Nandemonai

Well, for one, that emoticon is from one of the characters in Nekopara ... Nekopara 1 never manages to be great, but it mostly manages to not be boring. Nekopara 2 is a significant improvement. The series has nice art. Very nice art. I've actually come to respect Nekopara more as I replayed a few of the old VNs translated in the bad old days, and discovered how terrible they were. (I just had no taste back then.) Nekopara actually gives its characters personality - not much, but it's there - and lets them play off each other to create decent character interaction. Considering that they're basically really short moege, that's the main thing they need to do. I'd say that Nekopara is successful for three main reasons: 1) It has really good art; 2) It was in the right place at the right time; and 3) It manages to do the bare minimum of what you need to actually be an entertaining read. And number 3 is harder than you think; consider Wild Romance, a game that obviously wanted to be the next Nekopara and completely failed. Or compare Corona Blossom, which has art just as good or even better, but just wasn't anything worth reading.

Those are not really routes. They're endings. Most of the "routes" in Steins;Gate are short "what if?" endings, like that one. There are two "normal" endings, and one True Route. The rest are like Suzuha's end.

Wasn't going to double post, since apparently it's frowned on here, but yet again the Fuwa editor fails me There are two really sad things about this whole mess. First, we know they cared. Nobody who didn't care would have gone to the lengths they did to make the Kickstarter a success. From their efforts to turn the Kickstarter around, to their very frequent status updates (that were clearly handled by people who do know English), everything about the way the campaign was run tells me that they cared deeply about the outcome of this. And second, they fell victim to a mistake that many before them have fallen victim to: yet another company that starts up and releases hot garbage for their first release. Why can't new entrants into this market seem to figure this out? Why does everyone walk right into the same pitfall with their eyes wide open?

Well, this bit here sure seems like it completely butchers a joke: "Hooray, Master's got a lawful wife! After this, suck as much blood as possible and keep your favorite mistresses! Yay, harem, successful man!" Now, this line is supposed to be funny. After all, your maid is telling you to get out there and build a large harem by sucking hot babe blood. But humor is all about delivery, and the delivery is completely butchered here. If you have to stop to think what the line is going on about, it's not a very funny line. Now, I haven't played this yet (waiting for 18+) but it sure sounds like Persona 5 all over again: over and over, that game took what should have been cool character building moments, and translated them like it was a poorly-translated technical manual. As a result, characters' personalities come across very poorly. The impact of every scene where lines are screwed up is lessened. This doesn't turn Persona 5 into a bad game; but it means that the game could have been something much greater than what it is. Sorry, dude, but you said that criticizing bad translations is "a bit much", and minimized the criticism aimed at this particular game by saying it doesn't really matter. That's pretty much the definition of making excuses. And then you said bad translations "didn't really ruin the overall enjoyment factor", which sounds an awful lot like saying it's acceptable. Which is fine. To each his own, if bad translations don't bother you because you're just glad it was translated at all, more power to you. But you should own it. Yeah, there's a lot of people here who do care about good translations - myself included - but they won't bite you for expressing your opinion. We. I mean we. We won't bite. Often.

I'm curious why this editor was booted off. Their services seem to have been needed. I do see that they missed what seems to have been a mistake here, unless I'm missing some context here that means it should be translated differently, マスター (masutaa) means "Master".: The rest of the stuff seems to be accurate, though. Based on this, the translation is probably riddled with similar errors. I would have wanted this editor as the main translator, and another editor to spiffy up the language to read better (this editor didn't really edit the text as much as leave general notes on how it needs to be rewritten). What was done as-is I am definitely glad I never got around to trying out.

ZTD has problems: 1) I feel like it failed to really sell the personality of one of the returning characters compared to how this character was in previous games; 2) It has a few eyerolling plot twists in it 3) Virtue's Last Reward had an awesome I suspect what happened here is budgetary problems (ZTD had a considerable amount of trouble even getting greenlit) meant that the game had to be changed from what was originally planned. But this still sucks.

WTF, Fuwa, fix your broken editor. Why should I have to blank my damn post to fix the busted markup? Why isn't there a "show markup" button?

My physical copy actually arrived yesterday. But it doesn't have the 18+ patch, and I'm already playing like 7 games right now anyway, so onto the backburner it goes!

I can't believe nobody suggested replaying Persona 3/4 yet. I'm actually sort of itching to replay Persona 3 myself. And while Trails in the Sky doesn't really fit the bill. Trails of Cold Steel kind of does. But you shouldn't start there. You should start with Trails in the Sky. Mostly because I want Crossbell to get picked u - I mean, because they're really good.

Shift-JIS is not Unicode. It's a different standard dating from 1997, when Unicode hadn't yet taken over.

