Nandemonai

Those things don't exist yet. They're going to take the Kickstarter money and go have them written. Edit: Now that the campaign is over, I guess, only the ones that actually got funded.

Problems like this almost always point to a management issue of some kind. Sekai Project released 2 games that clearly weren't ready on the same day. Then they released a third game like a week later. Clearly they rushed these out, so they could get them out by the end of the year. That's a management decision. There could be a lot of reasons for this. We've seen a lot of evidence that Sekai Project struggles with the day-to-day realities of running a company. Their public communication leaves something to be desired. They seem to have trouble juggling the huge number of projects that they're working on; many have experienced huge delays from their original projected timelines. I suspect the root problem is that they're trying to juggle too many balls and are having trouble keeping them in the air. And they haven't got enough pairs of eyes to keep on them. Dovac's comments about untranslated lines in Leyline are telling. It doesn't take six months to find untranslated lines and fix them. (And yes, I write code for a living.) It takes at most a few weeks to write a tool to generate a report with all the missing lines. Then at most another 2 weeks (if that!) to get everything translated and a new build into QA again. A good project manager would know that. Sekai Project is managing so many different projects that they need a project manager. These debacles tell me they probably haven't got one. As for HoshiMemo's translation problems, that probably boils down to the choice of translator and editor. Whoever was in charge of the project put people on it that shouldn't have been on it. There could be any number of reasons for that. Perhaps they didn't do a thorough enough job vetting them. Perhaps this was the best they could do because all the good people were booked on other projects. We don't know, and they won't say.

You still should already have known they're crap, though. They're not just bad. They're famously bad.

No, fan translations are not legal. Not into English or into any other language.

Oh, there's definitely ones still left. Go find the request threads from here or a few other places and look at the games most often requested. Muramasa and Shin Koihime Musou are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there's lots more.

ImoPara 2 has been #1 for weeks now. It apparently also dragged ImoPara #1 back onto the top 5. ImoPara 1 also did really well for MangaGamer. It's like Koihime: it's been a bestseller for several years since it came out. In fact it's arguably better, because its ranking on their "best of year" list for 2017 actually went up compared to last year.

Is that what they're calling it, now?

If you're saying the translation is so bad it's not worth paying more than $5 for, and also saying that middle schoolers could do a better job... Why are you saying the translation isn't horrible?

I very much doubt the Hoshimemo fandisc will be a Kickstarter exclusive. I can't imagine Sekai would want to leave that money on the table. Sure, there have been some light novels and things that were, but those are much harder for Sekai to sell. Sekai sells games. It makes more sense to get money from the Kickstarter to translate the fandisc, then also get money from people buying at retail. If the fandisc was some kind of Kickstarter exclusive, I'm pretty sure it'd have been explcitly mentioned in the campaign.

I'm of two minds in regards to that last one. On the one hand: What. The. Fuck. Was. That? And on the other hand? I am intrigued by your ideas, and wish to subscribe to your mailing list.

One of SteamSpy's biggest problems is it's very high degree of inaccuracy, which gets even worse for games that haven't been on sale for very long, or that don't have very high sales. I used to put far too much faith in it myself.

He's been kind of busy. Progress update before I head out of town for the holidays in a few days: 24.9% edited

It's an all-ages-only release of a game that was 18-plus in Japan. Most of the people here who care about censorship and/or could actually judge it, are avoiding the game solely on those grounds. So no, probably no one is playing the game, at least, not anyone who can likely help you.

Regarding point number 1: While it is true most VNs are Asian-focused, and specifically Japan-focused, I wouldn't read too much into it. This is because the Japanese have an edge in making VNs: they've been making them for about 20 years longer than the OELVN crowd, so they're (generally) better at it. As such, Japanese VNs dominate the market. This causes Asian / Japanese settings to dominate for two reasons. One, a lot of OELVN writers will be basing their work off of what they know, which is predominantly Japanese work. Two, Japanese VN makers very very often use Japan as a setting. Not because VNs work better that way, but for the same reason that Japanese anime features the Tokyo Tower so much, or when Hollywood movies want to blow something up, they blow up the White House or the Hoover Dam. It's just easier to write what you know. If you ask me, the predominance of the Asian backdrop is more due to happenstance than to it being inherently more attractive to the VN audience. I would focus more on writing a good story than on things like 'do I need it to be Eastern-themed or Western-themed in order to appeal to the market'.

