Fred the Barber

This is the world's randomest location for a Phantom Trigger conversation, but I'll bite. I actually edited Phantom Trigger volume 5, so uhh, I might be just a tiny bit biased, but I'd encourage you to read the series. I hadn't read any of the previous volumes until I got the job, but I have now, and Phantom Trigger is actually pretty solid. Nothing amazing or earth-shattering, but good, solid fun. The first volume starts things off a bit slow, since it has so many characters to introduce and isn't all that long (they're all on the short side), so it doesn't really get much plot done, but the subsequent volumes have a good mix of introducing new characters, fleshing out backgrounds for the main characters (vol. 2 - Rena; 3 - Tohka, 4 - Chris, and now 5 is the last remaining of the original four girls, Murasaki), and slowly building up pieces of an overarching plot. The games are maybe 20% slice-of-life, 40% character development, and 40% action? I dunno, numbers made up and very subjective. At any rate, I had a lot of fun with it, so I hope people pick it up and give it a try.

Speaking of Mitsuda, I just realized a few days ago that the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 OST came out fairly recently. I loved everything about the game, and the soundtrack was an integral part of the experience. Sadly, it's way better in the context of the game than it is for standalone listening, but it's still got some amazing stuff that takes my breath away to listen to. 0:56 is fucking magic, as is the guitar solo around 3:25. 3:47 also kicks my ass. The only unfortunate thing about this soundtrack is that the song titles got a lot of Engrish translations, which is especially disappointing given how phenomenal the game's translation was.

It's kind of unclear who you're worried about getting into trouble with. The law? No. I'm not a lawyer, so take this with the requisite grain of salt, but still, no. You're not going to get into legal trouble for buying The Fruit of Grisaia or WagaHigh off the Denpasoft site (or anything else off the Denpasoft site, or anything off MangaGamer or JAST USA, for that matter) if you live in the US, any more than if you bought High School DxD off Amazon. Some countries have much stricter pornography laws, though. Are you going to get into trouble with your parents? Who can say. Edit: Actually, a better analogy. You're not going to get into trouble for buying those 18+ VNs any more than you would for buying Lolita off Amazon.

Couple of VN industry panels you missed: Frontwing Thursday, July 5th 9:30 PM PDT Aksys Friday, July 6th 5:30

Five.

The tags are not giving you an accurate picture. While there is certainly dark content, there is specifically no "girls raped by zombies" content, for one thing. The game is certainly very H-heavy, and I won't really try to defend it on that front; it is what it is. But at the same time, the game takes itself very seriously as a zombie survival story, and that's what I ended up finding interesting about it (in between editing pages and pages of H). I will say, I've recently realized that every single time I've tried to figure out whether I'll like a VN based on people's descriptions, I've found the experience of actually playing the game to be utterly different from my expectations, to the point that I almost think it isn't worth seeing what people are saying about a game, beyond the basics of who liked it and who didn't. It's also entirely possible that I just don't know my own preferences very well, or that they're always evolving, though. Not really sure where I'm going with this, except maybe "don't judge a book by its cover"? And that probably goes double for me saying positive things about it, heh, since I obviously have a vested interest in it!

So now that the I Walk Among Zombies announcement has gone out and I'm no longer panicking about the future of a project I worked on, I feel like I can comment on this. If there's a game or series you hope will get an official translation, doing a sub-par fan translation is possibly the worst thing you can do, because the release of a fan translation directly and substantially cuts into the potential revenue from a localization, which is already a low figure. VNs and VN localizations are a relatively cheaply-produced good with a small market, correspondingly low revenue, and low (if any) profit overall. However, they're relatively expensive for how cheap they are to produce: they have high per-sale revenue. Since the resulting profit is still small (or negative), that means every sale matters a lot more than with most goods. VN fans are already partial to piracy, and giving them an excuse that a game "should" be free (e.g., by providing a free translation patch for a game install which you can only get by importing a hard copy from Japan at extremely high cost) only makes that inclination stronger. This, incidentally, is why fan translations that only work on the boxed release and not on the digital release make me particularly sad; even the most well-intentioned people are put off by the extra hoops and expenses of importing. Moreover, people are justifiably not going to be interested in re-reading something they already read, most of the time, even if the version they read was substantially worse than the subsequent official version. For every person who buys the official release to support the people who worked on it, ten or a hundred people will say they've already read it and just ignore it. That said, I've done both fan and freelance translation, and I don't regret doing either, nor do I fault anyone for doing either. Fan translation is probably the only reason this medium has any kind market outside of Japan, and obviously I think that's a good thing (though it's a separate question whether fan translation is still helping the market grow today... likely not, IMO). The official VN localization scene is also still tiny in terms of its output relative to Japan's output (both in the sense of release velocity, and even more so when you look at the existing back-catalog), and that's not going to change any time soon. For any given game you look at, the odds are that it's not going to get a localization unless some crazily dedicated fans do it. But it turns out, you never know. Maybe that niche game you've always wanted to see localized is actually going to be announced any day now, and all you're doing is putting stress on the people associated with that. It's not something I'd really considered before, but now that I've gone through it, I certainly do empathize with the small minority of official localization staff across the JP->EN industry who go around publicly attacking fan translation as a concept.

