Nandemonai

I liked it quite a bit. It knows exactly what it wants to be, and does it very effectively. You can tell that the writers spent a lot more time than was strictly necessary planning out how things would work and putting together an interesting story. I appreciate that. Too often the opposite is true and the setting and story are all slapdash, thrown together on the fly or only given enough thought to make the story go where the writers wanted. I hope MangaGamer licenses the sequels.

I wasn't really ripping on G-Collections. My point wasn't so much ripping on G-Collections, as pointing out that the talent pool they had to work with was likely a lot less than what you can get now. The boom in anime really motivated a lot of people to learn Japanese, and many of them have gone into translation. The rise of fansubbing and fan translation groups also really helped VNs in particular. As for Nocturnal Illusion, there's other spots where kagi was translated correctly. Dunno how that happened. Clearly, nobody edited the script; it's riddled with typos. It was translated by RCY America, which seems to have been a distribution arm of a Japanese eroge company. These have a very spotty history with translations - just ask Mangagamer about the early days! Either the translator wasn't fluent in English, or had to translate the game on a super-short deadline, or just plain didn't care; at this point, who can say?

Older VNs have questionably-competent translations basically by default. Slave Pageant was translated by G-Collections back when it was actually an independent entity and not part of the J-List Coalition of the Undead. This particular game's localization dates to 2004. Pretty much every game translated in 2004 has at best a serviceable translation; in 2004, even mainstream games would often have sketchy translations in 2004. Nocturnal Illusion was translated in 1998, a mere 6 years before; games from then have abysmal translations. I can speak for NI, having retranslated it myself. I'd originally planned just to update the new lines, but the original was beyond hope. An example: So the original Japanese uses the word 鍵, kagi. A dictionary will tell you that this word has two definitions: 1) Key; 2) Lock. Now, one (and only one) of these translations makes sense in context. The other, however, has the unarguable advantage of being the first definition you see when you look the word up in a Japanese-English dictionary. Guess which one made it into the game? For a game from -- I guess I'd call it the second generation of English visual novels -- For a game from the second generation of visual novels, mistranslating a character's name is ... not a big surprise. I'm sure the translation contains even bigger sins if you look hard enough. Why was this? Well, a lot of reputable translators won't touch porn. And in the 90s and early 2000's, the pool of talent was definitely smaller. The anime boom and the online fansub boom had the effect of bringing VN fans to the forefront. So all of this means that in the early days, VN translation outfits had to make do with whoever they could find. Visual novels didn't really start getting well-localized releases until the localizations started being done by visual novel fans.

I'm still surprised the game actually came out close to when they said it would. Turned out to be pretty good, too.

You might want to look at that post, something seems to be wrong with the formatting. Partway thru the review switches to almost completely illegible light grey text on a white background. Is anyone else seeing that, or is it just my web browser?

1) I am not interested in getting 2 scripts for a game. I'm never going to read the literally-translated script, which means it's worthless to me. This is not to say that including both is a bad idea (since there are people who feel just as strongly the other way); but I am not willing to pay extra for the option to switch. I also agree with those who say that the danger here is that one of the translations will be sub-par. 2) My backlog is legion. If a game or a book interests me, I buy it. So if your release interests me, I'm already going to buy it unless you do things to make me not want to buy it. Those include translating the game really badly, or only releasing a censored version for anything but legal reasons. (I don't mind the *existence* of all-ages versions of adult games; I just don't want them, and I'm much less willing to put up with bowdlerization anymore. I remember back when people would get "funny" at a "cafe" because they'd had too much "tea", and I'm not interested in going back.) Pretty much all you have to do is release your game via not-shady-looking outfits like Denpasoft or Mangagamer or even DLSite. 3) The company being based in Hong Kong doesn't bother me. (Hong Kong does have a bit of a reputation; just to be clear, it goes without saying that I won't buy bootlegs.) 4) I believe in the fansub ethos. If something that has been fan patched becomes available legitimately, then I will buy it if I'm interested in it. 5) No, I have no interest in leaving the country. 6) Steam itself isn't important to me. (I prefer 18+ content, after all). Existing marketplaces like DLSite, Denpasoft, MangaGamer, etc. are important to me. I'd prefer to buy from them rather than sign up for some new site I don't know. 7) I hardly ever buy merchandise anymore (no space anymore) and I definitely do not buy merch for games I haven't yet played. 8 ) I doubt that policy will last long. It tends not to work out well in the long term. No, it doesn't really matter to me. Just don't take your cues from Konami and I won't have a problem.

