Fred the Barber

9/10 - blushing smiling cutie FTW

Correct: http://store.steampowered.com/app/331470/Everlasting_Summer/

I thought that was Frontwing's trick. Has SP done that, too?

Not gonna lie, I want to play all of them. I stalled out of KoiRizo after 1.5 routes (but want to go back), stalled out of Air after about 30 minutes (but want to go back), and am actually most of the way through Chrono Clock now (and it's awesome). Meanwhile, I never even tried Everlasting Summer or Ever17, but they're both high on my hype list.

I never listened to much Soundgarden, but I did really like Audioslave's eponymous album. I can hear him sing "I Am The Highway" in my head at will, and it's always worth hearing. One hell of a singer.

Finished all four of the initial Chrono Clock routes, getting started on Miu now. The only one of those four routes I didn't much care for was Misaki's, which is unfortunate since I think Misaki herself is probably my favorite character in the game. Her route just didn't do much for me, somehow. Most of the time, when people talk about forced drama, I tend to perceive the same content as just plain old drama and have no problem with it, but Misaki's route really did feel forced to me. It was also pretty clearly unedited way back when I read it, which kinda sucked. I played DD after that, and ended up taking a long break from the game because DD wasn't really all that appealing to me, and since I had a lot of other stuff going on at the time. When I came back, however, I quite enjoyed the rest of DD's route, even her ending (which I think raised a few people's hackles). After that, I knocked out (up?) Michiru, who provided a pleasant surprise of a route for me—the character dynamic in her route isn't one I recall seeing before in any VN, and I quite liked it. Also, I've come to grips with the fact that little sister characters are a turn-on for me. At last, a VN fetish I'm on board with. Yay? Finally, I picked up Makoto (I was saving hottest girl for last), who once again provided an enjoyable route, especially towards the end. It wasn't stellar or deep or anything, but it was a fun ride with a fun heroine. I gotta say, Chrono Clock really has very different heroine personalities, compared to most VNs. I keep mentally contrasting it with Princess Evangile: they're both clearly moege trading on their heroines' appeal, but where every girl in Princess Evangile felt she'd come straight out of a cookie cutter, every heroine in Chrono Clock has a lot of distinctive flair. Whether it's the tsundere being 95% dere instead of your typical 95% tsun, or the little sister being a demure, ladylike, blind girl with a roaring libido, they just all feel special. I also think the translation did an excellent job of capturing those characters' uniqueness. In spite of all the flak it's taken, and in spite of me not really enjoying some of the decisions they made (particularly the frequent use of British English, and not just by DD), I think this is a pretty damn good TL, and that's making it even more of a pleasure to read. I'm looking forward to getting through Miu and Cro and finally putting the game to bed, after having stalled it for a couple months.

Has to be a typo. Refer to (this one obviously on purpose):

Kabu's point is a good one, though: games are massively more complex now than they used to be. VNs, honestly, shouldn't be by as much since they aren't that much more complex than they used to be (generally), but if you look at the thing that's delaying them in the case of Libra, it's exactly the new technology they aren't familiar with: Steam features. For AAA games, it's clearly the complexity that leads to this. Hundreds of people work on one AAA game at a time. Scheduling a single project with that many moving parts is exceptionally difficult, and when such a project undergoes a large directional change (which happens), turning that ship can easily mean years of setback and lost work. Alternatively, if they have that kind of directional change and then choose not to delay, and instead just ship what they can by repurposing their assets and building something with it, we end up with Destiny (that is, in fact, what happened to Destiny, and why the story is incoherent and basically non-existent).

What did you do that fixed it? I actually ran into exactly the same issues you posted about, when I was attempting to run the patch on the version of the game I bought off DMM (after I got through the MSVCRT errors).

I was just thinking yesterday it'd been a while since I'd seen you post, and I was wondering if you'd either abandoned us or gone quietly into that good night. Good to hear you're just out there fighting the good fight.

