Nandemonai

Being that I did a full retranslation of Nocturnal Illusion, it should come as no surprise that I think it counts. It definitely has a kickass soundtrack. The translation on existing versions is terrible though. I'd wait. There are plenty of other really good games. I liked Tokyo Babel and Shadows of Pygmalion a lot. Littlewitch Romanesque is great (get the steam version if you don't like loli, game's great). Steins;Gate 0 is, well, it's more Steins;Gate. Koihime Musou has a huge cast full of great characters. Gahkthun of the Golden Lightning I haven't gotten all that far in, but it's awesome. (It also sounds right up your alley.) I hear really good things about Sekai de Ichiban NG na Koi (announced, not out yet). And I'd have to say Funbag Fantasy - yes, for real, but only if you like nukige. Planetarian is great. If you haven't played them, Persona 3-5 are all excellent. You'd probably like Demonbane. Also there's Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child (just got officially released). I haven't been able to get through Chaos;Head yet - it's much harder to get into because Takumi is a much less likeable MC than Okabe. So I really don't know squat about its sequel, Chaos;Child.

I'm surprised nobody's recommended Chaos;Head yet. It's not exactly the same, I don't think, but it's similar.

Sorami isn't the protagonist for very long. But I like Setsuna as well. Tokyo Babel is a lot of fun. The story's got issues, but the characters make up for it.

Assuming what I've heard about it being a Kancolle reference is correct, no, she's not. She's being a weeaboo. The random engrish in her original dialog is supposed to emphasize that she's a dork who's bilingual in Japanese and English. If that's the case, then what Sekai did is probably the only real way to translate this into English. No, American and British English don't diverge enough for that to work. I went and found some footage of the Japanese version for DD on YouTube, just to see if maybe they did that thing with furigana and translated the English words. They did not. She just throws in random English and the Japanese player is expected to follow along without help. In fact I hear that Japanese players found DD just as annoying as it seems Western players do. First, this tells me the differences between American and British English won't work. It's not incomprehensible enough to be a faithful recreation of the original. Second, it tells me that the translation actually worked. People are getting pissed off that they can't understand DD in the English version? That's great, it means the translator took one of the problematic aspects of the original game and faithfully recreated the experience for an English speaking audience. Which is nice: For a change, we have a translation that works so well people are getting annoyed at the game. Except that the issue was present in the original, instead of having been added by inept localization. Imagine how NIS America would have "localized" DD. The quirk would simply be entirely gone from her dialogue. People might notice because they'd hear her JP VA using tons of English, but that would be it. It would have just been lost in translation.

There's also Soul Link and Steins;Gate.

FF7 was the game that proved RPGs had a market in the West. I remember. I was there. In the Super Nintendo days, Nintendo Power tried to start up a monthly RPG column, but just didn't have enough material. They cut down the frequency after a column on a bunch of Japanese-only series. (I imagine I wasn't the only one who complained it just felt cruel.) The ones I remember were Tales of Phantasia and Fire Emblem, both series that would take a decade or so to catch on over here! But it turned out RPGs not named "Final Fantasy" had trouble moving units. They sold enough that post-FF7 a lot more got translated, but they didn't catch on the way (say) Call of Duty did. Disgaea was the next big one. It sold out almost instantly, and Atlus had to reprint the game. It led directly to NIS founding NISA and getting into the market, and it was also the game that proved the "quirky, very Japanese" subtype of JRPG could do well. A lot more games started coming over after that. As for why JRPGs have declined, it's because the console market in Japan has declined as well, so they all moved to portable devices. And as for visual novels... It's really only been since the mid-2010's that really good visual novels have been released, with really good translations. I'll point to the relaunch of MangaGamer, when they released Shuffle! and Koihime and Kara no Shoujo. Around the same time Jast USA finally released Demonbane. Prior to that date, there were a few gems released (Crescendo, Nocturnal Illusion, Eve Burst Error, probably some others) but almost everything was crap, even the games that weren't nukige. That, combined with Steam Greenlight forcing Valve to allow VNs onto Steam (after which they decided there was no reason they shouldn't have been allowed there all along), is what led to where we are today.

"Supposed to be" going? There's no such thing. Nowhere will you find a rulebook that says "Thou shalt not release censored-only versions of thine games". I hate Moenovel, SakuraGame, and Winged Cloud's market "strategies", and to me they represent everything wrong with the VN market, and I hope they crash and burn. But that's not the same thing as saying that's not "how it's supposed to be". Supposed to be according to whom? From a certain point of view, what they're doing is working, isn't it? And the only thing a business is "supposed to" do is make money, right?

You missed spoiler tags, dude.

And I've also seen a better job from Sekai Project - Chrono Clock. Being that I am still in the beginning, I'd probably give this game a B in translation so far. The translator has clearly tried to do this the right way, but also clearly isn't quite there.

I wouldn't really say any of those titles have a decent plot, no. Snow Drop is the closest to having a decent plot, but it's a very frustrating game to play, the plot isn't THAT great, and the older sister is probably the worst character.

Yeah, it will be obvious when the choice points for Suzuha, Faris, and Luka come up. Okabe wiill think to himself that he needs to do something, but the story won't force you to do it. That's a choice point for the ending.

I don't see anyone here digging back into the old days. There are several really old school games that might fit the bill, so I suppose I'll make myself look old. Kango Shichauzo and Come See Me Tonight both fit the bill, as I recall. Honestly I don't actually recommend these games. They're just too old, too simple, and too boring. There's an older-sister type, kind of, in Snow Drop too (she's the older sister of one of the heroines, not of you) but she doesn't actually have a route and she's not that good of a character. I honestly don't really recommend that one either. The Sagara Family definitely counts. That's one I actually would give a lukewarm recommendation, just because the pickings are kind of slim.

