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Showing content with the highest reputation on 10/01/19 in all areas

  1. Seems like a bunch of people liked my previous video so here's the next one!
    3 points
  2. Clephas

    Kimagure Temptation

    Kazuki Fumi and Silky's Plus Wasabi's newest game has arrived. This is the third game in the series that began with Nanairo Reincarnation. I will say this outright from the beginning... this game isn't as good as either Akeiro or Nanairo. It does have its high points, but it needs to be noted that this is not on the same level as the previous two games. This game uses the Emote system heavily, with the sole heroine (Annelise) being extremely 'animated' (think constantly swaying boobs) to a degree I haven't even seen in other games that utilize this system. Similar to the other games in the series, this game has excellent artwork that differs from most other Japanese VNs. The music in this game isn't as good as Akeiro's or Nanairo Reincarnation's was. To be blunt, in both the previous games, the music played a strong role in making the game what it was, and the music direction (when to use what BGM) was on the highest levels I've seen in the VN industry. Unfortunately, this game falls far short of either of those two in this area, with a much weaker set of BGMs. The game focuses around the protagonist's efforts to solve the mystery behind the mass suicide of the denizens of an apartment in the same town Nanairo Reincarnation was based in. Based on what is said in-game, the canon path that reaches to this game is Kotori's path in Nanairo and Youko's path (the Tsukihime-style normal ending) in Akeiro. Also, based on certain 'events', it is apparent that around two decades have passed since the events in Nanairo, for reasons that will become rather obvious early in the game (in other words, play Nanairo and Akeiro first if you don't want to be spoiled). To be blunt, this game has a much tighter focus on the mystery element than either of the previous games, with less immediate sentimentality and more confrontation with the dead people 'living' in the apartments. In addition, Anne's constant advances help it retain the goofiness that was present in both the previous games. This game has multiple endings, but I chose to only play the true one, as I figured (and I was right) that it would have the best possible result for everyone involved. Of course, when everyone besides the protagonist is dead or inhuman, that can be somewhat bittersweet. If you were to ask me whether it was worth crying over what happened in this game, I would say yes... in particular, I cried for Kanon and Akira (two of the victims), as their lives and final deaths were the most tragic and their natures (surprising in the case of Akira) were the least inimical to others. The true ending is definitely a tear-jerker...though it doesn't pull the tears out of me to the degree that either of the previous games did. Part of this is that both Akeiro and Nanairo are long games with extensive, detailed, and deep character development and superb presentation. The other part is that, while I predicted the truth behind what happened about two-thirds of the way through, I found that the mystery 'investigation' system crippled the game's ability to draw me in and keep me in. To be blunt, if a game only has a single heroine, I only want minimal choices to be present, and I certainly don't want to have to deal with this kind of gameplay. The gameplay is too perfunctory to be enjoyable, and it is too intrusive and intrinsic to the game as a whole for the reader to be able to stay fully engrossed in the experience. In conclusion, this is a game where the concept was good and the staff was first class, but where the attempts to be clever (such as with the gameplay system) fell flat. It is still a reasonably high-level game, but, considering what Kazuki Fumi has managed to do in the past with this universe, I can't help but feel it could have been handled better.
    1 point
  3. Silvz

    new fuwapocalypse in 2 hours

    time to say goodbye to your loved ones it was great to spend time with you
    1 point
  4. Hot on the heels after fixing payment issues, been a long wait for this lol
    1 point
  5. I have the JAST release of the novel. English and Japanese are both available options on mine. I'm not sure why it's not letting me attach my screenshots, but if you're interested in seeing basically the same images as posted above, here are the links: English Selected: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y3pMvyEsXQ5uYO-Lk1dV1Rpa6-C86ez-/view?usp=sharing Japanese Selected: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D9YqoEe99o7duIrgEOXX_NO7RbuyZoBb/view?usp=sharing
    1 point
  6. I'm currently playing Sengoku Rance and having blast, its a kind of Eroge/Visual SRPG that I didn't expect to play but ended up loving it all the way! The gameplay is highly addictive although somehow hard and needs to be played with a walkthrough or guide of sorts to have any sense of whatever is it your doing in the game. The storyline is pretty hilarious as well! the only let down is the lack of voice acting in the game but its no big deal. its has a ton of reply value and it would take a while before I could really finish the game and all its routes! Hope to see all the Rance games makes it way on Mangagamer!
    1 point
  7. Yeah, this. Another argument against episodic releases
    1 point
  8. there will be no test based on whether fuwa is up or down at the end of the course, you will either pass or fail
    1 point
  9. That video isn't that old right? Right? RIGHT?!?!?
    1 point
  10. Clephas

    new fuwapocalypse in 2 hours

    *Clephas watches happily as his roommates Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep emerge into the Fuwaverse, preparing for the fun*
    1 point
  11. isn't Angel Beats tecnically dead? They've literally release only one part of the game and moved on to the next franchise, never going back to nor talking about AB!
    1 point
  12. OdaNova

    What are you playing?

