Fred the Barber

Congratulations and welcome back! I forgot how amazing your signature was until now

Finished season 1 of Zero no Tsukaima. I am still annoyed that they took the best character they had and turned her into a cackling evil villain, and more generally I'm annoyed that there was literally no motivation given for any of the villains. However, the ending was cute and the protagonists are all sweethearts, so I'm still pretty content with the show. I'll probably continue watching the series, though I might take a detour for something else on the way. Also watched the last episode of Sakamoto Desu Ga, which was of course the coolest. I'm sad I don't get to see any more, but I think it was just about the right length, and I liked the way they kept things mysterious right up through the end. The show walked a thin line with Sakamoto's character, and IMO it succeeded masterfully.

I am suddenly quite a bit more interested in Maitetsu.

Them's fightin' words, TD. I think you're right about everything else, though. One of these days, I should probably play Princess Waltz or KoiRizo, but I expect those won't match up to gliders in terms of grabbing my interest. Wish I could read Miagete Goran, or even Cocoro@ Function...

Comyu was my first chuunige, and I was pretty nervous about it, even though I'd heard vague and positive murmurs about it before. But I'd gotten into VNs purely for The Feels(TM), and I was doubtful whether I'd enjoy all this shounen-y fight scene stuff. The reading club was reading it, though, and the whole reason I'd joined that was to expand my horizons, so I couldn't very well back out. That turned out to be a good call. Fantastic game. It told me interesting stories, and felt well put-together as a big overarching plot, despite the branching and repeated common route (though a strictly-enforced route order helps with that, obviously). It definitely brought the feels down hard at one point. And the ending kicked more ass than any other VN ending I've seen. Comyu was also the first time I actually appreciated an H scene. My only previous experiences with them were in Kanon and F/SN, though, so knowing what I do now, it's not a huge surprise that I found them completely cringe-worthy before.

The carefree zero-fucks-given sucks-to-be-you-Funya tone of this post goes perfectly with your Louise avatar.

Havoc, have you looked into frozen concentrated orange juice futures recently? It's important to keep your retirement in mind at all times, and with all the recent market volatility there, I'd say you should definitely be considering it: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/orange-juice-on-track-for-third-session-of-losses-20160622-00558

The sexual content tags don't appear by default on the game description pages, I think; maybe that's the source of confusion?

@Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, after all. And while it is perhaps true that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, most people won't stop and smell the roses if you don't present them properly.

Apparently I'm alone on this one at Fuwa, but I love a good fireworks show, even absent a cute girl. I can't really justify why very well... but they're pretty, and I like feeling the thump of the explosion in my rib cage.

I was going to call you out for posting this before the actual day, but then you mentioned it and owned your own mistake. How un-American of you.

Since the translated prologue script for Majo Koi Nikki is more or less finalized, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. So here I am, kicking off the editing blog I've been meaning to work on for a while, and also trying to build some hype for our TL project, where we are planning to release a patch for the official free trial version of the game soon, as a signal of how things are going towards our final patch for the full game. Like many things in life, translating occasionally means making trade-offs. With a large text, some detail and nuance isn't going to come through, regardless of how good at it you are. As a translator, TLC, or editor, one prime responsibility you have is to identify as many of those nuances and references as you can. But even if you're quite successful on that mark, you'll still occasionally be faced with a set of translation options that precludes maintaining everything; even among the nuances you found, something must be lost in translation. What should you do? Simple: evaluate your options and choose the best trade-off available. This is a story about a trade-off. The first sentence of the VNDB summary of Majo Koi Nikki (courtesy of these fine fellows) is: "Alice lives alone in an old barber shop in the shopping district of the rose-colored town." Rose-colored town? Now, don't get me wrong, there's a whole lot of pink in this game, especially in the UI, but the city itself isn't anything you could call rose-colored, unless you were talking about plant stems. See the below night-time aerial shot of the town for reference to how not pink it is, as well as just how pink the UI is. So where did that oddly specific phrase come from? Well, it turns out there's this Japanese phrase, バラ色, appearing all over the original script. It'd be pronounced "barairo", and literally translated, it of course means rose-colored. It most commonly appears modifying a word for town/block/neighborhood (that's their "rose-colored town"), and then with that it also appears modifying a shopping district (finally giving the "shopping district of the rose-colored town" in the VNDB summary). It also modifies a train station; obviously the train station located in that neighborhood. The first translator to come across this phrase, recognizing it as a neighborhood name, just romanized it: "Barairo District", "Barairo Station", "Barairo shopping district". The last phrase has a minor issue (you might wonder, is it a subset of Barairo District, or just a different name for the same whole place? it's the former), but there is a bigger problem here. First off, having multiple translators on the project gave us an interesting view: the phrase got translations as varied as "rose town" and "the pink district". And that spurred us towards consciously thinking: isn't some obsession with pinkness, flowers, or roses kind of an important thing in this game? Definitely more green than rose-colored. Alas, this map view and its cute chibi sprites aren't part of the free trial. I'm writing this blog, of course, because the answer was yes. Rose-colored stuff are an obvious and important motif. And better yet, pretty much every time the writer wanted to put that motif to use, this exact adjective, "barairo", is the word used in the original JP text to signal it. One late-breaking character in the prologue actually has "Barairo" in his full title, and his nickname is a portmanteau of his title: "Baragon". If that's not enough, meanwhile, the adjective "barairo" is the crux of what I view as probably the most important line in the whole prologue (which I'm not going to say any more about; gotta save the goodies for later, after all). To a Japanese speaker, all these things will layer over each other with no problem; it's the same word, after all. But we're not going to literally change that character's name even if it sounded remotely natural to call this guy "Rose-coloredgon" (or, God forbid, "Rogon"; sounds like a hygiene product), and we can't start using "barairo" in English as an adjective to say something is rose-colored; something's got to give. So here's the trade-off we made. First of all, the "Barairo District" gets an English-translated proper name: Rose Village. Sounds nice and quaint, though we technically lost the color from the literal translation. The whole English phrase "rose-colored" starts sounding cumbersome when you try to put it in a proper name, hence, Rose Village. Doesn't it sound like a great place to go get a haircut? "Rose Village Station" and "the Rose Village shopping district" fall out of this naming pretty naturally and sound fine. For the cases where the phrase was simply used as an adjective, rather than a proper name, we're consistently using the adjective "rosy", to get maximum resonance with all the roses we just strewed around the text. Now what about that guy with "Barairo" in his full title? Similarly, it got turned into "Rose"; his title sounds pretty good that way. I'm not telling you what it is. And his nickname? Still Baragon. Which is no longer a portmanteau. That's what we lost. That's the nature of a trade-off. It's unfortunate, but all things considered, it's a small sacrifice for the greater good. And what did we get in trade? Why, only all those lovely roses that the English readers will now see and connect together in their minds, consciously or unconsciously, and which should resonate strongly with the pink UI and pink CGs you'll come across while reading this lovely VN. The patch for the free trial of Majo Koi Nikki isn't out yet, but it's on its way. If you're the romantic type, maybe think of it as a bouquet of roses, from us to you. Enjoy!

