Fred the Barber

I watched Kara no Kyoukai / The Garden of Sinners. Pretty enjoyable. Episode 5 was far and away the most interesting episode: best plot, most developed cast, and an utterly confusing way of telling the story that, while occasionally frustrating, mostly just served to get me to watch more carefully. I actually liked episode 6 quite a lot, despite it being on the weak side on plot, largely because it introduced a fun, cute character who nonetheless kicked ass; "cute" was in terminally short supply throughout this show, so that was a breath of fresh air. 2 was also an outstanding episode, although I almost wish they hadn't gone back to resolve the threads it left open which were closed off in the show's finale, episode 7. 1, 3, 4, and 7 all were weaker episodes (hard to blame 1, though, since it had to serve as an intro; but there's less excuse for the rest), especially 7, which was also on the long side for honestly not having all that much to say. The "extra" episode, 8, was simultaneously somewhat interesting, in how it explained a lot of the mechanics of things, and mind-numbingly boring, since literally nothing happened. Would've rather I simply hadn't watched it and had ended the series at episode 7. Oh well. In summary, it had some boring episodes and some truly excellent ones, and it was quite a departure from my usual fare, so no regrets from watching Kara no Kyoukai. I'm now watching Watashi ga Motete Dousunda / Kiss Him Not Me, because I thought the title was funny and because I like watching the occasional lighthearted comedy + reverse harem. I don't watch them often, but normally I find reverse harem shows to be a little less shallow than normal harem shows; this one, unfortunately, isn't, at least so far. That said, things are looking up a little bit as of episode 5, so I'm hoping it gets a little more enjoyable for me soon. Episode 5 had a couple of nice features: 1) it introduced a little yuri slant, which I do not mind at all, and 2) it took a step towards overturning the extremely shallow premise of the show... before going right back to the start. I don't see quite how they'd fix the bigger thematic problems I have with the show, but episode 5 gives me a little hope that they just might do so.

Seems like a high price to pay, if all you get is HuniePop.

No, I pay for my games: I bought a boxed copy and applied the latest patch. The version I played didn't have hundreds of errors either, but neither does S;G 0. And, no, I'm not implying that an official release shouldn't be held to a higher standard than a fan translation: I'm still arguing (like I already said) that fan translations are almost universally lower quality than official translations. My claim that S;G0 (which you're calling out as low quality) is substantially higher quality than KoiChoco (which you're calling out as a paragon of fan translation) is simply supporting that argument. S;G0 isn't perfect, and I wish it were better. But it's honestly pretty good. I have no qualms complaining about things that should be improved (including that release), and in particular I'm on board with the Dies irae complaints you're making, based on sheer count of issues. I just think this side argument that's sprouted up (that fan TLs tend to be higher quality than official TLs) is ridiculous, based on my own experiences, and I'm pointing out discrepancies in your examples to demonstrate that. Edit: Wanted to add a bit more on the KoiChoco thing: the KoiChoco release I played did have a metric shitton of tense mistakes in narration. It didn't know if it was in past or present tense, and that was enormously frustrating for me to read; I'm pretty sensitive to that particular mistake at this point, but I don't think most people are. I don't recall seeing such errors in S;G0. As far as odd phrasing or word choice, I frankly don't recall seeing much at all of that in S;G0, whereas I do definitely remember seeing a moderate amount of it in KoiChoco (though much less than some of the more egregious fan translations, like, say, 11eyes).

Of the fan patches you're praising for updates, I've only played Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate, and fairly recently (well over a year after their last release, I believe), and I can attest it's still got a fair number of errors. It's no 11eyes, by a long shot, but it's not as good as a typical release-date MG release, or S;G0. I actually don't understand the fixation on that one; it's seriously fine.

Don't know who phar is, but as far as I understand, Makoto's, koestl's, and moogy's work are all official releases at this point (at least the ones that are good; ask moogy about the sharin fan TL and see what he thinks...). I've also seen some pretty convincing evidence (i.e., a bunch of screenshots) that the fan releases are not as high quality as the subsequent official release, in the case of Saya no Uta, and I'd be surprised if that's not the case for those same peoples' other works. Regardless, maybe those are good: I guess what I want to argue isn't that there aren't occasionally acceptable quality fan TL releases, so much as that acceptable fan TL releases are the exception, not the rule, whereas I'd say the opposite for recent MG, SP, and JAST releases (that I've seen, at least; I hardly play every VN out there).

