Fred the Barber

I also hated Honey and Clover, even though it seems like exactly the sort of thing I would love.

Started reading VNs for the feels, stayed for the feels, stories, and porn. Not necessarily in that order.

This isn't some weird game where they're trying to push censorship on us; they don't gain anything by that, and they know it upsets people. I'd bet the story is much simpler than that explanation: they know what upsets the English VN reading community, and they're trying to 1) eliminate all of it if possible, minimize it if not, and 2) be very transparent about where they have been unsuccessful at eliminating it. Frontwing has been doing mosaic-free EN releases for a while now (CoroBlo vol. 2 was their first, I'm fairly certain, and IIRC they even went back and de-mosaiced vol. 1 after that?). This isn't a change in their current plans, and it's not intended as a compromise. They're just doing the best they can, without assuming an unacceptable amount of risk, given their legal concerns. I also want to add that I have massive respect for Frontwing's transparency for what they knew would be an unpopular call, and for the fact that they haven't been trying to rationalize it away. I know it's honestly asking for a lot, since the people messaging and marketing these English releases are typically publishers with only a tenuous relationship with actual license holders (Frontwing honestly probably has an advantage over the other localizers in this regard...), but I sincerely wish we always had this kind of transparency around VN releases, given the fairly regular controversy that often surrounds them. I'm an optimist: I tend to believe that the VN localization companies' interests are actually pretty closely aligned with those of the fans (since, you know, all of the people working there are, themselves, fans, and it's not like they're making a lot of money in this business; kind of the only rational explanation, really... but I digress). However, most of the VN community is not equally trusting. My hope is that, if localization companies can always communicate issues like this so early and so clearly, maybe they can actually start building some trust with the more pessimistic members of the community.

FWIW, Decay isn't the first or only person I've seen claiming this. Maybe it's just the places I frequent, but I actually haven't seen a single person pitching the claim that the scene is actually important. I wouldn't know either way; haven't read the game, or even read any commentary on it until this came up yesterday.

Not sure where you've been listening for your ZERO news, because they updated the Kickstarter just in the last couple of weeks. Here's the most recent post with relevant information: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/muvluv/muv-luv-a-pretty-sweet-visual-novel-series/posts/1859716. It does not, for instance, include an actual release date announcement, but at least they think they're close (though I've very recently heard some rumblings that their public messaging has been overly optimistic this whole time and likely still is). At any rate, nobody knows "how long do we wait", but at least they are quite clearly working on it.

This is a useless comparison, at least without more detail, since it opens you up to (what I assume you're actually talking about) machine-translated nearly nonsensical fan "translations" like the legendary Flyable Heart "translation," which do not provide a viable baseline for comparison. Referring to such abominations as a "translation" is an affront to the original work.

Confession: I got new socks today. This is the very definition of luxury.

I think this is mostly a question of consideration of audience. There's certainly something to be said for targeting your translation for an audience of non-Japanese speakers who have nonetheless been steeped in Japanese culture, but there's also something to be said for tuning a translation to try to capture a broader audience, hopefully without losing that venerable audience of enthusiasts. This is, I presume, the line that most VN translations try to walk these days: increasing accessibility without sacrificing the accuracy and context that, understandably, the enthusiasts demand. And it's important to understand, with a work of fiction or poetry especially, that the translator's goal is (or at least should be) to give their audience an equivalent experience to what the original author intended for their own audience. Consider page 73, paragraph 2, of this book I came across while looking up some translation theory: IMO, as the translation critics the VN community have become, we have a tendency to get too hung up on extremely small-scale meaning equivalence (i.e., is the joke exactly the same as it was in the original?), and to be too willing to sacrifice the bigger-scale equivalences in experience (i.e., is the joke funny?). The explanation stretches pretty well, too, if you consider "equivalence in experience" as implying that, for instance, a joke should be about roughly the same topic, or a reference should share as many characteristics as possible, like how old the thing being referred to is, what various cross-segments of society think about it, etc.

Reminder that https://vndb.org/v20433 was also a thing, not to mention this other little game you may have heard of, https://vndb.org/v15538. I don't think they're shy about picking up moenukige.

JP-only hipsterism on Fuwanovel? It's more likely than you might think.