Nice! This was an interesting listen. A little bit of random commentary from me: I have to admit I kind of roll my eyes whenever I hear people griping about Chrono Clock's localization, since it's honestly one of the better VN translations that's come out in the last year by my lights (I dunno, 80th percentile? 90th percentile?). I get that DD's Japanese interjections are controversial, and I admit I find them annoying as hell too, but I have yet to hear anybody offer any suggestion which I actually believed was a better alternative to capture her bizarre speech. One thing worth mentioning that I've heard is about the way DD is perceived by Japanese readers: apparently her constant English interjections in the original actually come off as incredibly annoying. So, if you find her annoying in translation, perhaps you could say the translator actually nailed her character. I personally find Chrono Clock's frequent British slang even more off-putting, but that decision is even more clearly just a judgement call (if a bad one, IMO, purely from a perspective of sales). The bigger issues with the translation are the horrifying mixture of past and present tense (which I have yet to see a single other person complain about, but which seriously sets my teeth on edge), and the periodic awkward phrasing and mistakes which mostly lurked in some of the clearly unedited routes I played in the initial release. There are still a fair number of proofing errors in the script of the version I'm playing (which I think is the current 18+ release?). It's a shame they rushed the release to meet a deadline, instead of taking the extra month of polish the game could have used. I also don't know how much access to writers people usually get when officially localizing a VN. My understanding, at least, is that that's the exception, not the rule. I'd love it if that became the norm, but I'm pretty sure the typical story today is that license holders and localization companies talk, and then the localization companies then typically hand off scripts to contractor translation teams who basically work on their own. The original developers and writers (i.e., typically not the Japanese license holders) usually don't get pulled in at all (after all, the writers themselves are often contractors as well, and they've long since finished what they contracted for). So, while that's a nice vision of the world, I doubt it happens all that often. But I do dearly hope things move more in that direction, and it does make me happy to hear it happens at least some of the time (this is, honestly, the first such anecdote I've heard).

Super duper congratulations on your release! Does it feel awesome? I bet it feels awesome.

Chris was voiced during the Al Fine route. I very much doubt they will have added new voice acting to this release, or they would have mentioned it. Regarding a new song, I can't imagine that happening for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which is that Ritsuko Okazaki, who created all the songs in the game, passed away in 2004, and the game is very strongly identified with the music she created (Kogado, at least, seems quite proud about that association).

It's only eleven episodes total, and it honestly feels a little disjointed until episode 10, but man, when it comes together, it really comes together.

Shift JIS is a bitch.

You know what, I'm just making a new post this time, because this is important. It's not my fault the thread hasn't had anybody else talking in six days. Ping Pong is outstanding and you should watch it if you enjoy amazing things. I was into it, but not super into it, until episode 10, at which point it all came together and a chorus of angels began to sing. This show is unbelievable, and if you haven't already seen it, do yourself a favor and go watch it.

I read that book, too, actually, and I firmly agree with your restatement of his point regarding the tricorn: it's a great figure, and it's got a lot of extra magic when you really send the line home on that third element. The point about parallel structure goes more towards avoiding using different parts of speech, and it's actually more commonly a problem with simple pairs of things (like in my second example) than it is with longer lists; I just happened to find that really obvious example of busted parallel structure with three things when I was looking over the notes that led me to writing this in the first place. Edit: Also, for some reason I didn't read your whole post before responding. The last line is a very good point as well: there are a lot of lines in scripts that really should just be straight and to the point. If your script threw around a hefty figure of rhetoric on every line, it'd start sounding ridiculous before you were even a few minutes in. But they're great to have around when you want to call attention to a line.

