Fred the Barber

?? When I hear "fantasy setting", I think of sword and horse and wizard robes and shit, which is definitely not DareSora. Though admittedly, I'm not sure what to call it other than "mystery". Also, I edited volume 1 Edit: Oh god, bad typo.

Yeah, I agree with @Corrupted: I don't think you can consider Grisaia in this camp (assuming we're talking about Fruit here; I don't know how the other games work). Looking through the VNs I've marked completed on VNDB, the only one which I recall working this way is Funbag Fantasy, which does a full split off into a different ending for the other girls if you stop off the "true route" path early to pick one of the girls. That said, even it doesn't perfectly match this structure, since it kind of has a pair of full-length endings.

Whew, yeah, that's going to be a tough one to explain. If she has even an iota of taste, she's going to judge you pretty hard for Magical Marriage Lunatics. Could at least set your background to be something from one of those ImoParas on the taskbar instead.

I loved everything about this show, and the OP was no exception. That big guitar+keyboard hook it leads with is great stuff.

God true. It was almost as bad as last year, when we had ash raining down from the sky (no, that is not an exaggeration).

Confession: I was eating dinner and I somehow bit my fork really hard, and now a couple of my teeth kinda hurt.

Well, there is a slight difference. The Mikandi folks are native English speakers, and they had ample, well-founded feedback from the community early on that they should have been able to read and understand, to signal that they needed to axe the loc team they had and hire someone competent (who would have been delighted to get the kind of money those clowns got...). The situation with Japanese companies venturing into English localization on their own is a little different; they don't really know who to trust. Honestly, I worry every time I see a US-based localization company looking into localizing into other languages (Chinese, etc.). I sometimes wonder if, even when those companies are producing quality English localizations and are intending to produce a quality Chinese localization, they're doing the same thing to Chinese readers that Hikari Field, Sakuragame, and now Hobibox do to us English readers.

I just finished Evenicle last night. The ending is actually a pretty good setup for subsequent volumes, and I'd actually say it's specifically a good setup for clearly differentiated subsequent volumes versus the original, so I'm pretty much the opposite of surprised to hear about a sequel (though pleased at the timing) and not worried about it feeling stale or anything.

I'll echo Decay and Derg and say that I completely disagree with this. I was pretty bad at editing when I got started. Thanks to a lot of time spent doing it, and a lot of advice from someone good at it who was looking over my shoulder for a few early months while I worked on Majo Koi (Darbury), I can confidently say I've improved massively over the two years and change that I've been doing it. (Note that I also think I still have a long way yet to go, and that I expect to improve further with more experience.) I went back over the Majo Koi text I'd already edited some three or four times over the course of a couple years, and each time I did, I found all kinds of things that "new me" found problematic. It's been a few months now since I've last looked over it, and I probably won't look at it again, but I expect I've improved further and would make yet more changes if faced with it again. I also have gotten faster over the years, because my brain knows both what to do and why to do it more instinctively. But the much more dramatic difference is in the quality of work I do now, moreso than the quantity of work. Also, I don't think "effort" and "experience" are the only axes to consider here. There's another axis of "ability", which is probably the most important thing to consider. Ability often is honed through experience, and for editing and translating it's also honed through things like reading more and studying. However, no amount of effort makes up for lack of ability. A bad translator spending an hour on a line is still probably going to produce a bad translation, where a good translator could produce a good translation in a minute (while also considering more things, like the broader context, the appropriate tone, etc.). I don't think people like to hear this, generally, and maybe it comes off as elitist, but that doesn't make it any less true. In Ratatouille terms, a good translator can come from anywhere, but not everybody can be a good translator.

