Fred the Barber

Not all opinions presented in the style guide are universally held. They are, however, all indisputably correct.

Regarding asterisked sound effects, I kind of used to think the same thing: what am I supposed to do with this weird sound anyway? So I used them. Then I looked back and the script was just littered with them. They were everywhere, and they really interrupted the flow of reading. So, I went through in one day and gutted them out of the script, and it was like a breath of fresh air. Since then, I came around to the conclusion in the guide, that it's best to just universally avoid the asterisk thing, and judging from the recent official localizations I've read, I'm not alone on that opinion. I only see them in fan TLs nowadays, and they're always jarring, especially in speech lines. Once you force yourself to avoid them, you find both that it's not really all that hard and that it massively pays off in terms of readability.

While the principal job of a good VN editor is line editing (making sure that a line reads well and that a script flows), copy editing is vital as well, and copy editing should follow a style which is consistent both internally and with other comparable texts. That said, most VN editors (myself included) are way too lazy to sit and read the MLA, Chicago, or AP style guide cover to cover and actually internalize it, let alone to extrapolate from them what, if any, changes need to be considered for styling a VN, which, being a different medium, may require different stylistic choices than the media covered by traditional style guides. As is abundantly obvious if you read older officially-localized VNs, VN style has grown somewhat organically over the past decade and, if you compare against works published in only the last year, you'll find that the predominant style has become fairly consistent across the major localization companies. However, fan translations often miss the mark and make many styling mistakes and deviations from this standard, resulting in irritatingly inconsistent texts. To help solve that, I put together this brief VN style guide a couple months ago and shared it around a number of people, and I've subsequently refined it a bit in preparation for posting it publicly today. This is not a full prose style guide by any means, but it covers every interesting and potentially divisive topic I've seen come up in styling VNs; it is, I believe, pretty complete, especially given how concise it is. I've tried to avoid topics of grammar and of style that are not generally deviated from in VNs. Basically, I only tried to tackle areas where people actually have issues. This style guide, I believe, more or less represents the state of the art in officially localized VNs. I haven't read a recent official localization which I noticed to be following different rules than the ones I lay out here. All that said, take this with a grain of salt: I'm not a professional, and I haven't actually read any official MLA/Chicago/AP style guide cover to cover, though I have dabbled in each of them. At the end of the day, this is more a summary of what I've empirically discovered than anything else. But when you're a fan translation editor, you've got to start somewhere; this is a better option than any other that I know of. https://github.com/FredTheBarber/EditingPublic/blob/master/style guide.md Feedback is most welcome, whether to offer corrections or to ask questions for areas which I have not covered. Edit: By popular demand, I've made a markdown version of the document so it doesn't display like shit on github. The link has been updated accordingly. Edit2: who will edit for the editors?

Trying to hold myself to my recent claim that I prefer reading top-notch genre fiction over weeby stuff, I read Brandon Sanderson's novella Snapshot yesterday. It's a fun, short mystery + soft sci-fi read, and, as always with Sanderson, it's predicated on a very interesting "but what if the world worked this way?" premise. Since I had a bunch of time to kill waiting at the airport and then flying, and Snapshot was pretty short, when I finished it I picked back up the last volume of Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy, Last Argument of Kings, which I stalled out of months back. I'm about halfway through that final book of the trilogy, and Abercrombie started seriously cleaning house. Lots of loose ends getting tied up. That actually succeeded at seriously sucking me into the story, even though it's been so long, and I'm going to try to finish it this weekend.

