Nandemonai

Actually, there's a bunch of games in there that sound like re-releases. For example, Kyonyuu Fantasy Gaiden and Kyonyuu Fantasy Gaiden Digital Novel Version sound a lot like the same game to me. If you ignore all those, there are 7: Gaiden, Gaiden 2, Gaiden 2 After, Majo, 2, 2 If, and 3.

The amount of XP you get is divided by the number of party members. So yeah, you earn 4X XP by yourself, and even one other person cuts your XP in half. I consider this a pretty big flaw in the otherwise-stellar game design. The game clearly intends for you to only use this to go thru previous dungeons to train up a bit; but it's just too good not to use it all the time. The designers spent so much time and effort building in cool stuff for your allies to do, especially in P4G (where they added a lot of cool customization). Hell, a major theme running through the story of both games is the impossibility of doing it alone, and how you need help (that's the whole point of the Social Link system to begin with)! But your party members are so weak, and the battle system so disproportionately tilted towards being high level above all else, that you really are worse off if you have anyone around. (And I like those 'pathetic weaklings'. P3 and P4 both have great casts of player characters. I can't point to even a single one that I didn't want around in my party. I just didn't want to actually take said party into the actual dungeons, because they kind of suck at them.)

Really, it's not necessary. The first key to understanding the game mechanics is that your party members are actively harmful. They are worse than useless, so evict those losers as soon as you can. They're so much less powerful than the MC that all they do is hold him back, except in the very beginning when soloing is too tough. You want the extra EXP you get from running solo. Level trumps almost everything in this game; you're always better off having the extra levels that come from getting 4X EXP all the time. (Or almost always. There are a few bosses that have Almighty attacks, and they can actually hurt you.) The MC gets access to skills that regen SP every fight. He gets access to skills that void elements, and Personae naturally voiding more than one element, including physical attacks. What you want to do is check the FAQs to find Personas teaching "NULL WIND" etc, and get as many of those skills onto one Persona as you can. For about 3 or 4 skill slots, you can build a Persona that is essentially immune to all damage except Almighty. But the main one is NULL PHYS. In Persona 3, it's relatively easy to get the accessory that voids most status effects; P4 is slightly harder, but most of the status effects aren't that big a deal if you're nigh-indestructible anyway. Keeping your pathetic weakling friends in your party means it takes you longer to get access to these game-breaking skills, and therefore it makes you weaker. I really hope they fixed this in Persona 5. At least in SMT 4, they fixed some of the math problems in their game mechanics. (Basically, in P3 and P4, and I'm pretty sure in DDS 1/2 and Nocturne also - the formula for computing damage scales more or less linearly with level ... but scales with the square root of your stats. See above for "being high level is the most important thing you can do". Individual stat points rapidly become almost worthless in terms of "how much more damage did this get me".)

New Game + does carry over your social stats. You don't have to spend time grinding them to max on the replay, which gives you more time. So NG+ actually does make the social links easier, simply because you have more time. Also, the Persona Compendium in NG+ ignores level restrictions, and has all your old stuff. As soon as you can scrape up the cash, you can summon stuff way overlevelled. As soon as you can afford to summon an end-game persona you pretty much steamroller everything. And if you're playing P4G or P3P, then once you re-summon your persona with NULL or better to everything, the game's basically over. (In more recent games, they don't give you NULL/REFLECT/ABSORB ELEMENT skill cards anymore, so it's much harder to make yourself mostly-invincible).

Da Capo 3 is both translated and edited, so yeah, it might actually come out this year. Depends how long it takes for the port. If the port finishes this month, it might make December. Pygmalion isn't fully edited yet, but I don't think it's nearly as big as DC3, so it also probably has a pretty good chance. In terms of likely competition for release slots, Himawari is already in beta testing; Sono Hanabira New Generation is at 98/98% trans/edited; and Myth and both Rance games are already being ported. Bokuten is at 100/100 but isn't described as 'in scripting' (oddly). That's six games; they're pretty busy. (Based on its (lack of) progress, I was likely wrong about W Happiness being the February release. That gives me more time to play Princess Evangile, on the plus side There are only 3, maybe 4 slots left though, since their new Atelier Sakura title (what was it? 'Please sleep with my wife'?) is taking up the other September slot. It's hard to say, other than to say Himawari likely releases in October.

