s said; just count the number of dots. While not always true – plenty of slapdash commercial releases exist in the wild — there’s definitely something to this. More often than not, fewer ellipses are a sign that someone has taken the time to not just translate a text word for word, but thoughtfully localize it. Seriously, just dump the dots, folks. Your readers will thank you for it.

I'll join precisely because I want to lose. It'll be fun to see people weirded out by the dice multiplying! Do make sure to remind me when I lose though.

You might want to consider reading more modern books. With publishing companies losing money, they've recently started cutting down their editing departments significantly, so much so that people are constantly (not really constantly, but constant relative to before ...) complaining of proofing errors. It seems sometimes done by software these days, so you'll get words which are spelt correct but they're the wrong word, and it happens far more often than it used. Which is sometimes funny, cause you see shit like this :3

Ever since Sekai Project acquired the license for Maitetsu, there has been discussion, speculation and hope among the internet; "Sekai Project, will there be an 18+ version?". "Sekai Project, where is the adult version?". "Sekai Project, will we receive those hardcopies on time this go around?" and so on. But I - as well as many others - highly doubt that this will happen. Therefore, I am quite confident to announce the following bet: IF Sekai Project (not a fanbased translation group) confirms a full1 18+ version of Maitetsu at any point between now and the official release, I will change my current Avatar to one voted by community2. This is the one time chance for the community to break my status as an eternal user, who has not once changed his avatar. However, should I win the bet, everyone who bet against me will have to wear the TexasDice avatar for 1 week. Further rules: - 1Full means no content is left out. A partial adult release will not count. - 2Every User who bets against me, will add one week to my punishment, should I lose. (example: Should three people bet against me and win, I'll wear the punishment avatar for 3 weeks.) - In case of my loss, I'll gather suggestions for my punishment-avatar and let you decide which one to wear via Strawpoll. The suggestions can't break any Forum rules, keep that in mind. - Bets given after I lost obviously won't add to the punishment time. - [Placeholder for future Questions/clarification] Good gambling everyone. Participants: EDIT: The Sign Up period is over, FUTHER SUBMISSIONS WILL BE INGORED - Texas Dice August 2nd 2016

It is on this day that I shall take up arms against the texan crusade... Wait what? I mean, I'm all for this, may you need to don an avatar fit for an heterochromia lover. (´・ω・`)

Sanah's written an insightful review of the game. For those who just read conclusions, here are his: Full review can be found on his blog - http://sanahtlig.blogspot.com.au/2016/06/in-depth-review-sakura-dungeon.html Anybody on the fence about this game should read the review. It's comprehensive. EDIT: Fuwa blog link for discussion -

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Primarily it was visual novels, because there were so many great titles I was missing out on due to not knowing Japanese. Now it's a mixture of a lot of reasons, one of them being the fact I want to work in Japan. My favorite thing about being a mod on fuwa is that I always get to see the records of every shitpost ever. Sometimes I go back to look at hidden content and laugh at some gems. My least favorite thing is probably the fact I can never do something right, there's always somebody that will think I'm acting like a tyrant. And I don't know, I'm not sure how I got into this position myself. That's classified. I'd probably try to unify all 4 main pages a bit better, cause right now things still feel sorta scattered. Or maybe that's just me. Like, I know it's a dead horse already, but the main site is still sorta useless. One thing I woulf say is necessary for a visual novel site is passion for the medium. Visual novels are a small niche and you can't expect your community to be huge, but if you care enough and put time into it, I'm sure you can grow to a decent size so that other people start helping you grow as well. One thing I'd not change on Fuwa is the forum. I basically spend most of my time here and despite not being perfect I think it has a place for everyone. These were probably really generic answers but honestly I don't see myself as a revolutionary so this is the limit of my imagination.

I'll do a Sakura Spirit giveaway AND an AMA. If you're the first to post, I'll even include a copy of Bad Rats.

Have you considered books? I hear they meet these requirements pretty well.

If I was physically capable of tracking down every gaming console and every smartphone on this planet and smash them with a hammer, I would.

Not sure if you guys are aware, but I think VN/Dating sim fans would enjoy the "Witch Trainer" and "Princess Trainer Gold Edition" by Akabur. They're like many of the training games out there with the emphasis on turning pure characters into more or less whores. The first being Hermione from Harry Potter and the second being Princess Jasmine. Free downloads, the artist's work is usually Patreon supported. Get them here: http://akabur.com/ Enjoy

That's really sad to hear I'm probably in the state of "addicted to osu", but I don't care. While I do try to put a lot of emphasis on getting better, I want to get better because I genuinely enjoy osu as a game, just as a competitive one. I love music. I spent my childhood not listening to much music, and not until middle school did I start listening to anything once internet became part of my every day life. My music library has never been the most impressive in size, and only listened to random stuff my friends listened to, but I always loved just listening to stuff, so I didn't care. And then osu came along. osu completely changed my music library from just a few rock bands I listened to, to a large variety of music.It was the sort of shifting point (even though it's soo weeb like) to me primarily listening to Japanese music, which I personally don't regret. And at the same time, I can enjoy the game BECAUSE I can play along to my favorite songs. In fact, some of my favorite songs are BECAUSE I played them on osu so much. I didn't play them to go up a leaderboard, and there weren't songs I played for pp and hated (I really refuse to play shit I don't like). osu made me discovery utaite, which made me go listen to more of them outside of osu, and in turn made me come back to osu just to play the game with songs I liked. While I do get unreasonably angry at the game when I play badly, other times I'll just not care and keep playing, because I personally do actually enjoy the game. I've played osu for 3 years, and don't regret any of it. There's actually so many times I've said out loud to my friend over chat "I'm fine with xxx being my highest PP score, I love this song!" And then usually end up choking, but it's just the way I think. I like this song, and I like my highest PP scores being songs I like. Hell, nearly every song on the first page of performances is songs I like (I can see maybe 1-2 glancing through that are songs I find meh) Without osu, I would have never discovered these songs. The third song, I play an unranked version all the time because it's fun, and not even to get better or for ranking purpose.