VNs with some amount of literary merit exist, but they're the very rare exception, and they are by and large not very popular, especially in the west (when we even get translations of them...). Visual Novels are an entertainment medium, first and foremost, and it shows. That's neither a bad nor a good thing; it doesn't make sense to knock entertainment media for doing its thing. I like reading literary stuff every now and then, but in most of my leisure time I'm just looking for some good entertainment, and VNs often deliver that for me. But like Ariurotl said, they're not even at the top of the entertainment game for the most part: when the newest Brandon Sanderson book or Brent Weeks book comes out, I have a lot more fun reading top-notch genre fiction than I do reading VNs. Judging by the two I've read, as ChaosRaven pointed out, even games from the steampunk series, often acclaimed as some of the more thoughtfully-written VNs, have a bare minimum of really blatant symbolism, basically no subtext, and, when the dust settles and the rationale behind everything becomes clear, they have extremely straightforward plots. I love them dearly anyway, in large part because of the juxtaposition of the ultimate simplicity of the underlying motivation behind the entire plot and the vast resulting impact the events have on the world. But the fact remains: large, complex worlds; simple texts. The more I read it, the more I realize Majo Koi Nikki has a surprising amount of subtext and symbolism woven throughout certain sections of it. But I won't kid myself: that makes up maybe 3% of the writing, at most. There's probably as much time spent on sex scenes as there is on developing and building the underlying themes and messages, and this puts it in the far high end of literary focus I've detected in VNs I've read (though I'm quite sure a lot of this is simply a result of the sheer amount of time I've spent re-reading Majo Koi Nikki). Since they aren't subject to the same market conditions and thus don't suffer the innovator's dilemma to nearly such an extent as the entrenched Japanese VN makers, non-Japanese VNs may perhaps have a better chance at breaking the mold and telling at least somewhat different stories. VA-11 HALL-A is, in some ways, a more interestingly-told story than any other VN I've ever read, because it makes the unusual choice of putting the point-of-view character on the fringes of conflict, only relating snippets of the lives of the characters closer to the core by means of their conversation with the bartender narrator. I can't imagine any Japanese VN doing this; they're too stuck pandering to an audience requiring self-insert characters who are the most important person in the story. That said, if anything, non-Japanese VNs almost universally do an even worse job of it than Japanese VNs, since they try too hard to emulate a formula, and often even emulate the setting along with it. Every time I see another OELVN project about a bunch of people with Japanese names, I roll my eyes, and I'm worried I'm about to go cross-eyed over here. Anyway, maybe time to summarize: there's stuff out there that's more like what it seems you're looking for, but not a lot of it, and even then it's not a primary focus, because your expectations are probably a bit out of whack.

Then by all means, toss Da Capo 2 into the running, too. At least as far as I'm concerned, a tangential tie-in just gives people a bit more variety to choose from when the poll goes out. This isn't exactly something we need to be hyper strict about

"ef" did cross my mind, and I'd +1 that nomination. IMO, the themes are more to help people think of ideas than to be really strict guidelines about a topic. Would also +1 G-Senjou no Maou on those grounds, but I definitely won't be voting for that since I already read it and didn't think it was all that great

My understanding is they share characters but that Deardrops isn't really a sequel even vaguely, so it's probably fine to read them in either order. Also supposed to be surprisingly different experiences, aside from the obvious musical link.

Don't worry, @akaritan, this is why we have moderators to select the initial list that gets voted on.

Deardrops, Quartett!, surely some more that I'm unaware of. Edit: Ar nosurge is on VNDB, just saying. Edit2: Oh and we can't forget this gem. I bet Vorathiel would be all over it.

That's a not small number of votes already, so what the heck, let's do this. if you've got theme ideas, start tossing em out there, and maybe I'll start a private message chat among the more enthusiastic people to pick a theme and then nominees for the final poll, which will be public again? I know we've done this one before, but I'll toss my theme suggestion into the ring: music (no Symphonic Rain allowed this time, since the club read it the last time we did music, about a year and a half ago)

Lately, I've felt like I'm probably falling too much into the trap of reading only stuff that happens to catch my eye, either because it's new and shiny or because it's in my niche. I always enjoyed the reading club when it was around both since it forced me to get out of those set patterns and since it gave me people with whom to chat about what we were reading. So, I figured I'd gauge interest and maybe try to revive it yet again, at least for a one-month trial stint. Questions I'm trying to answer: Would we get a fair turnout, both to vote and to read? What should we use for a "theme"? Is anybody interested in offering nominations for the poll, once we have a theme decided? And a couple of simple ground rules I had in mind, if we do this: Nominations have to be, at the longest, a "medium" length VN on VNDB, so that we all have time to read it in the given month. The last club's dying gasp was a "Very Long" gameplay VN, which I think exactly one person read, and I'd like to avoid that mistake this time around. Since it just seems to frustrate people, no attempt at setting rules on when people can start discussing, though all discussion should of course annotate spoilers appropriately. I'm tentatively aiming to start the poll in late March to select a VN for April, so if any of the above tickles your fancy, don't hesitate to chime in.

