Nandemonai

Again, never actually played BlazBlue. But after I played Persona 4 Arena, I heard BB mentioned as a game in a very similar vein. In Persona 4 Arena, in the story mode, the difficulty has obviously been set to ultimate fucking pussy mode and you sometimes go upwards of half an hour in VN mode between fights. Then you pop over to (say) Arcade mode, or Time Attack, and ... the computer all of a sudden knows how to fight.

Aselia and Yumina are VNs, despite being RPG hybrids. Boob Wars is a VN, despite having a silly minigame tacked on. Brave Soul is a VN, despite having an action-RPG grafted on. 999 and Virtue's Last Reward are VNs, despite having adventure games grafted onto them. I see no meaningful distinction between these hybrids, and BlazBlue. Therefore, BlazBlue is a VN. It's also a fighting game, but this isn't a problem at all. Edit: To be fair, I've never actually played any BlazBlue. However, I am familiar with a different game series that I am told is very similar: Persona 4 Arena, and its sequel. These are both obviously VNs. That a sweet fighting game is also included on the disc doesn't matter. If someone put both Koihime and Koihime Enbu (the fighting game spinoff) onto the same disc, wrote up some connective tissue, and called the whole thing Koihime All The Things, the resulting game would still be a VN.

Progress updated. Now at 4.7%. (Just barely enough to be a significant jump from last time.) My editor is being hammered very hard by term papers and has to step away for awhile. Hopefully once school is out, editing progress will pick up.

So CNN is a marketing organization now? (Alright, I see you in the cheap seats, yes, I know, they are, har har har.) More to the point, what about your editorial? Is that MoeNovel marketing material now? It is true that media coverage generates more attention for whatever's being covered. That does not mean that the media are marketing. Marketing is something that companies do to promote their own products. So yes, Fuwanovel exists for the purpose of promoting visual novels (insofar as it is run by fans for the purpose of disseminating information about them). That makes them a media outlet, not MangaGamer's or Sekai Project's marketing department. Marketing makes its decisions based around how the market for a product will be affected; journalism makes its decisions based around what its readership wants to hear about.

This is probably why everyone left. Look, there's a small supply of people willing to work on these projects for free. There's more games than could ever be translated by the community. There's more good games that people want than could ever be translated. Your project's work need to be extensively redone, other projects' doesn't. I know it's hard to put yourself out there and ask for help, and get none. I was worried the same thing would happen to my project. But you aren't entitled to help, and people aren't selfish for not working for you for free.

Okabe can be ... difficult to get used to. Trust me, it gets better. Steins;Gate is possibly the best time travel story I've ever seen, but I do agree that the start is a bit slow.

You apparently remember correctly. It exists, it's been rolled out for Chinese <--> English only: https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html

In my case, I have a decent grasp of Japanese grammar but a rather small vocabulary (I just am not good at memorizing giant lists of stuff). Google Translate is convenient because it is a hell of a lot faster than pasting 80% of the words in every paragraph into a dictionary one at a time.

It can be done. But you need to already know enough Japanese to decompose complex sentences into simple ones. And you have to be able to pick out peoples' names yourself. Google Translate really loses its shit if there are names in the sentence, because it doesn't recognize them as names, so it tries to translate the kanji as if they were meaningful words. Generally this results in gibberish. Basically, Google Translate can be used to romanize unfamiliar vocabulary.

This is exactly the wrong attitude to take. We have exactly one way to convince MoeNovel to do things properly: Not buying their bowdlerized games, and demanding they fix their broken shit. Giving them money for doing a shitty job, because someone will fix it for them for free, only tells them to keep doing what they're doing. If you care about good translations, and if ridiculous censorship bothers you, then don't buy their products. You're of course free to do whatever you want, but if you buy their products then the message you send is that this is acceptable to you, and you want them to do it more.

How many Transformers movies did they make again? Sometimes lightning does strike more than once.

I know the name is different. I seem to recall hearing that MoeNovel was the people who localized Dark Souls, and I also thought I saw something connecting YumeHaven with an existing translation outfit. Last time they spoke, they only had access to Pulltop titles. Last time I checked, Pulltop hasn't got any all-ages titles. We'll have to see what they announce, but I'm not optimistic.

I think it was Doddler? Said on his Ask.FM like a year ago that they had sold enough to warrant doing more. I for one had hoped these jokers would give up and go away; their business plan comprises largely of taking things that I want (I liked Princess Waltz, I want more Pulltop) and ruining them so thoroughly I can't even consider buying them. Isn't this the same group that also announced the not-Essence version of Shuffle?

I just remember working on the fan translation of Tsukihime, many years ago, back when Ryuusoul and TakaJun were actually still around. Back then I didn't know even the piddling Japanese I know now, and so I was just a proofreader. Well, I picked at random basically for the files I wanted to proofread (this is back when they were using the many-cooks method). I happened to grab Hisui's h-scene. Or I should say, scenes; they make love three times in a row! And it was truly dreadful ... ye gods.

What kind of question is that? We're going to bang his wife, obviously.

As I recall, there's only one in the whole game, right?

Truly, you have a dizzying intellect

100% agree. People complain when companies release the same game over and over again. Then when the company tries something different, they complain it isn't as polished as the game that the company's made 4 times before already. Or they complain it's too weird, or not enough like the game that awhile ago they were complaining had been rehashed to death. If companies never take chances, then the market dies from stagnation slowly. That's not good for anybody.

