Fred the Barber

Whoa. Apparently I was completely wrong, my bad. At any rate, yeah, Shin Koihime Musou isn't translated and isn't going to be done any time soon, so if you need to read in English, that's your only option.

You want to play this one first: https://vndb.org/v369. The other one is its sequel. The protagonist ends up becoming the lord of a bunch of generals (read: cute girls who fight each other) and armies (read: faceless cannon fodder).

For whatever reason, maybe just because I have fond memories of Atelier Ayesha and it's been a while since I played it, I've been itching to pick up the latest Gust game, Atelier Firis. Anybody played it and have opinions to share? I should really just be holding out for P5, but something about the screenshots I've seen of Atelier Firis is calling to me.

I'm certainly looking forward to this, whatever we choose. I haven't read any of these, and they honestly all look pretty good. Also, I just love stories about musicians. I dug up the fan TL patches for both Quartett! and Brass Restoration today, just to make sure they were still around, but I have to admit, I'm kind of hoping for either Deardrops or Kira☆Kira just since it will be much easier to get a copy of them from MG than it will be to import either of those VNs from Japan (or find a place to buy a digital copy, which seems unlikely to pan out). @Ariurotl, two notes for you: I may or may not have been interested in Deardrops in part because of seeing the guy in your avatar and thinking, "Now that looks like someone I want to read about in a VN." You dropped a ☆ there in Kira☆Kira. Here, you can borrow some of mine: ☆☆☆☆☆

Here are your lovely nominees for the music-themed month of April. The poll will be open through the evening of March 31st PDT, at which time the selection for April will be declared and we'll all start reading. As usual, please only vote if you intend to read along with the club. Happy voting! Deardrops Kira☆Kira Quartett! Brass Restoration

Interesting. Didn't have a clue what you were talking about, but looked it up and am familiar with the parable. That said, I'm not much of a bible person — until I looked it up, I couldn't even remember where "through a glass darkly" came from when I encountered it in the last year.

I strongly suspect you'll enjoy Kindred Spirits. It has an absolutely lovable main character, it's a fantastic game (way up there on my list of favorites), and it has the same lighthearted vibe as Chrono Clock. Aside from that, give Karakara a try. It's short and sweet and good, and there's a sequel in the works. Supipara is a good reco as well, but be aware that the translated release only has one route, and the others might come... eventually...

I'm actually surprised that neither of you knew that meaning of "stiff", but I was raised on a strict diet of American television and whatever books I could get my hands on, so maybe that's really not all that well-known... Don't know if I learned that from Get Smart or from Dashiell Hammett, but if I were ever writing a detective show or something, that word would come to mind immediately at the right times.

While "whitewashing" is the common event and the most-known term for it (and deservedly so, since it's really a frightfully clever and nicely alliterative term), someone even coined the derivative term "asianwashing" to refer to the Attack on Titan live-action movie, and it got a lot of mockery for it (and for, by most accounts, being crappy, but that's a separate issue). So, as the OP says, this isn't some uniquely American problem: everybody does it. But, contrary to what the OP says, sometimes they get called out on it. That said, I think there's something to be said for avoiding "whitewashing" (or asianwashing, or anything). I don't want to get lynched by gamergaters for allegedly saying that there's some moral obligation to representative sample of the population in a piece of entertainment media, so I'm going to try to address this on purely artistic merits: when a director, for example, takes a manga that's written almost entirely about a bunch of European people who go so far as to point out how weird it is that one of their companions is from Japan and makes a movie where every last one of those characters is played by a Japanese person, don't you feel like they've kind of lost some of the flavor of the original? Distinct cultural backgrounds are a very real thing. A lot of us around here probably enjoy a lot of Japanese stuff simply because it's Japanese, and therefore different from our usual experience. Whitewashing cleans out all of that differentiation and leaves you with a blander cast. It just makes things less interesting.

In fairness, I did have to look up nugatory. I've certainly heard it before, but couldn't remember it without any context. The only other stumper this time was that usage of "rum," which is apparently British, old-fashioned, informal speech. Not shedding any tears over not knowing that one. "Abattoir" is only a good word when you're writing a high fantasy novel and you want to make your carnage-covered battlefield sound fancy, in my experience, but I guess I don't read a lot of horror fiction, which is probably another good place for it to show up. "Sultry" and "suss" are great words; use them all the time!

While I'd be delighted to hear that, it seems unlikely given they've already announced Sona-Nyl but haven't started progress on it. I doubt they'd double-down on those titles.

