Fred the Barber

I mean, that's a bunch of content at the beginning of the game with a pretty crappy enough translation that they had to replace the person doing it with someone good. I'm looking forward to this game, and I'm going to be annoyed if the intro, UI, etc., are all badly translated.

I'll be buying both on release, but I'll probably be playing KoiKuma first, for the same lone reason that other people have cited why you might pick it. Assuming your decision is motivated by literally anything beyond fap material, among these two, you're probably better off with Sanoba. Also, RIP LocaLove.

I think they managed to tap into the Japanese audience for a big chunk of the funding, with the promise of new content.

I caught a nasty cold this last weekend and all I wanted to do was sit on the couch, so I binge-watched Princess Principal over two days. Man, was that ever a good decision. First of all, the setting and themes were right up my alley: steampunk, sci-fi, turn-of-the-century, alternate history version of England, spies... Good shit! It was a relief to find that there was hardly any boring school stuff (apparently "principal" meant something else...), and instead the episodes were generally filled with action, plot, and character development. The characters were uniformly excellent, and the plot was super compelling! I thought I saw the twist coming, but how wrong I was. The dash of sci-fi helped a lot of the action scenes feel unique and fun, but even when it wasn't using that angle, the action scenes delivered, over, and over. The show even had good subs (official, by Sentai)! I only have one small complaint, which was that the ending wasn't much of a resolution. I'm glad there's a second season of sorts coming up (five movies, I think?), both because I loved the show and want more of it, and because I'm hoping for a more complete resolution. Here's hoping! For my next show, I just started on Made in Abyss, yet another thing I promised a friend I'd watch several months ago. It's pretty cool! The setting is really engaging, and the setup is interesting. I'm only one episode in, so I've just scratched the surface, but I like what I've seen so far and am looking forward to more. That said, I'm already unimpressed with the (again, official, from Sentai) subs. They're not bad per se, but the tone of the subs often really clashes with the tone of the spoken line (frightened one- or two-word exclamations turn into long complete sentences, for example), and there's no clear attempt at characterization in the subs; all the people kinda sound the same, despite large age gaps.

@Jun Inoue I have a cold right now. You should hear the unholy laughter that just bubbled up from my belly.

Bro, that's not even a double space, it's just dot-space-I on a monospace font. lrn2read

Since I got explicitly called out here, I feel somewhat obligated to comment... I don't think of myself as a purist at all, nor do I think there's such a thing as a perfect translation. I do still think there are both good translations and bad translations, and it doesn't look like that's really being debated here either (though I imagine the defining characteristics of a good translation would be very hotly debated!). Just to offer two common arguments for "good" translation over "bad" translation which I haven't seen mentioned here: I think a bad translation is an insult to the original writers. VNs are in fact written by professionals, and the vast majority of those professionals work their ass off to produce something worth reading. I think it's unfair to them to produce a translation which is obviously lower quality than the original. And, why is that...? A good writer makes the story beats land, makes you giggle at the jokes, and occasionally reduces you to a blubbering mess of tears. If you're basically just reading VNs to see the CGs and the sprites, to listen to the music, and maybe to kind of understand what's going on overall, well, you're entitled to enjoy things the way you want to. But me, I really like reading, and I want to get the same full-color experience when reading a game in English translation that the Japanese readers got reading the original. That means, at a high level, that the logical flow from line to line needs to be maintained, that the result needs to be true in spirit and in content to the original. My go-to example is always that the jokes need to still be funny. Look, everyone can believe what they want to believe, and I don't think anyone here is going to change their mind. But regardless of what some readers may think, I do think that translators should care about their writing quality. If you think you're translating something and you're not worrying about delivering an equivalent experience, then I think you aren't doing your job.

FWIW, faceless protags are the norm in galge CGs (and it pisses me off to no end, since it looks so weird). I admit, this looks weirder than most, but that's kind of to be expected with ancient Itaru Hinoue art.

I think Rumbling Hearts hits a few different notes than most things, and people find it refreshing for that reason. The biggest is surely the fact that things get a bit more "real" than in a typical romance anime, in a variety of ways (the melodrama and the sex, particularly, in your terms). I'm a fan of it, and if we do see a localization of the game someday, I'll be grabbing it immediately... but in the meantime, there's always Muv-Luv.

Whoa, long time no see! You might consider going for the (more recent) Steam version. Apparently the Vita version got crappy QC and has some text bugs as a result (like, em-dashes replaced with question marks, I think? that kind of thing, at least).

I've never played a mobage before, but, uh... I might be really really enjoying Dragalia Lost. It's cute and fun and funny!

