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What did you just say about lolis sold to a brothel, Kokoro? I'll have you know I graduated top of my English Literature class at the University of Miami, and have over 50 confirmed credits as a visual novel editor. I am trained in English and I am well known as one of the top editors on Fuwanovel. As we speak I am contacting my network of experts across the internet right now to assemble and work on Musumaker together so you better prepare for the patch, maggot. If only you knew what kind of lolige your "clever" little comment was about to bring onto the world, maybe you would haven't clicked on "Submit Reply". But you couldn't, you didn't, and now the entire VN community will pay the price.

Off the top of my head, my primary focuses when editing are, in this order: Precision, i.e., making sure that a sentence says exactly what it wants to say. This means you need to know precisely what the words and phrases in the line mean. If you're not sure that you do, you should generally just not use that word or phrase, or if you insist on it, go look up both definitions and other usages of the word or phrase. Google Ngram is a good resource for examining other usages. Naturalness, i.e., making sure that a sentence isn't going to "sound weird" to a native American English speaker for any reason (this is kind of fuzzy, since in some sense there is no such thing as "a native American English speaker", since we all really speak our own idiolect and thus judgments will vary person to person). Classifying all the problems in this area is impossible, and even trying to would take a very long time. What you really need, if you want to do well on this front, is an excellent ear for the English language and a ton of experience reading and speaking. Avoiding unintentional ambiguity, i.e., cases where a single sentence can be interpreted multiple ways (hopefully one of them the correct way). Consistency, at many levels. This goes from the low level of making sure terminology used is the same throughout a game, to the high level of making sure that events in the game make sense together. One important thing people screw up on this front is consistency of narrative tense. The flow of narration should either be in the past or present tense, and it should stay there. Consistency overlaps a fair bit with some of the other things on this list, particularly the next two items. Flow, i.e., making sure that subsequent lines make sense together and form a coherent whole. When two people hold a conversation, they're usually talking to each other. A response tends to be related to the question that elicited it, and so on. Narration tends to be a single train of thought, not a series of disconnected sentences. Tone and character voice, i.e., making sure that the way the line expresses the thought is appropriate to either the narrative tone or the way the speaking character should talk. Character voice mostly comes down to word choice, but also sometimes to syntax. As an example, if your character is a bit childish, they shouldn't use SAT words and they shouldn't speak like the narration of a Dickens book. This objective is particularly fuzzy and difficult to get right. Rarely, people can go overboard on this one and end up flanderizing their characters' speech, or even just make them sound a bit silly. This one is the most forgivable thing to mess up, especially if you underdo it (overdoing it tends to be annoying...), but it's worth doing. Other fuzzier "good writing" things that don't really fit into the above categories. Avoid purple prose, avoid filtering verbs, avoid mixed metaphors, etc. This list is probably exceptionally long, and there's no way I'm going to just think up even a tiny fraction of the things that should be on it. Editors work almost entirely on instinct (because analyzing everything would take forever), along with a healthy dose of preparation and analysis outside of the time spent actually changing lines. For instance, you often need to sit down and think about common terminology, catchphrases, and other things that will influence word choice across the game. That's necessary because of both the "consistency" consideration and the "character voice" one. And although changes are largely driven by instinct in the moment, any editor worth their salt should be able to explain why they are making any given change, and it will usually boil down to one of these items: "it's more natural this way", "this is the way that person talks", etc. VN fan translations tend to be bad at all of these things. The same is true of many (most?) official VN translations, and also official and fan translations of anime, manga, LNs, and even of many mainstream video games. Being good at each of these things is hard. Being consistently good at all of these things is extremely difficult, and hence why there are professionals. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the VN-reading community has gotten so used to people being bad at all of these things that they won't notice if you, also, are bad at them, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't strive to be better at it. One thing I want to drive home: Japanese VN writers are professional writers. If all of this stuff I wrote sounds nitpicky and you think I'm making this all way more complicated than it should be, then you are disrespecting the original. You can bet your ass the original writers had all of this stuff (and a whole lot more related to writing in a broader sense) in mind at some level while they were writing it. Either that, or they're bad writers and it's probably not worth the time to translate their work anyway...