I liked all of them, but yeah, they're super short (except for Mayuri's). As for the specific question about Mayuri: This goes for the Kurisu ending as well. You should probably get them before getting the true ending. The true ending explains everything in a way that these endings don't.

Be warned: Libra Vampire Princess technically came out, but the translation is beyond awful. You should probably stay away.

I was talking to some cousins of mine once years ago about Zelda: Twilight Princess. They said they loved the game. So I asked something like "Oh yeah? Which part gave you the most trouble?" and they told me "well, uh, we actually have a guide, and we just use the guide to play the game." I thought this was crazy, and was like "But all the fun is figuring all that stuff out for yourself. How is it any fun to use a walkthrough?" They didn't really have a good answer other than "I dunno, I just like the game." There's no one right way to use a walkthrough. The trick is to figure out what works for you, and do it. Or I guess, figure out what doesn't work for you, and then don't.

Honestly? if you want my advice, then just put down games you want to play based on how much you want to play them. Don't worry so much about feasibility. Just don't suggest any games by bankrupt companies, and all other things being equal, suggestions from companies they already work with are more practical. Beyond that, trying to read the tea leaves is basically a waste of time. There are just too many unknowns to try to predict this. There are too many reasons why a company might have never dealt with the west before, and most of those reasons are kept secret, so it's not even like you can try to make an informed guess. Maybe they remember RapeLay and are terrified of it happening to them. Maybe the artist doesn't want to redraw the CG. Maybe one of the people in management dealt with Western businesses before, had a bad experience, and thinks "never again". Maybe they think it'd be a waste of time and money. Maybe someone who works there hates someone who works in the Japanese branch of MangaGamer. It could even be as simple as, well, nobody ever asked. We'll never find out those sorts of things, because all such negotiations are confidential. So just do what you want.

And such obvious manipulation isn't handled by VNDB administrators? If it's that blatant I'd figure those users would get banned and their votes annulled.

Wait, that runs for large parts of the game? Then if I were working on the game I'd definitely spend more time on it than 10 or 15 minutes at 2 in the morning I still think my original point holds water - it's definitely possible to translate Asa-baka into English, you just have to get creative.

Eh, that depends on how profane the character is the rest of the time. For someone who swears like a sailor that would be pretty mild, for someone who hardly ever curses it's probably too harsh. But yeah, same idea.

Yeah, I know. Talking to yourself is said to be a sign of impending mental collapse. And double posting is frowned on. But it'd be even more disruptive to edit my previous post with an example. This line here: I honestly didn't expect anything else, but it looks like the miracle that she got up by herself remains as an event that occurs once in a hundred years or so. The translator clearly tried to make this flow in English, and it's not too bad. But it's not quite there. It's kind of stiff. I'd have tweaked it a bit like this: I wasn't really expecting anything else, honestly, but I guess Konami getting herself up is destined to be a rare miracle, seen perhaps once a century.

Having not gotten that far in the game myself, I'm just going to speak generally. First, while in general it's good for similar terminology to be translated similarly, it's not a requirement. This is one spot where I'd ditch it. Having it consistently translated might be nice, but having it consistently translated battily is not. And second, I'd ditch the whole bit where it mimics an honorific. It's technically extraordinarily difficult to make that work in English (as you go over pretty well). But it's a mistake to think that means it can't be done. No, this is when you get creative. And you can get close. She's making a point of not just calling the person stupid, but being very disrespectful at the same time (by not using a real honorific, and instead using an insult in its place). Making fun of the person's name seems good enough. So I'd probably go with something like Aso Stupid, or Asa Doofus. Maybe Asuck, or Asand-for-brains. Failing that, I'd break another part of the Pirate Code of Translation (Arr: it's more of a set of loose guidelines). Generally, it just seems weird for someone to in Japanese use someone's name in a spoken line, and the translation not reflect that. But people use names when talking to each other differently in Japanese than English. So I've had to reword sentences to find good spots where an English speaker might actually insert the name of whoever they're talking to. I don't like to break this not-a-rule, because it's one thing people can actually notice and it will feel weird. But it can be done. And then you have a whole wealth of ways to insult someone's intelligence. Knucklehead. Dumbass. Dingbat. Fool. Dim bulb. Special. Thinks "gullible" really isn't in the dictionary. Out to lunch.

... And to think, when people play the game where the translators actually did something like that (Chrono Clock) they're like ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER! DO YOU SPEAK IT!? Edit: No, you can't. And I say that as someone who's moderately in favor of leaving honorifics in. It's not an honorific. It's an insult. Calling someone stupid is not some untranslatable concept.

Indeed. Trust me, you don't want the game translated as if it were a technical manual. Instead, when characters talk, the English is supposed to convey as close to the same thoughts in as close to the same tone as you can get to the original. Now, Saku Saku in particular is supposed to be funny. Taking some liberties in order to keep the funny bits funny is definitely a good call. Overall, it's not the best translation I've ever seen, but it works well. I have found some spots where the translation seemed rough, but it had nothing to do with adding words or not. (Embarrassingly, I can't remember any off the top of my head.) As for "bat"? Yeah, that's a pretty darn terrible choice. There are worse ways to translate using "baka" as if it were an honorific. But you kind of have to try. I would honestly not have called it a piece of real slang had I not seen the evidence in this thread. And I would have been just as sure of it as I was that "circuituitous" was a word until about a month ago.

Chrono Clock and Kindred Spirits are both pretty good.

Definitely not the guy who hasn't even finished the common route. Err, wait. That would be me!