Fred the Barber

Oh, I almost forgot. I have a present for you: https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2018/01/03/hoshizora-no-memoria-3/

Whoa. Welcome back!

I actually liked the Berseria gameplay. Best Tales combat system since Graces F, IMO, and maybe even better than Graces F. Once you get the swing of it, combat is fast and rewards both skill and sound tactics, and all of that is important to me. There are rarely some boss enemies that make the combat system very unforgiving and less rewarding, and those can make a fight extremely frustrating, though. All that said, you probably just have different preferences, and that's fine; you can't all have excellent taste like me. I'm currently playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which is by turns fun and frustrating. I haven't gotten that far in (I'm in Chapter 3, I think?). The gacha is pretty infuriating; I've only rolled one rare blade so far, and it was for Nia, so my main character only has two slots and one of them is a lousy three-star generic, ugh. The combat is growing on me as more options open up. The only thing I'm not liking so far is that there seem to be major balance problems. Land in a new zone: prepare to be playing ludicrously safely for the first hour or two until you level up a few times, peeling monsters off one or two at a time so you can actually handle them. Then, once you level up, just roflstop everything for an hour or two. Then move on to a new zone and repeat. Add to that, all the boss fights so far have been an absolute joke; I'm much more likely to die by accidentally pulling three mobs in a new zone than I am to die to a boss. All feels rather off.

I don't what you're talking about.

Welcome back. I don't you a review, do I? Edit: I don't owe you anything.

I would argue SakuraGame doesn't translate the original work, either.

Haven't posted to this thread in quite a while, so I've got a pretty long list to run down... My Work Outaku Friend (hereafter "my wof") recommended me Blend S, so I watched it. An impressively average show. Previously he recommended Restaurant to Another World, so I assumed he at least had similar tastes to mine, but I am now reconsidering. I shall henceforth be taking my wof's recommendations with a grain of salt. I watched Your Name (I'm not putting the stupid period at the end) with some friends. It was about as good as people have been saying; I enjoyed it quite a bit. The subs had their moments, but they were pretty mediocre for such a high-profile release, so I wish I'd been able to convince folks to watch the dub. At least then we presumably wouldn't have had to deal with untranslated pronouns which left at least one member of the audience with no idea what was going on (among other problems...). Ugh. I've been steadily going through Monogatari Second Season, and am now in the middle of Koimonogatari. I didn't care for Nekomonogatari Black, but everything since then has been absolute genius; I enjoyed Nise and Bake quite a bit, but season two is on a whole other level. This show is mind-numbingly good. Also, I can't get Nadeko Medusa's OP song out of my head; what an earworm. Meanwhile, Koimonogatari's OP video is batshit crazy and I love it (and the same could be said of episode one of Koimonogatar; wow). Speaking of subs, this show's are godawful, which is particularly depressing given how much of the show revolves around dialogue and characterization. Screw Aniplex and their almost-always-terrible translation quality at an absurd price point. At least it still looks jaw-dropping. Last but definitely not least, I'm about halfway through Recovery of an MMO Junkie. For obvious reasons, it reminds me of Welcome to the NHK (which I loved) but much more lighthearted; it's got that same "hitting a little too close to home" feel which pulled me into NHK quickly, but without some of the queasiness NHK induced (which ultimately was what made NHK into an outstanding show, for me). At any rate, I like soft-hitting sweet romcoms too, so I'm enjoying it a lot and expect to give it a high rating when I'm done, assuming it gets a sufficiently conclusive ending. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go revel in the rest of Koimonogatari.

Oh, yeah, that's a stupid thing about Symphonic Rain: the choice system is very picky about how it wants you to play. I think I got the same crappy bad end the first time I played as well.

Agreed with the first paragraph, and most of the second, and moreover, that dub is fine. J. Michael Tatum does an excellent Okabe in general. The only thing you can object to in that clip is the fact that the broken English is gone, which is IMO purely an improvement when you consider they lost both the intentional broken English (Okabe's) and the unintentional (the border officer's). Native English speakers don't go around saying "What's the purpose?"

I mean, I know how much you all love Kickstarters. At any rate, the game looked cute when Frontwing announced it back at AX, and it still does, so I kicked it. Go give it a kick if so inclined. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/frontwing/expose-your-inner-otaku-with-visual-novel-momoiro/ (looks like the link auto-embeds as a video, so whatever, I left the video and the raw link)

Philistines.