Hello there! It's not Friday, so it has to be an unusual post and it definitely is one... It will be a bit chaotic too - only now, late in the evening, after taking a day off and pursuing the only lesbian romance route in Tales of Aravorn: Seasons of the Wolf for most of it, I've realized that today is Lesbian Visibility Day. For me, both as a fan of yuri and as an appreciator of OELVNs it probably should be one important holiday - definitely worthy of a few moments/words of reflection. Visibility as something inherently positive is a curious idea. It's based on a very important and reasonable assumption, that to make something a public issue and fight for social change, you have to make people aware of that phenonenon's existence, scale and the consequences it might have for those most affected by it. To fight for the acceptance of gay people and systemic change that will give them equality before the law (and, hopefully, equality of opportunities), you cannot accept the conservative argument that sets sexual orientation as a purely "private" matter - the long-lived stance that wants people to visibly adhere to social "norm" and not "bother" others with the fact they're different. Most often, if you want your rights to be respected as a member of a minority group, you have to be loud, you have to be bold to the point of possibly being obnoxious and offensive to some people. You have to fight tooth-and-nail to make sure you won't be trampled by the majority's concepts of what's "normal" and "proper". In many Western countries, for lesbians that fight is to a large extent already "won" - the majority of people see them as a legitimate group worth respecting. Not everywhere though and it's not clear to what degree these gains are permanent. Hopefully? But is all visibility a good thing? Paraphrasing painfully accurate thought by @Fiddle, we don't really praise Adolf Hitler for bringing attention to Jewish issues in Mein Kampf. Yuri, is, obviously, not nazism. It's not in any inherent way a negative phenomenon for the lesbian cause. But it's also not automatically an ally of any progressive agenda. Japanese media is full of depictions of lesbian romance, which reaches a society that ignores LGBT issues in a way more persistent than pretty much any other highly developed country. For me, it's not especially surprising - just like the saturation of Pornhub with lesbian porn probably doesn't lead to people watching it going to their local Pride parade, fetishized, male-oriented yuri themes in anime and VNs do not have to translate into any kind of educated attitude towards RL queer women. And Japanese yuri, at least until recently, didn't really have an ambition of grounding its narrative into any kind of reality of homosexual romance. SonoHana series is the perfect example of completely isolated, imaginary "yuritopia" (to borrow a handy term from Yurirei), where a huge number of young females live in a world where males exists only in passing references, pretty much everyone's gay by default and there's no prejudice or social stigma connected to that fact - which, of course, make possible a gigantic number of voyeuristic porn scenes. Is it a bad thing by itself? Not really. Does it make people more aware of the situation of sexual minorities as a social issue? Hell no. Admittedly, some Japanese depictions of yuri romance are probably too lovely and heartwarming to say anything bad about them... Obviously, there's a lot of issues with representation of women in anime and VNs and I don't want to write a book here. I want to make a slightly different point and this goes to yuri romance in English VNs. This is also not a black and white picture - many EOLVNs directly copy the Japanese formula or give slight twists to it, while still keeping the "lesbian porn for guys" premise. However, for every Negligee and Sakura Fantasy our VN scene produces maybe even a couple of projects that are genuine expressions and/or appreciations of lesbian identity and realities of lesbian relationships. Throughout the various editions of Yuri Game Jam, NaNoRenO and in many commercial titles, I've seen lovely, touching, thought-provoking depictions of f/f romance that gave me huge pleasure as a reader, but also made me empathise with people different than me. Christine Love's work I think holds a special place here, with powerful and persuasive depictions of discrimination and her courage in exploring themes that commercial games rarely dare to go anywhere close to, from Analogue to Ladykiller in a Bind. Lately, Brianna Mei's Butterfly Soup gained similar notoriety, also through a genuine message and creative passion involved. But even small, cute and silly games such as those by Nami can have a genuinely positive role to play, confronting people with diversity in an approachable and lovely way. One other thing that OELVNs regularly prove to me is that some small, indie games can have more soul in them than many giant, high-budget productions... I, in all of this, have a pretty questionable position of a straight guy that finds lesbian romance lovely and, to a certain extent, hot. The more genuine the romance depicted is, the more I'm probably a bit of a creepy voyeur getting a high out of something that for other people is part of their identity. But no matter how we see that problem, this genuineness depicted above is something I absolutely love many yuri OELVNs for and a thing to be shared and appreciated. And that's my message for this day. Thank you for reading!

