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Having read Himawari and Himawari Aqua After, I will say that it is a continuation from Aqua's end in Himawari. It deals with the aftermath of Aqua's route as well as various issues their current relationship has. It's easily the best FD I've ever read as it doesn't feel like a complete waste of time (aka just there to add more routes and milk the series). However, it most likely will never be translated as Himawari didn't do well in sales. Unless somebody decides to most likely poorly fan translate it, I wouldn't hold much hope.

? The definition of 'good enough' is that it is... good enough. So while I appreciate time and effort spent going above and beyond to do excellent work, 'good enough' is perfectly acceptable. That's what it means. Where it gets weird is that 'good enough' changes over time. Standards change. Work that was 'good enough' for video game translations in the late 90's / early 2000's will generally not pass today's minimum standards. Mostly, it doesn't qualify as 'good enough' anymore. Companies have raised the bar over time to bring the average up enough that people demand better. And that is the real threat here: The VN scene still does bad enough business that SakuraGame's business model - 'burn the forest down and profit off the ashes' - probably provides a comparable profit to doing things right. Some number of companies will look at the foreign 'market', see it an order of magnitude smaller than the Japanese market (even though Japan has shrunk so much since the heyday 10 years ago or so), and not care enough to pay attention and just sign with SakuraGame because they offered more money or it's easier. Just like normal video games moved the bar up, but there's NISA and Tecmo Koei trying to drag it back down - the real threat is lowering the bar, so 'good enough' starts including bad work.

Yeah, but not always. The fact that such VNs as Muv Luv Alternative, Umineko and Fata Morgana are so highly rated on VNDB suggests that many VN readers are looking for something more than escapism in them. Or that they are masochists or something. To OP: here is the full fersion of the review quoted by Seraphim88 if you are interested.

I don't know any details about the story, since I haven't read it myself due to the language barrier, but it's supposed to be a direct sequel to Aqua's route from the original game. Here's how a review I found sums it up (without any specific spoilers): I would very much like to read it for myself to find out what actually happens, but I sincerely doubt it'll ever be translated (unless it's by a fan) and I don't know if learning Japanese is a wall I'll ever be able to climb.

It's pretty telling of how desperate the situation in the Western VN scene is when most of us are fine with "good enough".

…And you probably know about it already if you know me, but anyway, my own #brand is Memeshii Translations apparently. Since you’re here, have some information on the experience of working with the paltry tools available: *The linecount had to be the exact same or the insertion tool would crash with an unhandled exception. *Some lines had a linebreak in the original; these were joined together engine wise so they had to be line broken no matter what. Usually this wasn’t a problem, but some lines ended up short in english but still needed a linebreak so they look wonky, and the second line in-game had two lines that wanted to be long and couldn’t be split so it was kind of hell to fit. *Weeb quotes 「」 had to be used or the engine wouldn’t read it as a spoken line. *One line was turned from speech to narration for flow reasons (it was like suu haa or some shit) by removing the speechtag annotation in front. *There was no manual linebreak code I could use (mandated ones were just CRLF linebreak, and could only been used for that specific line). However, the engine does automatically line-break on a character level, and seems to be more or less monospace. So I ended up doing some of the line-breaking in this truly kami manner, checking it manually ingame over like 5 iterations: す＠ is Sumire; あ＠ is Azami *The extracted yscfg.ybn file had the window title at the end in plaintext. But the title seemed to be read in 2 char blocks or something which meant the title ended up as either “The world ends tomorrowA” or “The world ends tomorrowb” after insertion. I fixed this by adding a space after the name. *The nametags were in a different script than the scenario but they were just text strings, so I could just edit them *Same for the exit message when pressing the cross at the top right *Since we used the “spoken line” format I had to convert this to the japanese quotation brackets. Kotlin code for you to meme at: oh, java strings are immutable, fuck… fiiine I’ll your it your goddamn way This is probably half the reason why any in-line quotes ingame are single quotes; I actually edited a pair of doubles because I couldn’t be arsed to clean up the script after the fixer code worked on it… or something. Okay since you read this far some stats; I used Mediafire for the release because it gives download counts. It seems to update daily or something. First update was 63 downloads. Second was 89. I had 66 pageviews the blog release post on feb 14 and have 178 so far for feb 15. 89/244 gives us a ~36% download rate per view, not too bad. The About page seems to have gotten like, 8 views. The dedicated asuowa tl page has 7. So uhh I guess I have to tl more shinimasu now. fuck View the full article

I played about 15 VNs this year and finished 9, which is actually quite a lot for me. At the same time, none of the VNs I finished this year are that long. Overall, this year I regained some of my original interest for VNs, which I was slowly losing ever since I finished MLA in 2015. Though they probably deserve to be somewhere in this list, I'm omitting Dies Irae and Seabed since I didn't get that far into these VNs, and there's a good chance that my impression will change later on. 1. Fata Morgana - Requiem for Innocence. Even being a fandisk, this one clearly became my number one, without any real competition. It's not only a nice addition to the original story, but also a very good story in itself that will work perfectly well on its own. 2. Aselia the Eternal. I'm reading this right now, and I've only finished one route so far, but this game is pretty linear, so I think the other parts of the game will be the same. Well, I didn't really expect much from the game when I just started it, but overall this was a nice surprise. Well, I know that this game isn't perfect. There are a lot of very noticeable plot holes, and they definitely could structure the story a lot better. At the same time, the combination of interesting characters, nice ideas, and engaging gameplay makes the experience worth it. 2.5. I guess, Seabed should be here. 3. Chuusotsu. A cute short story that tries to touch some really important themes about an individual's place in society. 4. The Labirinth of Grisaia. The after stories are mostly forgettable, but Yuuji's backstory makes a pretty nice read. 5. Cinderella Phenomenon. Not the best story I've ever read, but still pretty nice. As for the biggest disappointments this year, this title will go to Phenomeno and Grisaia no Rakuen.