Fred the Barber

I'm here to denounce the announcement announcement renouncement.

Playing Sakura Sakura. It's aight. I like the art style a lot. It's aged well, and I'm sure the stupid amount of effort that went into upscaling made this a much more enjoyable experience for me. TBH, the game looks better to me than any other recent release that comes to mind, probably because it hasn't gone too far down the moe route; modern VNs tend to look a little too distorted, in a cutesy way, for my preferences. I tried Sanoba for a while, but the art is really squishy and rounded, relative to my preferences... The story's pretty run-of-the-mill, but it's been a good backdrop for the characters, and it's played out pretty well. I like the way it's balanced showing off all four of the heroines; I never know where the focus is going to shift next, and the common route is usually juggling background exposition for multiple characters at once, in a very natural way. Good pacing. Doing the sub-routes (like the "seven mysteries" stuff) can make things drag a bit... but usually I end up happier for having watched them. This is also one of the few games I've played where I really feel drawn to all the heroines. Like, whoever is on the screen at any point in time, I'm thinking "Oh, she's my favorite." I tend to either drop VNs early or play them to 100% completion, so knowing that I'm not gonna be kinda half-interested through an entire heroine route is a nice plus. All in all, pretty happy with Sakura Sakura. Still early going, though.

Thanks for the announcement of the announcement announcement.

no, that'll be after tonight's four hours of smashing

Played four hours of Smash today. My thumbs are sore.

Shadows of Pygmalion is not what you describe, but it is yuri and chuuni and heavily oriented towards overcoming plot things. I say it's not what you're looking for because it's a 15+ game, not 18+, and it's not nearly as interested in romance as it is in plot (though there is clearly a bit of crushing going on and one very hot kiss to keep you warm at night). I really enjoyed it, at any rate: https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2017/03/08/the-shadows-of-pygmalion/

She's also Rei (aka best girl) from Majo Koi Nikki. Just throwing that out there.

Good, good.

Symphonic Rain Fal Enjoy the rest of the ride! Lise is the brass ring of the bunch, so it only gets better from where you are!

Unprovable either way, but sounds like horseshit to me.

Actually, here's why this argument doesn't hold water: even if 95% of pirates decided not to bother, if that meant the 5% remaining actually bought the game, it would be an unspeakable windfall for the VN market. Piracy of VNs dwarfs actual purchases, and every company in the industry is constantly running on such razor-thin margins, that it's squeezing out all of these companies. Piracy is exactly what prevents us from getting better games, and better translations of them. It's why virtually nobody who works in the industry even tries to make a living off of it. I totally understand why people pirate. It's often easier, it's less intrusive if there's DRM, and sometimes you just can't afford a game. But if you can't afford it, maybe you should stop playing? Because I shit you not, the ratio of pirated downloads to legit purchases is utterly soul-crushing for people who work in the industry and have to see it constantly on the edge of collapsing in on itself.

...there's that thing I helped you with a year ago but which you never released because you were too lazy to make a patch.

The use of "at the same time" is ambiguous: do you mean that no girl can be all three? Or that, at any point in time, no single girl can be all three? e.g., in any given depiction of your waifu, she is at most two of three, but perhaps in alternative depictions she may be that third thing? Fortunately, regardless of the equivocation, you're wrong even on the stronger assertion, because Rei.

I'm pretty sure she's literally fandisc bait. Like, moege makers intentionally include an attractive girl who's not one of the heroines just so they have something to move product if they decide to make a fandisc later.

Sol Press has released four things. Get your facts straight before you predict doom and gloom. From everything I can see, things are going fine there, and they've learned a lot from the various slowdowns and setbacks (not the least of which was the months-long Steam adult content meltdown which hit basically everybody in the industry).

They haven't said anything about a fandisc release yet. I have no knowledge whatsoever, but mixed opinions on whether they'll do it. On the one hand, I imagine this game did well for them and expect the fandisc would too, so it seems only logical that they'd do it. On the other hand, I don't recall SP ever releasing a fandisc before, unless you count the little Grisaia things, which are obviously exceptional (I could be wrong and just unaware of things they've released, though?). Notably, they didn't (yet) do the fandisc for WagaHigh, which I imagine also did well.

I'll probably always associate snow with Kanon. It helps that I both first watched the anime in winter, and then first played the game the following winter, but of all the seasonal themes I've seen in VNs, that one sticks with me the most.

Yeah, I honestly don't know why they published that update, as I don't think these names are any more final than the previous ones. All it did was elicit a firestorm of feedback from "critics" who don't know what they're talking about. I wouldn't worry too much about it or think too hard about it. The translator on the project knows what he's doing; let the man work.

I've read about 1.5 routes (Emi and half of Yuu). I really don't know why I did Emi first; didn't really care for her route. Yuu is going a lot better, though. Looking forward to Miyabi a lot, but I'm saving her for last. Also, I'm looking forward to literally all the side routes more than any of the main characters except Miyabi... Biggest surprise: the TL is consistently pretty good! (Except that shiritori scene in Yuu's route, ouch, and the very rare clunker line.) Like, I'm actually enjoying reading this. Ten points to Slytherin.

People need to be more hyped up about Nukitashi in here, seriously. I flipped my shit when they told me about the announcement. Also, I hope all my fellow degenerates are looking forward to Onii-Kiss. I'm editing it.

Just to correct a slight (and common) misunderstanding: Steiner did work on Steins;Gate, but the lion's share of the translation was done by Blick Winkel. Also, the JAST release is very heavily edited versus the fan TL, to its benefit, which is in my experience the norm for when fan TLs get picked up for official release. The quality invariably rises because the people involved are more committed to it, and because more resources become available to the project, particularly on the QC and programming side, and often on the editing side. You certainly do see cases where the resulting official release of an acquired fan TL is bad... and in those cases, I tend to think the fan TL itself would likely have been even worse, though perhaps there are exceptions, where the project management of the official release is bungled or where certain licensing restrictions imposed by the Japanese license-holder tie the hands of the people responsible for the official release.

Just another vote for "I don't really notice when backgrounds are empty, but I really notice and appreciate when they're populated". Muv-Luv and Clannad both come to mind as having a lot of characters in the background art in the school shots in particular, and they breathe a lot of life into those backgrounds.

Truly spoken as someone who has no idea how grueling a process it is to translate something.

TBH, I don't find the "nukige" and "moege" distinctions very useful nowadays... moege all seem to have so many H scenes that the distinction is kind of lost on me, unless it's purely one of attitude towards sex, rather than sheer quantity/density of sex.

Yeah, I honestly couldn't deal with MML. I played through the common route and a tiny bit of a character route, and it just feels like nothing ever happens, so I dropped it.