Utsuge, chuunige, and nakige/moege, I guess? We need more English-localized utsuge.

Nothing drags like Clannad, man. Nothing. Seems like I take another point away from it every time I go back and revise my VNDB scores.

FWIW, Yukiko gets a lot more interesting when you spend more time with her, but, yeah, I have to agree with most of what you said. Frankly your largely negative opinion of the game is reassuring, since I keep seeing people talk about how great 11eyes is, and I really thought it had a lot of problems, especially in the character department, which is typically an easy win for VNs.

FWIW, I didn't have any problems with relative sound levels that I can recall. It's rare for me to adjust sound levels at all, but I sometimes do, and always in the situation you describe where the music is too loud and the voices too quiet, such that they get drowned out. That said, I don't recall whether I did any adjustment with Pygmalion's sound levels. Do you use headphones, or your laptop speakers? I actually played the whole game on a tablet and listened through the tablet speakers, but I find the quality of the speakers has a dramatic impact on perceived relative volume of human speech vs. background music (though right now I can't remember which way I decided it biases things ). Incidentally, in case you're thinking listening on my tablet speakers means I'm crazy, while I agree it's a less immersive experience than using headphones, it makes it much lower-friction for me to get into the game. Since I have problems getting started on playing a game sometimes, I try to optimize for ease of pick-up-and-play, so that's how I'm usually rolling these days.

I finished both Maria the Virgin Witch and Engaged to the Unidentified in the last couple days. Maria was really something special — not a 10/10, but a solid 9/10. I'm a sucker for strong female leads, first of all, and Maria is as strong as they come, in terms of both will and power. There were times when I thought the show was approaching being a little too whiny, but every time that happened (basically any time Joseph opened his mouth), I was pleased to see that the writers agreed with me and promptly used the familiars to great comedic effect to totally undercut the mood and get me to laugh. I fell for the side characters almost as hard as I did the main characters; aside from the witch quartet, they were all unique and striking, from crafty and crazy Brother Bernard, through saucy and lovable Viv, to cute and innocent Anne, with a lot of stops in between they were all just so different. Probably most importantly for my final very positive feelings about the series, the ending was a total knockout, bringing both a lot of cool surprises and a satisfying conclusion. What a great show! Engaged to the Unidentified was merely fine. Very pleasant, but pretty cookie-cutter rom-com. Edit: A day later, I've picked up Orange and watched the first three episodes. Looking really, really good so far. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be rating this one highly as long as it has a complete ending, but just how highly depends on the nature of the ending.

For sure, it's by no means hard to do, so I always write around the need for a present-tense aside like that because it brings a lot of fourth wall-breaking baggage along for the ride (unless it's intentional to break the fourth wall, in which case, an aside is exactly what I'm going to use). That said, it's a pretty natural thing to do when you're relating a story in person, so I wanted to drop it in there to use as a negative example of how the "trick" doesn't always work, and you may have to think a little further.