Well, yes and no. MangaGamer only has a booth at SakuraCon, not a panel, so they won't be announcing anything there. It looks like SP will have a panel there, presumably as well as a booth, so I expect they'll be announcing things (they usually do). Both of those are business as usual for those two companies at SakuraCon - both of the last two years were exactly the same, IIRC. The Sekai Project panel at SakuraCon was incredibly well attended last year (like, maybe a hundred people?), so I'm kind of surprised MG doesn't come there, too, but I expect it's a question of costs and inconvenience; traveling isn't cheap and they probably don't have a huge number of personnel who could run a panel, whereas just having a booth to sell stuff is a lot easier. Anyway, apologies for the threadjack. To get back to the topic, aside from the FFG announcement, I have no expectations (in either sense) for the MG announcements at Anime Boston, but I'm content with that one.

The lack of romance in P4 for both the nurse and the stepmother was borderline criminal (but especially the nurse, I mean, damn...).

Only opinion I've seen (though I think it was a somewhat biased one) is that the Steam version messed up some things that the JAST version got right, so you're likely better off with the JAST version.

Recommend you to: start a new save periodically, and maybe check in for further advice after you finish your first route if you find yourself confused (I know I did) Have fun! I first played it long after I'd already watched the anime, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Kyonyuu Fantasy Gaiden is a pretty likely candidate though, and I, for one, will play it. I wonder how they'll localize the title...

Not sure what's up with your strikethrough "unfitting" there, but if I'm understanding it correctly, I think you may have missed the boat on a lot of the game's allusions. The original Japanese script heavily cribs from Platonic terminology (go look up anamnesis, for instance) and Platonic philosophy in general, and though I'm not certain, I'm pretty sure the word you're referring to is yet another example of borrowed Greek philosophy terminology and not Japanese at all. I believe the word they're saying is essentially "meme" (which is, of course, a very good reason not to just transliterate it...), and that it's actually a reference to mimesis. Relatedly, here's a short blog post from the game's editor which talks a bit about this stuff: http://blog.mangagamer.org/2017/02/22/allusions-in-pygmalion/

I didn't see it posted elsewhere (I probably just missed it), but just so it's in this thread too: The game is actually going to be VR, though it will support a non-VR mode for plebes like me. Sekai Project has long-since been confirmed to be handling the US release. The English release is coming out really soon, on March 31st 2017

I haven't forgotten you either, @Mr Poltroon, I've just been ignoring you since you asked about stuff that was harder to answer. For starters, I totally agree with you that asterisked sound effects are less of an interruption than singularly complex sentence structure. Forcing the reader to go back and re-read a sentence just to try to understand what the blazes is going on when all they want is to move on to the next element in the plot is anathema to the goal of most VNs, which is, generally, to offer the straightforward entertainment of a quick jaunt through a story world, rather than the joy of ruminating on a particularly fibrous utterance. However, *clears his throat*, I would like to point you at the hill you're about to go sliding down. It is, if I do say so myself, a slippery slope *wink*. My own personal experience with trying to use this technique was that use instantly turned to abuse *sigh*. Before too long, the dialogue was filled with all sorts of things that had no business being there; they weren't sounds being made by a speaker at all, but rather related actions which, if they needed to be communicated, belonged more properly in a narration line, and if none was available, why then the dialogue itself would have to carry the meaning *shakes his head*. It simply doesn't make sense for characters to be communicating quite so much in what is, ultimately, a poor excuse for narration *nod*. In a nutshell, I found that the technique simply did my script more harm than it did my script good. The same is true of the use of italics in scripts I've read: I have seen them used only once that I can recall, in an official translation, and while once or twice they were helpful, much more often they were completely unneeded and simply served to call attention to themselves and look out of place. When a tool causes you more harm than it does you good, it's better to simply force yourself to throw it out and work under tighter constraints. Art has always and will always flourish under constraints, and I personally have not found it particularly onerous to go without this one tool; on the contrary, I've relished the change. Aside from their usage to introduce lists of things, you can also use a colon in place of a semi-colon when the half of a sentence after the colon is more like an illumination/rephrasing of some part of the first half, rather than a separate, related, independent clause. It's kind of an advanced technique, I guess? I don't mention it in the guide both because I don't have a solid handle on the rule myself and because I think it's not really a necessary thing to do (there are plenty of other options available), but I certainly do use colons this way myself from time to time without much thought. Your usage looks perfectly cromulent to me. (I would probably always assume the former interpretation, not the latter, without some strong contextual evidence otherwise, and I would probably only find it not to be a somewhat odd utterance when coming on the heels of a request for help putting on a seatbelt.)