Parallel structure is a really simple concept that you probably already know in the back of your mind, but that you probably could use a little formalism to better understand. The idea is simple: when you're building a sentence with a list of multiple entries (which may potentially be pretty much any part of the sentence), try to keep the syntactic structure of each entry the same. If you don't do this, in the best case, your sentence will be a little harder to follow, and in the worst case, it will be downright ungrammatical. Ready for some examples? Here we go! VN TL Example I was mostly inspired to write this blog post by a translated script I was looking at a few months ago which had quite a lot of parallel structure problems. Here's a particularly clear example sentence demonstrating the issue, from the translated script: Makes me want to put my fist through a wall. The problem is that list of three items: "good grades"; "great looks"; and "is very popular among all the students." One of these things is not like the others. So, what do you do about it? You massage them until they're the same, of course. You could try to rewrite that last one to an "<adjective> <noun>" format like the others, e.g., "<some adjective> popularity", but I'm having trouble making that work. "High popularity?" Basically nonsense. Maybe chuck the word popular and find some equivalent? At any rate, I gave up on this branch because it was too much trouble already and there were better options: for starters, we could just switch to single adjectives down the line: It's a little terse now, and it doesn't say exactly the same thing, but this sounds quite a lot better because of the improved parallelism. You could also go the other the direction and make them all verbal phrases: Or even rewrite them each as a full-on independent clause: I probably wouldn't go with any of these (I actually didn't edit this line; I just left a note for the person who'd already been through it to come back and fix up the parallel structure). To be honest, most of the words here are pretty bland; the character in question is being painted in dull shades of gray. I'd want to splash some color onto it. And, yes, it should really have a serial comma (you'll see I added it to all of my versions), because the serial comma actually is as great as it's hyped up to be. That said, neither making things more interesting (while of course keeping in mind that the goal is to better match the intent and flavor of the original) nor waxing eloquent on the value of the serial comma is my concern with this blog post. At the moment, the goal is just to avoid wanting to put my fist through a wall, and if we fix all these parallel structure problems, I might just make it through the day with my hands and walls intact. Published News Article (if by "published" you mean "posted to some site on the internet") Example Here's a great, more interesting example. This one I just happened to stumble across mere minutes after I'd settled on writing this blog entry earlier today as I was, out of idle curiosity, poking around for more info about that zoo penguin with a Kemono Friends waifu: My fist is twitching. As with any writing problem, there are many ways to rewrite the sentence to fix the problem, but here's probably the least intrusive fix: insert a "to" after the "accustomed" and before the parenthetical. It's easy to convince yourself this is at least an improvement by dropping that whole additional verbal phrase inside the parentheses and reading the resulting sentence out loud to yourself, since the result is a straightforward, obviously grammatical sentence. As the sentence was originally written, if you drop the parenthetical, the result is equally obviously ungrammatical. So, here's the simple fix: This is passable, in my opinion (assuming the audience for said news article is a bunch of weebs who will understand "waifus and husbandos"), but it's still a pretty extreme example of odd sentence structure, and if you so desire, you can go quite a bit further to fix this up for better readability, by either breaking up that list entirely or by further enhancing the parallelism. This example is particularly interesting, and the mistake here particularly understandable, because the structure of that compound verbal phrase is so complex. My initial analysis was that "to grow accustomed to" was a transitive phrasal verb, but I don't think that's quite correct, because "accustomed to XXXX" is probably best classified as an adjective, which is consistent with this usage of "to grow" being best classified as a linking verb, rather than a transitive verb. By that, I mean that "to grow a fruit tree", the transitive version of "to grow," is quite different from "to grow bored", the linking version of "to grow," of which this is an example. Meanwhile, "to celebrate" is a simple transitive verb. So in this sentence, they've actually managed to build a compound verb phrase out of: a linking verb, linking the subject to a phrasal adjective which takes an object (itself a pretty long, complex noun phrase); and the simple transitive verb "to celebrate," which is taking the same really long noun phrase for an object. Bottom line, it's still a pretty gnarly sentence because of the remaining lack of parallelism between the verb phrases. Want to fix it more? Knock yourself out (but I think my walls are safe from me now, so please don't knock them out). Once you get parallel structure ingrained in your brain, it gets pretty easy to spot problems and to fix them. In fact, you might even start spotting correct usage of parallelism and appreciating it.

You're both right. It both sounds odd to me and is perfectly correct. There's a rather plausible explanation of that phenomenon for this particular word here. I don't agree with the analogies you provide to "cutted" and "hitted", since you're literally making up non-words there, but the analogy to "put" on that page resonates pretty strongly with me since "input" obviously descends from "put". Edit: Also, "it sounds odd and is perfectly correct" doesn't mean you should leave it that way. It means you should change it, because when it comes to written text in this genre, being right isn't nearly as important as sounding right.