I'm just going to jump right in and give you the answer: imagine you're telling someone a story about something that happened to you a month ago. It's that easy. Ingrain that mindset into your brain, and you, too, can write in past tense without sounding like a madman. Before I launch into an example, I do want to point out that there's nothing inherently wrong or right with writing in either the present tense or the past tense. Some things come off better in one or the other, and both are common choices in VN localizations. I have a personal slight preference for past tense, even though it's a little harder to write in, even once you know the trick, but either is fine. That said, I firmly believe that a localization should make a conscious choice for the tense in which the flow of narration proceeds and should then stick to it. All too often, even in professional localizations, there will clearly be an intended tense for the events in the flow of narration, but then the tense will slip back and forth between that choice and the alternative. This reads really unnaturally, and it frankly bugs the crap out of me, keeping me from being able to fully enjoy what I'm reading. It's one thing to intentionally switch, for instance by consciously employing the historic present (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_present), but it's another thing entirely to just be sloppily jumping back and forth because you don't know what you're doing. So, here, let me make up a story and write it the way I would tell it to you out loud if you were sitting next to me, and then let me write it the way it would hypothetically have been written in some of the localizations I've read recently. After that, I'll break down the pieces and explain why and how I'm doing things differently, and even a little bit of why things that may look questionable are okay, in this example. Now, here's the way you'd see this sort of thing written in a couple of the localizations I've read recently: "The night before" vs. "Last night" and "By that night" vs. "Tonight." This is, honestly, the big one, and the way I snuck in a present tense verb into the very last sentence after "tonight" is a clear sign of the problem (and is exactly how it would have been written in some of the things I've looked at recently, mixed-tense sentence and all). You cannot say "last night" to describe something that happened a month and one day ago; people don't do that. When you write "last night," that "last night" is relative to the person narrating the story, and you're narrating something that happened in the past, so that means "last night" should be, in all likelihood, in the future, relative to the story you're telling. The result is nonsense. The same thing happens with "tonight." The word is relative to the present you, not relative to the past you, and no gymnastics with the verb are going to prevent that interpretation. Trying to write these words into the flow of events in the past tense makes you sound like a madman. There are a lot of other words with the same behavior, to some degree or other: "now," (probably the very worst), "here," "this," "these," and so on. Picture yourself sitting across from someone, telling a story, and try to use those words in the story, and you'll realize they simply don't work correctly. Take "here" for example: "here" is where you are. If you're sitting in the office, telling your coworker about your amusement park trip a month ago, and you drop the word "here", they're going to naturally expect you mean the office, and when you're trying to use that word to refer to the amusement park, they're going to get horribly confused. Those words all have to refer to something around you at present, not something that was around you a month ago at the time of the story. You have to swap them out for words like "then," "there," "that," and "those." Basically, you need words with an appropriate sense of distance to them. I see this kind of line all the time in VN translations: Every time I see it, it makes me want to cry. I suspect there are a couple reasons why so many VN localizations fall into the trap of using words like this as part of past tense narration: They write individual isolated narration lines, often surrounded by long stretches of dialogue. Of course, dialogue isn't rewritten into the past tense, like the narration, but delivered naturally as the character delivered them, so you simply end up seeing lots of dialogue for a while, and you start to get some cognitive dissonance pushing you towards present tense. VN narration is always surrounded by images and voice acting, which lends everything a sense of immediacy. This gives an even stronger push towards the feel that everything is happening "now," unconsciously biasing the writer towards present tense. However, you'll never find this kind of word usage in the past tense in a professionally-published novel, where those two conditions don't apply. You could use those two reasons as an argument for why VNs should be written in present: maybe, arguably, it's just easier on the brain. I personally don't really think so, but ultimately, you can choose what tense you want. If you want to write present tense, go for it. If you want to write past tense, though, you need to overcome all of that and start using the right words. "Hadn't been able to sleep" vs. "couldn't sleep." This one kind of sucks because it's more verbose in the past perfect, but this is a necessary consequence you have to accept when the flow of events narrated is in the past tense. How should you describe events which happened prior to the flow of narration? Grammatically speaking, what happened before the past? That's the past perfect tense. "I went to the store, but before that I had gone to the bank to make a withdrawal so I could buy groceries." If you don't put the past perfect tense on events which already happened relative to the past, the order isn't as obvious. Yes, you absolutely can say "I went to the store, but before that I went to the back to make a withdrawal," but when you do this it's more like a mental rewind. You start playing the narration forward with the first clause, but then you say, but wait, before we can do that, I need to actually rewind the narration and tell you about this bank trip. In this example it's fine, but imagine you're telling a long complicated story (like, say, narrating a VN), and at some point you need to refer back to an event that was already narrated, maybe something days in the past relative to the flow of narration. You can't do a mental rewind in that circumstance. You can do a flashback, but usually such thoughts aren't a full-on flashback, which itself is basically that mental rewind that resets the flow of events; these are much more often simply the narrator reflecting on something happening in the past relative to the current flow of events. You need to put that recollected past event relative to your past narration into the past perfect tense. What's that present-tense clause doing there? "They've got great thrill rides there" is a particularly interesting clause, being in the present tense, so I want to talk about it for a moment. This is basically an aside (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aside), and as such it's bound by different rules. It's a statement directly addressed at you, the reader, rather than a part of the narration of the story. In the case of an aside, it's perfectly reasonable to make an observation about the present state of things. That said, in VN writing, I try to avoid this entirely. Of necessity, an aside is breaking the fourth wall. This is fine if you're doing it for a good reason (maybe you're Deadpool and you just love breaking the fourth wall), but not so fine when it's not stylistically important, and it's just making a simple observation. In this circumstance, it would be a needless disruption, in a VN. That said, it does feel perfectly natural when I'm just informally telling a story. IMO, this is one point where the process of telling a story and the process of writing VN narration diverge. The trick isn't completely foolproof; it's just a hell of a lot better than writing without any guidance at all, wandering aimlessly between tenses.