Seattle... Hmmm...

Guys, it's Sol Press, not SoL Press. Like the sun, not the boring genre.

Yeah, definitely wasn't being serious there. VN localization isn't a zero-sum game. I feel like I may have accidentally come off as one of those morons who gets angry when the stars align and once per millennium one of these companies releases an otome game. Truth is, I like to see the VN localizing companies bringing over a variety of stuff, even when it's not all specifically to my taste, since I think it makes them more likely to thrive and thus to continue to bring over the things that actually are to my taste. Though I really do want them to get more softhouse-seal GRANDEE porn, that's some good shit.

License bad games. License bad games that aren't even the bad games I want them to license (*cough* https://vndb.org/p1374 *cough*).

You're much better off just getting someone who knows what they're doing translating it in the first place. Translation checking is a luxury some localization projects have, but at least in fan translations, it's largely there to compensate for the fact that most of the people working in fan translations just aren't very good translators. 99% of the time, if they were passable at translating, they'd get out of fan translation and translate for a living. If the translation is best described as garble, no editor can save it short of going to check every translated line and effectively redoing the work. I think what you're saying here is predicated on a mistaken assumption people often make when talking about localization: that there's some sort pidgin language between Japanese and English (let's call it Fantranslationese). Bizarrely, some people not only believe in the existence of Fantranslationese, but they have even convinced themselves that they prefer to read Fantranslationese over English. But make no mistake: Fantranslationese is not a language, and it does not communicate anything like what the original Japanese did and what a decent English translation would. Fantranslationese is a pale shadow of a language, and an editor can only do so much to fix a "translation" attempting to use it short of retranslating the work because the editor otherwise doesn't actually get an experience like reading the original. Relying on editors to inject flair into a Fantranslationese script means you lost all the flair that was in the original. You're certainly not there yet, but you're well on your way to writing fanfiction instead of a translation, if you go this route. Editors should be polishing a translation, smoothing out rough edges and ensuring consistency. They absolutely should be fixing the translator's mistakes, always with the aid of the translator, because the editor sees the work differently and therefore is going to rarely find translation mistakes due to their different view. This is a given especially because of how ambiguous and context-dependent Japanese is. I never want to work on any project with a translator who believes this.

*simpler

At least one of the people behind the fan translation of Sharin has disavowed it and actively discourages people from reading it, so, yeah, I'd wait for the official. Regarding G-Senjou:

Nice. Now that Amazon has stopped procrastinating, you can do the same.

The WareMete project is dead. I haven't heard from the translator + project lead in about a year, and we've cleaned up all the organizational stuff around it. I suppose it's always possible he or someone else will start up a new project, but the old one is gone. Also, just to clarify, there is no Luna Translation, so that isn't the Luna Translation progress page; that's the personal page of a nice person who happens to be the programmer for a lot of different projects, some of which were formerly part of "Luna Translation" when that was a thing. But yeah, the art on the game sure is freaking stellar, right? I'm just saying, it'd be a good suggestion for the MangaGamer survey...

HoshiMemo didn't have "quite a bit of content not translated". It had, IIRC, five untranslated lines across probably a 40,000-50,000 line game. I think Leyline had more, but IIRC it was on the order of 30 lines? At any rate, you can read my review to see why, but I definitely wouldn't recommend HoshiMemo... Muv Luv Alternative is legendary, but Muv Luv is supposed to be kind of a slog. I'd still probably pick Muv Luv, among those, since eventually you'll get to Alternative and have a great time with it. Fate/Stay Night is legendary, too, and that one I can personally say I enjoyed.

Clephas beat me: http://testyourvocab.com/result?user=9518258 I felt bad because I had to dock myself terpsichorean because I couldn't remember what Terpischore was the muse of, and mawkish even though I looked it up like four days ago.

FWIW, I agree a lot of the stuff you're talking about feels pretty fuzzy. I don't recall having any problems with the points you're raising, but I have unspeakably strong suspension of disbelief, so it's not uncommon for me to say "man, what a great story" about things where every other person on the planet would say "god, that whole ending was just a massive ass-pull", so I've learned not to take my being okay with a plot as a sign that it's actually okay. So, yeah, I'm definitely not trying to argue or anything, just trying to understand/clarify.