Nandemonai

I've seen Nekopara called a nukige (a pizza delivery simulator) before. It's not. I mean, yes, the sex scenes are a big part of it. But there's too much attention paid to giving the girls real personalities and to the setting. They're more moege/ charage in my book. As such, they wouldn't be too bad without the H. Nekopara is not super great, without the art (and especially the animation tech) nobody would care. (The original Nekopara's trailers actually made a point of showing off the movement, because Nekopara was the first game to use the tech.) But it actually has good enough writing to be successful, where something like Neko-nin Ex Heart does not.

I liked Dengeki Stryker, but I didn't really like the main story very well. None of the routes felt to me like the really gelled the way they should. For me the fights were cool, and the characters were interesting, but that was pretty much it.

I am very glad they decided not to just write off the project and move on. The temptation to do that is very powerful (throwing good money after bad, and all that) but it really wouldn't have done good things for their reputation. Look at MangaGamer's shaky reputation early on (because that's what they did with a lot of their early titles); it took them quite awhile to shrug it off.

Of course language matters. My whole point was that more people want English games than want Japanese-only games.

Well, there's always this one...

Other people already added most of what I would've added. So I'll chime in with ones that I haven't seen mentioned yet. Eve Burst Error and Soul Link (if you were lucky enough to buy a copy when it was available, anyway).

Hah. They'd better remove that first video. You can't have that kind of stuff up in there. (Thanks, SakuraGame! )

I'd be pretty pissed off too if I made $16K in a year and people were stealing what I poured my heart and soul into on the internet. The guy seemed really upset when he wrote that, and even so it was remarkably polite (for a "go to hell" letter anyway). And he actually took the time to explain why he was angry instead of just making demands. That doesn't seem so bad to me. It's a simple fact that a fan patch causes piracy of the title in question to shoot way up compared to what it was before. And yes, I see you over there, getting all indignant. Well, it does. There are a lot more fans that speak English than can read Japanese, so a fan patch dramatically ups the number of interested pirates. The fact that fan patches aren't released by their creators as prepackaged torrents doesn't really matter when other people distribute them that way. If he writes off the entire English community as a bunch of filthy pirates, well, be honest. How far off is he? Really?

Well, that was fast.

To each his own. I'm a sucker for monster girls, and I've been especially interested in Draculius for a few years now. So I was interested in the game, but, well, not with that translation. But the more important thing here is that the complaints were not ignored, and they're working on patching the translation.

I didn't see any better thread, and I didn't really want to start a new one. So I chant my dark necromantic incantations instead. So there was an update that went out over Halloween. It was marked 'For Backers Only', so I'm not going to post the whole thing here. But there are some highly relevant parts: Also, I found this: http://www.7happycreations.com/just-who-translated-libra-of-the-vampire-princess/ This description is horrifying. 3 translation teams, team changeovers, it was the particular team members' first translation job (which is just terrible - if they're a big company, haven't they got veteran people? No team should ever consist of all newbies.) They translated "simply and cleanly" in an effort to make their style fit with the other teams' styles, even though they never saw any of their work! Un. Believable.

I actually sent them a message at their 'contact us' page and pointed them to the thread you posted. We'll see what (if anything) they say.

http://www.cherrykissgames.com/2017/11/01/assuming-direct-control-dev-blog/ Apparently they just officially acquired the rights to the game and will be releasing the full 18+ version. (I remember hearing that the non-h parts that did come over were shortened and changed. I don't know if those changes will be reverted.)

Damn, that was a weird ride.

MangaGamer's put out quite a few fandisks. Don't give up hope.

Steins;Gate is pretty much exactly what you said you wanted: great characters that you'll really get to know over the course of the game. H-scenes are a thing, though. Of the VNs that I listed, Steins;Gate is all-ages (I mean, it's on Playstation). Tokyo Babel is also all-ages. All the others, except 3, are h-games, but also have a non-H version available. Koihime Musou is a huge game, so even though H is a pretty small part of it overall, there's still a lot of it. Kindred Spirits is so tame that it could be put on Steam 100% as-is with no censorship, but it's technically adult. And Demonbane is really low on H as well. Those are the 3 I mentioned that don't have a non-H version. I have no idea if that matters to you or not.