Aside from the Larry reference, which I guessed to be a Three Stooges thing but couldn't be sure without context until I saw Decay's confirmation, and the "It's a fair cop!" which I guessed to be a strange use of the phrasal verb "to cop to" (http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/cop-to) but was wrong since apparently it's common British and Aussie slang (though the usage looks pretty similar to that phrasal verb; probably related?), everything in here is common English speech that you would pick up from watching English TV or movies, reading English novels, or speaking to native English speakers. Moreover, all of it is common American English, aside from the "barmy" and the aforementioned "it's a fair cop". It's kind of weird to me to see a localization into British English, TBH, but it's fine; I deal. Localizations into English are written for people who speak English, so, while I think you're trying to cast the fact that you don't understand all this stuff as a negative of the localization, it's falling on deaf ears because, well, we speak English. I'm sorry you apparently don't speak it very well. If you want to enjoy stuff written in English, you should probably take an attitude that you should learn more of it, rather than that you should criticize the stuff you read for not dumbing down the content to what you already know. Edit: Forgot the "mi amor", too. Not English, but it's not uncommon to borrow extremely well-known and easily comprehensible phrases like this from Romance languages when speaking in English, mon cheri.

I voted it 8, not 8.5. A 1-10 scale is already ridiculous enough; it doesn't need fractional values. Be careful with that - I know he gave a caveat about potential problems, but I can go a bit farther and confirm there are problems with it and Pygmalion: at least one game crash for me, and several black screen issues.

Circling back around after playing most of Pygmalion with this fix, and while it does indeed fix the screen tearing perfectly, there are unfortunately several pretty serious issues: Results in a complete black screen during certain visual effects (notably the sepia tone one), and a partial black screen (UI overlay + text box is visible, sprites + background are black) during other visual effects. Can't remember which caused which, but one of the problematic effects was a sepia tone, which was used a few times, and the other was one with cherry blossoms fluttering by. Results in a crash during episode 6, I believe it was, during the scene where: I really appreciate that you put in all the work on this, and it was honestly lovely reading the game without the screen tearing, but I'd probably recommend against people using it right now, between the above issues.

https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2017/03/08/the-shadows-of-pygmalion/ Seriously, though, that one kiss scene was hotter than the sum total of all the H scenes in a few eroge I've played.

The weeb I work with says "gomenasorry". It makes me want to cry.

Sorry if it's coming off that way. This is why I usually go out of my way to say that I enjoyed the plot and a couple of the characters, to make it clear that I'm talking about the micro-level writing, not the bigger picture. Moreover, I don't usually bother trying to explain that I'm talking about the writing in the translation since it's usually irrelevant — I figure anybody who's going to potentially listen to my opinion on a VN is almost certainly not someone who can read Japanese in the first place. That said, you've got a totally fair point, and I should be more precise. If you can read 11eyes in Japanese, the writing is probably fine, though my caveats about route structure and some of the characters would certainly still stand. But unfortunately the English TL reads terribly.