I put somewhere between 100 - 200 hours into a typical Disgaea game. I did that a couple of times for Disgaea 1, I think, so it's probably somewhere north of 200, south of 300. I think that's the longest for any JRPG or Western RPG. Now, if you counted MMORPGs... then I don't want to even think about it.

I got some really good advice on this decision when I was trying to figure out what to do in my senior year of college: unless you are certain you want to go to graduate school, don't do it. Anyway, nice to see you back, congratulations on your accomplishment, and best of luck!

You should play Tamaki's route in To Heart 2

Wow. They even figured out what weebs their customers are and just put "Sharin no Kuni" almost everywhere. IIRC, "Wheel Country, Sunflower Girl" had more prominent placement earlier in the campaign (though it looks like the Prefundia has just "Sharin no Kuni" in the title now... but I don't think it was always that way.) One thing for people to pitchfork about: they are very clearly saying that the physical copy of the game isn't going to come with a digital download key, and implicitly saying that the digital copy will arrive before the physical copy. I'd be surprised if it isn't a substantial time gap. So if you're one of the people who griped about not getting to play Clannad for a few months because you only backed and got a physical copy reward, please take better notice this time and don't gripe next time. Anyway, I backed it

The "true" endings in F/SN were definitely more emotionally satisfying than the alternative endings, for me. As for the UBW "Good" Ending:

Confession: Every time I see Flutterz's new avatar, I could swear Kud's in the process of really happily flipping a table.

I generally prefer female MCs over male MCs in my RPGs, but they're so ridiculously rare that I'm excited about this one in spite of a cliche story. A thoughtful, determined, Yona-esque MC would be amazing, but a sexy edgy female MC is fine too.

It seems a bit weak on the in-between scenes to really call it a VN hybrid. I'd say it's a gem-matching game that shows you snippets of a nukige when you win, at best? Because the plot of each route appears to be on about that level. And, yes, there are H CGs, but no H scenes. So, if reading "Ahh... mmm... slurrrrp" and hearing someone moaning are beneficial for your enjoyment of H content, be aware that you won't find them here. HuniePop is better in many ways - gameplay is more interesting, characters are more varied. The art is a little less familiar to the otaku eye, in HuniePop vs. Purino Party, and the voice acting is in English instead of Japanese. So, maybe if you're a really huge weeb, Purino Party might win out on those grounds? Barring some kind of bias like that, definitely play HuniePop rather than this game.

I played it for a couple hours. At first I thought it was soul-crushingly difficult and random, but then it turned out there was an under-explained mechanic which is completely different from HuniePop, and thus my brain never thought to try it: once you pick up a gem, you can drag it all around the board, not just along a column or row, for some 10 seconds. If you don't do this, it's essentially impossible beyond a certain point (basically once the clock appears; I actually survived up until that point, without even lowering difficulty). The gameplay that results from that big mechanic change is substantially different and still complex - unlike in HuniePop, where I built my strategy around a couple of gifts that gave +1 move and +sentiment for matches of 4+ gems, now I have to approach the board completely differently. I'm trying to clear a lot of it at once, rather than build single long strings. I don't think it's more complex than HuniePop, but it is different. I liked all the complex currencies and whatnot that HuniePop was so fascinated with (like in the puzzle game, the heart meter and sentiment, and in the dating sim, the Munny and Hunny). Purino Party is definitely weaker in terms of having an interesting balance of concepts. But the core puzzle game is pretty playable. The English text is fine - I didn't stumble across anything jarringly unnatural. Nothing about the text is going to be noteworthy anyway, so the translation is sufficient to the task.

I've never had a problem with my whiskey dispenser. Just saying.

Why is Kud flipping a table in @Flutterz's new avatar?

I picked up VA-11 Hall-A earlier today and played through the first day so far. The prologue grabbed my attention right away, and the game is fun and engaging. There's gameplay elements, yes, but ultimately the game is basically just about reading character dialogue, so as Turnip said, it's enough of a VN for me. And I'm quite pleased to say that the writing does not suck, which is crucial given that the game is, well, pretty much just dialogue. The gorgeous pixel art and excellent soundtrack sure as hell aren't hurting my impression of the game, either.