Just wrapped up Hapymaher finally and posted up my thoughts over in the dedicated Hapymaher thread. tl;dr: good game, shoddy localization. Now I'm moving on to Muv-Luv. I played it for an hour or two last night, and I'm already super impressed by the scripting. It's phenomenal, easily the best I've ever seen in a VN, and it really makes the experience special. I've been introduced to most of the cast at this point (just got past the silly first school lunch scene, near the beginning), and I'm just looking forward to the ride, now.

Welp, some two months after I started playing it, I finally finished Hapymaher. I liked the overarching plot quite a bit. This was a way better game than Chrono Clock in terms of both having an interesting premise and, more importantly, really getting a lot of mileage out of it. The Christmas arc was my favorite by far, and the true ending was predictable but still good. If every arc had had something as batshit crazy as the Christmas arc, but distinct, this game would have been an absolute legend for me. As it was, the common route was too long and the heroine routes were too short. I would've liked more distinct content. Though, that said, the game is still a far cry from something like, say, 11eyes, which has hardly any route differentiation. At any rate, even just that one Christmas chapter being so good was more than enough to make me consider it a great game. Art and music were both solid, too. Not my favorite or anything, but very good. It's a real shame the translation read like absolute ass. Talk about phoning it in. I can't decide if this was worse than Magical Marriage Lunatics or not, but it's at least the same level of low-effort mediocrity. Constant bad translationisms, frequent absolute nonsense, shitty English, the works. Don't know why MG keeps doing shoddy work on relatively big-name titles like this one. Oh well, at least Evenicle and Sorcery Jokers got good TLs, among MG releases I played this year. I just wish they'd focus more on consistent quality for titles like this, especially since this one happened to be so firmly up my alley.

VNDB lets you list which releases of games you have obtained, btw, which I generally maintain pretty well: https://vndb.org/u90542/list?c=all;v=0;t=-1;o=d;s=vote Everything I've listed on there was obtained legally (or at least, mostly legally, I guess, in the case of imported games which say they're for Japanese sale only...). There are a rare few things I own multiple copies of (usually because of a JP release followed by an official EN release), and I own both JP versions of Majo Koi Nikki... Guess I'll be getting a third copy of it when the release happens.

The game's writer is so pumped and so memey: Frankly, I'm looking forward to Memelord Blick's take on this memegame.

Crap, forgot to mention something important: the official Sentai subs for The World Is Still Beautiful were really good! I probably haven't seen anime subs I enjoyed that much since Plastic Memories. Really attentive to flow. If I had to be nitpicky, they did have a tendency to start sentences with "But" when it wasn't appropriate, from time to time... but seriously, everything else was just perfect. Great example of quality localization work, which is sadly as uncommon in anime as it is in VNs.

I've been really slacking off on watching anime for a while now, but I'm trying to get back into it a bit more. I started with one that's been on my backlog for a while, since a friend randomly also said good things to me about it: The World Is Still Beautiful. And it was great! It was a very satisfying romance, and it did my favorite thing (and a very rare thing, at that!) of mostly focusing on what happens after a new couple gets together. If I could complain a little, I did usually feel like the show didn't have quite enough dramatic tension: I always felt, with any given arc, that I knew how things were going to end up, and indeed I was right. It pretty quickly became clear that apparent villains were just misguided people (sometimes deeply so...) who would inevitably be won over by the slightly-too-perfect main characters after a good talking-to. But despite that, it was still a lovely experience. The highlight was watching the relationship unfold and grow, but a close second was the interesting setting and setup (though it was maybe a bit under-utilized most of the time). All told, a very pleasant watch. No earth-shattering experiences, no tears, but an enjoyable way to slide back into watching some anime. Next up on my list is Princess Principal, from another friend's recommendation. Hope it goes well!

It's short enough that you could probably find time to read it on pretty literally any day, even if you're a busy person. Definitely won't take you an hour to see everything.

It's out! https://store.steampowered.com/app/913450/DareSora_Tears_for_an_Unknown_Sky/ Go buy it! It's good! I want to work on the rest of it. It's also short and weird. Get it now for a whole 30 cents off!

Yeah, I might already have to walk back my earlier statements. Steam has been talking about this for ages, but at least it seems like maybe they're giving this a chance now. We'll have to see how it goes. I'd still be very wary if I were an eroge publisher, just because tying their livelihood to Steam has proven risky in the past, but at least there's a chance things work out now. That said, I'm wondering whether the new way things work will actually make Steam a viable storefront for eroge publishers. The settings to enable seeing this content are off by default and pretty difficult to find, and if you don't have those settings enabled, Steam literally gives you a "that doesn't exist" page, not like an "are you sure you want to see this content" page, as far as I understand. The main value for publishers being on Steam is the big exposure and the chance to grow the market, but I don't know if they get that with the way this content filtering is implemented.

