Fred the Barber

Hype train, now leaving the station. All aboard!

Root (E)pilogue wouldn't have been all that surprising, though...

It was nice knowing you, Funya. WoW is where free time goes to die.

Maybe I'm somewhat of a masochist, but I mostly find Audrey endearing. The pairing of her character sprite and her voice acting go a long way, actually - when you're on a date with her, you do something good, and she says "Don't get smug" with a not-wanting-to-admit-it-but-obviously-happy smile, she's the cutest thing in the game by a mile. Not the sexiest thing, mind you. That would be Kyu, at all times. But the cutest, definitely. Nikki, on the other hand, I can't stand, mostly because of her voice actor. I'm mostly recalling her voice outside of the bedroom, though, so maybe she's better in that setting. Edit: A related, definitely masochistic thought: Audrey makes me feel like I earned it.

Jojo is the only current standout action-oriented non-fanservice anime that I know of, although admittedly my knowledge isn't all that deep. But you have to be on board with the incredible cheesiness that pervades it, or you'll hate it. Personally, I think it's pretty great, but I watch it in small doses. I do really need to watch One Punch Man, but unfortunately it's not available for streaming on any service I have...

I actually have the first season on disc but haven't gotten around to it yet. My incoming rate of anime to watch is much higher than my consumption rate, so as dictated by a fundamental theorem of queueing theory, the queue keeps growing and I never actually watch half the stuff in it But I'm more interested now - I didn't know that writer by name, but I loved both NagiAsu and AnoHana, which speaks pretty well for her. But, don't worry; I know not to expect either of those from AKB0048. This one has been sitting in my backlog for at least six months now, probably a lot longer... I really need to get to it, but I never hear anybody around here talk about it so it always gets put off. No more!

http://xseedgames.tumblr.com/post/145377764065/xseed-localization-general-blog-1 Anybody else read it? On the one hand, "unpaid internship" is a veritable trigger for me, but otherwise it was a pretty enjoyable read, even if it was more about a personal journey than about localization itself. I threw them some support when this came across my Twitter feed in the hopes that they keep posting something from their team. I'm holding out the hope that these disjointed communities of professional localization for more mainstream non-eroge and the professional and fan eroge localization scene can benefit from each other, but while the latter are quite outspoken, we generally don't hear much from the former (that I know of...).

I'm a huge music lover (which isn't to say I think I have good taste or anything - just that I enjoy it), so music tie-ins are a big deal for me, and if done well basically account for +1 star to any baseline rating from me. I actually love the shit out of K-On! as well, but K-On! and Nodame are more different than they are similar; high school slice-of-life vs. post-high school rom-com puts them worlds apart, in the anime world. Granted, Nodame branches out and does a lot more WRT character development especially - I'd go so far as to say it's objectively better, from a storytelling perspective. But that doesn't change that, subjectively, K-On! is ideal for people looking for cute girls doing cute things. At least latch onto the Cantabile part, rather than the Nodame part, geeze. It's basically what makes her cute.

But they keep making all these damn card game shows anyway. Edit: still watching Zero no Tsukaima here and there, still on the first season. It's on an up-swing lately, though, with what looked like a throwaway episode about a love potion turning into the next major plot arc. I loved the throwaway part, though; that was cute as hell. Full-on dere was a nice break from the constant tsun.

Unfortunate, since the anime is amazing. It's unfortunate that all the blurbs for it just try to sell the fanservicey angle of the first arc (which is itself less than a third even of the fairly short one season + OVA show that exists, and was hardly a major feature of it to begin with), since the show as a whole is actually fairly serious, psychological, and yet still optimistic - a rare combination which I greatly enjoy.

Chihayafuru and Nodame Cantabile are the stealthiest top-tier shows I've seen; most series that are as good as those two are are widely-known and celebrated, but those two somehow fly under most peoples' radar (including mine, for the longest time). So now that I know how awesome they are, I find myself recommending them quite often.

Ok, I'll take a stab at offering a legitimate answer, and allot myself one bonus point for not looking anything up before trying to answer: In general, it's very stripped-down - the numbers aren't really necessary if you're good at reading a clock, so remove them. Bam: 12 unnecessary things gone. The resulting interface is now much cleaner and less cluttered. They took a middle ground and put little dots around the edges - they're still much less intrusive than numbers, and as a bonus are just as easy to read for most people (and will certainly become natural for you to read if you actually wear the watch frequently). I actually kind of like the way that looks. Modern design is unapologetically flat: this is kind of in the same vein as the above, but in a very specific way. This more often applies to digital design than to physical design - remember when computer UIs used to have beveled 3D buttons with glossy finishes? No more. In modern design, flat is justice. But I see the same thing going on here, especially with the blue hands. That said, it's probably not very good modern design, because it does still have too many extraneous bits. Remove all the blue hands, for starters. With a watch like that, do you really care about the second hand, let alone whatever those other tiny hands are? Plus, then you can remove those extra depressed dials and flatten the whole thing further. Disclaimer: I know pretty much nothing about this stuff, and I haven't worked on any kind of UI in about a decade. But that doesn't stop me from reading about it from time to time!