If "I will now obtain visual novels by other means" means what I think it means, you ... aren't a customer anymore? I mean, you're free to put lines in the sand anywhere you want them - I have my own and I don't give companies money that are on the wrong sides of them - but if you solve your problem by pirating Denpasoft's games, then you are - by definition - not a customer of theirs.

My guess is that it isn't, if only because of the timing of the various releases. Before Love Rainbow, there was something new every few years. But there hasn't been any new Shuffle! since 2011.

Our source is repeated public statements by MangaGamer employees explicitly and directly confirming that digital copy sales are the primary driver of which titles get hard copies. Okay, you found a few high-selling titles that haven't got a hard copy. What does that prove? Certainly not that 'hard copies have nothing to do with sales numbers' (your exact words). All you've proved is that the correlation isnt perfect. Which isn't a surprise, since hard copy releases have to be negotiated seperately, and Minori is fidgety and not quite comfortable with the English market in general. The fact remains that every single game that has received a hard copy release by MangaGamer, has sold above average for them.

As someone who liked Shuffle (despite its flaws), I'm definitely not interested in this. I would be interested in the 2 new routes, but I want Essence+. I want the Kikyo route and all the other stuff.

Sure they can. It might not be a smart thing to do, but there's nothing preventing them from releasing one of their new games in English. They could sell the game at Japanese prices (terrible idea but someone has to be fool enough to try it eventually), or they could sell the game, digital only, and region lock it, and then make sure that it's only in English.

Why would this be a good thing? Sure, there's a lot of dreck. So what? There's a lot of Japanese dreck too, we just don't usually see it. I'd hope that the people making OELVNs that aren't dreck could do well enough to keep the genre alive long enough to rise above its ... 'humble beginnings'.

To elaborate: putting out a fan patch is really time consuming. I spent more than two years translating Nocturnal Illusion, and now there's editing (which it looks like will take six months or so) and coding. The patch won't be out until 2017, close to six years after I started working on it. That's a major undertaking. As for legit releases, don't also forget that the games are much cheaper in the West than they are in Japan. It's a hard sell to companies, to expect sales less than half of what they made in Japan (maybe a lot less) and that also sell for half the price. (The flip side is that I understand most English releases have a much longer tail than Japanese simply because there's so many fewer of them.)

Not to jump to conclusions or anything, but that sounds kind of like you didn't buy the game. You know, if you think the game is a masterpiece, it's probably worth dropping a few bucks to give the developers some cash. If you're anything like me, you want the spinoffs to come out, right?

Progress updated. Went from 3.2% (9/6 update) to 3.9%. (Edit: Miscounted which files had been edited, slightly revising upward the completion total)

Hmmm ... There's a couple I can think of. Koihime Musou, Littlewitch Romanesque, Kara no Shoujo, and Steins;Gate would all qualify, I think.

I don't suppose I can argue with that. Machine translating marketing materials is pretty pathetic. Even I know better than that ¬_¬

That makes perfect sense from a business angle, even if it is ack-basswards. They looked at how much it would cost to translate the H, they looked at how many extra sales they expect it would bring in, wasn't worth it to them. I'm guessing a) the h-scene text is most of the text in the game, and b) they weren't expecting to sell many copies. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they deliberately picked a game they could slap together for very little money to put out as a test release, to see how well the market reacted. In which case, they might well decide to be as cheap as possible to hedge their bets against the whole thing bombing and not even selling 100 copies. I hate it when companies do that, especially when they compromise the quality of their releases in order to do it, because it often leads to the companies mistaking the "crappy releases don't sell" message for "nobody wants this". But they're far from the first. Even the mighty Atlus made this mistake when they cut out half of Persona: Revelations.