That's a common trick, actually. I haven't actually played FSN myself, but I have no problem believing that's why he's there.

Part of the problem is that Da Capo 1 was translated in MangaGamer's very early days, when their translations left much to be desired. Unlike some other titles, which were fixed later, this one never was.

I don't really consider the average moege heroine to be a 'main character'. And the protag-kuns in most moege lack any real personality. Okabe Rintarou comes to mind. He's got a very well defined personality, and it makes the game he's in shine. I have to say the same for Kurou Daijuuji, the main character of Demonbane. He has a very well defined personality, and it oozes through every aspect of the game that he's in to great effect.

I went to go take a look at Maitetsu's Steam page, only to find it hasn't actually got one. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the game doesn't wind up releasing on Steam after all. And if it does, it will only be because the game's promotional materials (at least the ones up on the game's site right now) aren't pushing the sexualization angle. They push the slice of life angle, none of the characters are explicitly underage, and the main character isn't a grown man with an explicit avowed interest in little girls. Sure, it might be a lolige. But they're not marketing it as one. Whereas The Key to Home sure seemed to have been designed to be marketed that way from the get go. I checked out their Steam page awhile back. It had a screenshot that was obviously supposed to look an awful lot like a footjob without actually being one. It's just much more open and obvious about it, and guess what? Steam has the right not to sell something if they don't want to. It is their service. They obviously know about the porn games flooding onto Steam. They've chosen to throw up roadblocks (the patches thing) but have continued to allow it. They don't need to do that. Nobody has a right to sell their stuff there. If Valve decides "we're not comfortable allowing this title on Steam", they can do that. I'm fine with them doing it because they're worried about bad press if the story somehow blew up. I'm also fine with them doing it because Valve as a company decided 'this makes our skin crawl, we don't want this on our store'. I would not be fine if Valve said something like "if you publish that game anywhere else, we'll never talk to you again". That would be censorship. Valve deciding it doesn't want to carry Imouto Paradise or Suck my Dick or Die or The Key to Home isn't censorship. No one has a right to be heard using any platform they demand access to. That's not how it works. Other folks have the right not to associate with you, if they don't like you. Steam is not a public utility.

It was announced at Otacon 2016. It's been in the works for quite awhile. Compared to Funbag Fantasy, which was announced last May, and released four months later.

Yeah, that game is actually a compilation. The three parts were, once upon a time, sold as individual games. Here is the original release corresponding to that first part. So yeah, that's literally just a framing device to tie together the three pieces, that were originally completely unrelated.

So ... you want the latest update to the Steam version... But you can't get access to it? No dice, pirate stuff isn't allowed here.

Especially don't do it again three more times after it happens to you the first time. You've got to admire(?) somebody who sees their pet go into a hole in the wall... Remembers what happened the last three times this was an issue ... Then gets in the hole in the wall anyway.

Then you might wanna back at a cheap tier just to get access to BackerKit. I would not assume those bonuses will ever be generally available.

That is ... not impossible, but it's unlikely. Most of these companies don't do the English versions in-house. They let their US publishing partners take care of it. In fact, we've seen the results of Japanese companies going it alone. They tend not to be able to judge how good a translation is themselves, so they tend to hire really bad translators. The results tend to be things like Libra, or early MangaGamer translations. Edit: Besides, a censored game just happened to be published by the only major player known for censoring things. Personally, I think that's good enough. I'm assuming Nutaku probably did it on that basis. I'm not willing to extend them the benefit of the doubt. Sure, we don't have proof. The evidence still points in their direction. I mean, Nutaku hasn't even denied being responsible. If they were to issue an official statement which said "we did not request these changes, the original licensor wanted them" then that would be different. (Nutaku has a reputation for being dishonest, so I might not believe them. But a denial would definitely make me more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt.)

After they got flak for their translation work on Sakura Sakura, they went and got some experienced and skilled translators to work on the game instead. I presume they will continue to do good work in that regard. Besides which, MiKandi is currently working on a new translation for Libra anyway.