Nandemonai

I'm completely fine with more Steins;Gate. It's one of my absolute favorite visual novels - no, scratch that. It's one of my favorite time travel stories, period. Make more Steins;Gate, if it's any good, I'm there. I wasn't a big fan of the way S;G0 just ended and skipped over stuff it shouldn't have, but I still enjoyed the hell out of the game because ... it's more Steins;Gate. And it has Maho! If they took the game's whole script, and animated it, that ... would be crazy expensive, but at least it'd be something cool. Doesn't seem like that's what they did, and really, it seems unlikely. They could also add S;G0 stuff. Chris could talk to Maho occasionally, maybe a thing or two about Amadeus. Wouldn't cause continuity problems if Okabe never finds out about it. Doesn't seem likely either. But if all they're doing is "you got your VN in my anime", that'is literally, like, the VN equivalent of Cine-manga or whatever Tokyopop called it. That, uh, that's like the worst of both worlds. Lower-fidelity anime graphics, combined with pacing issues from combining the footage with text boxes ? Really?

They at least mentioned it on their Twitter late last week, so I expect an announcement of some kind relatively soon. Apparently last weekend was a holiday weekend in Japan, so I don't expect much to have actually happened in the last few days. The almost total lack of communication is pretty inexplicable, though. Come on, guys! It's not hard to say "We're still looking into it" periodically!

I converted to a paying customer in 2001, but was a fan about 2 years before that. Now get off my lawn! ... Damn whupper-snappers -- If that ball comes over my fence one more time, so help me...

Total necro, I know, but I couldn't find a better thread for this important public service announcement There is an untranslated menu in Chrono Clock. Start up the game, get in game, and hit ESC. I'm not sure what all the options do, but I can tell you that the bottom one means "Quit game", and the second-from-the-bottom one means "Return to main menu". "Quit" displays an English confirmation box, but 'Return to title' pops up a Japanese language dialog box with a yes and a no option. Picking 'yes' will in fact take you back to the menu. I contacted Sekai's support, since they probably want to fix that (the menu should either be removed, or be in English), but they're pretty swamped, so I'm also posting it here.

Where did that info come from? But I guess in that case it's better to wait, than to have another Libra Vampire Princess incident.

Seems to be looking a lot more secure than it was a couple of days ago. Looks like putting out that demo worked out well for them. (But they probably shouldn't have even launched without it in the first place.)

So I recently beat Shadows of Pygmalion and Tokyo Babel. I saw both of them get flak from people here, and they definitely both had issues, but I enjoyed them both quite a bit. I'm really hoping we get more Propeller games licensed officially. I also beat SonoHana New Gen (which was much better than I'd expected it to be, but still had issues). And I finished the prologue for Majikoi (which is as far as I said I would get before waiting for the updated version from Jast). And I beat Nekonin Ex-Heart, which is ... not good. At all. Of the games I've been recently playing that leaves only Gahkthun, Chaos;Head, and Princess Evangile/W-Happiness. I think that I've had enough serious deep plots for awhile, though. Not sure what I'm going to start; Chrono Clock or Kindred Spirits or Fashioning Little Miss Lonesome seem likely. The original translation does not do the game any favors. And yes, the game suffers because of its reliance on old school game design, to its detriment. There's a reason the old adventure game style went out of favor; and the lack of a real route structure also does not work very well. (In fact the only thing that affects endings is having to choose between [2 girls]; if you 'can't decide' then nothing happens, but if you pick one or the other, then only the bad ending for the other girl is accessible.) But I think it's still an exceptional example of a good story, especially from the era. If there are other horror games like it, I want to know about them.

Exactly. Their budget is likely rather small, and they're likely limited in companies to license from. That forces them to get creative. They probably can't get famous or very highly-rated games; licensors aren't eager to give those to a first-time outfit. (This is why Alicesoft made MangaGamer release Beat Blades Haruka first; MG was an unknown quantity.) So they need a B-list title they can get with a lot less trouble, while avoiding the pitfall of picking a crappy game. Given the limitations I imagine they're probably working under, they seem to have done as well as they could by picking Sakura Sakura. It's old. In its day, it was decently well-received in Japan - but not wildly successful. It's neither notorious nor famous. These things spell 'cheap and easy to license, but still of moderately high quality'.

Actually, pirates are probably downloading versions that don't ask for activation at all. On the off chance that this is a legitimate customer who's confused: Go to your Mangagamer account here: https://www.mangagamer.com/mypage_index.php - You'll need to be logged in, of course. Look for Kara no Shoujo 2. If you see an activation code listed there, try it. If it doesn't work, it's been used already. Codes only work one time. (ManagGamer's site will continue to list codes even if they've already been used. This is kind of annoying and confused me once before.) In that case you'll want to click the "Request another activation code" button, then use the new code. (If you've already reached max activations somehow, then contact MG support.)

Yeah, they're 9K short, the final surge often is similar to the initial one (which was about 3-4K), and the last couple of days have not been kind to them. They need to do something to revitalize this project, or it runs a pretty significant risk of failing.

