Nandemonai

The point remains, that Steins;Gate isn't dead yet in the West. If S;G 0 sells well enough, those fandisks might materialize yet. S;G has done rather well, in between the anime, the Jast USA release, the Vita release, and the Steam release. In fact, the reason that Jast never put S;G on Steam was that Kodansha said "Hey, great working with you, but we want to release it ourselves."

If I'm understanding the original post, he says that the exposed map area doesn't move with him. Now, I never played the game myself, but usually fog of war moves with you, yeah? That sound to me like it might be a glitch. Or maybe you have to manually move it and he doesn't know how?

MangaGamer has released multiple fandisks before. Peter Payne making a decision based off of one flop is ... regrettable, but not representative. And one of the Steins;Gate spinoffs launches next week. It's not quite as bleak as that. If Gahkthun really did do poorly, that would be a reason MangaGamer might skip the fandisc; but I wouldn't rule it out.

I wasn't referring to that. That seems fine. (I mean, if you get a bunch of people who flake, that's a pretty big problem, because then the style is very inconsistent.) I was referring to not wanting the game to take multiple years to be translated. Getting the whole game translated in a year might be ... a bit of a tall order.

I was under the impression the full restoration patch was only going to work on Japanese copies?

Clannad is by Key, one of the most famous VN makers out there. The Kickstarter for its Western release raised half a million dollars. I'd also recommend Littlewitch Romanesque and Steins;Gate, and Kindred Spirits on the Roof. I'm also going to recommend The Stanley Parable and Her Story even though they might not strictly speaking be considered VNs.

You may be a bit optimistic in hoping for such a thing. Even the professional companies occasionally take forever to translate a title. Chaos;Head Noah is about 2 MB of text. That's decently long. Kudos on the port, and I'm really looking forward to it. But how many of your people have been involved with a fannotation project before?

Sweet. I'm still hopeful that Chaos;Head will get properly picked up (after all, Steins;Gate on Steam was a pipe dream only a few years ago) but this is the next best thing. Oh, and thanks for reminding me I should play more Chaos;Head

Didn't IMHHW's original Japanese version win an award for its story? Whereas this has 'excuse plot' written all over it. So they can't even lean on the underlying quality of the source material this time. At least they seem to have figured out the appropriate price point for such things. It's good that they seem to be responding to their critics by changing their strategy, but I'm not sure this really has the potential to be anywhere near as successful for them as their previous release.

There is a reason people still want SKM all these years later

Right click the icon, select 'properties', go to "start in" and open that directory. Poking around in there is a good place to start. (Note: I don't actually have KnS2 installed to check if that's where it puts the files. But that's how to get from an icon to the installed folder in general.)

Even this isn't quite 100% cut and dried. Sure, right now, it's obvious: there's no ero version to be censored. But that doesn't mean they can't have censored anything. All censorship requires is that content be suppressed because some might find it objectionable. MoeNovel is deliberately choosing not to bring over adults-only titles for exactly that reason, probably for marketing reasons. If it turns out that this game gets a Japanese release, especially if that Japanese release happens almost at the same time as the US release, and that Japanese version is 18+, it will be fairly reasonable to presume the title was conceived with the dual-release in mind, and that therefore the content was censored from the Western release. I believe others in this thread have already raised that possibility. Hell, it wouldn't be wrong, necessarily, to claim that this game was censored even if that doesn't happen. Pulltop makes eroge. It seems like a pretty reasonable assumption that a game like this probably would have had ero-scenes if it were intended for the Japanese market. Pulltop chose not to even write the ero-scenes in the first place, where otherwise they probably would have, to avoid controversy from objectionable content. In the courts, they call this a chilling effect. It would be extremist, but usually even extremist positions make sense and are defensible from a certain point of view.

My reaction in a nutshell. They still aren't willing to release 18+ content, which irks me. But at least now they aren't taking a game where the 18+ content was essential, gutting it anyway, turning the routes that depended on it to incomprehensible gibberish, and translating the rest poorly. They created a new game with no 18+ content to remove. It seems like they listened to all the people upset at them. That's ... enough to get them off my go to hell list, even if it's not quite enough to make me interested in their game. After all, MangaGamer was a pretty shady outfit, when it first launched. They made a terrible first impression. You might remember how they'd occasionally launch games before they intended to, because their website coding couldn't handle TBA? Well, they launched their entire site early. Had to go dig for quite awhile to find the proof - their prices were originally listed in Euros only, and were closer to Japanese prices. Games had release dates in the future, but could be bought, if you found the internal links that weren't on the main page (which we did). And the translations ... well, they were the god-awful dreck anyone who played any of their very earliest releases remembers. (As I recall, when MangaGamer management found out that people had actually bought stuff from them, they shut the site down - and to their credit, refunded everybody's money and let them keep the games.) Hell, when their site went live, there was a lot of concern that they were a pirate site! And look at MangaGamer now. What a difference a few years makes, eh?

