Fred the Barber

For my money, Wagamama High Spec and ChronoClock were both solid VNs that fit your list of preferences perfectly. You'll probably love Princess Evangile (link NSFW), though I didn't much care for it. That said, you should really refer to this thread: And consider broadening your horizons and trying something outside slice-of-life. Your stated preferences are definitely ideal for getting the most VNs in terms of quantity, but the best VNs tend to be the ones that step outside that mold a bit. Maybe give Gahkthun of the Golden Lightning a look (the MangaGamer release [NSFW link] is exactly the same as the Steam release for Gahkthun, IIRC).

Just here to throw my support to Saya no Uta because it made me so goddamn queasy and yet was utterly riveting. It is horrible and beautiful, and I'm still in awe of it every time I reflect on it.

I have yet to find a way to transfer it to another individual, and I only seem to mine more as time goes by, not less, so probably not.

I'm mining salt.

Oh. Well, yeah, my feelings are a bit less strong on that. I do think it's pretty bad there as well, though, especially when it comes to poorly-timed infodumping and manufactured drama (my god, Aoi's route and Asuho's route...).

Oh, christ, I forgot about Libra. I only saw like five screenshots of that, and I'm still sure it's vastly worse than HoshiMemo was. So... let's go with calling HoshiMemo the second-worst thing I saw this year. Regarding this doubt: Either the screenshots I posted show obvious problems to you, or they don't, I guess. But to be clear, all screenshots in the review are representative, none more so than "Mare's face is instantly shrouds in a hue of weariness." There are so many problems with that line, but let's try to break them down: "weariness" is a typo, given context: it was supposed to be "wariness" "is shrouds" was obviously supposed to be "is shrouded", so, another typo "is shrouded" is passive voice, which usually you want to avoid. I'm not going to say it's something you should always avoid: that would be a stupid and incorrect thing to say. But I will assert that passive voice is incredibly common in this script and it consistently weakens lines, this one included. "instantly" is a totally unnecessary adverb, which is one of the most reliable ways to weaken prose. There are many rough guidelines in writing, and this is one of the most important: if you're reaching for an adverb, use a better verb instead. Unfortunately, such weakening adverbs are all over this script; they're probably the biggest problem I have with it. Play the game and count the number of occurrences of the words "literally" and "considerably"; I bet there are no fewer than 20 combined. Then read a short novel by your favorite English genre fiction author and count occurrences of those same words. I'll bet you don't find more than one (Jim Butcher seems to always have exactly one "literally" in every Harry Dresden book, presumably just to tweak people's noses...). This is not a coincidence: those words are baggage, weighing down good writing. It also bears mentioning that adjectives can be just as bad as adverbs, and are also overused in this script. "hue" is a blatantly overly literal translation of 色, and it appears as such many, many times throughout HoshiMemo. What the heck color is a "hue of wariness" supposed to be? I'm sorry, I'm just not synesthetic enough to relate to using color words for emotions like that. I want to stress: this line is representative. I have hundreds of screenshots I took from the game, the vast majority of which bother me in the writing department almost as much as this line does, often for the same reasons cited up above, often for different ones (notably including redundancy, awkwardness, and unreadability). It took me a solid half hour to pare my HoshiMemo screenshot folder to a shortlist of 46 bad screenshots, and then another half hour to trim that down to the five I finally ended up using in the review (the hard cap I set for myself so the review wasn't just a pile of screenshots). It frustrated me that I had to sacrifice a screenshot that could have gone to bad prose on showing an untranslated line, but I needed one untranslated line screenshot to drive that point home, unfortunately. So, instead, here are a few choice lines from my screenshot folder (typos theirs, not mine): "It is literally just like a flood." "Maybe it is the atmosphere surrounding Asuho that's sealing my mouth." "Just like yesterday, the night sky is flocked with twinkling stars." A pair of lines which have to be taken together to see the nonsense: "Sure gets your heart racing, huh?" "True, anxiety's making mine shoot up like crazy." "It is quite literally just like a flood." "I directed my field of vision, which, unlike as it is with the naked eye, is quite narrow, over towards there." "I don't let even the faintest, most slightest of sounds slip by my ear." "A opportune chance to ensure the survival of Astro Circle that I mustn't let slip out of my grasp." "We are essentially tossing in all of our cards towards this massive, risky gamble." "Will You-san start up one of those trifling chats with me that almost personify peace in itself while wearing a wry smile on his face all the while in response to his sister?" "Wait, is this all because I said you wouldn't be? Would you have turned Chinami down "defiance-causally" if I'd instead said you'd be all for it?" "Belatedly so, I learned that while one grain of light may be small, if they amount to near the number of stars in the sky, it reflects like a big light." "The overwhelming amount of red everywhere renders her unable to grasp where she's falling to and from where." "Even if our surroundings were to be painted in the black night, so that neither the sky nor the sea remained, the horizon line alone would still retain its faint glow." "It was undoubted that Isuzu was unaware of what exactly had happened." "The wind, pregnant with moisture, that blows over it is really refreshing and softly makes Asuho's bangs wave." If you can't see the problems in these, then HoshiMemo will probably be fine for you, honestly. But if you can't see substantial problems in every one of these lines, and you're unwilling to try to learn why all of them are problematic, you shouldn't be involved in a creative writing endeavor.

