Fred the Barber

Off the top of my head, my primary focuses when editing are, in this order: Precision, i.e., making sure that a sentence says exactly what it wants to say. This means you need to know precisely what the words and phrases in the line mean. If you're not sure that you do, you should generally just not use that word or phrase, or if you insist on it, go look up both definitions and other usages of the word or phrase. Google Ngram is a good resource for examining other usages. Naturalness, i.e., making sure that a sentence isn't going to "sound weird" to a native American English speaker for any reason (this is kind of fuzzy, since in some sense there is no such thing as "a native American English speaker", since we all really speak our own idiolect and thus judgments will vary person to person). Classifying all the problems in this area is impossible, and even trying to would take a very long time. What you really need, if you want to do well on this front, is an excellent ear for the English language and a ton of experience reading and speaking. Avoiding unintentional ambiguity, i.e., cases where a single sentence can be interpreted multiple ways (hopefully one of them the correct way). Consistency, at many levels. This goes from the low level of making sure terminology used is the same throughout a game, to the high level of making sure that events in the game make sense together. One important thing people screw up on this front is consistency of narrative tense. The flow of narration should either be in the past or present tense, and it should stay there. Consistency overlaps a fair bit with some of the other things on this list, particularly the next two items. Flow, i.e., making sure that subsequent lines make sense together and form a coherent whole. When two people hold a conversation, they're usually talking to each other. A response tends to be related to the question that elicited it, and so on. Narration tends to be a single train of thought, not a series of disconnected sentences. Tone and character voice, i.e., making sure that the way the line expresses the thought is appropriate to either the narrative tone or the way the speaking character should talk. Character voice mostly comes down to word choice, but also sometimes to syntax. As an example, if your character is a bit childish, they shouldn't use SAT words and they shouldn't speak like the narration of a Dickens book. This objective is particularly fuzzy and difficult to get right. Rarely, people can go overboard on this one and end up flanderizing their characters' speech, or even just make them sound a bit silly. This one is the most forgivable thing to mess up, especially if you underdo it (overdoing it tends to be annoying...), but it's worth doing. Other fuzzier "good writing" things that don't really fit into the above categories. Avoid purple prose, avoid filtering verbs, avoid mixed metaphors, etc. This list is probably exceptionally long, and there's no way I'm going to just think up even a tiny fraction of the things that should be on it. Editors work almost entirely on instinct (because analyzing everything would take forever), along with a healthy dose of preparation and analysis outside of the time spent actually changing lines. For instance, you often need to sit down and think about common terminology, catchphrases, and other things that will influence word choice across the game. That's necessary because of both the "consistency" consideration and the "character voice" one. And although changes are largely driven by instinct in the moment, any editor worth their salt should be able to explain why they are making any given change, and it will usually boil down to one of these items: "it's more natural this way", "this is the way that person talks", etc. VN fan translations tend to be bad at all of these things. The same is true of many (most?) official VN translations, and also official and fan translations of anime, manga, LNs, and even of many mainstream video games. Being good at each of these things is hard. Being consistently good at all of these things is extremely difficult, and hence why there are professionals. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the VN-reading community has gotten so used to people being bad at all of these things that they won't notice if you, also, are bad at them, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't strive to be better at it. One thing I want to drive home: Japanese VN writers are professional writers. If all of this stuff I wrote sounds nitpicky and you think I'm making this all way more complicated than it should be, then you are disrespecting the original. You can bet your ass the original writers had all of this stuff (and a whole lot more related to writing in a broader sense) in mind at some level while they were writing it. Either that, or they're bad writers and it's probably not worth the time to translate their work anyway...

I'm reading it, mostly so I can bitch about the terrible writing in the translation. Off to a great start with that so far!

Pictured here: most people involved with fan translation.

Must Love Words

Generally speaking, MoeNovel gets good licenses and then does a shit job with them from a translation perspective. They also remove adult content, by varying degrees, which gets a lot of people riled up, especially around here, but make no mistake: their translations range from merely bad to utterly abysmal. From what I've seen, A Sky Full of Stars is far and away their least bad release, so if you don't mind missing the adult content, and you don't mind merely kinda lousy writing, give it a try. But check out some fine screenshots from their latest masterpiece, Cross Channel (be sure to click through for more WTF): A lot of this stuff is completely incomprehensible. Don't play Cross Channel. Don't play If My Heart Had Wings. A Sky Full of Stars might be kinda okayish.