Recent professional English VN releases from known good localization outfits (anything recent from MG, SP, and possibly JAST?) are universally higher quality than fan translation patches. The team that did Dies irae was not associated with any of those, and this was their first project; they likely incorrectly believed they didn't need (or perhaps could not afford at the rate they promised? who knows.) as much QC as is merited. Turns out that when you have hundreds of thousands of words to deal with (Dies irae might even be into the millions?), even if you're pretty damn good, you still make a lot of mistakes. I'd be curious to see a citation of a really excellent fan translation, which some people in this thread seem to be asserting not only exists, but even go so far as to imply it's the norm. Honestly, even the best ones I've read have universally been filled with errors (at least as high an error rate as what you're seeing in Dies irae, given the number of lines you've quoted and the size of the script), and that's to say nothing of abominations like 11eyes. KoiRizo is a great example of a fairly well-written script, for a fan TL, which is again still chock-full of errors, because QC is both hard and hard to prioritize for fan TLs. Or we could go look at, I dunno, the Little Busters! fan TL, which doesn't even have word wrapping in the entire script. I've certainly never read a fan TL with as high a quality as the S;G0 release being called out in this thread, for instance, even though S;G0 does indeed have at least a couple dozen errors that I found when reading it. I think that's nonetheless still pretty solid for a script of its size. I also don't even usually see fan TLs releasing patches; the aforementioned KoiRizo, for instance, certainly had someone who was willing and able to make all those fixes, but the people making the patches couldn't be bothered to take them. Fan TL is a fine thing for getting exposure for stuff that otherwise wouldn't get it, but you're kidding yourselves if you genuinely believe it's higher quality than what you're getting from known good English VN publishers.

Because one recommendation is better than a dozen, here's one each of VNs and shows I rated 10/10 and would recommend without qualification to absolutely anybody: VN: Steins;Gate Anime: Chihayafuru

I started watching Gurren Lagann (finally). I tried it once, years ago, but I think the fanservice put me off at the time; I've since been hardened to that (heh), so now I just find it to be another draw of the show. The show itself is looking pretty good, two episodes in. I can't even fathom where it's going, or perhaps more accurately I can't fathom how it's going to get where the brief cuts to space opera scenes indicate it's going, but I'm happily along for the ride right now. The setting is interesting, the characters are fun, and even the fight scenes (normally kind of boring for me, TBH) are entertaining. Also, since apparently I can't restrain myself from judging the writing quality of JP translations these days: the subs are lovely, to the extent that they're making me fully grasp just how wildly uneven anime subtitle quality is (and that, to my surprise, newer stuff seems to often fare worse than stuff from a few years ago). I expect it's a combination of: 1) there simply being more of this material getting translated, thus meaning there's more demand than talented people capable of supplying it; 2) the fact that nonetheless a supply of translators has arisen to fill that gap, some obviously less qualified than others; 3) tighter timelines on translations, thanks to the prevalence of simulcasts; and 4) likely a race to the bottom on pay, as it turns out that less-qualified people can do the work with minimal repercussions on a show's sales and popularity, thus justifying a lower price point for translation than the qualified people would demand. That's all pure conjecture, of course; it's not like I have any data or knowledge of the industry, or for that matter even enough data points (I honestly don't watch nearly enough anime, old or new) to be willing to claim that quality is getting worse recently. Still... the Dragon Maid subs kinda sucked, and that made me sad since the show was otherwise great.

My takeaways: Disappointed girls don't like Spice and Wolf more. Disappointed so few guys have watched Ouran High School Host Club.

Akatsuki no Yona is simply amazing, especially if you're a fan of strong (in the sense of strength of character) female leads. One of my very favorites.

I watched Plastic Memories, and I have complicated feelings about it. The characters were pretty bland, and the plot was ludicrously predictable every step of the way, but I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy watching those characters act out that plot anyway. The main characters were the blandest, none more so than Generic Male Main Character (I've long since forgotten his name, if I ever knew it), but even the female leads were forgettable. The further out side characters were a little more interesting, but not much. I think the setting played a big part in my enjoyment, and the plot, while ridiculously predictable, still tugged at my heartstrings. The central motivating idea behind the show was, frankly, great. That, coupled with the way the story stuck to its central themes and morals all the way to the end, made for a compelling tale to watch, even while there were no surprises or twists, and no particularly interesting people. The sheer inevitability of it all was, perhaps, its greatest strength. In the end, despite my gripes, I thought it was really good. Not great, but really good.