If the screenshots I've seen of the later chapters are anything to go by, the translation is probably not worth adding to. It's probably looking more like the full on IMHHW retranslation that followed from the uncensorship project. That's much more difficult. I at least am not willing to work on such a project. Training companies to do crappy translation jobs because fans will fix it all for you, and you don't even have to pay them, doesn't strike me as a good idea. But as the restoration project shows, it's not impossible to get people behind it. Fan translation projects have gone pro before as well. And ChuSingura does sound like the kind of game that might get sufficient interest.

I'm no lawyer, it gets weird. As a practical matter, if you keep the translation private, nobody will know about it and so it's impossible to be sued over it anyway. But nobody goes to the trouble to make a fan translation, and then keeps it to themselves. Sure, technically, I guess we wouldn't know, would we? But I'm pretty sure that nobody would do all that work and then just keep the results for themselves. Only a superrich person would be able to assemble a team willing to work under those conditions. And if there were any superrich VN fans, they could for probably not much more money arrange for an authorized translation of whatever game they were so dying to play that they were considering paying for a private fan patch.

All fan translations are illegal. The Berne Convention specifically provides that copyright holders have control over translations. Fan translations exist at the sufferance of the copyright holders, who have the legal authority to go to court to demand that any project be stopped. However, most companies don't know, or don't care, about the patches. And even the ones that do care can't really do much about it, because VN developers are usually poor, and suing people in a foreign country is very expensive and time consuming and a pain in the ass. That's why you hear about translation projects shut down by C&D, but never any actual lawsuits being filed. Fan translations are an ethical grey area, not a legal one. Paying someone to produce a fan-translation is unethical in addition to being illegal (because someone is making money off someone else's work without paying for it or getting permission). It also is significantly more likely to get rightsholders pissed off enough at you to decide they want to try to make an example out of you. As a fantranslator myself, I can tell by how much the OP is offering that they have no idea how much translators charge, or how long it takes. It took me two and a half years to translate Nocturnal Illusion from scratch, and that's a game I'd already played in English multiple times. It isn't even a particularly long game, either. I spent hundreds of hours during that time on the game. $500 might be a lot of money to the OP, but in terms of how much work is involved, it's peanuts. You can motivate translators to work on something they're not particularly fond of. By paying the industry going rate. However, professional translators charge somewhere between ten cents and a dollar per word. (I've never done pro work - not nearly good enough - so I can't quote you real numbers.) Nocturnal Illusion's script is easily 500K characters in Japanese. That's about fifty thousand dollars; a hundred times the original offer. (Now, h-games probably pay somewhat less than the going rate. Still.)

MangaGamer has released a bunch of fandiscs. Kira Kira and Deardrops, I think even Edelweiss? They also released two fandiscs for Shuffle - Tick Tack and Really Really - and one or two for Da Capo. I'm not sure what else they've put out that has fandiscs in Japan that MG didn't pick up. Their output is prodigious. But MangaGamer is definitely fandisc-friendly, having put out half a dozen of them already.

Even if it's not IMHHW-level bad, they still bowdlerized the title quite extensively, and basically said "uncensored release never happening, tough". If you give these people money, they're going to want to do this to more titles. It's up to you whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing. I remember the bad old days from 20 years ago; I think it's a bad thing, so I'm not supporting this company.

Ryechu (the editor) had another project come up a few weeks ago from MangaGamer. Since it's MangaGamer, this project got put on hold. Talked to him earlier today, editing should resume shortly. (Not updating the main post, as the %age hasn't changed).

If I'm not mistaken, IMHHW was actually translated professionally, just by a group that kinda sucks. I heard (don't remember from where) that it was translated by the people who translated the Dark Souls series (which is known for having a serviceable but not great translation, poorly translated patch notes, and mistranslations in the lore) and some other video games, but IMHHW was the first time they'd ever tried anything so large. Also, the route that they had to make up (because the original unavoidably included sex) is supposed to be much much worse than the others (probably because it was done last minute). There are plenty of games on Steam that are translated okay, and a few that ... aren't.