I finally started NieR: Automata a week ago, wrapping up route A yesterday (and then quickly thereafter finishing route G as well... oops.). It's been a great pleasure to play, on all fronts. I'm playing with the English dub rather than subs, since I found both that the dub is excellent and that I was missing some things occasionally with the subs, when the action was a little frantic and someone was trying to tell me something. N:A is probably the most thoughtful and thought-provoking story I've experienced in at least the past year, and it never becomes either pushy or preachy. Really, it's just been a pure joy. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to go resume my second playthrough...

The days go by slow, the years go by fast.

Just finished up Guy Gavriel Kay's Sailing to Sarantium, the first book in a duology called "The Sarantine Mosaic." It was really good! And at $4 for a long, high-quality fantasy novel on the Kindle, it's a steal. It's got a lot going for it: I think I must like historical fantasy. This is only the second historical fantasy series I've read (the other being Elizabeth Bear's "Eternal Sky" trilogy), but they both really spoke to me. There's something fascinating about the overlay of a familiar world and familiar cultures (in Bear's case, Mongolia, when men and mares conquered half the span of the world; in Kay's, Byzantium at its decadent height, on the eve of collapse) with fantasy elements (gods; spirits; magic) which apparently really pulls me in. It's a decently long book, and the writer is definitely not shy to go to the wall on writing elaborate descriptive prose, but even so, the book never once dragged. There was always something interesting happening, someone I wanted to see doing something I wanted to read about. It didn't fall victim to the typical long fantasy novel problem of having a giant, easily forgettable cast: I never once had a "wait, who are you, again?" moment with a character, and in fact, almost all the characters were pretty dear to me. In spite of it being a pretty misogynistic historical setting, the main female characters play big roles, and they earn those parts. There are some interesting male characters around, including the main character, but the women are the reason it's fun to read. Can I say "characters" a few more times? There are a lot of them, from many walks of life: slaves and emperors, chariot racers and mosaicists. And they're all worth reading about. Anyway, I really enjoyed it; highly recommend it, especially if the idea of historical fantasy seems interesting to you.

If we're nitpicking (I love nitpicking): Your "can play that game" version of the idiom has a weird feel to me, compared to the "can play at that game" in the Libra TL. Apparently your choice was nearly on an equal footing in the early 2000s, but then the gap widened again: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=can+play+that+game%2Ccan+play+at+that+game&year_start=1800&year_end=2018&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccan play that game%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccan play at that game%3B%2Cc0. Alas, Ngram doesn't have data beyond 2008... I thought maybe it was a regional difference, but hell, apparently there's even a US English movie with your version of the expression as its title, so who knows. Edit: Just noticed NGram actually has a little box where you can select American English vs. British English. If anything, "two can play at that game" looks to be even more consistently popular in British English.

But KonoSora is actually a good game.

Having recently finished it, I can attest that Saya no Uta is not shy about doing verbose description of things, but that it doesn't waste lines or scenes, which is a lot more than I can say for most VNs. So, it's very likely what you're looking for, in that sense. A lot of ADV-style VNs, especially, have a tendency to dedicate entire lines to shit like (completely made up example), "Having said that, she looked at me and tilted her head. I shrugged," which, while not a lot of words, is a totally wasted line and is obnoxious when you just want to get to what happens next. Similarly, said games will then dedicate lengthy scenes (or arcs) to relatively minor things which, in the grand scheme of things, I don't give a shit about. Sometimes I'm okay with that, but most of the time I want nothing more than to get through it so I can see the real meat of the story. Saya no Uta, at least, certainly doesn't suffer from that problem. Looking through VNs I've played for other things which don't have that problem... maybe the Steampunk series? Despite being pretty long games, I think they do a good job of making each arc self-contained and interesting on its own merits. Maybe try Gahkthun? Sekien no Inganock is certainly a better story, but dat fan TL...

This one never really clicked with me. I don't even remember the ending, TBH (it's been a while, though, so I might be doing that specific of it a disservice). My biggest problem was always that the characters felt a little thin (especially Tohru), even for a reverse harem; I'd rather watch Ouran any day, for the more interesting characters. I never really got the name either.

Keep fighting the good fight, Flutterz, one day at a month.