You're being way too optimistic. Steam may have added a checkbox on the consumer side, but that doesn't mean anything until they actually publish a policy so developers and publishers can know what's allowed and what's not allowed (they haven't done this), and actually start applying said policy (they also aren't doing this). This isn't done until we start seeing the games we expect there getting published back to the platform. Maidens of St. Michael will probably be a good bellwether, since you can bet MG wants to get it back on there ASAP and is just waiting on Steam. If you see it on Steam, maybe there's some progress. If not, then everybody's almost certainly still stuck in this same crappy situation we've been in for the past half a year or so. Regardless, you certainly shouldn't get your hopes up for KonoSora or other Pulltop releases. I doubt they have any interest, on their own side, of releasing the full versions of their games, and even if they do, god only knows what quality we'll get with their translation agency roulette game. Lastly... this is all kind of irrelevant to the OP's topic! At least, it is unless you think having the uncensored versions available on Steam will make a big difference in sales or revenue, which I honestly kind of doubt.

Dear all you people talking about Grisaia and complaining about it getting stale: seriously, give Phantom Trigger a try. Same solid humor, way better pacing.

I haven't posted anything particularly editorial in a while, nor have I landed a new FuwaReview in a while; I've been busy with one thing or another, and also I just haven't had that much to write about. However, today I finished reading new shiny new Kokoro Connect: Hito Random release, and when I finished, I knew I had to write something up about it. I first watched Kokoro Connect way back when I didn't know who to ask for recommendations and was still finding my way around anime. I was mostly just going through things that were highly ranked on AnimeNewsNetwork's overall rankings, that were accessible without pirating, and that sounded interesting. But I didn't pick it up without some trepidation. Back then, I was a little put off by fanservice in general, and the show's description was selling the perverted body-swapping angle really hard, so I was concerned it was just some shallow fanservice show. Still, I decided to take the plunge anyway, thinking there had to be more to it given the show's reception, and boy was I ever glad I did. Nothing pushes my buttons like Kokoro Connect. The story it tells is as closely tailored to my own preferences as anything I could ever ask for: coherent and interesting characters, immensely human drama, realistic romantic development, clear story beats and plot arcs accumulating to bigger themes, and a little spritz of magic to grease the wheels of the plot. Hell, the anime even got a great dub, featuring the immensely talented Luci Christian as best girl Inaba. It's an all-time favorite for me, something I can happily recommend to anyone. One of my favorite elements of the show is that each arc feels so complete. In 3-5 episodes, a new twist emerges, a plot unfolds around it, the characters grow in response, and at the end it resolves fully, always in a satisfying way. The one season and the OVA together had four such arcs all together, and while I was immensely satisfied with where it ended after each one, when I finished the last OVA, I still thought to myself, man, I wish there was more of this. What I eventually learned, when I finished the show and went to read about its origins, was that the reason for the tight storytelling was that the show was based on an existing series of light novels, of which the show only covered the first four out of ten (eleven of you count a volume of short stories). There was a whole lot of content out there I hadn't seen yet! Except, it wasn't available in English... And that brings us to today, when I got to read the first English volume of the English release. And let me tell you guys, it is gooood. The translation is fluid, natural, and well-written. The characters pop right out of the page, and the narration is consistently solid and occasionally beautiful. Props to the localization team on their work here! I do have a couple minor gripes, of course: leaving people's heights in centimeters, which is totally bizarre in an American English translation (sure I can do the calculation, but talk about kicking you out of the immersion. Fortunately this only happened once); and not translating the per-volume titles ("hito random" ain't exactly my idea of a punchy title). So how did it hold up, revisiting the material again after all these years? It's still awesome! I had to stifle my laughter a few times so I didn't look like a weirdo laughing out loud in the middle of a plane flight. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I felt tears welling up in my eyes at a couple of particularly touching scenes, and had to fight just as hard to hold them back. And while there's nothing major that's new here, versus what you'd see in the first five volumes of the anime, there are little bits and pieces that make it worth the time, especially in the narration, something inherently missing from an anime. So what are you waiting for? There's a criminally neglected property out there finally getting a great English release, and it deserves your attention. Go out and give it a try! https://j-novel.club/v/kokoro-connect-hito-random

Well, fair. I've read my share of the Dresden Files. But DareSora definitely isn't that, either. Edit: Also, it's not a magic school. Honestly, it's hard to describe without going into spoiler territory, sorry...