Sounds like Imopara to me!

Also, @CrimsonAsmodai, the easiest way to relieve your concerns is to just read up on how obscenity works. Especially don't ask random forum people for legal advice Rather than just taking my word for it, you can read up on obscenity yourself. You'll never get a law degree this way, but you can find out enough to answer your own questions. A lot more info is available online than most people think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law The currently active test used in the courts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test And if you want to know the kind of thing that gets people in trouble, very little anime porn obscenity prosecutions exist at all, and all the ones I know of involve child porn. Either they caught the guy (and to date I'm pretty sure it's always been guys to date) with real child porn, and a bunch of hentai, and they threw in charges for the animated stuff while they were sending the party van for the real stuff; or it was loli h-material. The important thing to note is that even if the post office inspects the package, all they're going to do is open it and look at what's inside. They won't find any loli material on the box. They cannot install the game and play it to see what's what. That would require opening the contents of the package (not the package), and they can't do that. A summary of the cases I know about is here: http://cbldf.org/criminal-prosecutions-of-manga/ One of these was in Canada; don't worry about it. The other involved a comic book store selling Urotsukidoji comics across the street from an elementary school, in Texas, in the early 2000's and complete BS prosecutor statements that comic books 'are for kids'. The two other cases mentioned are the only ones I know of at all concerning manga, and it in both cases involved much more extreme content than what's in anything MangaGamer has put out. (In fact, the specific content at issue in both of those cases - adults having sex with elementary-age kids - is what MangaGamer has said it's not going anywhere near).

I wouldn't worry about that. All the MangaGamer employees you might actually talk to are Western. The company is owned in Japan, but MangaGamer works in the US mostly. There also isn't anything on the cover of Imopara that could get you into trouble. Neither Aya nor Rio look remotely loli, and that's the main thing to worry about. Rest assured Japan does know about obscenity law in the US, and no localization outfit is going to put out hard copies of games that might cause an obscenity prosecution. In fact, most of the time, games that have problematic content simply aren't licensed. Shiny Days (from Jast) is the big exception to that, and there the legally-questionable loli content was removed and added back in via an unofficial patch released later. (This is significant because it means that a hard copy of Shiny Days doesn't have any such content on it, meaning that it's not problematic to sell or move across state lines.) MangaGamer itself has said that they take care to consider what's legal in the US: Here

Progress updated. Now at 4.6%

On the one hand, the story is better than average, it's actually good; good enough I was interested in it. (I was actually playing the game for the articles, I guess.) On the other hand, the story also is obviously in service to the h-scenes. There are many h-scenes, and the plot has obviously been designed with the explicit goal of providing good reasons for them to be there. You aren't going to be interested in a large part of what the game is about. To use my favorite analogy, the game is still a pizza delivery simulator; there's still huge amounts of pizza with extra sausage being delivered to, well, every major female character (and they all love pizza, can't get enough of it). This still takes up a large part of the game's running time. It's just that instead of an excuse plot tying all of this together, there's a real plot. I'd say that the game gets a B or an A in ero, and a B in plot (and that's overall, not the usual "for-a-nukige" scale). B is still a really good score; I don't really regret playing games I'd rate with a 'B' story. To me, 'A' is reserved for the really awesome stories out there, and 'B' means "I really liked it". The thing is, Funbag Fantasy has a much better plot than the average nukige, but that's still only enough to make it good. Not awesome. Which is enough to make it awesome overall if you actually like nukige, and also like good plots; you get both things at once, and that's very uncommon. Devs making nukige know they don't have to bother, so usually, they don't. That's why people are gushing about it. But if you don't like nukige, then that's different. Let's say there's a mystery novel out there getting rave reviews with people saying it transcends the usual limits of the mystery novel, where the plot wasn't just an excuse to set up a compelling mystery but actually went beyond that. I still wouldn't recommend that book to someone who has no interest in mystery novels at all. They might like the book despite not liking mystery novels; but there are too many books and not enough hours in anyone's life to ever read them all. Might as well read something more up their alley. My advice? Probably not. If you're dying for a visual novel, and have already worked your way through all (or most) of the others that interest you, then go for it. Otherwise, I'd pick up something more in line with what does appeal to you. There are plenty of VNs out there with plots that are great and not just good.

No, it wasn't intended for Western release. It was purely a domestic release; the copies floating around are straight-up imports. The same is true of Casual Romance Club; that was also a gimmick release not actually aimed at Westerners, but the domestic audience. In that case, the translation is better though (or so I hear anyway, my backlog is legion), so Peter Payne apparently went to the company and bought a whole bunch of copies wholesale, or something.

Oh, it was a gimmick, to provide a bonus for Japanese consumers to get them to buy another copy of a game that had already come out before. That's why it's so awful, it wasn't intended for the Western markets at all. It was intended for Japanese fans - who know at least a little bit of English - to look thru. Now, key in this is the idea that most Japanese can't actually read English well enough to read the whole game; they'll read for awhile, mostly relying on the fact they already know the story. Then they'll get bored and quit. It's kind of like commentary and the trailers on a DVD; people like the fact that they're there, more than they actually use them. So from that perspective, paying for a good translation is a waste of money. The intended audience can't really appreciate it anyway, so why spend a lot of time & money when you can spend a little?