In the meantime I'm still waiting for my clannad copy

Got this in the mail today

You have yourself a bet, sir.

I don't know if it was a huge mistake or not, but after mulling over it for days and days, I ended up ordering all 7 volumes of Koe no Katachi

1v1 me irl m8

You know what, I said I wouldn't in the chat but ... fuck it. I'm in. I seriously doubt they will release a full patch, but I really want to put something hilarious as your avatar... Please SP! Make it happen! (It's never going to happen, is it? I am so going to end up with that fucking dice as my avatar ... )

It must be the only VN from R07 of such a length that isn't terribly paced and filled with dubious humour though (that is still present in some scenes but to a much lesser extent than in his previous works, especially Higurashi). A great read for people tired of enduring the same anime tropes again and again that are so common in many VNs.

Chihayafuru is a pure series! Leave Kana alone. I get what you nean though. Happens all the time with certain series. Not sure exactly why.

I'd recommend playing on Hard difficulty. It's referred to as "Normal" in the manual, so that's likely the setting the game was balanced around, and it makes encounters challenging without the need for additional grind. Testers might've complained, which is why "Easy" was changed to "Normal" and made the default.

The best translated VN atm

Good question, I was actually just googling around for VNs similar to Little Busters, and then came across the Hoshimemo page on Fuwa. Not long after I registered on the forum and that's how my life spiraled out of control.

Only focus on getting ticket really,my scrub of team dies half the time i try to do 3BP

Wow, it actually sounds ... acceptable. Seeing as I am a fan of similar games, I think I kinda have to give it a try. (To clearify, similar games like Raidy, not similar games as in other Sakura games. Please.) The fact that there is no rapey scenes in the game makes it a bit less appealing though. No voice acting also kind of sucks. Anyways, nice review!

Well if it has windows setting in the settings of course it should work in a window. Try using all the different compatibility modes and test if any of those works in a window. I couldn't get one game working in a window except if I used Vista mode.

Preferences set just right.

I call you faceless weebs with only the utmost of sincere internet love.

It's to troll those who don't read

i dont want to be ported to a console not because i dont have a console but 1. porting to console will remove some of the scenes (h-scenes) as mentioned before 2. after a year or 2 the console will be replaced by a new console 3. because of (2) you need to buy every console to read the vn you what. so no console. also regarding the survey \ am i doing it right?

I was so naive to think that the question "What does Sekai Project do really well?" would be followed up with the question "What does Sekai Project do really badly?".... That would maybe lend to more balanced feedback.

Put stuff out quickly. Piss off the established community.

To expand a little on this: Few thousand people probably only got the game the game because it's new and checked the CGs or something but still really sad that at least 20k people played it without paying. Many people also probably from outside Japan so buying it is little tricky. But still sad. (Also Softmap had tokuten of the most popular character.) Numbers can vary A LOT from those because of the shop tokuten. See here (nsfw) for example tokuten that decides the real sales. Also your normal guy will buy the game 2 weeks later used for 50% off the price which doesn't do good for sales

We keep having less and less time to do more and more damage quests

It's interesting that they have so many game genres in there. Could this mean SP wants to expand beyond VNs and start localizing actual games? Some options are kinda bullshit. There's plenty of questions that ask me to rank stuff despite the fact I don't care for 90% of them. For example, I'm never going to own a gaming console, but I'm forced to put a "would very likely play a game in this console" because the survey doesn't allow a different opion. Or the option about where you get your information from. No matter what choice I make, it always implies I use all the sources, which is not true at all. I particularly liked this option though Lastly

So, I asked on reddit and in a blogpost about if people wanted another podcast about vns and since a lot of people were interested in it we decided to do it! So here we have the first episode where we discuss about learning japanese and reading untranslated stuff! I hope you like it, remember its the first episode so it sounds a little stiff since we dont have that much experience, it'll get better with time (also, please bear with me and my hopeless stuttering lol) https://www.mixcloud.com/VNP/the-visual-novel-podcast-ep-01-learning-japanese-and-reading-untranslated-visual-novels/

I'll just save you the effort That's so Flutterz.

With over 1000+ hours in SC1, 2000+ hours in SC2, and 500+ hours in osu, I think I know the flavours of addiction. I played Starcraft 1 and Starcraft 2 all the time for about a year and two years respectively, quitting mostly just before I went into Uni. Also was addicted to osu in streaks. Now I'm more sensitive to whether or not I'm actually enjoying the game, and I can put in perspective the gratification I'm getting from it. Also, about MMorpg's, when I came back and tried MMOrpg's I was suprised at how weak the player to player interaction is by default. Couldn't stand it. Glad you realized that. From someone who's gone through this... don't be too hard on yourself if it takes time to get off the game. It's still an activity that you are very used to. Especially for people who have used games as a diversion from real world tasks, important to recognize that failing in real world stuff (like trying to do X, and failing) isn't the end of the world, nor something to be afraid of, you just have to learn from it and try again. RL stuff relies on strategy and skill, and takes time to figure out, just like games.

Found another one

https://gyazo.com/0767856aca513504a2808530cd3e30f0

Funya has been exposed