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VNs sometimes get criticized for their overuse of the ellipse (…). And I suppose I'll start my defense of the use of ellipses in VNs, by extending an olive branch. VNs do misuse the ellipse to an astounding degree, and I have an interesting little anecdote demonstrating this point. In college, me and some friends decided to spend a Friday night getting drunk and reading the worst VNs we could find. We stumbled upon Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme. There is a LOT wrong with this VN, but a glaringly consistent detail of bad writing we all noticed was the excessive use of ellipses. After we all collectively noticed and pointed out how often ellipses were being used, we decided to start counting every instance of an ellipse we spotted. Keep in mind, they had already been used plenty before we even started to count. Before we even reached a total playtime of 1 hour, we counted over 100 uses of ellipses, and gave up counting after that. I share this anecdote for two reasons. Firstly, as a petty example that Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme is horrible and I almost want to say it has no right to exist. And secondly that overall I am in agreement that ellipses do get misused often in VNs. So I am not entirely attacking this point of criticism, but I do think that many who do champion this specific criticism of VN writing miss one very important function that the ellipses achieves in VN writing, that it can't achieve in traditional print. The written word as it is presented in VNs is transient. With each click you typically receive one line at a time. And after a certain point all the lines disappear and you are greeted with fresh words from the top of the screen if NVL, or the top of the dialogue box if ADV. Furthermore often (though not always), sentences aren't displayed whole at once. But rather they get displayed in a sort of typewriter effect. This means that regardless of whether the narrative is in past tense or present tense, the occurrence of the text and the story to the reader will always be in the present. Character dialogue, internal monologues, narrative descriptions, it is all being presented to us in real time. A book on the other hand has everything written out and open to display. You can scan the whole page as well as the next page, and you have equal access to every page of the book at any given time. Want to skip to the ending? Well the medium can't stop you. This is not true of VNs. You can fast-forward, but you can't just skip to the end. The only way you can typically access specific parts of a VN is by creating a save point and therefore being able to load it up whenever you want. But you only have that option for everything you already read, you can't just pick and load sections you haven't experienced yet. Because for all intense and purposes, that's in the future. It hasn't happened yet. In other words, there is a sense of time in how the narrative of a VN gets expressed. Well in VNs, the ellipse can be used to demarcate time and expression. In this way, VNs can literally show the passage of time, without having to tell it. And I always thought the golden rule of writing was “show don't tell”, in this function the ellipse is being used optimally to show and not tell. Here is an example of how I would write a certain passage if I were writing it for a book/short-story, and then I will proceed to rewrite it for a VN. Novel/Short-story: “I don't know about that,” she briefly paused while biting her lip, “you sure it will be okay?” Visual Novel coded in Renpy: “I don't know about that...{w=1.5} you sure it will be okay?” The {w=1.5} is a wait command in Renpy that pauses the text for 1.5 seconds before resuming the rest of the line. Without having to tell the reader “she briefly paused”, we literally showed the pause by manipulating the speed in which the text gets displayed. The ellipse helps signal to the reader that the character is hesitating to express her thoughts, while the {w=1.5} command is running in the background. Now if the detail of “biting her lip” is also important to you. You would have to script things slightly differently, but you could make it that after the ellipse her sprite changes and bites her lip and you hold on that image for 1.5 seconds, before transitioning back to her previous expression and continue the text. So now you not only showed her hesitation and the gap in time it took for her to finish her thought, but you also showed her expression change. This is a way you can “show and not tell” with VNs that you could never achieve when writing for traditional print media.

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.

Hi everyone, I'm yumi from pantsudev and we're working on a translation of the 2019 adult visual novel True Love's Lily Dyes Red 真愛の百合は赤く染まる Manakashi no Yuri wa Akaku Somaru https://vndb.org/v26232 Team Team: pantsudev - Discord - Homepage - Twitter Lead: @yumi Translators: yumi, @LuckyDaikon Editors: yumi, @nihilloligasan, girlrituals, Beau Programmer: yumi Contributors: @Zakamutt, @Funnerific Ex-members: BlackBane91 (TL), @aho (ED) Background The work started sometime in the spring of 2020, mostly due to happenstance. I was bored and started hacking around this nifty new VN I'd found. I developed my own tools and launcher/loader and started translating. Once it began to look somewhat promising, I announced my lone work here so that others wouldn't accidentally end up duplicating my efforts. Current State Since the start of the project, I've been fortunate to meet some fantastic, nice and helpful friends who've certainly helped take the project to another level. Progress has been sometimes sporadic, sometimes steadfast, yet always inevitable. I'm a busy person, but never abandon my projects. Last year (2021) was a bit quiet, but this year (2022) we've been happy to recruit THREE new awesome editors, and really picked up the pace again. I created custom collaboration tools that allow the others to work on the project without my involvement at all, greatly improving efficiency. A web-based translation editor allows everyone to translate, edit and comment on all the content in the game comfortably, and a custom app allows everyone to synchronize the latest changes from the shared web editor directly into the game on their computer. 2023-02-15: Still alive Still here, still going. You'd better believe it. Join our Discord. However: It seems that we'll now be recruiting one (1) capable extra-/emergency translator! We're no longer recruiting for new members. Thank you for your interest! 2022-05-25: Situation update! We're no longer recruiting editors. Thanks for your interest, and a warm welcome to nihilloligasan, girlrituals & Beau who recently joined the team! As an interesting aside, with aho and BlackBane91 having retired from the project last year, we're now a team of 5 girls. I swear it wasn't intentional. But slightly interesting, huh? 2022-05-25: Situation update! The project is roughly 50% done now - and we've doubled the translated line count within the last 5 months alone! The new TL & edit tools make for a much faster workflow, and all the programming and UI work is also pretty much done. Therefore I feel confident in stating that we're now moving at a much faster pace than at any point before. It's not going to take two more years. What else? Well, our previous YouTube account got nuked; you can subscribe to the new one here. Our Twitter account is @pantsu_dev should you care to follow. However, we are primarily active on Discord. Alright, cool! Anything else? Feel free to let us know what you think! Join our Discord or reply to this thread, or PM me with any questions. Thanks for reading!