Not meaning to jump on you here, but the word "bias" concerns me. Do you just mean I had something against the game? The game definitely just didn't work for me, which is certainly a big part of how the final rating shook out, and probably always will be for a moege, like ChaosRaven said, so if that's all you mean, that's totally fair. Just concerned that maybe you mean I was somehow unfair in the review, which I don't think I was. Personally, I think there's a lot of objectivity in the review, but I'll also be the first to admit that there's a lot of subjectivity as well; but I don't think any of it is unfair, per se. For what it's worth, I was honestly looking forward to playing this, going into it, so I don't think I brought any negativity to the table when I started it, but... well, you see how things panned out, at least.

These kinds of questions are generally really hard to answer unless you're intimately involved with the project, or at least the company, which I'm not. I will say that localization is really hard in general, and that in cases like this, it's usually a combination of many things going wrong, rather than something you can lay on any one individual's shoulders. One thing you learn from professionally doing pretty much anything is that you're better off blaming processes, rather than individuals. Sekai Project's localization process wasn't working very well in this case, which could have led to this kind of result through any number of avenues. Some of the possible things that could have resulted in include: insufficient time given to individuals to complete their work (I would guess this is the most common contributor to game localizations gone awry in general) insufficiently experienced individuals working on the project (probably the second-most common) insufficient oversight and checking of individuals' work (because everybody makes mistakes, so you need enough checks and balances across the board to keep things in line) too many people working on the project without enough centralized decision-making power to steer it in the right direction And probably there are tons of other things I'm not thinking of. I have no way to know if some or any of these are applicable to this particular case, but probably. The money is probably a big part of explaining the root cause for these problems. It's easy to look at the HoshiMemo Kickstarter numbers and assert that SP must have made tons of money, but a pretty huge portion of their actual take from Kickstarter funds goes towards paying for the goods. For the remainder, well, localization takes a whole lot of people a whole lot of time. Most of the people doing translation and editing work on visual novels (and probably other roles as well, though I'm less familiar with them) are making somewhere in the ballpark of minimum wage, or less, in spite of it being a highly skilled profession. Evan (lead translator for Muv Luv) had good comments on this topic (click through for a couple more replies closer to the "what could have gone wrong" question):

https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2018/01/03/hoshizora-no-memoria-3/ I really don't know why there's a "3" in the review link, but I can't help but wonder if it isn't because the last FuwaReview was for "Karakara 2".

Agreed with them needing to start getting Erina and Souma together already, though honestly I'm still in love with the show. It's not so much the food porn as all the passion in the characters and the interplay of the characters that does it for me. That said, I haven't watched season three yet... but it's next on my docket.

I mentioned this to someone before here (I don't think it was you, since I feel like it was before you started reading LB, but maybe...?), Little Busters is really all about Refrain. It's the big payoff at the end of a very long VN, which definitely has its share of ups and downs, and which can lag a little at times. So, I'm glad you enjoyed the best part of the story!

Wouldn't be the first time our tastes have diverged. Maybe my bias towards food shows is even stronger than I thought.