A translator must be able to understand what they are reading, beyond just being able to look up a word in a dictionary. If your version of understanding the source text is nothing more than looking it up word by word in a dictionary, you will be doing the same as a machine translation would do. So, before you consider becoming a translator for a real project, you should get better at understanding the language in general, which is really only done by studying a lot, and reading natively written Japanese texts etc. In terms of how much kanji you need to know, that depends on what you're going to translate, and how serious you are about it. An official translator must know at least the 常用漢字 (common use kanji), and preferably even more, to truly comprehend what they are reading. But, for fan translators, the main part to focus on is the general understanding of the grammar and such in whatever you are translating. Looking up a kanji compound is significantly easier than learning an entirely new piece of grammar. Additionally, as many grammar forms in Japanese have many different meanings, without the proper knowledge, you could easily pick the wrong meaning/ usage when you simply look the grammar form up on the internet. So, first and foremost, it is important that you are capable of reading and understanding what you are translating. (So, if you want to translate a visual novel, start by reading the entire thing, and make sure you are capable of understanding it all. If you are, you can start looking into translating it.) Translating something without having read it first is never a good idea, anyways, as you'll be missing out on potentially important context etc.

^ well, But hell, I kind of agree with the availability point. Some time ago I was looking at the translation bounties on exhentai for something to tl, and this really attractively bountied one had been on the list for a long while. It was kinda weird to my degenerate self, but I guess it being and old guy and a loli turned most people off, lol.

Good luck waiting for a good enough editor willing to "write" your loli project then my brethren. Most people aren't into lolis sold to a brothel.

a person thinking of becoming transgender. see, theyll be a trans later. alright, ill stop.

Outside of new releases, I usually try to avoid reviewing bad OELVNs in-detail, unless they’re especially interesting or notable despite their failures – after all, in any semi-amateur game development scene, the poorly-made, misguided or horribly iterative titles will be far more numerous than those actually worthy of your attention. Writing that much about the former, especially when my goal is to promote OELVNs as a niche worth exploring, is arguably a waste of time and possibly even counter-productive. However, just like Carpe Diem: Reboot, today’s game is a great opportunity to look at some problems and tropes very characteristic of the Western VN scene, in a game that actually had the production values and traces of genuine effort that should at least make it an average, reasonably enjoyable product. And the sin that made it ultimately fail was not silly writing that plagued Carpe Diem, but something arguably even worse – boredom. Sweet Volley High, developed by New West Games and released on Steam in October 2016, was marketed as a “yuri/otome Visual Novel”, featuring a female protagonist and both female and male romance options. While some might already feel unease about such use of the terms "yuri" and "otome", both of which usually denotes a bit more than just romantic configurations available, it hints at a much deeper problems – game’s utter lack of personality and very poor use of the themes it tries to tackle. While trying to appeal to a broad audience, in reality, it wasn’t able to replicate the appeal of neither yuri nor otome games, just as it didn’t manage to create a satisfying alternative to those formulas. But, why exactly is that the case? Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

Well, quite a lot has happened since I've last posted in this thread and I'm quite satisfied with how things are going. The content you've seen throughout April took quite a lot of work to make, but what's coming might be even more interesting. The yuri event is slowly coming to an end - for the next week I have a very neat, non-yuri-related interview ready and after that I wish to fit one more, very fresh game, which will give me an opportunity to discuss the rare romance VNs with protagonist gender choice. Later in May, the gameplay VN month(s) is coming, where I will cover things such as the whole Sunrider series. I think there will be some really fun reviews in there and I hope you'll join me on that journey to the world of VN and strategy game/RPG hybrids. Today, however, we have something pretty rare - another failed VN review, where I could share my grievances towards a title that I consider the worst commercial VN I've ever read - New West Game's Sweet Volley High. Apart from giving in to the sadistic part that is present in pretty much every reviewer's soul, I think it shares a few important notes on how NOT to make an OELVN - there are some things that are common issues with Western visual novels, but which this game made especially visible and easy to digest. It's a fairly short one, so I really encourage you to read it (and avoid the game it concerns like the plague): I've also written an impromptu rant yesterday to commemorate the Lesbian Visibility Day, sharing some of my thoughts about yuri OELVNs and their connection to the LGBT issues. It was more or less a stream of consciousness, created while being half-asleep, but after a few edits I'm actually pretty satisfied with how it turned out. If you haven't read it yet, you shouldn't regret doing so now: And that's all from me for now. Please look forward to the next week's interview - I think it's a really good one, even though the developer involved is a relative newcomer to the OELVN scene - and as always, have a great week everyone!