TBH, the thing about official releases being better than fan releases sounds like something I've said before, and regardless, I'll still say it's true, as long as you interpret that the right way. Outliers are always going to exist, but I still feel confident saying that if you had a "quality meter" on TL quality of releases, the mean, median, and maximum quality of official releases are all way higher than those same values for fan TL releases. That becomes even more true when you discount obvious hack releases like this one and SakuraGame's releases (I won't include Moenovel, since A Sky Full of Stars, while not good, was also not terrible, and would fall on the very high end of the quality spectrum among fan translations, though not among officials; obviously the rest of Moenovel's releases are not doing so hot on that scale). Fan TLs by and large range from bad to mediocre, with a tiny handful of outliers that are pretty darn good, and are weighted pretty heavily towards the bad side. Official TLs range from bad to pretty darn good (and there are honestly a lot of these), and tend to be weighted towards the middle of that, rather than towards the bad side of it. At the end of the day, sure, it depends on the people doing it, but the people doing official TLs are just by and large better at what they're doing than the people doing fan TLs.

Oh, you're totally right on that one, and I've actually offered that exact opinion to the Newrin folks. That last paragraph makes me feel like you're missing the point, though... sure your statement is true, but it's predicated on this silly assumption: "assuming they are regular customers for both". Steam has vastly more regular customers than other game storefronts. Edit: Sorry, realized I forgot to make the other half of my point... I'm sure that at no point did they think they were six months away from a release. If I had to guess, probably at no point did they think they were more than a month away from releasing. But a constant string of one-month delays turns into a six-month delay before you know it, and you can't fault them for not having perfect foresight. It's easy to call this a bad decision now, but at each point in time where they made the decision? Definitely not so easy.

I think you're mistaken here. My understanding is that Steam sales dwarf sales on other platforms, and that even if you release uncut content on other platforms and cut content on Steam, a Steam release brings in a lot of extra sales. Obviously the effect is larger for things that blow up, like Nekopara or IMHHW, but this is true even for releases that don't do that well. As much as people love to meme about them, collectively, the VN localization companies aren't utterly irrational. They wouldn't keep jumping through all these hoops for their releases if they weren't making money off it (at least not all of them; and yet all of them are still releasing stuff on Steam, even though it's a pain in the ass).

But nah, seriously, I'm glad you at least played it. For me, I find the games are about the right length; I'm usually a little worn out by the time I finish a full-length game, so these shorter installments are actually a breath of fresh air. Longer games tend to also have longer individual scenes, rather than just more scenes, and drawn-out SoL scenes and H scenes especially usually feel like a slog to me. You're definitely right that the games have a clear formula, but I liked that this one broke from the mold in the second half by featuring a flashback with a lot more character history for Murasaki and her sister, rather than a "mission" showing off the featured heroine and her newly-introduced sidekick. if your primary concern is $ per length, they objectively are pricey, and though I think that's an absolutely terrible metric (if it was, I'd be exclusively reading free or dirt-cheap books on my kindle), I do agree they still feel pricey for what they are. The bundled deals are a much better offer; I think the first four together are around the length of a normal, medium-length VN, and at $35 that's not bad. But the $15 per individual installment price tag is steep. Incidentally, your "hour and a half" seems kinda skewed; I know you take pride in your reading speed and all, but it makes throwing out numbers like that deceptive for other people. I'm pretty sure it took me over four hours to read each installment in this series.

Why yes, yes it is

All right, I know advertisements aren't what you normally find in The Freditorial, but what publication doesn't have an ad spot every now and then? But I want you to know, the reason I'm posting this isn't to shill the game, but simply because, well, because I really liked this game and liked working on it, and I'm proud of the work we did on it! I think Phantom Trigger did itself a disservice by attaching "Grisaia" to its name. While I have a lot of respect for the original Grisaia trilogy, the Phantom Trigger series is totally its own thing. What's more, you certainly don't need to have read the original Grisaia series to enjoy it. Oh, did that catch your attention? You haven't finished the original Grisaia trilogy yet? Same here, TBH. The games are a serious time investment. You know what's not a serious time investment? The Phantom Trigger games! Each volume is short and well-paced, with a good balance of character and relationship building and satisfying action sequences, and each ends with a solid conclusion to the chapter. The first volume starts off a bit slow since it has a big cast to introduce, but each subsequent volume dives deep into one featured heroine while growing the cast a little further. By volume 5, you're looking at this big, crazy cast of quirky, lovable girls. Like Tohka. Oh, man, Tohka. Anyway, give it a try! Volume 5 is hot off the presses: https://store.steampowered.com/app/871280/Grisaia_Phantom_Trigger_Vol5/ And if you need to catch up on the series, volumes 1-4 are available in a bundle at a pretty nice price: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/5497/Grisaia_Phantom_Trigger_Vol_14_Bundle/ But if you get 1-4, make sure you play them all and then play 5, too, because I only worked on this latest volume, so when you talk about how funny all the comedy is (and lemme tell you, man, it is freaking hilarious), I'm only going to get to take a smidgen of the credit for it on volume 5!