I program computers for a living. There are a couple different reasons this could happen. They're all basically variants on reasons why changes would be being made right up until the release date. Given what I've seen Doddler say on Twitter about making changes to games a week before they're supposed to release, this doesn't seem to be that uncommon. Perhaps the uncensored assets took a long time, long enough to threaten to delay the schedule. Sekai Project would probably do most of the testing before the new assets arrived, and plan on testing the bare minimum with the new assets before rushing the game out the door. If they didn't get that new build with those assets until (say) late Tuesday, when it was supposed to release on Thursday, well, that's not a lot of time. If something's broken, it's going to delay the release. Or perhaps the issue was introduced by a fix for a different issue. Again, if testing is running late, fixes are going to be made running up real close to the intended release date. If one of them breaks something, bad things happen to your schedule.

And the Chaos:Head patch was released in 2008. It had a show-stopping bug where, if you saved at the wrong time, attempting to load that save would crash the game. Whoever developed that patch never bothered to fix it. It wasn't fixed until earlier this year (or was it late last year?) by a completely different team, and then only because that new group started working on Chaos;Head Noah. Also, you mention fan translation scripts that have been "perfected"? Fan translations vary widely in quality, and many of them are pretty darned crappy. I haven't played it myself, but I am given to understand that even at revision 4, Amaterasu's work on ReWrite just wasn't very good. Finally, while it is true that fan translation patches are free, the games themselves are not. Fan translations ask you to pay the ridiculous Japanese retail price for these games. That's way more than any of the professional releases you mentioned. Of course, if you just pirate the Japanese release, and compare that to paying for Western releases, well then that's not a fair comparison at all.

On the one hand, you may have an arguable point here. It may very well be that fan patches get updated more often. But in my experience, professional VN releases get patches more frequently than you might think. Especially if they're released by MangaGamer. But on the other hand, uh, even if that's true, it would be entirely consistent with the idea that there's more stuff broken in fan patches that needs fixing. If one company sells washing machines with a no-questions-asked lifetime warranty where they'll replace the unit if it blows up, you're still better off with the company that doesn't offer that because their washing machines don't explode.

I quit reading them because they ran that silly "I got mine, screw y'all" editorial advocating censored-only releases. Which I found hilariously hypocritical for a site that specializes in covering RPGs, considering how heavily bowdlerized they were in the PS1 days and earlier, and how this used to be pretty regularly criticized.

They actually announced translation had begun in their last status update, 2 weeks before this one. At the rate of 2 weeks to translate 2.5%, the game will take about 80 weeks to be translated. Of course it won't be fully linear, but in my experience tracking MG's status updates these things are roughly linear in the short term. It's possible that it might start jumping dramatically (like the way Kuroinu Vol 3 did 15% in the same 2 week period) but it's unlikely. I wouldn't bet on this VN being out before 2019.

Yeah, I like the VN and everything, but good lord, is it hard to deal with Takumi. I can only play in fits and spurts because of that. Okabe was not particularly well-adjusted, but Takumi literally needs professional help. The real problem, though, is that Okabe has redeeming qualities that come part and parcel with his eccentricities and obnoxiousness. Takumi - well, I'm still relatively early in the game (I think), but not so much.

Okay, it's 8/31. Where's the game? I mean, delaying the game I understand. But they clearly said "August" in their tweet, so it's not like they meant to say 9/31 but said 8/31 instead. And they tweeted it out of both of their accounts. Now there's just radio silence and no game, which is kind of weird.

Yeah. I honestly do hope Mikandi doesn't give up. But I do hope they never work with these "translators" again.

Use your braaaaains a little bit, man. Of course it - rrrrr - sorry, what were we talking about?

Okay. In no particular order: Manga: Berserk. Yokohama Shopping Log. Monster Musume. Battle Angel Alita. Anime: Evangelion. Escaflowne. Cowboy Bebop. Kino's Journey. Crest of the Stars. K-On. Azumanga Daioh. Rage of Bahamut. VNs: Steins;Gate. Steins;Gate 0. Littlewitch Romanesque. Shadows of Pygmalion. Gahkthun of the Golden Lightning. Koihime Musou. Kara no Shoujo. Demonbane.

Damn you, @Huang Ling Yin, for making me switch to this hideous theme just so I could like your post. And @Darklord Rooke hurry up and fix your busted-ass looking theme!

Yeah, that's what I thought the link was. Whenever I go there, I get redirected here: http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Community_Central:Not_a_valid_community?from=agth.wikia.com

You sure? I get the "not a valid community" message when I try to go there. What's the URL for the database?

As someone who's never played your games before, but is vaguely interested in The Last Birdling: i know that talking up your own stuff can be bad, but you should also beware the other way around. You might want to be a little less hard on yourself when describing your own body of work. If the whole thing is "Jesus Christ, I'm so sorry that I suck" then you run the risk of causing people to say "Well, gee, this game looked good, but maybe I should reconsider..."

And that's fine. As long as it's coming, it being last on the priority list isn't really a problem. (If it is only one scene, it probably doesn't matter all that much anyway; but it certainly would matter if they just said "screw it" and bailed after having said that wouldn't happen.)