TBH, I'm pretty interested in this topic as well, and really should check out Fault myself, since it's the only one I can think of. That said, the closest I can think of that I've read would be (and neither of these is precisely what you're asking for, to be sure, but both are kind of in the ballpark): eden* Karakara

I'll start by reiterating my position that I have shit taste, but honestly, I really liked the original Karakara. It's "just a moege," but it at least has a unique setting and doesn't drag, both of which are more than you can say for most moege. So, I'm even looking forward to Karakara 2. And, if I'm being honest with myself, I'll probably even try out Neko-nin as a guilty pleasure.

I once witnessed a friend being asked if he wanted "soup or salad" request the "super salad, that sounds amazing!"

Just like last time for half of these my reaction is, "Really, you didn't know that?" and for the other half my reaction is, "What the hell does that mean?" That said, so far, every time I look up a word in the second category, I find out it's non-American slang, and then I don't feel so bad.

@Zakamutt thanks, this is great! Addressed your comments and uploaded a new version of the guide. Here's some line-by-line responses as well: Good point, I completely missed this pattern. That said, I haven't actually formed a strong opinion about what's the right thing to do with these, assuming I'm following the rest of the guidelines in the style guide; my inclination is to go the same direction you say. It does feel like it goes against the grain of the "drop honorifics" theme, but this casual form with the glottal stop feels more like a nickname than like proper (and thus somewhat less meaningful) usage of an honorific. Majo Koi actually has exactly one route where, as a running joke, everybody starts calling Takumi "Takkun" (my suspicion: possibly a different writer from the rest of the VN, and the head writer just shrugged it off and rolled with it). Now, honorifics are actually still in the current Majo Koi script, but I'm likely to drop them soon (like... probably today or tomorrow I'll go through the whole script and rewrite them away). When I do that sweep, I expect Takumi will retain that same ridiculous-sounding pseudo-nickname, Takkun. I've updated the guide to mention this form and that suggestion, but I'm intentionally leaving out the term "glottal stop" from it, since I don't think most people have studied enough phonology to look at that phrase and react with anything but "Wot?" It's now available in markdown format and the blog link has been updated (and I actually deleted the .txt file). Should be much more readable now; apologies for my laziness in not doing so sooner. I actually had had people complain to me about the formatting before, but it wasn't on github so it wasn't quite as bad back then, so I just ignored them... But yeah, the display on github was pretty bad. I did indeed intend to say senpai, sensei, onee-san, etc., are not honorifics (though obviously the "-san" there is). I think I was going into this with the mindset that "English doesn't have honorifics," but of course I was just plain wrong there; it does. They're just less ubiquitous than the Japanese ones. I've brushed up this section a fair bit, and generally went along the same lines of what you have here. I modified this section a bit to explain the backing reasoning for this opinion: in a nutshell, GivenName FamilyName is the natural order in English, so I honestly expect people to just find the alternative confusing. What it comes down to is, at this point, even if I was given a blanket guarantee that every single Japanese translation I saw from here on out was going to have names in FamilyName GivenName order, I'd still have to think hard about it due to the accumulated weight of experience reading stuff in English. That said, like I mentioned in the section, this is one where I have a less strong opinion; I mostly called it out just to make sure it was mentioned and that I could drive home the importance of consistency in it, more so than to lay out a single answer. Good point! I should call out that my list here is not intended to be prescriptive. "Uuu" is often more of a slightly disgusted "Ugh," for instance, and probably some other things as well. I've updated the section to drive home that these are examples and not a blanket gospel answer, and also to mention the "ugh" translation of "Uuu." Done I always feel a bit like I'm making an argumentum ad baculum when I say "you should use American English because there are more of us," and I don't think there's really any better rationale than that one. So, while I do religiously hold to this style myself and get annoyed when anybody else doesn't (looking at you, Chrono Clock), I don't think I really have a leg to stand on, so I prefer to leave it as a somewhat petulant statement of personal preference. It's my way of saying, "You can do something else if you really want, but personally, it'll make me sad."

Thanks, @Fiddle, for all the feedback. Addressed it all and updated the document. Still need to look through Zaka's feedback... Line-by-line comments on Fiddle's comments. Insanely enough, I actually noticed my previous example had exactly the same problem today before I posted this, and so I rewrote it... but apparently I rewrote it to another sentence with exactly the same problem. FML. Fixed. I edited this myself today and fixed up all the little problems I saw, but of course I couldn't stop myself from rewriting some sections entirely, so naturally I introduced more typos. Like, say, this one. FML. Fixed. Your guidance is very much appreciated, thank you! I've fixed up this section with all these recommendations. I figured it went without saying, but sure, I've added a whole section devoted to the superiority of the serial comma, just for you. Plus there was a funny news story about it recently, so adding this section gives me a chance to share that.