I just finished Restaurant to Another World, which I absolutely adored. It was every bit as solid a feel-good experience as Interviews with Monster Girls was for me earlier this year (quick check: is it still this year? yes, it's still this year, whew). Normally I don't care for such episodic shows (and I would probably be even more likely to be put off by shows where each episode was basically two half-length stories), but this one totally worked for me, perhaps because it actually grew the cast meaningfully in each episode. That's a pretty big contrast to, say, Natsume's Book of Friends or Kino's Journey, where every episode brings in new characters, but then they disappear never to be seen again, which I guess kind of rubs me the wrong way. No "monster of the week" formula here: everything compounds and ties back into previous stories. It shows a lot of care and love for the people on behalf of the creator, and I found the resulting experience really appealing. Of course, it also helps that I just like food shows. But more importantly, I loved aspects like the show's casual approach to character development, such as when Heck, I even loved the way they tied things together and explained them, when I was fully expecting (and fine with) that remaining ambiguous. All in all, even though everybody told me it was good even before I started it, this was still an incredibly enjoyable show for me, vastly exceeding my expectations.

9/10, best sad robots ever Delicious raw potato.

There are a few threads floating around about this, and of course lots of stuff on the internet. Maybe start here: Also, I find tofugu has a lot of good "how to learn Japanese"-type content, especially in how it presents a wide variety of views and goals; once you've figured out your main course of study, tofugu is pretty good as a way to read supplementary advice and maybe course-correct your studies a bit. One important thing to understand is why you're learning Japanese. You seem to have a good idea of that, so next, make sure that the course of study you set for yourself is accumulating to those goals. There are lots of guides, courses, etc., out there. You'll want to make sure you pick the one that points you fairly directly at your specific goals. Brief protips: Learn the syllabaries first Then study grammar (and sentences) constantly

Honestly, something of an overstatement. Here's what an actually somewhat competent person I ran this by put for the first few lines: "Just thinking of it fills me with nostalgia / the first summer I spent on that island / and the people I met there", versus the borderline nonsense in the Kazamatsuri video (what the hell does this second line even mean, you may have wondered? Well, nothing: it's a mistranslation.): "I had a nostalgic summer / I learned of a new summer / I encountered that on this island." Still, I'll backpedal a bit: although Key tweeted out a link to the Kazamatsuri video, that's more an indication that they don't know a bad translation from a decent one than it is that they are necessarily hiring shit people to do this work (as they have tended to do in the past). So, while I'm not holding my breath, and while I'm a little salty given they have an actually good writer on Summer Pockets, there is theoretically still some hope.

I'm surprised you haven't played Demonbane yet. It's got a lot of personality, so it's certainly not pure horror or purely dark, but it has a fair bit of that stuff, while still occasionally being a silly adventure romp. Think chuuni meets Cthulhu. At any rate, I'm a big fan of it. It's one of those VNs that grows on me more and more over the years, where most fade away. Edit: Worth mentioning that not only is it translated, ~80% of the translation is really good (Leica's route... not so much).

I tried reading that release, but I'm afraid it wasn't written in English. I suspect, like the shogun said, I'm going to be waiting forever. Judging by the Kazamatsuri-"translated" PV for Summer Pockets, I guess we can look forward to another dumpster fire of an English translation for Summer Pockets too. Oh well.

Yeah, I hear you. I'm still waiting on a Little Busters! English translation.

But there were four routes, not three... so now I want to know who you forgot. (It was Tsubaki, wasn't it?)

I read one complete H scene (Lavi's, chosen on a lark), and then read a bunch of the intro again on the same day the demo released. A handful of issues I saw in the youtube video were indeed fixed (there was some really terrible line about "dropping knives", IIRC, clearly literally translated idiom, that was made into something rational), but most of the issues I had still remained in the demo. I actually wrote up a lot of detailed feedback and forwarded it on to some people loosely involved with the project (turns out I have a few acquaintances there...), which was received positively, but even if the immediately-involved team benefits some from that, I still have to admit that I don't have high hopes for the end result: it seems like both the primary translator and editor are not all that experienced at English writing, and it shows in the text. People who are less critical readers should be fine with it, of course; it's about on par with at least one recent Sekai Project release...

Rothfuss put a deadline on the new Kingkiller book and then missed it? I expect literally nothing from that man at this point, and yet he still somehow finds a way to disappoint. Impressive.

I like to call it The Catmaid's Tail, but I should probably be saving that joke for when the next season of The Handmaid's Tale debuts. But the parallels are haunting.

0/10. No hat.

Huh. For some reason, I thought it was just at the beginning of this year, but you're right, it has been 16 months since the announcement. Funbag Fantasy was obviously something of a special case, though, since it was 100% translated and edited at the time of the announcement, if I remember correctly. At any rate, allow me to rephrase: it's been a long time coming, but I'm looking forward to it!