    I'm reading The House in Fata Morgana and I think it's been excellent so far. The music has been superb as well. I'm at, chapter five, where we're starting to get some answers. I'm not doing a very good job predicting how the plot is going though... I've come close at times but the plot twists always seem to one-up my guesses. Anyway, it's great, I can't put it down at the moment.
    1 point
  13. who is the woman who would want a geek who stays every day of the week in front of the computer fiddling with japanese porn games? Frankly, I'm curious how I would be with a girlfriend, I personally recognize myself as a short tempered person, I don't have much patience and get angry very easily, I don't think in me as the best of people to have a relationship. On the other hand when I like something I have a good patience, no... Maybe weird persistence, for example, I've had games that only got a translation tool working after a year of trying (of course, not every day), me too I completed translation projects that took more than four years, I think this is due to the fact that I like visual novels, so I wonder if if I like a girl it would look like this too ... Well, whatever, no need to comment more, i don't want make this a offtopic.
    1 point
  14. There is a secret language spoken in the darkest corners of the visual novel world, a cant so ancient and intricate that none know its origins. To be initiated in its ways, one must drink from the Dread Chalice and be reborn in fire. Only then will the caul be drawn from your eyes. You shall know onomatopoeia. And you shall know fear. Sploosh 101: What is onomatopoeia? Before we jump in with both feet — *splash!* — let’s do a quick primer on terminology. An onomatopoeia is a word that imitates, resembles, or suggests the source of the sound it describes — i.e, it sounds like what it is. Like clink, yip, kaboom, swish, meow, oink. (That’s the verbatim transcript of my bachelor party, in case anyone’s wondering.) This is different from a word that describes a sound or action, but doesn’t actually imitate it — e.g., sneeze vs. achoo, punch vs. kapow, close vs. slam. The latter are onomatopoeia; the former, I call ononotopoeia. For the sake of brevity, let’s refer to these O and not-O. The Japanese language is rich in O. There’s a sound effect for everything. There’s probably a sound effect for there being a sound effect for everything. (If there isn’t, I’d like to propose one now: darubu.) There are even sound effects for things that don’t actually make sound — e.g., “jii” for staring. While it’s woven into the fabric of the modern Japanese language, O is especially prevalent in manga and, to a somewhat lesser extent, anime. Since visual novels draw heavily from these two worlds, they too feature lots and lots of these words. English is relatively impoverished in O by comparison, and therein lies the challenge for VN translators and editors. Do you leave these essentially untranslatable sound effects as they are? Or do you try to translate them, losing some of their immediacy and, for lack of a better word, oomph? Across the great divide The VN community seems to be fairly split on that question. In one camp, we have the purists. By and large, these are readers who are already comfortable with Japanese O through manga and anime. They consider it part and parcel of the VN experience. Learning and appreciating such terms is simply part of becoming an accomplished reader. It’d be like going to a fine dining restaurant and, instead of the chef presenting you with “the amuse-bouche,” he just came out and said, “Here’s this small appetizer thingy I made. Hope you like it.” The vocabulary is part of the experience. In the other camp, we have the reformists. To them, leaving O untouched isn’t translation; it’s mere transliteration. It denies meaningful content to the uninitiated English reader — e.g., if you don’t know "munyu" means to grope someone, you’ll be clueless when the best girl hauls off and smacks the protagonist in the very next line. To extend the fine dining metaphor, it’d be like going to the same restaurant, being handed a menu that was all in French, and having the waitstaff snootily refuse to tell you what anything meant. Hope you like thymus glands, mon ami, because that’s what you just ordered. When it came to KoiRizo, I was a reformist editor on a purist project. I joined the team after the translation had been completed and a lot of the big up-front decisions had already been made: Will this be a literal translation or liberal? (Literal.) Will we keep all the honorifics? (Yes.) Will we keep all the onomatopoeia? (Yes.) MDZ, the KoiRizo project lead, was very up-front about all this. And that was fine. The job of a VN editor is to facilitate and execute on the project lead’s vision. It’s great if you’re involved early enough to shape that vision, but it’s ultimately his/her show, not yours. (If you’re not okay