Hell yes. This is the best take on Watamote. I watched the entire show (or at least the first season, I don't know if there are subsequent ones, and I don't care), and I only loathed it more with every episode. The worst was this one teaser episode where she got a little better and a little happier, and then nope, fucked it all up again, revert back to being even worse than before. This was one of the most upsetting shows I've ever watched, honestly, since I tend to be pretty selective up-front about what I watch, but apparently a lot of people really like this thing that I absolutely hate.

Nearly every line sounds awkward. It's bad enough that you can easily find examples even from the screenshots they elected to put up on the game's Steam page that sound like ass: Or that are just bad English: There was also a fair bit of obvious mistranslation in the short part I could bring myself to read, but it's been a long time ago since I tried, and I no longer have the pile of cringe-worthy screenshots I took (also, uploading screenshots is kind of a pain anyway...). This is, unfortunately, not true. It's pretty rare for anybody who is both capable of criticizing and willing to criticize translation quality to read a bad translation, and it's even rarer for them to actually go talk about it. It's also worth mentioning that the opposite happens: you'll sometimes see a lot of noise raised about perceived bad translations in games that are, generally, at least solidly mediocre, because someone picks up on one thing and manages to make it snowball. Most releases have some problems, so it's honestly pretty easy to make nearly anything look bad, if you're dedicated. So teasing out the consistently bad works from the ones that are generally fine is pretty hard, if you're just following along with the discourse and not judging these things for yourself. But the general VN discussion seems to often pillory things that simply occasionally make a mistake, but happen to make an obvious one, or even just do something that annoys the community because of certain predilections, like, say, the ever popular hate for cursing in translation even though cursing is an everyday thing in English. This sentiment I agree with, but it implies the Little Busters! translation is decent, which is, unfortunately, also not true (at least by my lights). Just to draw a controversial comparison: I would say that Chrono Clock has a vastly better translation, both from an accuracy perspective and a readability perspective, than Little Busters. CC has more than its share of problems, of course, but it has actually good moments, which Little Busters does not; Little Busters just consistently (as in, nearly every line) sounds like it was written by somebody who has no idea how you should write English, whereas Chrono Clock only sounds like that somewhat infrequently. Little Busters is consistently awkward and unnatural and translation-y, whereas an ideal translation shouldn't sound like a translation; it should just sound like written English. Chrono Clock also frequently sounds like the editor was trying way too hard, and as a result also sounds unnatural, but in a slightly different way than people are used to, which I'm sure is why people complain about it so much. My personal preference is that I'd rather have what CC delivers than the bland, undertranslated, mistranslated, and just generally botched Little Busters translation, but I can understand why that's not a common view. I dunno. Like other people have said, I do have high standards, and I do complain a lot, so you obviously you have to take my complaints with a grain of salt. But I don't make them lightly, and I don't make them without foundation. Reading Little Busters was such a bad experience for me that I had to drop it after about an hour, even though I was initially excited and was planning on reviewing it; I honestly could not handle reading something that read so poorly. After that I read Karakara 2, and the difference was night and day. The Karakara games have marvelous translations, and I loved every minute of reading that one. It's a shame that work of that quality is so rare, and even more a shame that it's even more rarely recognized... Anyway, sorry for the wild tangent here. FWIW, though, I do think the bad translations for Key games (specifically for Harmonia and Little Busters, that I'm aware of; Clannad was fine IIRC, and I don't know anything about the others) are probably keeping them from having broader appeal, but I agree with what others have said, that the only reason Clannad did so well was a combination of the KyoAni anime and the resulting popularity of the Kickstarter getting out to a bigger audience than VNs usually see.

