Leaderboard

Just finished White ~Setsunasa no Kakera~ recently. This was NekoNeko Soft's debut game and, although I did enjoy it overall, most of the routes were definitely a bit underwhelming/unpolished. The biggest problem being that the actual routes are way too short (and some of the characters get introduced pretty late in the common route) That being said, it was a pretty solid effort considering it was their first original/commercial game + 2 of the routes (Hadzuki and Chinami) were actually REALLY good imo. It's very clear the developers were inspired by early Key games (or rather early games by the Key staff, since One was published by Tactics game), particularly One ~Kagayaku Kisetsu he~ and, although not all routes accomplish this, White is clearly meant to be a Nakige in that vein. (+ there's some pretty clear One references sprinkled throughout) "And, that scene where the [main character] just disappears while blind senpai is holding ice cream" Anyways, some brief thoughts on each route. Izumi Mikana Madoka Hadzuki Chinami The other "fun" thing about this game was getting it to work right. Installing it and getting it to run + using DXWnd's Winmm.dll to play the music without the disc wasn't a big deal but... for whatever reason it loading the character sprites REALLY slow, so there was like a 3 second delay every time an expression changed. Did a little research and found out this was a common issue with older nScripter games that use CD-DA audio, so I ended up grabbing a newer version of the nscr.exe and learned how to manually modify/create a new Dat file to go with it so... now I know how to do that if I ever play another nScripter game that uses CD-DA audio. But anyways yeah, good game overall. I'm looking to play more of NekoNeko Soft's library (and by extension Team Nana's games) eventually. Already bought their second title GinIro, which is apparently a pretty legendary Utsuge, so I'll probably get to that some time this year.

If we're at it, I strongly recommend Amber Quartz (it was made by NekoNeko Soft's offspring - Cotton Soft).

So the Dessert de Otomate 2023 was yesterday and here are the announcements. I borrowed the summaries from this Gematsu article. Especially for Hakuoki they probably contain more info than I could give. Radiant Tale: Fanfare fandisc announced Radiant Tale's description: Summary: A fan disc of the May 2022-released Radiant Tale. Delivering smiling faces to everyone once more. Radiant Tale was announced to be relased in English as well this year in Summer. If it sells well we could get this fandisc too in the future. Hakuoki Shinkai: Manyou no Shou fandisc and Hakuoki: Sweet School Life port for Switch announced Hakuoki Shinkai: Summary for the fandisc announcement: A fan disc containing a number of spin-off stories and illustrations not included in the main story, such as a recollection of the events of Hakuoki: Zuisouroku. Hakuoki SSL: Summary: A Switch port of the 2014-released Hakuoki: Sweet School Life. The setting shifts from the Bakumatsu period to a modern era school, where you can enjoy a cheerful and slightly heartrending love story. Hakuoku SSL also got a fantranslation patch for the PS Vita in 2021. Collar x Malice: deep cover 2-part movie information: The two movies will open on May 26 and June 23, respectively this year. The movies will cover an original story and introduced a new character called Mitsuru Sowa (CV: Katsuyuki Konishi ) that will appear: They also announced that the protagonist Ichika Hoshino will be voiced by Kaede Hondo. Collar x Malice: I hope the original story will be interesting enough. I just hope they animate it properly, that Ichika is cute and that my favorite Shiraishi get's screentime. Cupid Parasite: Sweet & Spicy Darling fandisc updates: Cupid Parasite: Summary: A fan disc of the goddess / marriage hunting love comedy game Cupid Parasite. The story follows the good ending of the previous game. In addition to the hidden romanceable character Peter Flage (voiced by Nobuhiko Okamoto), Melenis Levin (voiced by Yuuto Uemura) the Fate Parasite appears as a newly romanceable character. Japanese band The Biscats will once again perform the opening and ending theme songs. Melenis Levin (new love interest): I sure wonder what kind of a mess Melenis will end up being? "Fate" doesn't tell me too much. What made him a Parasite? OP video and more revealed to Alice in the Country of Spades: Wonderful Black World: Summary: A sequel to the September 2021-released Alice in the Country of Spades: Wonderful White World. The opening movie and shop-specific bonuses have been newly revealed. Alice in the Country of Spades The good old Heart no Kuni no Alice series! The Anniversary edition of the first game in the series has an English fanpatch for PC. A very unconventional series which most might know from all the manga adaptions this series spawned which got localised around the world (I have quite a few of them in German). Cast announced for 9 R.I.P. 9 R.I.P. Summary: A slightly strange omnibus romance visual novel that unfolds in various “other worlds.” Announced cast: Kureha CV: Toshiki Masuda Hibiki CV: Toki Shunichi Kouyou CV: Suzuki Ryota Sena: Kakihara Tetsuya Minami CV: Okamoto Nobuhiko Seiya CV: Tachibana Shinnosuke Yukimaro CV: KENN Koharu CV: Azakami Yohei Very interested in this one. I remember it having to do with urban legends and I like my otome games a bit spooky. I don't know about the large number of love interests tho. Quality > Quantity for me. My9Swallows TOPSTARS LEAGUE: My9Swallows TOPSTARS LEAGUE: Summary: A new professional baseball league has been organized, and a team of newcomers who passed the Yakult team auditions is formed with the goal of making it the league championship. This is the story of the romance between the protagonist put in charge of the team, and the players on the team. The story summary, first characters, and stage portraits have been newly revealed. Well. This is quite something. Tfw you have to be a baseball star aiming to win the league championship AND be an idol. I do not know how that works but alright. Could be funny to watch honestly. There is also something about them recruiting for the newest Altergear (non-romance branch) title. I would be surprised tho if any of the titles from this branch end up as a success. I haven't heard anything good about the title that was already released. Doing romance-less joseimuke visual novels only works with good characters and story. I guess we'll see...