with that, go start your own TL project.) So with that in mind, I did the best purist editing job I could. But what if I had carte blanche in how I approached O? What would I do differently? As luck would have it, I’ve given that some thought. Onomatopoeia in standard scripts For the majority of scripts, it helps to separate O-words into two groups: content-light ad content-heavy. The content-light group tends to consist of interjections, exclamations, grunts, groans, laughs, etc. These are mostly self-explanatory terms, communicating very little other than the fact that they’re a familiar sound. Some examples include: HoEAHehUuuAt most, I’ll clean these up to make them friendlier to Western eyes — “A! A sea cucumber!” becomes “Ah! A sea cucumber!” (In this case, it’d be too easy to mistake the “A” sound for a stammering repetition of the indefinite article “a.”) Otherwise, I’m happy to leave them be. On the other side, we have the content-heavy O-words. These are either (1) terms that have a very specific meaning you’d never be able to guess at without prior knowledge, or (2) common sounds that are rendered much differently in English than Japanese. These are the words that, if you ignore them, will result in meaningful content being lost in translation. Some examples include: Kakkun = the “sound” of hitting someone in the back of the knees. Based on a kids’ game.Su = the sound of something suddenly appearing (among other meanings)Gusu = the sound of a whimpering sobHakushon = the sound of sneezingChikutaku = the sound a clock makesOur first line of attack is to see if there’s any suitable English onomatopoeia we can swap in. It’s rare that it works out so neatly, but it does happen. So "hakushon" becomes “achoo,” "chikutaku" becomes “tick tock,” etc. If this doesn’t work, we fall back on another common approach: turning not-O English words into O by enclosing them in asterisks. So: “Gusu. Why won’t you return any of my calls?" becomes: *whimper* “Why won’t you return any of my calls?” As your final line of defense, you might consider abandoning O altogether, instead relying on some explanatory text to flesh out the intended meaning. So: Su. “Where do you think you’re going, jerk?” becomes: She appeared out of nowhere. “Where do you think you’re going, jerk?” I’d recommend turning to this as a last resort, however, since you can see a certain staccato elegance gets lost in translation. As for where you can find out what all these untranslated O-words mean, there are all sorts of online resources to be had out there. I tend to use the Japanese > English SFX dictionary over at The JADED Network, but I’m sure there are plenty of others just as good. Onomatopoeia in H-scenes Sex scenes are something of a special case. You’ll find there are large blocks of text that are nothing but wall-to-wall O. (I see what you did there, you sly dog you ...) Here are some sample lines from KoiRizo: Sango: “Nafufu. Fumu, Juru, Zuzuzu." Sango: "Rero, Chu, Chuu ..." Sango: "Hamu, Chuu, Chuu ... Rero, Juupu, Zuzu." Sango: "Jupo, Gupo, Zu." Sango: "Juzuzuzuzu." Sango: "Fumu? Fua ..." During editing, I liked to call these sections “word salad.” They’re an unholy mishmash of content-heavy O, content-light O, and nonsensical fuck-grunts. It’s a tangled mess of syllables that can make even the bravest editor or translator turn tail and run. In my earlier post on editing H-scenes, one of the commenters — smile for the camera, Ittaku! — suggested it might just be better to replace these sections with ellipses and let the VO do all the heavy lifting. It’s a tempting thought. But despite all appearances, there’s content to be had there — content the Japanese reader would have understood, and which the English reader will miss out on ... unless you take action. Let’s see what happens if we (somewhat liberally) run it through the techniques we’ve discussed so far. Sango: "Ummph. Umm." *slurp* *sluuurp* Sango: “Mmm.” *suuuck* Sango: *nibble* *suck* “Mmmm ...” *bob* *sluuurp* Sango: *sucksuck* *slurp* Sango: *slurpslurpslurpsluuurp* Sango: "Mmmph? Ahhh ..." Okay, it ain’t poetry, but at least we’ve transformed our tossed salad it into something with actual meaning. Even without having read the rest of the scene, you can guess that Sango is vigorously polishing the protagonist’s knob. Or is trapped in a vat of ramen and eating her way to freedom. It can be improved upon, of course; all those asterisks start getting visually distracting, so if the VN engine supports it, italics might be a better choice here. But I’d argue it’s much better than what we started with. Feeling more confident? Good. Go forth and sploosh.
    1 point
  15. They don't. Each individual VN is considered on its own merits. So even if the fan disc features a 5-hour orgy with every single man, woman, animal, and teapot in the cast, the original VN can still pass the test.
    1 point
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