Shouldn't understanding Japanese be a given? If anything, I'd argue what makes a translator is his writing ability. Any JOP can read japanese no problem, but few can craft a masterpiece like moogy-dono.

Fureraba ~Friend to Lover~ Summary Springtime. The season of the cherry blossoms, and a time of new beginnings, new encounters, and new people. For Aoba Kyousuke, this new season marks the start of his second year in high school, and after taking a moment to reflect, and looking at the friends around him... All he can find is a dumbass too horny for his own good, and a weirdo who can't get over his strange fetish for lizard-humanoid creatures. Sure enough he enjoys hanging out with them, and he wouldn't ever think of giving it up, but something feels missing. A precious, valuable part of everyone's adolescence, and something he might just miss out on at this rate... What is that something? Why, love. So upon realizing this, he shouts out to the world-- "I WANT A GIRLFRIEND!" He'll need to give it his all, of course, because he knows that love does not come to those who just wait. Ending Guideline / Suggested Route Order There are four heroines. In order to get into the routes proper, you must select the heroine in the choice screen (when available) and then select to talk about topics that interest her. This walkthrough will, among other things, clarify which topics interest a heroine. By selecting the topics within the walkthrough you will always receive a decent amount of affection and you may choose any combination of topics that interests you. Walkthrough Talk topics will be in brackets [] with the relevant questions for any heroine underneath between quotes "". Sometimes these questions will lead to further questions, which will be indicated by -->. Some questions seem to provide more affection, so I'll mark those with (EXTRA). (Will be removed in the final version of the guide) Not all possible questions will be presented, but there are enough that you will be able to move to the next stage. NOTE: For some of the girls, when you have one at stage 4 and another at stage 3 a jealousy short scene will display. Hiiragi Yuzuyu Mochizuki Rina Minahara Himari ??? Bad Ends and Flags Attribution This walkthrough is based on info attained by me, playing the game. Synopsis from NekoNyanSoft's website. This Rina guide is based and tested by shadowice777, a Team Rina lover. Contributions by AaronCHM.

Holy fucking shit guys at long last, Bloom Into You or Yagate Kimi ni Naru is getting a anime adaption set for October! https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2018-04-26/nio-nakatani-bloom-into-you-yuri-manga-gets-tv-anime-in-october/.130800 I'm so damn excited for it Bloom Into You is one of my favorite Manga series

It's great that some semblance of peace has finally come to light in the Korean Peninsula, but I fear for the situation in the rest of the world. Far in the west, in the Americas, a belligerent, jingoistic United States has its salivating visage locked onto the Middle East; beyond the former Iron Curtain to the East, mother Russia looms over Eastern Europe like a crazed den mother. War is hell, and casualties are everywhere. Soldiers, their brothers-in-arms, their mothers at home; all suffer and lament and cry out in pain and writhe and die. In these post-apocalyptic scenarios, these casualties are always considered. The human element and our compassion for fellow man is contained. But war and the waste of resources in its name kills something far more important to all of us here than any human: 2D anime porn. No doubt Moon Jai-In and Kim Jong-Un have recognised this, and that their proximity to Japan endangers its production, and thus made peace. I only hope that the rest of the world can do the same before we have to live in a world where I cannot walk in on underaged 18 year old anime girls while they're in the dressing room or on the toilet.

Or rather they can now invade Japan together and take over the eroge industry as war reparations for WW 2. Would be interesting, Korean VNs are pretty cool. It is super-interesting though and I absolutely don't understand where North Korea is going with this. I didn't think I would live to see a formal peace agreement in my life as long as the NK dictatorship is in place. We'll see whether it's anything more than an empty gesture to solicit economic concessions from the South Korea and the West. I have little hope in that regard, but let's not be overly pessimistic...

