Nandemonai

Guess I might as well fill this in. Currently I am somewhere in the middle of: Sono Hanabira New Gen Princess Evangile Gakhthun Chaos;Head Majikoi Shadows of Pygmalion Tokyo Babel Now that I write it out, that's a lot of long games. Someone send help!

It's essentially a preorder campaign. Preorders have been asking you to do the same thing for years now. I'll probably stay away from this since I haven't even started Grisaia yet.

That the likes of XSEED can make a living putting out Vita games isn't a strong endorsement for the platform. XSEED thrives by being small enough to be able to survive on smaller sales. The platform's creator thinks it's dead. That means it's dead, irregardless of how well it seems to be doing otherwise. There won't be any attempts to make the system more viable. There probably won't even be a follow-up. At this point there might not even be a follow-up to the 3DS, which was far more successful than the DS. Or at least, the 3DS's successor is the Switch (as much as Nintendo says it's not).

If I'm not mistaken, asking for help pirating stuff is not allowed here.

Editing is always a necessity in a professional work. But there's a difference of degree. There's "yeah, I screened for typos and fixed some inconsistent terminology", and then there's "I rewrote the whole thing, using the translator's work as Cliff Notes of what the Japanese was trying to say". In general, feel free to assume anything put out by Sekai or MangaGamer or even Jast has a good quality translation, unless you hear otherwise. (And in the case of MangaGamer, as long as it wasn't one of their early releases.) It's not like these three never screw up - Imouto Paradise wasn't translated all that well, and Flowers was a Big Deal. Rather, these are the big three, the established big names. They've been doing this for a long while now. They've released lots of titles. Translations from them are simply expected to be good. If one isn't, you won't need to ask here; you'll see an existing thread about it because someone will have already started one. Their work can be assumed to have been edited. And since they pay, unlike fan translators, they generally don't put up with translators who need TLC, because they don't have to. (Odd exceptions like Flowers are the odd exception.)

That must be it. I can't imagine any other reason to do such a convoluted thing. Just pay very close attention when you're checking out that the "final amount" to be charged is $0.00.

That's nothing, the following exchange happens at one point:

That's still not going to be enough to support a claim of fraud. There are two defenses such a company will deploy, and they will be very difficult to overcome: 1) We were honestly planning on it, but the plans fell through. We're very sorry and we removed the claim promptly. 2) It was a mistake, it never should have been there, we removed it right away once we realized it was there.

That would be this: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/11/teacher-in-porn-popup-case-dodges-jail-loses-creds/ And it is in fact pretty ridiculous. Their expert lied his ass off in court, and nothing ever happened. System's broken.

This sounds like an interesting story. I guess what I'm trying to say is, pics or it didn't happen?

I have an awful lot of old Jast USA releases. I think I would remember that. I mean, come on now. You're telling me there are old Jast USA releases that managed to get multiple stick figures in a single CG? I think you forget how these games looked in EGA mode ... Now get off my lawn! Damn whupper-snappers ...

And? It's also 3 games. It comes in both forms. No, they're selling you 3 digital games, that were already made by Liquid when Liquid themselves decided to cut up Kuroinu into 3 parts. They don't appear to be doing anything to those 3 games other than translating them into English. Why MangaGamer decided to license the 3-release version, I don't know. They're skittish about large releases, so it might have been that they took the opportunity to hedge their bets. After all, parts 2 and 3 could easily be cancelled if part 1 bombs horribly. (Although that's not too likely since part 2 is already 40% translated, it could still happen.) Or maybe Liquid themselves said "no, we want you to sell the game in 3 pieces" and made them take either the 3 parts, or nothing. We don't know. They aren't likely to tell us. But if you want more brutish fare like Kuroinu (which, I'll be honest, I'd rather pull my own teeth), then ... you have to decide how pissed off you really are. Because MangaGamer hasn't really released a lot of things in that vein recently. Euphoria did well for them, so they've licensed Maggot Baits. That's two games in - well, in a while. If Kuroinu bombs because people feel like they're being overcharged, well, that will tell them "stop doing that". So they won't be releasing more games like it. Also, keep in mind that Kuroinu was announced at a con in 2015, and the first part is just now being released, coming up on con season 2 years later. A year and a half to translate a third of the game means the full version would likely take as long as Da Capo 3 did.

MangaGamer has subtitled chapter one "The Dark Elf Queen, Loyal Subject, and Married Holy Knight", as can be seen here. The Japanese title of the Japanese chapter one is Kuroinu ~Dark Elf no Joou ・ Reijuu Kishi ・ Hitozuma Seikishi~, which roughly translates to "Kuroinu ~The Dark Elf Queen, the Slave Knight, and the Married Holy Knight". They seem to have gone a bit liberal with "Slave Knight" -> "Loyal Subject", but that sure sounds to me like MangaGamer's chapter 1 is the same as the Japanese chapter 1.

I'm pretty sure we know exactly why MangaGamer did this. That's the way it was released in Japan: https://vndb.org/v3706 I don't know what the deal is with the 2010 release, whether that's the full game or not. But the most recent releases appear to be exactly what MangaGamer is releasing now. A set of 3 games. Yes, there's a combined release. But that was released a few weeks after MangaGamer announced Kuroinu. Besides, they're pricing each individual chapter pretty cheap.

Confirmed where?

Corona Blossom is the game that sold so poorly they fessed up in public and said "please tell us why you don't want it".

