tahu157

Finished Heart of the Swarm as well. http://i.imgur.com/2eC1iFQ.jpg

Pssh, brutal difficulty? I could never get past normal. For the last Prophecy mission I even had to drop down to casual although that was a bit weird because normal was too hard but casual was too easy.

I tried my hand at making a flow chart for the Wings of Liberty campaign based on the wonderful Mirror Moon flowchart guide for F/SN. It's uh, way too big. But it's a good start. Link for best viewing: http://i.imgur.com/QCdLUNa.jpg

Gotta say, this looked a lot cooler and neater in my head than it does on-screen.

I haven't read all of the replies, so I apologize if I'm repeating anything anyone has said already. Reading for entertainment in general doesn't happen as much as watching TV shows or movies or playing non-VN video games unless a book gets a movie. So I doubt many people would turn to primarily text-based games as an alternative to their fast-paced shooters and whatnot. This is sort of the same point as the last one I guess, but VNs are a slow burn where most games released today you could probably beat in a day if you wanted to. I think a lot of people have gotten to a point where they want and expect that speed and quick game turnover, and have trouble slowing down to VN speed for more than a few sessions. I know I was ready for something different towards the end of F/SN's Heaven's Feel route, and again towards the end of Hollow Ataraxia. I'm pretty happy with the size of the English-speaking VN community though. It's not too big, but it's not microscopic either.

I stumbled upon the now defunct CraneAnime.com and saw they had uploaded Mashiro Iro Symphony onto their forum, erojiji.net. For some reason I was enamored with the idea of the game (and still am), so I downloaded them game from there, but of course, it had no translation patch. So I went looking for one and I got the Fuwanovel project page for Mashiro Iro. Either that or I was looking for information about Fate/Stay Night, but I'm pretty sure it was the quest for a Mashiro Iro translation.

+1 for Mashiro Iro Symphony Mahoyo seems to be stuck in editing hell too.

Sometimes I wish people would translate things without telling anybody, and then suddenly one day go "hey, I've been working on this for the last 3 years and now it's done!" That way if the project dies, no one is let down.

Got another one of those sheets for the Commie Subs Mahoyo progress? The Fuwa page has said 100% TL for as long as I've known about the site, but the Commie Subs progess page has similarly said 67.99% for as long as I've been checking up on it.

That was basically what I was thinking the whole time. When I asked if it was illegal, I guess I was really asking whether or not a translation company would translate the scripts with the knowledge that I don't own them.

I wasn't talking about finding a fan-translation group and paying them, but rather a professional translation service whose whole job is to translate. They would definitely be better about staying on the job because it /is/ their job. EDIT: This was meant to quote Getsuya's reply. Not sure why it didn't work.

So, three reasons really that it's not a good idea. - It's a grey area legally, and paying someone is traceable - It'd be cheating and buying my way into a field of people who are not only hard working, but sacrificing their time and energy for no gain other than to share what they enjoy. That'd be a real dick move. - It's not plausible financially to do it anyway. I went around and got a few quotes from various translation companies. The first one was only going to be $5 per script, give or take for a few. So $5 times 26 scripts, that's $130. A bit steep but probably worthwhile. As it turns out that was only paying for a machine translation, which was free for the first 500 words anyway, so if I wanted that I could just put in 500 words at a time. However, the actual human translations cost about $0.16 per word, and each script on average has around 10K words. So, $1600 per script times 26 scripts and you're looking at $41,000 to translate a long VN. No wonder Sekai Project was asking for so much for all three Grisaia games.

Yeeeeaaaaaah, I guess I knew all along it was a bad idea. And on top of that the entire idea is disrespectful to actual translators. So, double whammy. Thanks for the feedback though.

Yeah, that's what I'd figured. Twas' worth a shot though. Back to the studying then.

So, there's always that somewhat obscure VN that you've had your eye on for as long as you've known about it, but no one else knows it exists, and there is no interest in translating it anywhere. You don't speak Japanese, and though you're studying it, you're not getting very far, so you can't read it or translate it yourself either. One solution could be finding a professional translation service that will translate the scripts for you for a price. It's cheating I know, but has anyone ever heard of any "translation" groups or individuals doing this, or does anyone know if it's even legal? You certainly don't own the rights to the scripts and text, but you won't be causing any financial harm to the company that made the game either if you don't ship the patch with an illegal copy of the game. Thoughts?