Why can I only give a post one like. If I ever write something in English about beef stew and someone translates it to Japanese, I hope they'd do me the common courtesy of translating my beef stew as "nikujaga" instead of writing "beef stew" in katakana. Regarding numerals, AP and Chicago (and probably the others) agree that numbers ten and under should almost always be written out, and certainly in this case. If you're making mistakes like that in publicly-released materials, you probably need a style guide, so here's a free starter kit, a lightweight, VN-centric style guide: https://github.com/FredTheBarber/EditingPublic/blob/master/style guide.md

Or the version with lewds: https://denpasoft.com/products/wagamama-high-spec

Other: I pretty much just read ALL the Umberto Eco things. On a more serious note, one source for more organized reflection on translation which you're missing is social media, and—wait, hear me out, don't run away, stop. In all seriousness, probably half of the people I follow on Twitter are either professional translators or localization editors, most of whom follow each other, and there's often a lively discussion brewing or a lovely little nugget of wisdom waiting to be picked up.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-how-to-draw-1 The much-talked-about "10,000 hour rule" is bullshit, but there's a reason people trot it out all the time: it takes a damn long time to get good at most things, whether you're naturally talented at it or not. FWIW, I used to have drawing skills at your level until a couple years ago, but practiced my way up to where I can at least freehand copy things with results that look not utterly terrible. I stopped working on it at that point, satisfied that I could indeed draw if I wanted to. I'm convinced that, like @Velvetique said, nearly nobody is truly unable to learn to draw, or learn to program, or learn to do any of the other skills you'd need to have to make a VN if you really wanted to. If you want to get good at those things, you can; but you're going to have to work at it, a lot.

Want to know your batting average? Hint: you wouldn't be making it in the majors.

More accurately, as I understand Blick Winkel was the lead TL and did the majority of the work on Steins;Gate, and Reading Steiner (the guy who was part of the Dies Irae team) did a minority of the work. At any rate, Steins;Gate has quite a nice TL. But then again, Chrono Clock's is also fine, so it just goes to show that the internet has no idea what it's talking about and you should probably make your own judgements (but Libra's TL is undeniably garbage).

I wasn't very critical when I read the original fan TL, so I really couldn't say if the official TL with the remaster was better or worse in my opinion. OP covered backlog issues and typos, both of which were quite annoying to me, but there is one specific thing I'd call out about the official localization: they kind of screwed up some of the characterization of Chris's wishwashiness early on, which rubbed me the wrong way. In the JP, he's always falling back on his catchphrase 一応, and this is really noticeable since a couple of voiced characters (the teacher and Torta) actually chide him on it in rapid succession, and even start dropping that phrase on him, in those early scenes. In the official localization, the phrase was handled haphazardly (inconsistent translation, non-obvious flow of conversation around it), so the impact was basically lost. I distinctly remember the fan TL handling those exchanges better: IIRC, they consistently used "I guess" to mirror that phrase, and they got it right when Torta called Chris out on it by actually throwing the phrase back at him. The official localization basically dropped that last bit on the floor entirely, from what I recall. Anyway, that's all basically one specific example from the early game. I seriously only played the official release for about an hour and then didn't feel like going back for more. I really loved the game when I played the fan TL a couple years ago, but when I tried the official release, the really quite large number of typos was off-putting, and the less-than-stellar TL was upsetting, given I've gotten kind of picky about those things recently. All told, it was frankly not that pleasant to read; it had its moments, but it was still more misses than hits. I just didn't feel like sticking with it.

From my perspective as one of the current reviewers, and speaking only for myself, not for FuwaReviews at large or Palas in particular as the head, I see a combination of factors influencing the rate at which we publish reviews (which, btw, I don't think is all that slow; we've maybe had some outlier slow months recently with only one review a month, but these things are going to be cyclical): Reading a VN simply takes time, and we're all busy individuals doing various things. Reading a VN to review it vs. reading it for pleasure is actually a surprisingly different experience. Reading something with the intent to review it actually puts a fair bit of mental burden on me, vs. simply reading it normally, for better and worse: I spend time stepping back and assessing how I'm feeling about certain things, taking notes, constantly considering collecting screenshots, etc. All told, it's actually a fair bit less entertaining to read this way. That said, the psychological payoff of actually putting out the review and having a big public conversation with people about a game is substantial (and is the reason I do reviews). It actually takes a while to write a review. Even if you're thoughtfully preparing along the way while reading it, like I mentioned, preparing the final review takes a few hours (at least for me). Basically, choosing to do a review is signing up for a fair bit of work. We don't have all that many active reviewers. Looks like only 5 reviewers have posted something in the last 10 months? Palas recruited another reviewer fairly recently, and I myself only joined the team within the last year, so this isn't an area where we're completely stagnating, but finding interested and qualified people is not easy. To have a review, you have to have a game that people want to review. There are a ton of VNs coming out all the time, of course, but individual reviewers have their own preferences and interests, and not much incentive or desire (hopefully understandably) to review outside of things they're already interested in. And even within the bounds of those interests, things don't always work out. As an example, the Symphonic Rain HD remaster came out recently, and I picked it up with the intent of reviewing it since I really liked it back when I read the fan TL years ago. However, a couple hours in, I realized the release was sub-par in a lot of ways (backlog didn't work correctly, lots of proofing errors, translation did a poor job of capturing characterization), and I just couldn't stand the thought of sinking 40 hours into ruining my pleasant memories of a game by playing a bad release of it at that level of elevated scrutiny, just to wind up saying, "This game I loved got a sub-standard official localization and HD remaster," even though I think that's exactly the sort of review that would be great to put out there, in that it would likely create an interesting conversation. Now, all that said, I can personally say that I'm planning to pick up WagaHigh on release date and review it, since for whatever combination of reasons, it's caught my eye. I don't know how long it will take—my time is always limited—but you have my word there will be a review of it before too long after release. I also want to add one important request, as a reviewer. If you want to support FuwaReviews, from my perspective, the best thing you can do is to make sure to comment on the reviews, in whichever venue you prefer: the tweets (retweets are always appreciated), the FuwaReviews blog posts themselves, associated forum threads, the Facebook post I guess (I've never even looked at those to see if there are comments... I probably should...). Doing reviews, for me, is an extension of why I'm on Fuwanovel in the first place: I like VNs, and I want to talk to people about them. The payoff of all that time spent reviewing a game is all in that subsequent conversation a review sparks.