Unlikely. What's more likely is that it had hard-coded support for common game engines, and that because it's no longer maintained, those game engines are using newer versions that break VNR. Either that, or it's relying on outdated technology in the OS that doesn't work quite the same way anymore. In general, programs that do things like alter the behavior of other programs tend to start having weird problems when they stop being maintained.

It's been out a little over six months, and it has 35 reviews.

Err - no, not really. Well, kinda sorta. "They" are a bunch of different companies, all doing their own different thing. Some of these companies avoid cutting out h-scenes wherever possible, but not all. But then there are releases like Wild Romance, which didn't just censor the h-scenes, it also rewrote innocuous parts of the script (just look up the thread here about it). And then there's If My Heart Had Wings, which took an h-game and cut out all the way down to the kissing scenes in a deliberate attempt to target a larger audience. That the game featured a route where sex is unavoidable (the characters start out as sexfriends then it turns romantic) didn't matter to them at all. They just made stuff up, and the result is apparently literally gibberish (as in parts of the script are plain and simple impossible to understand). Pay attention to who releases a game. MangaGamer has a good reputation. Jast USA mostly has a good reputation, but it's been marred by a few regrettable incidents. Sekai Project may or may not be releasing uncensored versions of everything they've announced; apparently not even they know for sure. I am, however, fairly sure Sekai Project wants to release the adult versions. Beyond the big three are other companies doing sketchy things. At the end of the day, companies make their decisions not based on what the censorship will do to the work in question, but what it will do for their bottom line. The temptation to go for the wide mass-market appeal by heavily censoring something has already worked at least one time. Just check out IMHHW's sales on SteamSpy.

That's no great surprise, considering this was literally a popularity contest. People have most recently read the stuff focusing on the new characters, so right now they'll (generally) be more popular than the original cast, who starred in a game released in 2009.

The troll is strong with this one, yes. Post strong trolls, you will. But for maximum effect, you can't just give a bad review to a good - I mean, popular game. You want to make sure to insult people who like popular things. Never mind that something is popular because lots of people like it, liking a popular game automatically means that you have no taste. If you really wanna troll, you can't just rate Steins;Gate a 6. You also have to post a condescending review like this: [sarcasm]Steins;Gate huh more like Steins;Grate amirite folks? Haha, all you folks out there with good taste know what I'm talking about. I'm just shocked at how many sheeple there are out there that like this lowest-common-denominator crap [/sarcasm]

The game isn't really a raising sim. Those are highly repetitive games featuring a few events that are repeated over and over, in order to raise stats. Littlewitch Romanesque eliminates the repetitive events in favor of a nice minigame, but more importantly, it is crammed full of story events. Learning a new spell or completing a quest always has a unique event associated with it. There are a lot of other unique events that pop up as the game goes on. The main problem with raising sims is that outside of the core gameplay loop (picking a schedule and seeing the same few events over and over) there often aren't many unique events. I definitely recommend the all-ages version of Littlewitch Romanesque, if you've got a problem with the artstyle. (They're not technically underage at the time you sleep with them, but that really doesn't help very much.) As for the OP, basically this is the way I think of it. When you buy a game, you are sending a message: do this some more. I am not a very big proponent of censorship; I remember what things were like in the bad old days of Nintendo heavily bowdlerizing any and everything. Of Playstation 1 RPGs being heavily altered to remove references to drinking and so on. They sucked, and I'm not on board with them coming back. I don't mind small alterations to games, but I do mind major changes. Generally removing h-scenes qualifies as a major change, but it doesn't have to. For example, Chou Dengeki Stryker is basically better off without the h-scenes. The problem is that it's hard to tell whether I'll mind the censorship before I buy the game, so I tend to lean away from buying censored things. The big exception to this is anything censored for legal reasons. If the people releasing the game are worried about going to jail unless they change something, well, I still don't like it, but I understand. Ultimately, there are no right or wrong answers here. Some people try to make it a moral issue; I suppose it is, when you get down to it, but the problem is it's squarely within a grey zone. The line can be drawn more or less anywhere you want to draw it. Personally, I bought Aselia from Jast USA, and I don't regret it. I wasn't happy the adult version wasn't brought over, but I understand, and I'm okay with what we got. But I'd never consider buying If My Heart had Wings, or Wild Romance. Other people don't have a problem with censorship at all. They aren't wrong, they just don't have the same priorities. Still others are vehemently opposed to any censorship whatsoever, to the point they think charging more for adult versions is wrong. I think this is kind of silly, personally, but I could never prove it. My advice for the OP is to decide on your own principles, whatever they are, and then research titles to make sure you don't buy any that are on the wrong side of them. How much does censorship bother you? No one else can answer that for you.

Use something like jisho.org instead. You can put in a whole line and it will make highly accurate guesses as to what all the kanji romanize to. (Just be sure you know what's a proper name, it can't recognize those at all.) Definitely don't even try Google Translate, it doesn't do that thing anymore that it used to do where it would highlight part of the source sentence when you hover over parts of the translation anymore (I guess cause that's not how it works anymore).

Oh, it's definitely a contradiction. Steins;Gate is in English, isn't it? Then why isn't it an "English Visual Novel"? Because the term doesn't actually mean "a visual novel that's in English", despite it claiming that's what it means. The term is straight-up ncorrect in a way that OELVN is not.

This is the problem I have with the term 'EVN'. It contradicts its own definition! "English Visual Novels" ought to include include all visual novels in English, such as Steins;Gate or Aselia, in addition to Western-made originals like Sunrider.