TBH, the Taisho x Alice thing (and maybe even all the stuff on that Twitter thread from the last few years) doesn't look to me like a con so much as, like the person in that twitter thread suggested near the end, absolutely gross incompetence. I just can't help wondering how these guys got the job in the first place. I can understand that JP companies will have trouble finding competent people when they have to establish new contacts and whatnot, but it's not like there aren't well-known localizers of JP games. Even in the super specific niche of otome VN localizations, surely they would know about and try to work with Aksys, and failing that, at least some other known entity like MG or Sekai Project? I just can't imagine these clowns from E2Gaming coming off as trustworthy business partners. Guess there's no use speculating about it... Edit: As for the dub, I thought this would be obvious, but just in case some people don't realize: the voice acting for Japanese games is usually licensed out for a specific purpose (i.e., a release in Japan) by the voice acting agency, not by the license holders for the rest of the game. The agency will retain rights for, say, an international release. Moreover, JP voice acting licensing is expensive. In the case of most VNs, it would probably literally be cheaper, or at least break even, and would possibly even be less of a hassle in some cases, to record a completely new, fairly competent dub by voice actors from the the standard anime voice acting talent pool Sentai/Funi/Aniplex employs, rather than to license the JP voice acting for an international release. The reason we get subs only, rather than dubs only, for all VNs isn't a matter of cost efficiency: it's because the companies doing the work aren't required to provide dubs for their fans (because we're all weebs and prefer the original VA anyway), and because organizationally speaking, they're better at doing licensing negotiations with JP companies than they are at organizing an English dub recording. But keep in mind there are a lot of these JP games that have historically not been released with dual audio (look at the somewhat-niche Atelier series, which for a long time was dub-only), which a lot of us weebs complain about: that's a cost-savings measure, make no mistake, and it can be a pretty huge savings, depending on the relative size of your audience. Now, imagine you're not going to do a competent job with the dub: no professional studio, no professional actors, just you, grossly incompetent E2Gaming, on your home computer with a mic you bought off Amazon and Pro Tools. You're talking about saving many tens of thousands of dollars on voice acting at that point. They make money, Primula saves money, you cut one more licensing negotiation out of the picture. Everybody wins... except the people who have to listen to it. The thing that's hard to understand is how E2Gaming sold Primula on this being a good idea, since Primula's people are the very ones who shell out so much money for good voice acting. Obviously they understand how important it is to their own customers. Maybe E2Gaming somehow spun it as "Well, Americans will obviously want English voice acting." Dunno. We probably never will find out.

Yeah, if you don't find the characters likeable, the game definitely isn't going to work for you. I actually like the way the mysteries all kind of fall into place in the player's head shortly in advance of their actual reveal, since it always left me wondering what was going to happen as a result—but if you don't like the characters, you're not going to be interested in how their relationships change as a result of those reveals, and thus you're going to find the game boring. Fortunately I did really like most of the characters, so it worked for me. That said, even I think Lise's route is undeniably bad and that the game would be better off without it. I'll probably replay Symphonic Rain when the official release is out, but I'll probably just skip all the way through Lise's route. I'm one of those crazy people who even likes Fal's route, though, so I'll be looking forward to that.

Jesus christ dude, why are you spoiling important plot points in KiraKira for me and anybody else here who hasn't read it?

How long did it take Rothfuss to write that line, I wonder? A month? Two?

Get real hype, people. It's coming June 14th, and initial signs (text on the official website and on the Steam description) are looking good for the TL: http://www.kogado.com/sw/contents/kuroneko/sr2017/en/index.html http://store.steampowered.com/app/629650/Symphonic_Rain/

Has anyone gotten the DMM version of the game to work, either standalone or with a patch? I bought, downloaded, and unzipped it successfully, and I'm running with Japanese system locale for non-Unicode programs, but if I run just the game, it gives me this nastygram, which I'm pretty certain is telling me I should be running the whole OS in Japanese... which I can't imagine all you folks are doing because I've tried it once before and it's annoying: --------------------------- 日本語版Windows判定 --------------------------- This Game is Japan Only このゲームは日本国内でのみプレイ可能です。 動作させるには 『 日本語版Windows 』 が必要です。 ゲームを終了します。 --------------------------- OK --------------------------- Meanwhile, if I try copying over the patch files and running launcher.exe, I get these two delights (and god only knows which version of the CRT it wants...): --------------------------- Launcher.exe - System Error --------------------------- The program can't start because MSVCP100.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem. --------------------------- OK --------------------------- --------------------------- Launcher.exe - System Error --------------------------- The program can't start because MSVCR100.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem. --------------------------- OK ---------------------------