What about Gahkthun?

Aaaaaaaand it's out!

Progress updated. (I'm going to edit the editing %age into the main post, but I'll still bump the thread when I do.)

I disagree. Many things are well written, but don't appeal to me. I'm not a big sentai fan, for instance. Nothing against sentai shows, just not my cup of tea. Sometimes I find that I don't like a character. If that character is the protagonist, or one of the main characters, then this can cause anything from mild annoyance to outright loathing. Occasionally a character will piss me off so much that I don't want to read / watch / play as them any longer. Haruhi (from Haruhi) was one such character. I hated her. She basically poisoned the entire show for me. I had to stop watching it. That's also the reason I quit watching Ranma 1/2. Almost everyone in the show is unlikeable and just a completely awful, horrible, morally reprehensible person. And I don't find the amoral selfish antics of psychopathic maniacs to be very funny. Now, I'm not going to say that either one of these shows is bad, or even poorly written. (Yeah, lots of people hate on Ranma 1/2, and the people I've talked to basically all agree it falls apart later on; but I quit watching after season 1, when a lot of people still like it.) They're not, they're both well-respected shows that are popular for a reason, and that are rather well-written. They're just ... not for me. For some people, a pervy protagonist is going to be a dealbreaker. For me, 'pervy' is not going to be a dealbreaker nearly as much as 'evil' will be, which is why I'm not going anywhere near Rance.

If all the extra work cost them was 200 sales' worth of money (and some time), that's a bargain. Doing this will pay dividends in the long term because it builds Jast's reputation. People will remember that they did this. Now, it's real hard to attach a dollar figure to that kind of good press, but I'm sure it's more than 200 sales' worth. As for whether Flowers is any good, I couldn't say. I would have been interested in it, except that I found Kara no Shoujo 2 to be a reputation-destroying landmine and I don't want anything Innocent Grey touches anymore.

Yeah, Atlus does good dubs. Persona 3/4 are some of the only games I actually like dubbed. I actually put in the original track in Persona 4 Arena for awhile, just to hear what the original voices sound like, and then I switched it back. As for the gameplay, Persona 4 is in fact a hardcore dungeon crawler. Not quite as hardcore as Persona 3 with its 200-odd floor giant tower, but still very hardcore. It's a MegaTen game, they make mostly hardcore dungeon crawlers. It just so happens that Persona 3/4 have a VN grafted on, and they've finagled time management into the VN parts to turn the sidequests (which is basically what each social link is, a sidequest) into a proper game mechanic by itself. I was more of a fan of the social links in 3. The ones in 4 seemed less polished. The main cast of 4 is more interesting than in 3, generally, and the main plot is also better. But I much prefer the social links in 3.

Sekai Project is just publishing. Winged Cloud actually develops the Sakura series games. The people who work on translating and localizing Grisaia are probably not the same people that work with SP's OELVN partners.

I'm with Ariurotl. This is the main reason I have zero interest in Rance. I can appreciate the parody of RPG hero cliches, but that doesn't mean I want to read it.

Wow, just loading the thread threatens to crash my browser, twice. As for my favorite VN soundtrack, I think I have to go with Nocturnal Illusion. So many good tracks in that game.

I still think it's more likely that Sekai Project already hired someone else, so it doesn't make sense to pay him to use his stuff AND pay this other outfit for their translation too. I don't know Aroduc at all, other than his weird attempt to Kicikstart an unauthorized fan patch that then turned into a real release for Littlewitch. So I can't say whether he cares about an adult release or not.