Well I guess I should have mentioned that I played it ! :3 Same thing with Sharin no Kuni! Played it! Really the reveal on the later route is so fucking amazing. Forgot to mention it :3

And this point you made really shows the distinction between directing and writing. A way that was done that really stuck for me was that when i was playing Da Capo 2, the love interest got embarassed and instead of telling this through text, the VN only showed her changing sprites in quick sucession.

Good question, and I would say the difference is in a subtle but significant effect. A comma is a pause represented by a single punctuation point. And it represents a complete, temporary pause. An ellipse on the other hand, at least to me, illicits a feeling of hesitation or tapering off. This is because instead of stopping suddenly, an elipse extends itself, its composed of multiple periods. For instance a comma is like turning a switch off, then on again. And an ellipse is like stopping a car, and then starting it again. It doesn't stop instantly but takes a couple of seconds to fight the momentum. And then you have to start it up again. Therefore there is something certain and almost forceful about a comma, but indecisive or vague about an ellipse. So if you want to convey an ambiguous pause, I feel like an ellipse is better suited. I suppose a specific example would be like this. If I wrote "hmm...", at least in my head I would continue pronouncing the lingering "mm" sound. To the point that if I wanted to technically convey how I pronounce "hmm..." without the ellipse, I would have to spell it it as "hmmmmmm". The ellipse is like hitting the break button, I don't pause immediately. But if I read "hmm," I literally stop my pronunciation after the second "m". Like a binary system of on and off, once I see that comma I fully stop, pause, and then continue. This is how I distinguish the two, but I could just be weird lol

From my observation, Gatcha games are nothing but a thinly veiled form of gambling. In that sense, they are exploitative by nature. Particularly of people who are prone to gambling addiction. But for me the real crime is that the content that comes from Gatcha games tends to be pretty low.

I'm reading No game no life,torture princess,strike the blood and when it arrives the youjo senki light novel.

No lmao. This is fuwanovels, not reddit that people'll be toxic towards you for no reason. Enjoy your stay here.

Yamaguchi Mioko's album Tsukihime from 1983 reminds me a lot of Clannad's soundtrack when it comes to arrangements and overall atmosphere. For me it totally hits the sweet spot of being melancholic and relaxing at the same time:

Recently Akina Nakamori comes up often on the radio I'm listening to Today I recorded instrumental cover of her song "Jukkai (1984)"

Yesterday, as I went to sleep, I listened to Maiko Fujita. There's something in her songs that tugs on my heartstrings even though on the surface they're pretty typical Jpop ballads. Don't know what it is exactly. (Or perhaps I'm just captivated by her beauty? But then, I was only listening, not looking ) The first song on the disc was 藤田麻衣子君が呼ぶのなら, which is also featured in this live clip: Now I think I have to get some of her live discs as well

Indeed It sounds very good with this natural-sounding singing. What was with the album version - did they overuse the vocal processing? (extreme tuning etc?) BTW recently I tried to do kind-of "live" cover of one of abovementioned Yoko Matsuura's songs. Here's the result - officially approved by the author herself, despite my terrible singing Also, this time I also put English translation of lyrics in the subtitles.

I AM A GENIUS. BOW BEFORE ME, PEASANTS. This hypothetical badge will make a fine addition to my already amazing profile.

Alriiiiiiiight, now comes the moment no one asked for: the disappointing answers and the shocking results! 1) A Not my fault the teachers never picked a book I actually wanted to read so classic lit usually put me to sleep. My school's cafeteria was also so-so most of the time so lunch break didn't deserve top spot by any means either. 2) B I wanted to argue with Poltroon's motive but... eeerrr... Last time I tried to argue with a friend I don't like DMC all that much they pointed how I was buying my 2nd copy of DMC4 in that same instant so welp, I give up trying to hide it. 3) A I FEEL LIKE A CHAMPION OF SELF-CONTROL WOOOO! I hope the streak doesn't break any time soon. And yes, there are BL gachas but either their translations or gameplay sucks too much for me to care about grinding them so I usually stick to otome ones. 4) B At least that was the original answer, but turns out I beat one more yesterday after posting. Go me, but oops. I'm sorry for breaking my promise that all questions had one right answer, so everyone gets a point for this one as an apology. Bonus 0.5 for Lesiak for getting it right the first time, bonus 0.25 for Zaka for having faith in my capacity of beating 11 bosses and bonus 0.1 for Kiri because he picked the 11 option too one way or the other I guess. 5) A I'm real sorry, but my shit sense of humor kinda prevents me of not choosing Mogeko Castle. I do love To The Moon, but default assets, the align puzzles serves no real purpose, yadda yadda technical bullshit excuses yadda yadda 6) C The other options are glorious, but the last one comes with an extra Archer and oh my god, imagine being served by Archer and eating with him, yadda yadda fangirlism yadda yadda 7) A I prefer 9S as a character, but voice prize goes to Eve. This is him btw (on the right): And if anyone's wondering what the コノママジャダメ is: So after this breakdown, the final score ends up as: 1st - Fiddle (4 pts) 2nd - Zaka (3.25 pts) 3rd - Poltroon (3 pts) 4th - Kiri (2.1 pts) 5th - Lesiak (1.5 pts) So our crowned champion whose badge is coming soon-tm-maybe-never is: FIDDLE!!! Moral of the story: Sheeps are powerful and now I'm scared