For that matter, I don't think there's an otaku code. Unless it's that one with injunctions like "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's waifu".

The leftovers I planned to have for dinner tonight had grown mold. Why, Valmore? Why did you put mold in there?

Since you're mostly looking at otome, maybe take a look at Code Realize. I only know one person around here who played it, but he was quite positive about it, and I've been meaning to play it since then; I just need to find the time to wrap up other things first...

Recently in the Otome arena, Ozmafia just came out, and lateish last year there was Code Realize, both of which have had fairly positive reception around here. I encourage supporting the industry by buying them, rather than pirating, but then again I'm sympathetic that that's easier for me to say as a wage-earning adult than it will be for you to do as a student... Also, welcome!

You keep doing this. It keeps annoying me. On the other hand, it has me wondering whether I'm awesome enough at my job that I can say to my manager "I've decided I don't want to work on Fridays anymore." Hmm...

Ok, slight fork on the topic of length - I kind of wonder whether this should be a bigger consideration for VNs, as it already is with traditional fiction literature. VNDB tries to provide a rough estimate for it, which is not perfect but is better than nothing (except for Clephas who reads everything literally 10x faster than I do, of course), but I'm actually suggesting that maybe, in critical discussion, we should start categorizing VNs more specifically based on their length before trying to assess them, and in recommendations take length into further consideration. Currently length is hardly considered in discussion at all, that I can see, whereas we do have lengthy fixated discussion on other VN categories, which are mostly classified based on mood (and sometimes topic) of a VN: nakige, utsuge, moege, chuunige, etc.,. For instance, Clannad takes a mental eternity to play, especially when considering all the skipping through (or, God forbid, actually reading through) replays of the common route. Eden* is rather short and requires no replay. Yet people will probably quite happily simultaneously recommend both of these to someone purely on the basis of the content of other games they've enjoyed, since both are highly-regarded nakige. But the actual experience of reading each is vastly different. Reading a short story and reading an epic novel are radically different experiences; the same is probably true of VNs, too. Also, I kind of wrote this post just because I wanted to bring up The Dinosaur, because it's a rather good 7-word short story.

For what it's worth, I love when OP/ED songs have subtitles (bonus points: both romaji and translation on separate lines). I only recall ever seeing any kind of subbing like this in anime, never in VNs. Since apparently KoiRizo has it, I am once again reminded that I should probably play that at some point just to see Darbury's work, especially if he went to that trouble... Anyway, if you're talking about an official project, there are usually additional legal ramifications with subtitling the songs. Music has lots of very specific licensing agreements, I guess; apparently this is the reason officially-licensed anime often doesn't have subtitles (I'm shaking my head at you, Crunchyroll). Even if those licenses can be obtained, it's more time and effort than they can go through before they rush the regular subtitle release out, and so it simply never happens, at least with streaming sites (curse you, Crunchyroll; bless you, Sentai). But as far as fan projects, I expect those additional legal concerns are a drop in the bucket, so rock on.

Agreed with Mondaiji-tachi, Haruhi, and Kaze no Stigma, in that order (though that last one's really, really never going to happen...). I'm constantly hopeful that the Haruhi author will decide to complete the series, and then to hype it up they'll make a season 3 of the anime to pick up where they left off before since there's still a lot of LN content they haven't covered in the anime. As for Mondaiji-tachi, I don't even know why they aren't continuing that anime... I'd buy it all in a heartbeat, and I'd Kickstart the shit out of anybody bringing official translations of the LNs. One more to add: Kokoro Connect. I am always ready for more Kokoro Connect, and there's plenty of LNs still out there.

Welcome! I'd encourage you to make a VNDB page to facilitate conversation and recommendations. Hope you have a nice time here!

It's cute! Really cute! I saw you'd changed it just now and hoped you'd post in this thread so I could praise it. 9/10 (feels like the face should be bigger, but I'm not a cropping expert like Kaguya-hime)

A common recommendation for translating such scenes is to take whatever you've written as an initial translation and then say it out loud it after putting something in your mouth (fingers are a common recommendation, but you do what you gotta do) and then transcribe that sound to get the same effect. That said, "shtahf" is probably what I'd end up with for "stop", and is probably going to be completely indecipherable, and that kinda matches my usual experience whenever I've tried to do this. So I tend to just leave whatever the original translator thought was best, which is typically a straightforward translation of the actual word, not some garbled phonetical transcription of the translation. I think that original recommendation is probably only good if you're transcribing, and is not a good idea if you're translating; it may work fine for the original JP transcription to do the more phonetically-correct thing, but an English reader is lacking the additional vocal clues, and therefore is going to just be confused by it. Heck, clearly the JP-savvy people here were pretty confused with the JP transcription and no vocal clues, but I bet they would have had no initial confusion if they'd heard a sound clip.

I suggest Sekien no Inganock. It has three H scenes, if I remember correctly. I believe them all to be rather important to the story, and I found none of them to be overly oriented towards "fanservice". It's also a beautiful game in many ways and well worth anybody's time, IMO.

I realized halfway through the blog post that I was eating a hot dog while reading it (with mustard, of course). It rated somewhere around a 2 on the "surreal moment scale". I have absolutely nothing of substance to add to the conversation, though.