I agree, it's not likely that Giga even knows Aroduc exists. But if they did, it's conceivable they might take offense at him pushing ahead with a translation without their permission, and so they might refuse to work with him on general principle. (I find that unlikely as well, but you never know, licensors have made stranger demands before.)

We don't know, and never will, because companies never talk about this kind of thing in public unless it goes to court. And believe me, it won't. Maybe Aroduc wanted too much money. Maybe SP are skinflints and gave an insultingly low offer. Maybe the folks over at Giga were not impressed that someone decided to work on the title without their permission, and told Sekai Project that he would not be acceptable to them. I figure the most likely explanation is Sekai Project was secretly negotiating for Baldr Sky at the same time Aroduc was secretly fan translating it. And that neither one knew what the other one was doing. So SP might have already inked a contract with another translator to work on the project. It's still fairly rotten for SP to not even straight up tell Aroduc 'sorry, we can't hire you' and subject him to the no-reply treatment. That's just straight up unprofessional. The no-reply treatment is fairly common in the world of business. If I submit my resume to a bunch of different places, I expect to not really hear back from places that have no interest. They just don't respond. I don't expect places that were actively talking to me to suddenly stop. If a company and I are talking, and they decide 'this isn't going to work out, we don't think we want to hire you after all', but they've already started talking to me, or I've already had an interview? Very bad form to simply start stonewalling. Honestly, I get the feeling that Sekai Project's troubles almost all seem to stem from the unprofessional way they seem to be handling public relations and communication. This issue was never going to make Aroduc happy (his work on a game he didn't even like is now wasted), but blowing him off is just stupid and short-sighted. What if they want to work with him in the future? Likewise, all the controversy over will-they-won't-they on whether their recent announcements will get adult releases. If you take one of their twitter comments at face value, the only reason they didn't announce the adult versions was time constraints. Okay, so why haven't they since? Why have we been left to read the tea leaves, and try to read into statements like "well this game was explicitly announced for Denpasoft and Steam, this other game was only announced for Steam". They said they'd have news to share at AX about Maitetsu uncensored; they said the reason they didn't reveal it there was they ran out of time at the panel. Then why didn't they announce it at Otacon? Or online? So either they lied, or they were telling the truth and somehow something came up. If they lied, and have no plans to make any such announcements and are simply trying to shut people up - this is terribly unprofessional, and makes them look bad, and makes people not trust them. If they were telling the truth, then they are simply incompetent at public relations, they're so bad that they can't even keep track of the things they said they'd announce, or they commit to announcing info they really intend to announce but then it turns out they can't. Either way I think SP would do well to get this under control. They're generating a LOT of ill will towards themselves unnecessarily. Even if the answers are "no adult versions of games X, Y, and Z for now, sorry, we tried" - telling the truth would hurt less than this.

OK, so first, I second all of the following: Steins;Gate, 999/VLR, Danganronpa, Ever 17, and Planetarian. Now, my own suggestions: I'm going to suggest a blast from the past; Crescendo, because I found the writing in it to be pretty good. And I actually had luck getting a non-VN fan to read and enjoy it. Also, Littlewitch Romanesque: Editio Regia. (Yes, the censored version. Of course, the censored version.) It's got great characters, it's far more interactive than most other VNs, and it has great art. And the censored version will be much easier to get people to try. I'm also going to be a bit weird, and recommend games that are like VNs, but not actually VNs. The theory is that you can get people comfortable with very story-heavy stuff, as a sort of gateway drug-type thing. (Even though the whole gateway drug idea is more or less debunked now; it's a metaphor.) Her Story and The Stanley Parable more or less defy categorization, but are in the same vein. Then there are really good adventure games with a strong story focus. There's The Longest Journey, which is the one I've actually played. Then there's a bunch on my list that I've been meaning to get around to: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Grim Fandango Remastered, Day of the Tentacle Remastered, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and finally The Last Express. (Note I haven't played any of those last group yet, but their reputation precedes them.)