Let's see. You want a strong cast of likeable characters? And genre doesn't matter? In no particular order, there is Chrono Clock, Kindred Spirits, Steins;Gate (and the sequel S;G 0), Persona 3-4, Demonbane, Koihime Musou, Littlewitch Romanesque, Tokyo Babel, Princess Evangile (Konomi and Ruriko by themselves ought to work out well, some of the others are kind of bland), Chou Dengeki Stryker, and A Kiss For The Petals New Gen. Oh, and if you like RPGs, then you should also check out Recettear and the Trails series (Trails in the Sky / Trails of Cold Steel - 1st 3, and 1st game of 3rd arc, are on Steam).

Actually, I was convinced they had. But reading this announcement closely, I don't think that's right anymore. Here's what they actually said. They gave it a "Winter 2017" window. Except because "Winter 2017" runs from 12/21/2017 to 3/20/2018, realistically, they're releasing sometime in the first quarter of 2018. (I very much doubt they'll be shipping the game out over Christmas, after all.)

Two? As far as I know they've only released one. Another one does in fact come out next week, but it's not actually out yet.

I'd forgotten about those two unavoidable h-scenes. But we're both right. I'll explain a bit more. KM has a system where the main story periodically takes a breather for side events. You can pick who you want to see the side events with, but you have a limited number of slots per free time block. As characters join you, they'll become available to spend time with. Each character has a set sequence of side events, and they're written so they could take place - mostly - anywhere in the story. (It can get a little weird doing really early events for characters that join in the beginning, towards the end of the game. Otherwise, it mostly works.) There are only a few h-scenes outside of this. Two that relate to spoilers, and one for Aisha that serves as a tiebreaker. Which ending you have available is determined by which of the 3 main girls you've seen all the events for. If you meet none of the criteria, the game defaults to Aisha. At no point during the story (except for the aforementioned spoiler main-story events) does the main character sleep with anyone he's not already in a romantic relationship with. So anyone he's sleeping with, he has a serious romantic relationship with.

Technically yes, but those routes basically suck. There's 3 "main girls", and they each have an ending. But the real ending is the harem ending, which you must unlock by getting all 3 of the normal endings. The lead is basically an emperor in ancient China (it's an isekai game). He basically has multiple wives (though I don't the game actually claims you're technically married). There is no casual sex before serious romance forms. He's in a serious romance with, uh, almost (but not quite) everybody. I highly recommend the game, because it's kickass from start to finish. But if that bugs you, it might not be the game for you.

Never mind being sued. You never deliberately release something you don't have rights for, if you ever want to do business with any licensor ever again. NuTech found this out the hard way. And that's the difference. Fans can do whatever they want because there are no consequences to them personally. They don't need to worry about their reputation with the rights holders, because they're already ignoring what the rights holders want. They don't need to worry about being sued, because it's a waste of a lot of time and money (that the rightsholders don't have) and generates huge amounts of ill will. They don't need to worry about their company (which in the case of J-List has been around for more than 20 years) being destroyed, because they haven't got one. Fan translators ignore all the rules and do whatever they want. The same rules apply to them, in theory. Fan translations are illegal. But all the penalties for breaking those rules are toothless, when it comes to dealing with people like fan translators. There's no way to punish them. So they have nothing to lose. A real company will have its business destroyed if it ignores the rules. Fan translators have no such problem. So that's why the fan translation has all this extra stuff in it. Because the people who made it didn't give a crap about what the rightsholders wanted and just did whatever they wanted. And if that makes the fan patch look more attractive than the legit release, and that in turn causes sales to suffer? Then maybe the lesson Jast USA takes away is 'maybe next time don't license the game with an already-released fan patch'.

MangaGamer's words on the matter are far more eloquent than mine. Here is the Wayback archive of an answer on their ask.fm account (which was deleted with no explanation a year or two ago):

You've also just identified a large part of the reason things that have already had a fan patch released to the public don't often get full releases.

Funbag is like Berserk. They both belong to a genre that typically has a strong draw other than plot. Things in Berserk's ultraviolent genre include truly awful stuff like Apocalypse Zero. And in the nukige realm we have games where the "plot" is something like "All these monster girls are into the main character because... umm... His semen contains hyper-concentrated magical energy!" Most entries in those genres don't bother, because they know a strong plot and characters aren't the reason people buy these. So they'll still do well even with terrible writing. But Funbag and Berserk do. I have played non-H RPGs with worse characters and worldbuilding than Funbag Fantasy. And yes, I'm serious. Yes, there's gobs and gobs of h-scenes, but the plot actually is written well enough to justify why they're there. To answer your other question (harem versus routes): It's not an either-or. The game basically does both. There are individual character routes, which focus on a single character and are romantic. The harem stuff comes basically as an epilogue to the true route (which is canon and is what the sequels are based off of). And it even makes sense in-story!