No posts here in the almost two weeks since I last posted? Oh well, so it goes. I shall double-post if I must. I was most of the way through season 1 of MariMite when I needed to find a show to watch while cooking, and I ended up with Citrus. I wrapped that up today, pleased with the choice. Very good, if not great, and very effective at manipulating my emotions, which I admit to enjoying every now and then. I was a bit tickled at first at parallels between the two shows (girls into other girls; strict all-girls school; focus on drama; banner themes notably included the importance and difficulty of reaching mutual understanding) and the places where they diverged wildly (presence of malicious characters vs. total absence of malicious characters; prurient/pandering handling of sexuality vs. much more subdued treatment). The presence of malicious people, especially, led to Citrus having a lot of outright negativity in it. It got pretty nerve-wracking for me at times, particularly during the Matsuri arc, since I don't like seeing characters I care about being put in danger, particularly danger of any kind of mental trauma. But the plot's willingness to put people in danger also makes for a more powerful story, and as Rooke pointed out elsewhere recently, as a reader, being made a little uncomfortable is often a good thing, when it broadens your experience and perspective.

Yeah, as with every other ero RPG I've played, it's rapey: defeat your enemy (stripping their clothes in the process, in this case), then "subdue" them, for "reasons" (in this case, because, to the batshit crazy main character, "seducing" his opponent is a necessary step in his plan). As these things go, it's on the lighter side (less pain described than a typical VN defloration scene; no blood in CGs; everybody involved is pretty into it within a few lines), but the lighter side of rape is still clearly rape.

Word on the street is that they tightened up the gameplay in vol. 2, both fixing some of the balance issues (you actually want to use different spells; map time actually requires some thinking since they don't just heap blocks on you) and expanding things (they added ice and electricity in vol. 2, and again, you actually want to use them). Then my work here is done!

I just finished it, and I thought it was a pretty solid game. In full disclosure, I've opted not to write a full review on it since a couple friends of mine worked on the localization, but I haven't seen anybody talking about it, so I thought I should at least start a thread here. First of all, the gameplay is pretty fun! I have only a little past experience with ero RPGs (like... three games, I guess?), and with the notable exception of Alicesoft titles, I've generally found them to be pretty thin on the gameplay. But Re;lord has pretty solid gameplay! The combat requires you to do a lot of clicking, trading off between left- and right-clicking to attack and guard, and it's all in real-time. No taking your time over a decision on a turn-based strategy game: click or be clicked. It's not the most complex system, and it does stop evolving about halfway through the game, but it's both active and challenging without feeling punishing or random (which often seems to happen to poorly designed turn-based RPGs). The leveling up of skills is fine; nothing special here, but still a decent gameplay element. And the last gameplay element is the map-conquering segment of the game, which is also pretty gratifying, though it's very easy (they didn't get the balance right here). The gameplay has various balance issues (for instance... you should probably just stick to the Wind spell most of the time and leave Fire alone), but they're only ever imbalanced in a way that makes the game easier, at least, and the game is still often challenging, all the way through the end (especially the optional hidden boss, which I eventually gave up on, because they were pretty darn difficult!). The script is pretty good. More typos than I would like, and there's some issue with line breaking around ellipses that gets annoying at times, but fortunately there just aren't that many ellipses hanging around. The writing is funny (cape jokes for miles), and also timely (right-wing nationalists, ahoy). The latter admittedly makes me a bit squeamish, but given the ending, I suspect it's not going to stay quite as hard-line on that front. The only downside to the game, really, is that, while the story reaches a reasonable stopping point at the end, it barely scratches the surface of where it wants to go. So, get out there and buy it, so we can get localized releases of volume 2 and volume 3. Do it for the cape jokes.

Studies in dystopic fiction. Read assorted classics of the genre, e.g., 1984, Brave New World, Nekopara, The Handmaid's Tale, etc. Reading aloud and/or acting out scenes from the currently-studied work. Reading the works and writing comparative analysis papers.

I finished MMO Junkie. It pushed my buttons all the way through, and ended up being extremely satisfying. I'm sure it's not for everyone, but if you 1) like sweet romances, 2) are a recovered MMO junkie, and 3) enjoyed Welcome to the NHK but maybe thought it was a bit darker than necessary at times, then have I ever got the show for you. I've since started my roughly annual re-watch of Maria-sama ga Miteru. I still enjoy it a great deal. Trying very hard not to look at subtitles this time through, which means I'm getting more enjoyment out of Yumi's goofy facial expressions than I ever have before. Otherwise, it's about the same as usual, which is to say, I still enjoy it a great deal.

I came to this thread just to offer this one. Thanks for beating me to it, Zaka.

Do you have a VNDB, just to make sure I'm not recommending things you've already played? Anyway, a selection of games I enjoyed quite a bit which I consider to have good plot: Gahkthun Deardrops Demonbane They're all very different games. Demonbane can be a little intense at times, but it's also very silly a lot of the time. Gahkthun is part of the excellent Steampunk Series. It's not my favorite, but it is the only one with an official translation (and also, not coincidentally, the only one with a decent translation). Deardrops has a fair bit of downtime, but the main plot is excellent, and it's a lot more lighthearted than the rest of these (or most of what I see other people recommending). I'll also add another plug for Saya no Uta. It's all intense, all the time, but it's beautiful and terrifying and wonderful.