https://denpasoft.com/blogs/news/announcing-a-new-upcoming-title https://vndb.org/v16802 I edited it, so I'd be pretty stoked regardless, but it's a cool game and pretty far off the beaten path in terms of themes and execution, for the VN medium. I'm looking forward to you all getting to play it, and I hope I get to work on the sequels and the prequel!

Thanks, folks

sure doesn't look like it. I suspect @Mr Poltroon's prediction is correct.

I just finished reading Salman Rushdie's Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, which was about as awesome as nearly everything else I've read by Salman Rushdie, which is to say very. The man has some great stories up his sleeve, and damn does he write them well.

Shuffle fite me

Is it still written badly?

For the record, both from statistics I've seen and from my own personal experience (reading just the common route and a tiny bit of a single route), this game is really damn long.

Okay, okay, I'm sorry I tried to start shit in this thread. Suffice to say, I agree that Chrono Clock is in some ways a failure of a translation, especially in terms of some of the conscious decisions made (about as much so as in terms of just lack of capability to do the text justice), but I think you're misunderstanding the way in which it's a failure of a translation. I already made my suggestion for the thread, at any rate, so I'll stay out of it from here...

lol. The translation has its share of issues, but "more american" is not one of them. This is a good suggestion. I genuinely enjoyed Deardrops, in spite of a mediocre translation (still probably as good a translation as most of the other things people are recommending...). It's distinctive in its characters and themes, rather than being Yet Another High School Slice Of Life Comedy, while still hitting those sweet romcom notes. For something in the general vicinity of what you're looking for, but still very different, maybe try Kindred Spirits? Great game with a solid English TL.

WagaHigh was pretty sex-heavy. I enjoyed the game, but once it got into a route, it definitely felt like a very large percentage of your time (more than half?) was spent on H scenes. Lots of thoughts on it from back when it was fresher in my mind, when I reviewed it: https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2017/10/18/wagamama-high-spec/ Edit: Also, scanning through my review again, I was reminded that I really liked the soundtrack, so I just bought a copy on amazon.co.jp. This turned out to be an expensive Fuwa post for me...

Disappointed there isn't an option in the poll: "I got tired of reading the bad writing and gave up on the game before I was anywhere near finishing a route." Too much sex? I never even made it to the sex...

This reply to a previous, similar post pretty much covered what 95% of the time is spent on (the remainder is spent on hacking the VN, mostly to get text and images into and out of the VN):

I wish I'd waited and watched the dub for Dragon Maid, since the subs were godawful. Glad to hear you enjoyed it!

Salt.

I'm nowhere close to finished, but I'm more than ready to say the translation is mediocre at best. Grammar errors, incorrect word usage, butchered idioms, dull writing, bad metaphors, wave dashes just literally everywhere, etc. My favorite (as in, the stupidest) line so far: "As they entered, another group of guys meandered in after them like white on rice." Ah, yes, notable meanderer, the white on rice. But I'm a salty loc hater, so you probably want the opinion of someone less picky.

Karakara (all ages and 18+) and Corona Blossom (all ages and 18+ patch) also support English and Japanese switching. Karakara has a delightful translation, too.

Yeah, the game is apparently huge. Route count is high, but just, sheer amount of text is up there... which probably explains all these people complaining about the infinite SoL common route. I will be resuming my reading it shortly, but I'm still at the very beginning since I keep screenshotting bad lines...

Best of luck to you with obtaining your freedom! I've been MMO clean for something like four years now, and it constantly amazes me what I can do with all the time I've suddenly reclaimed and all the actually new experiences I get to have, instead of spending all my time doing the same old things over and over again for meaningless digital trinkets.