I finished this last week, actually. Overall it was an interesting experience, but didn't do all that much for me. I'm glad I read it, but with the benefit of hindsight, I'd probably rather have spent the time reading something else, I guess? I feel like the combination of amateur writers and grand aspirations really shows: it's got a real Chekov's Gun problem, where it keeps introducing important-looking stuff that doesn't matter at all, and in general an issue with leaving loose ends all over the place (and not in an "open ending" sort of way, but more in a, "we just plain didn't care/forgot about all this shit we introduced" sort of way). It could definitely be more compelling if it were a little leaner, and if it had taken a few of the apparent ideas it had and ran with them. For instance, here's one regarding Yulya: Or consider the fallout shelter: Also, when I was done with Lena's route, I loathed her character because she had no character anymore. The game has too much forced-reread-that's-insignificantly-different content. I don't mind that the overall game is short (I actually kinda like short games), but that I spent about a third of the time on each route rereading the same scene was annoying. Anyway, lots of complaints, but the game certainly had its good points as well: a difference in setting and plot alone is nice, the art was pleasant, and the music was alright.

I finally played Saya no Uta yesterday. It was very good; not like exceptional or earth-shattering, but very good. Just as importantly, it was also extremely different from what I usually read, and it's nice to have a change of pace every now and then. My favorite part of it was how the game simultaneously made certain characters both repulsive and sympathetic. That's not a common or an easy thing to do, and it leaves you in a really strange mental place, which is a feeling I'm kind of savoring. That said, I'm looking forward to playing something more straightforward. I've been wrapping up things I wanted to do, lately, so I'm either going to read WEE Episode 3 or, more likely, finish up Fruit of Grisaia. Both have been hanging over my head for a while, especially the latter. Plus, that'll give me an excuse to read the common route again...

FWIW, Vokoca's fix does indeed seem to have solved things for me. So, don't worry, you don't need to uninstall Office and install any of Rooke's programs, just disable that task

Did you even read all the posts in the thread? I noticed the same problem fairly recently (and find it super annoying), and found this well-timed post on Tom's Hardware suggesting exactly what Vokoca said, so I'm trying it out without reasonably high hopes.

Yeah, this is something I was well aware of, but which probably isn't well known in general. I had a friend in college who insisted on importing the British version of the Harry Potter books, rather than reading the American localization, as if there was some joy to be had in hearing people say "Happy Christmas" to each other, and generally sounding like space aliens. I meant more like modern world literature, which I presume is predominantly translated into intentionally neutral English so as not to alienate Americans, Canadians, Brits, etc., though I could be wrong and maybe non-Americans find that all translated world literature reads strangely. I expect it makes the most sense, economically, to ensure you don't alienate Americans primarily, and then try to not alienate those other markets as a secondary goal. The best equivalent example I can find is translations from Japanese world literature: I've read tons of Murakami, a fair bit of Mishima, a couple of Kawabata novels, and an Oe novel. I don't recall any of those featuring British slang, and while I don't know if there was a separate translation for Britain vs. for the US for those, I'd be kind of surprised if there was.

No. As I also mentioned in the review, there's nothing per se wrong with it, but that doesn't keep it from annoying me. I literally didn't understand quite a bit of the slang used in the translation, and that got in the way of my enjoying reading it at times. To be clear, it wouldn't bother me in the slightest if it was just using British spellings for words common to both dialects, but when it's frequently throwing in phrases like "taking the Mickey out of [x]" which I have to deduce the meaning of from context, it hurts the reading experience. For the most part, it's a small annoyance compared to the actual problem of crappy writing which we had in pretty much every VN TL until a few years ago, and still have rampant in fan translations, so I'm mostly willing to take that trade, but I'd still much rather have something without all the British slang. In some ways, it's exactly the same problem as an unnaturally stilted translation: it doesn't sound like the way people actually talk, in the language I see everywhere, hear everywhere, and speak, and which I've come to expect as the standard for stuff I'm reading. It's arguably not as bad ideologically as a stilted translation, in that literally nobody actually talks the way a stilted translation reads, but from the perspective of somebody who's reading occasional bouts of near-nonsense, it's not practically that different. I've read a lot of world literature, a lot of genre fiction, and a lot of VNs; none of the rest of them have had characters periodically taking the Mickey out of each other.

Characters other than DD use British slang fairly frequently, especially Rei and Shuji. I mentioned it in my review as something I didn't like and considered to be a questionable decision. I don't have examples handy and don't really feel like cracking the game open to find them, but it's there, for sure.