It's actually not negligible. [Edit to add: The cost is negligible in terms of dollars, but that isn't the only cost here. Restricting your ability to execute your larger strategy is another kind of cost.] Denpasoft isn't just a store, it's a repository that houses downloads for its paying customers. You can't just turn off the store and shut down the site. Well, you can, in the same sense that you can give all your money to that Nigerian prince who just needs help moving money around - it's a really bad idea. It's more correct to say that if your company wants to survive the act, you can't just turn off the download server. Instead, if you want to retire the storefront, you turn off new purchases. At the same time, you publically announce you plan to turn off downloads of existing items on such-and-such date. So if SP wants to close Denpasoft down, they can't continue planning to release new games on it. It's very bad form to have the interval between announcing the closure, and actually turning off the lights, be anything less than a few months from the last time anything was sold. People are on vacation, they don't hear about the closure right away, lots of things can happen. In other words, every title released on Denpasoft moves out the feasible kill date to a few months after its release, at a minimum. And that means that if SP wants Denpasoft dead, first they need to find a new storefront.

That's just how PR-speak works. I mean, really. What do you expect him to say? "These guys are well known for shady, underhanded tactics, but we decided to overlook that and give them a shot because everybody likes big fat sacks of cash money"? Nobody ever says that, even if that's what they really think. Instead they always say meaningless fluff like "We're really good friends with the guys at Nutaku and they're so awesome blah blah blah", whatever their real thoughts on the matter are. Puffery in press releases and other official or public statements should basically be ignored. Maybe Audi really means it, maybe not. Maybe Audi and Nutaku really are all buddy-buddy, and maybe not. I'm certainly not going to take Audi's word for it.

Yeah, the wording is a little ambiguous, because something "launching" is used to mean "releasing the end result", but it seems like " We are putting forth all efforts to ensure that the project will be able to launch in mid-September" literally means launching the project - the Kickstarter - and not releasing the game.

The Kickstarter ends in 24 days (essentially the end of September), and the projected release date is in October? That sounds like "we're already working on the game" (Edit: which they already say in the KS itself they're doing). If the game is already being worked on, and is already targeted to release in a few months, why do they need to run a Kickstarter at all? Edit 2: Also, why do the various shots of the boxes say "Moekuri 2"? Is this a Final Fantasy 3/6 thing here?

Basically, back when there were still huge numbers of cool console games that never made it out of Japan (like, for PS2), I got sick and tired of not being able to play them. Eventually I sat down and said "Which would I prefer? To get to the end of my life, and look back and say "I always regretted never learning Japanese", or "Damn, those years spent learning Japanese were a total waste of time!"" I figured I was more afraid of the former than the latter, and that's around when I enrolled in Japanese classes at a community college I found near work. I'm ... not so good at memorizing large lists, so I have a lot of trouble learning vocab and kanji. And I haven't been the most persistent. But I can follow along a lot more than I could before, and given lookup tools to tell me what vocabulary means, I can generally figure out what stuff means if I can copy/paste into (say) Jisho.org.

Err, that was kind of my point. I guess I was a bit too subtle about it. Yes, for the foreseeable future, Valve is only going to approve story-heavy games with the occasional shift into R-rated erotica. My key takeaway is that Valve will ultimately be the only judge of what is/isn't acceptable. It will be like the App Store; inconsistently applied guidelines that are in practice heavily influenced by politics and media pressure, even though the organization will always deny it.

It's ... hard to predict what effect this will have. Kara no Shoujo was, if I recall correctly, not a terribly good seller at first. But MangaGamer really likes Innocent Grey, so they picked up Cartagra and KnS2. If it was only about sales and profit we'd have, like, Softhouse Seal's entire catalog, and no more of this 'games that take almost 3 years to translate' stuff like Da Capo 3. That is a really good point though. I hadn't considered that. Especially since Sorcery Jokers is from a new partner, it's always harder to get deals cut with new business partners.