I can't wait for the baseball/idol one. It sounds too interesting to pass on it! AND A TWO PART MOVIE FOR COLLAR X MALICE? man, this year has just begun, it's already too good. Like I said i can't waiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. (fingers crossed the animation is good)

I'm back for another update, this time to announce that all the in-game images (and at least a portion of the UI) have now been completed. The vast majority of the images were pretty simple in terms of typesetting and editing, although there were a certain amount (around 25-30 or so) that required extensive editing, but I'm very pleased with the end result. Even the more challenging ones were fun to go through, if not a bit tedious at times, but there was nothing too difficult, at least. On the video side of things, all the lyrics for the 7 songs have now been translated (a shout out goes to Shinyyyjoke#1112 from the Moekko Company discord for providing the lyrics for 2 of the songs that I couldn't find anywhere online), and that was the last thing I had left to do before moving on to the text editing phase. Speaking of which, that's what I'll be doing now for a while. There was a certain amount of self-editing I was conducting on my translation as I went through the script just as a general side-effect of the translation process itself, but there still requires a fair amount of editing the script now that the entire thing is translated. I'm not really sure how long this process is going to take, but I'm not going to rush it by any means. Preliminarily, it might take me anywhere from 2 to 3 months, but I really don't know. As I've commented on previously, this game is wordier than the previous project, Imaimo, not only in terms of its sheer length, but the lines themselves and the overall writing style lends itself to be more verbose than what I encountered in general when I had worked on Imaimo last year. As such, I can already anticipate the editing phase for this game to take longer, but how much longer exactly I probably won't know until I'm around 50% through the script. So thank you for your support, and your patience in this long process. I want to put out the best quality patch I can, and 90% of that has to do with the script, so that's why the editing and QC phases are so important to ensuring the quality of the overall product and experience when playing the game. So until the next update. PS: The game is once again 50% off on DMM until March 7. Now would be a great time to buy the game in anticipation of the patch, if you are able to do so.