Prioritise according to how I rank the girls. I do them in reverse order except for the first heroine I choose which is my 2nd favoured because if I start with my least favourite there's a chance I might give up before giving the game a good enough go. So for example if there are 5 heroines, my play order is 2, 5, 4, 3, 1. Yes it is a conscious decision every time, though sometimes a heroine surprises me or disappoints me depending on the quality of the route of course.

Raw translation requires at least a solid grasp of Japanese grammar (grammar being all-important), the ability to write comprehensible English prose, and the ability to transfer the meaning from the Japanese grammar system to the English one. I'm going to be straight with you... if you can't at the very least play the average charage without even once referring to a dictionary, you shouldn't be translating VNs. I don't mean skimming it either... I mean understanding every sentence without having to spend a minute thinking about it. There are plenty of people who play VNs in Japanese who don't have this level of comprehension, so don't think that just because you can play the VNs while using a parser and occasional mechanical translation aids that you can translate a VN. If you want to one day become a translator, your first task, above all other things, is to master the grammar. Just learning words doesn't mean anything when it comes to translation. In addition, even if you don't memorize all the kanji (something very few Japanese ever manage), you need to be able to grasp how kanji go together to form words on a gut level, not just an intellectual one. If you can't tell by the context and the kanji when a different meaning of the same phonetic phrase is being used, then you will repeatedly make the same mistakes.

Sakura Swim Club, well it is not really good, but it is the most known sports VN I could think of. Given that it is the best example I can think of, nope there are no good sports VN, at least in english.

I'll keep my fingers crossed for a Haikyuu!! of VNs

I doubt anyone would disagree with this.

Watching Oregairu, and the OST is so great i'm in love with this one

So I finished reading Doki Doki Literature Club!. I felt I needed to read it after all the attention it has been getting and to get a break from reading the massive novel Sakura no Uta and yeah it was kind of what I expected after having been spoiled about all the major plot points. I still enjoyed it though. Still definitely an impressive feat for an OELVN and something of an eye-opener for my view of the "genre" (my first VN was Katawa Shoujo but since then I have not read a single one). I guess the game is too short for me to really make a thorough review of my opinions so I will just stick to leaving this small notice.

Best girl always first, I don't want to torture myself. I tend to play other routes as well even if I don't like them the same. They have to be legally bad for me to drop them. For Little Busters, however, I followed a suggested play order. It wasn't half bad.

Then you've lost a lot, Sir. My condolences.

I wonder why the hell they even chose that titles when it is so bad that they have to lie about what it is.

Kind of odd that Jast seem to be totally missrepresenting the VN, at least how they present it in their tweet seems very different to everything I have heard about it.

If you're gonna mention me, at least @ me next time. Either way, since I'm bored and apparently love torturing myself as of late (Just dropped KonoSora for being abysmally boring), I'll probably end up trying this out, if only to see how bad it is.

For me I'll go with the best girl first and save the rest for later. Of course, most of the vn's I've played had three or more girls after the best girl that I liked so I still had the desire to play through all of their routes.

Usually I just follow recommended route order if it exists. If it doesn't, I just go for whatever girl I like more first. At the same time, I always try to leave at least one rote I expect to like to the middle because it's always quite annoying to read several shitty routes in a row.

Magical Marriage Lunatics!! which just released today has moster girls. Sakura Dungeon a lesbian moster girl dungeon crawler Neko-nin exHeart has catgirls For ones not released The Ditzy Demons Are In Love With Me which has already been mentioned. As well as Monmusu.

WORDS HARD

To be honest, I don't think it's possible to explain these things and say completely spoiler-free, so I won't. I'd say, just keep reading. It all makes sense after you understand the logic of Umineko story, but you're supposed to be confused at this point.

Must Love Words

Oh god, SHE KNOWS!

Alright so I just got through what I assume is the common route (to the point where an opening played) and I've got a few thoughts so far I need to get out. Spoilers for common route ahead. Anyway more of a rant than anything but I felt like putting my thoughts into writing for some reason. I'll continue reading because I do like it and want to see more but I lost quite a bit of steam in reading it today. Feel free to let me know your thoughts as well.

i mean, moenovel gets paid for their shit tls so how much worse can you do? so long as the final work is cohesive and remains true to the final translation, you should be good. dont be like grisaia and add shit you think would make the scene funnier or better. thats you projecting your own standards on others work.

an*