11eyes is a decent chuunige with a typo-laden and occasionally borderline incomprehensible translation. The story and plot are honestly pretty good, as is the way the story is told through the narration and the Cross Whatsit system, but don't expect anything else from it, including branching plot lines, romance, etc.

Well, I called out the lack of route differentiation as a con in my review over here: https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2017/01/12/11eyes-sin-damnation-and-the-atonement-girl/ As I put it there: "Once you've seen one route, you've seen them all."

I ended up on that route, which also featured the character " ".

Most of the routes are practically identical. I would suggest saving Kukuri's route for last, and otherwise doing whatever order you feel like.

I don't know if either is better than the other from that perspective, sorry. FWIW, if your goal is to support the developer, then to be consistent with that, make sure you avoid used good stores like Mandarake, since obviously the developer doesn't get any cut of used game sales.

The Reddit VN buying guide is pretty thorough when it comes to listing all the options available: https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/wiki/buy Personally, I usually use either Mandarake or Amazon.co.jp + Tenso. Edit: actually, I forgot an important option. Usually I just buy them digitally from dmm or dlsite, nowadays.

This is actually the worst. Job well done.

I really should not have clicked that spoiler link.

Good point, the whole "win the combat in the game, but lose the fight" thing has grated on me at times too, and it does keep happening periodically on throughout the game, at least as far as I am (which is pretty darn far at this point). I'm curious how far you got now, but regardless, that one isn't going away. The random one-shots out on the field basically go away, pretty quickly. That's at its worst in the first zone, around to a much lesser extent in the second zone, much lesser still in the third, and then it's gone after that, from what I recall. The protagonist remains pretty one-note, though he gets at least a bit of filling out later on and a bit of shading. But he's definitely the "too pure for this world" type and isn't going to be winning character of the year any time soon. That said, the other characters (I want to say all of the major characters, which is a cast that keeps growing up until pretty late?) get to be a lot more interesting. I certainly have never felt like putting it down, so it clearly does more for me than it did for you, but even so, I'd say you should play it anyway. Rex is boring, but Pyra, Nia, and Tora are great, and so are the other characters who haven't joined up yet. Heck, even the bad guys are fairly cool once you get to know them better.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 update: holy crap I can't believe how good this game is. The plot just keeps getting better. At this point, every chapter ending knocks me flat on my ass, and sometimes I get a bonus pratfall in the middle of the chapter too. The difficulty is still kind of all over the board, but my experience now is radically different from what it was when I last posted. I think starting with the end boss fight of Chapter 3, boss fights started to feel a lot harder (that one in particular took me several tries, rearranging my party and roles each time). However, since I like doing side stuff, I did a lot of sidequesting and spamming merc missions, which has ended up with me outleveling the main game by quite a bit, so boss fights are again back on the easier side (when you're a solid ten levels higher than the boss, I guess that's understandable?). Balance is returning slowly though, since now I just run through story areas without actually fighting anything except named enemies. The random core crystal resonating thing is still infuriating, but at least I'm close to being done with it, I think. I have some 9 Blades left to fill in the encyclopedia, of which at least a few should be from quests/story. It does bug the crap out of me that I've found maybe four legendary core crystals at this point, and not one of them has given me anything better than a three-crown Blade. I think I once got a unique Blade from a rare core crystal (that despite opening a ton of rares), and all the rest of my random unique Blades have come from commons. If they're going to make the legendary crystals that hard to get, they could at least have the decency to give them a guaranteed good drop. Hell, I'd be happy just for them to guarantee a four-crown generic blade so I could farm it for an Overdrive. Oh well. At any rate, I can't recommend this game enough. If you do play it, definitely play the dub: admittedly, there's one voice actor I don't care for in the cast, but the rest are stellar. The localization is excellent and uses this lively set of regional accents for the characters, which I suspect reads weirdly if you're playing it subbed. However, it's an absolute delight (at least for me) playing it dubbed, when the regional wording is matched by regional accents on the voice cast. Mòrag's Scottish burr, in particular, is an utter pleasure to listen to and tends to make me melt into a puddle of happiness whenever I hear it. Edit: I forgot to mention the soundtrack. Mother of god, the soundtrack. It's so good it makes me want to cry.

The gameplay is absolutely terrible, and the loc is pretty bad. It's got more of a story and more of characters than Purino Party (which is saying almost nothing), and maybe marginally more of those than Huniepop, but abysmal gameplay where Huniepop had fantastic gameplay. Yes, the art is nice. Especially the date CGs Still, I'd strongly recommend against picking this one up. I certainly regret it, more for the waste of time with joyless gameplay than for the waste of money.