Wrapped up Interviews with Monster Girls. I unfortunately watched the best episode before a long hiatus, so the last two episodes I watched just now couldn't help but be a disappointment, given how much I enjoyed my favorite episode, but the show remained lovely and sweet right up until the end. I really appreciated that it never fell prey to sacrificing its characters for its plot: every episode was well thought-through and the way each one played out was honest to the characters. That resulted in a truly marvelous episode 11, which was backed by a plot which in most other shows would have been a frustrating, predictable episode about a misunderstanding. Instead, we got a real, interesting, and incredibly beautiful episode about working through issues and forming new relationships. In retrospect, Interviews with Monster Girls reminds me of what I loved in Kokoro Connect, a level of care which I hardly ever see in anime: all the characters are thoughtful, relatable, and believable. The last may sound ironic for a show featuring a vampire, a snow woman, a Dullahan, and a succubus, but of course that is exactly the point.

It would definitely help recommenders if you had a VNDB page, since it seems like you've played quite a lot. At any rate, here's a suspiciously alphabetical (according to VNDB title) list of games which either I really liked or other people really liked but weren't quite for me, and which seem particularly well suited to your request. Funbag Fantasy is a better story than you'd expect from either the name or the premise, and it's a hilarious nukige (not quite as silly as Boob Wars, but definitely in that ballpark at times). I have pretty mixed feelings about Memory's Dogma, but it might fit the bill. No school. Very interesting intro, though I think it gets confused in the middle and ends up writing a lot of checks it can't cash. Great soundtrack and art. Most of the Steampunk Series would probably work. Gahkthun is technically at a school, I guess, but it doesn't feel like a school VN at all, and you'd probably really like Inganock (it's pretty well-thought-of generally, and I personally love it), which is not even remotely school-ish. Note that while I called this a "series" there's not really any need to read them all or to read them in any particular order; they're basically independent stories in a shared universe. Played Swan Song? It was looking to be a bit heavy for me so I dropped it, but from what you say you enjoy, I suspect it'd be right up your alley. VA-11 HALL-A is atypical, quirky, and excellent. World End Economica is quite good, especially after the characters grow up a bit (they can be kind of grating at times in episode 1). I still need to read episode 3... need to get to that soon. I thoroughly enjoyed both episodes 1 and 2. It's by the author of Spice and Wolf, so expect a whole lot of economics infodumping and discussion. Deus Machina Demonbane is a hilarious fusion of giant robot shounen and vaguely Lovecraftian influence and themes. Demonbane is one of those rare games that I look back on more fondly the more time passes. I'll definitely be going back to play it again some day (though only Al's endings, since they're far and away the best).

@Ningen, the official localized title does include the subtitle as well, albeit in German. I don't see it anywhere in the text of the Kickstarter or Prefundia, admittedly, but it's there in the logo.

"Funbag Fantasy" is proof that translating the title of a VN can be a fine thing.

That's what I was referring to when I said it was a completely understandable mistake at a language level. Perception of color and language are actually fascinatingly intertwined topics. Refer to this lovely wikipedia article for a lot of background, but even more interestingly, this article asserts that the vast majority of humans didn't even perceive blue as a distinct color until modern times. I also remember reading an article a few years ago (though I couldn't dig it up now) where some guy who was fascinated by this carefully never taught his child that the sky was blue, and then, when the child was still pretty young, the guy asked his kid what color the sky was, which netted the answer "Gray, I guess?" Bottom line: our brains are weird.

Hahaha, that's a great one. I can completely understand how they could make that mistake at a language level, but when you're actually playing the game, damn, those eyes are definitely green. I feel like I need to make a list of these sorts of problems for QC people to look at, because for translators and editors, it's basically impossible to catch all occurrences of this flavor of mistake...