And they didn't censor a title that needed 18+ content in order to make sense, they created a new one that didn't have any in the first place. I would imagine they don't want to localize LoveKami because they'd have to either release it uncensored, or censor it and deal with the backlash. They don't seem willing to release h, and they seem to have figured out that censoring games is a bad move. That leaves creating new games that don't have any h to remove (since Pulltop makes eroge in Japan, and MoeNovel basically is Pulltop).

Didn't Escaflowne do really poorly in Japan, though?

I generally agree with most of that, ChaosRaven. Except that Route B spoils one of the central mysteries of Route A. Route A is much more effective if that mystery is still mysterious, and I think that Route A is in general the stronger of the two. Mostly because Route B is very slow compared to route A. It probably would have been better shortened. End result, I prefer the reading order that doesn't weaken what I consider the stronger of the two routes. A hypothetical altered route order, where the introductory parts of route B take place first, then route A (with the remainder of route B mixed in as flashbacks) kicks off, would probably have worked better. (With some in media res intro to avoid having the beginning drag too much.) But that's not what we got.

Sorry, dude, but that's just flat out wrong. Lout dates to the sixteenth century, and lot has meant "group, collection" since the eighteenth century.

You really should play the routes in order. What order? Alphabetical order. The game enforces some of this; you can't play C without playing A and B, likewise for D requiring C. I don't know whatever possessed them to give you the choice of playing A or B first. The story is clearly much better if you play through A completely, then start on route B. (Never mind that the pacing is off a bit because Before drags for a bit early on. It's still clearly much better that way.) Giving a choice just makes the game worse because some people will get a sub-optimal experience.

Well, from a certain point of view, the very fact that the TL is a joke actually is a good reason for a C&D by itself. I wouldn't want something I'd worked on treated so shabbily.

Please. You can't hold a day hostage. I'm not sure who this poor April girl is, but someone really ought to ask her parents where she got the last name "26" ... As for Sumaga and Django, looking at JAST USA's tumblr, we can gain useful (if now half a year out of date ... damn you, Jast USA) information: http://follow.jastusa.com/post/128544859416/progresslog Sure, it was last updated in September, more than 7 months ago. But it was updated regularly-ish between December 2015 and September 2016. We can find out a lot by reading between the lines of what they updated and how often. Sumaga was listed on 12/3 as being in 'editing', and then on 9/16 as '70% edited'. Now, unless Sumaga is huge, this is pathetic; but it also probably means Sumaga is done being edited now. After all, 10 months to get 2/3 done means 5 months later - right about now - is a reasonable estimate for when it finished. Django, well, that doesn't bode well at all. It has one update - on the initial date they started putting updates there - saying "Pending translation", with no subsequent updates. You can get an idea which games are being concentrated on (or at least, were 6 months ago) by finding the ones with frequent status updates. That'd be Trample on Schatten, Nympho Sensei Ryoko, Princess X, and Sweet Home (along with a few others that actually released). Sumaga isn't one, but it was updated the last time they updated the tracker. Katahane, Eiyuu Senki, and Django ... were not. How much to make of that, it's hard to say, but it certainly doesn't look promising for those titles coming out anytime soon.

Technically yes, I have; but Planetarian is probably not a good comparison because of how short it is. Other than that, no; I've watched Kanon (both versions) but never played it and likewise I watched Air (and wasn't overly impressed).

Alright, all I know about Clannad is the name, and that it's by Key. I've got access to both, so just assumed I ought to play the game first and back-burnered the anime. Is this not the case? Should I watch the anime instead?

Status update: Editing is proceeding. Darklord Rooke has decided to start over. Editing proceeds somewhat slowly because of Persona 5 and me being in the middle of moving. Seriously, go play Persona 5. And then go write complaint letters to Atlus about their shoddy editing.

For me, the writing is not good enough. It just doesn't gel. Events don't seem to have the urgency that they should. And the biggest problem I have with the game is Ryder himself. Sorry, Ryder, but you suck. Commander Shepard was badass and interesting enough to carry three games because the character's dialog was full of verve and personality. Ryder by contrast just is kind of there, and never really has any cool lines. It's just kind of boring to be Ryder, which is very unfortunate.

"No matter how virgin"? I wasn't aware virginity was a continuum; I always thought you either were or weren't. How, exactly, is somebody "more virgin" than someone else?

I can think of two factors. One, the e-mote system. Sure, that didn't work out so well for Corona Blossom, but the game's writing was just terrible (and this is from someone who thought the best thing you could say about Nekopara was that it usually managed to not be boring). But the main thing that I think Nekopara had was timing. It was in the right place at the right time to explode. There wasn't a lot of competition at the time. Now there is. You can't ever recreate that. Edit: there's a third factor, actually. The catgirls in Nekopara actually act like cats.

To be fair, they are at a con right now. I'd ask again, say in a week or so.

Just to be clear, the "story" is already offline. So it must have been an April Fools joke.