All these complaints about Little Busters, and not one person slamming the horrible translation. That said, I suspect people are right about the reasons it isn't selling well, and that the bad TL isn't a significant contributor to the poor sales, but for what it's worth, if it did have a nice translation, I'd be out there evangelizing it to people, because I love the daylights out of the game. Unfortunately, it doesn't, so I'm not. Here's to hoping Rewrite gets a good translation, at least, or maybe Summer Pockets (though reception to it in Japan is lukewarm, I hear?).

Well, I Walk Among Zombies came out a couple days ago, and as a zombie survival story, it certainly seems to fit the bill.

I read this one, and it was all right. Definitely a different breed of nukige than what I can recall seeing before, but nothing wrong with different. The "naughty" route didn't do much for me, but the "nice" route was, in fact, very nice. The characters are lovable across the board, and it ends up being a surprisingly feel-good VN? I love the translation, too; they nailed the humor. Also, as much as Reiji's little sister is a sweetheart, I'm sorry, but you have to be blind not to see that Sakahogi is best girl.

Yeah, by all accounts, the correct answer is "none of them". The official translation from Moenovel is quite possibly the worst, though, if that helps you make a decision.

Hello, sorry for the delay, kind of a long night last night. I just updated the Majo Koi thread as well, but yeah, the Denpasoft release of Majo Koi Nikki will be based off the fan translation project. I would say "it will be the fan translation", except that that hasn't been QCed yet, let alone made into a release, and you wouldn't want an un-QCed unimplemented translation! 9 is a pretty straightforward Chuunige, at least as much as I've seen of it (volume 1). Also, as @Kiriririri mentioned, cliffhangers are definitely the order of the day for the series, and the series isn't finished yet in Japan, which can be a source of frustration for some. That said, the game is fun, and has very pretty sprite art and a few solid characters. But, usual disclaimer: I'm working on it, so my view is a bit biased Lastly, I'm gonna put in one more plug for the Re;lord series, which some friends of mine worked on. The gameplay is actually really good! It needs some rebalancing in volume 1, but from what I hear, they actually did a great job tuning it and making the gameplay angle more entertaining in volume 2. Even better, while volume 1 is pretty much pure comedy, volume 2 starts to reveal the big plot motivating the series (which is finished in Japan and totals 3 volumes, though SP/Denpasoft has only announced volumes 1 and 2 so far). At any rate, I exhort you all to go buy Re;lord volume 1, and then volume 2 when it comes out, so they feel motivated to pick up volume 3

Hi folks! Bumping this thread since I Walk Among Zombies volume 1 was quietly released last night! This was announced at the Denpasoft panel, but I haven't seen a tweet about it yet... at any rate, get it here: https://denpasoft.com/products/i-walk-among-zombies This is the first game I worked on to get an official release, so I'm excited to hear what you all have to say about it!

Can confirm all of this. I'm playing the game now and enjoying the heck out of it (the Yaegashi Nan art is certainly helping with that!), but the combat isn't particularly involved or strategic or difficult, at least so far; I'm admittedly not that far in. It is also a little punishing in terms of sheer number of random encounters, unless you're religious about sticking to the roads, and who wants to do that in an RPG? It's a major step up from any other H-RPG I've played (side-bar required at this point: I haven't played Rance), but it's not on par with any non-H RPG I would consider worth playing. But the characters are fun, and there are a whole lot of them, so I'm going to go back to playing it right now!

Wait, are you all telling me @Darklord Rooke is even older now? Wow. Happy birthday, Rooke.