These guys seem to have learned from their mistakes, unlike whoever "localized" ChiSingura ... Launching a prefundia, launching the Kickstarter a second time with barely any changes and not really doing anything from the Prefundia, then blaming it on "someone else from the company started the Kickstarter again". See what a difference figuring out what your customers want makes?

There's a bit more. It picks up about a year or so after the disaster for the epilogue, and it also unlocks the Xtend content (which, as I said, I haven't looked at yet).

Well, that's hard to say. If you use text skip, it will take maybe an hour or two to get the other ending. That also unlocks the Xtend Episode, which I haven't actually looked at yet so I can't tell you how it is. I didn't hate the choice system the way that you did, however. I didn't think it really worked, but I appreciated the attempt to do something different. So I wouldn't consider it a 'huge chore' to go through with a walkthrough, it's easy. To answer your question, no. The final endings don't require different sub-endings from A-C. The different sub-endings from A-C unlock extra epilogue scenes, but the ending itself can be achieved just from route D.

This particular version is all-ages. The original game, however, is not.

Commit Sudoku? I admit I've never been a fan of sudoku but I'd hardly call it a crime. What horrors are in this game, that it drives you to complete annoying math puzzles?

Da Capo was one of the first titles translated by MangaGamer. In other words, it's translation is terrible.

Damn you, Kaguya. My backlog is the stuff of legends, and now you've gone and added another entry into it.

I have to agree, and I'm pretty far on the "release the 18+ version" side of things. This is the kind of 18-plus to all-ages transition that I don't have a problem with. (The upcoming localization of Dies Irae is the same way.) It doesn't mangle the story, there isn't much being cut anyway, and it's a better version all around. The problem is I have a very hard time trusting companies that say this about their own releases, since obviously nobody is going to say that they had to undermine the writers' vision in order to make money (whether it's true or not).

It would be one thing to say you're going to write this yourself. I mean, I'd still think it's pretty presumptuous to think you could write something better than he could, when even you think 999 and VLR were great. Writing is hard, and the best writers make it look easy. Even so, if you were going to write it yourself, you might actually come up with something respectable. But crowdsourcing a complex plot? Get real, it will never be any good. You can't even crowdsource fan translations and have the quality be acceptable. I should know, I was part of the Tsukihime fan translation project when they tried exactly that. They couldn't get it to gel until they threw out almost all of it, and had a small crew retranslate and re-edit the game themselves. Writing something original? Forget about it, you'll get authors ranging from awful to mediocre to good. And even if you got all good authors, it still wouldn't gel into a coherent whole.

*snip* Nothing to see here ... that'll learn me to post without reading the thread first ¬_¬

I've edited my post to be a bit more clear. I was speaking in general terms about my impression of the several companies that have released mosaiced games in English. I understand that Frontwing got the message; that was a big feedback item from Corona Blossom vol. 1 and they definitely paid attention.

That might be what they say, but it's wrong. H-OVAs are routinely uncensored in western releases. (Granted, they don't really do too many of those anymore. But the point still stands, they did once upon a time release quite a few of them and they were all uncensored.) Almost all games released in English don't have mosaics. This trend goes back almost twenty years! Some companies are unnecessarily paranoid about mosaics. In fact, in ages past, these companies would simply pass on localization altogether. You can find 5 to 10 year old statements from Peter Payne saying things to the effect of 'talks fail for a number of reasons, one of them being mosaics'. Nowadays, they do things like Nitroplus (watermark the images in Demonbane) or Eden (leave the mosaics in, but shrink them) or even just leave them there altogether. However, this is not legally obligatory. The law only prohibits distribution within Japan. Even possession in Japan is legal. And absolutely no one has gotten into trouble for un-mosaicing Japanese porn for foreign release. Not a single soul. Instead, I see other reasons why some companies make this decision is made for other reasons: they don't want to piss off their Japanese fans by providing an arguably superior product to other markets (which I believe is why the market for h-ovas has died). Or some company won't understand how much people in the West care, so they figure 'why bother?' or honestly don't even realize it's controversial at all, and just leave them there from force of habit. Or a company might be paranoid about, well, RapeLay 2.0 (hell, Minori - I think - was so worried about that, that they demanded an ESRB rating be obtained for - I think it was Eden?) and they think that putting the mosaics there will somehow make a difference. [Edit: Be less confusing]