Nandemonai

Even though sales of VNs in Japan are collapsing, and have been for years, they're still far greater than Western sales. Remember Koihime struggling to sell two thousand copies? How MangaGamer estimated that it wouldn't sell that many, so they couldn't afford the voices? And then on top of that, the western market simply will not pay the ludicrous overcharging that is standard in Japan. I very much doubt the US market affects their decisions. It simply isn't worth it.

The bit about stripping people to find out the truth doesn't sound terribly compelling, though.

Nobody's mentioned Funbag Fantasy yet? Huh. Tick Tack has Ai, but it won't make any sense without playing part of Shuffle! first (and that game's got ... availability issues). As for nukige: Nympho Sensei Ryoko and I assume Sweet Home probably does too. There's also a bunch of really old, probably not worth bothering with G-Collections titles that have a MILF. Come See Me Tonight, Kango Shicyauzo, and Do You Like Horny Bunny come to mind. Amorous Prof. Cherry is essentially all this.

Coming up soon from MangaGamer are: BokuTen, DameKoi, and Sona-Nyl. Sekai Project has Harumade Kururu, Baldr Sky, and Nanairo Reincarnation. Sol Press has Irotoridori no Sekai and The Future Radio and the Artificial Pigeons. Nekonyan has Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm. There are so many VNs upcoming that I find it very hard to believe that a) you like VNs in general, and b) none of them interest you at all.

VNDB says original release in October 2010, so a little over eight years yes.

If you haven't read Steins;Gate, it probably also fits the bill.

I am intrigued by your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your mailing list. Draculius actually comes highly recommended by someone else (who isn't really in the scene anymore, I don't think - his old site literally died (disk crash or something) and his new one eventually went offline). Nargrakhan really liked it. But he also really liked Euphoria, which did impress me but I found a deeply flawed and ultimately unsatisfying experience. I've kind of meant to try it out eventually.

That sounds like something to contact MangaGamer's support over. If multiple people have been affected by it they might want to issue a patch.

Of games I actually played, I think I have to go with Magical Marriage Lunatics. The badness is really driven home by another 2018 release - Ponkotsu Akuma. A god damned pizza delivery simulator has better worldbuilding, more interesting characters (MML has one who might compete, Mona, if s/he weren't the comic relief), and better comedy. I admit to being a sucker for monster girls, but MML just made me feel like a sucker.

For the record, the flak they're getting from me (as I can't speak for anyone else) is a) for being hypocrites, and b) for not apologizing to the Kickstarter-using companies they hypocritically insulted earlier.

Yeah. I'm giving them flak for the flip-flop, because... they deserve it. Doesn't mean I think they suck. Just means they did something that I'm giving them flak over. And I'm with Fred: nobody is in this industry for the "sweet sweet cash". The cash is paltry and mostly sour. Most of the companies that ever tried to enter this industry either died, or gave up. The ones that are still around are lucky to sell a few thousand units of each game they release, with a very small handful of lucky exceptions. Sekai Project might not even still exist if it weren't for NekoPara.

Setting aside the fact that I disagree it's a mistake... Even supposing it was a mistake, there are still much worse mistakes that have been made in the past. Nocturnal Illusion was translated professionally, yet it chose to translate one of the girls calling you Shinichi-oniisama as ... Brother Shinichi.

The problem is this is what they actually said: But before we talk about individual titles, I would say it's important to first off all talk about ourselves -- NekoNyan. You see, all of us had been pretty dissatisfied with how things were going in regards to the Western VN/eroge market. It just felt like many -- not all -- of the only few localizers don't really have a passion for what they're doing, nor do they seem to actually understand much about it. We talked to many of the Japanese devs, and the truth is (unsurprisingly), they had been getting the same impression. That whole KS practice that just came to be the default for most companies is anything but liked over in Japan. One company we talked to said it'd feel like those localizers are trying to span a safety net, which would, in turn, give off the impression that they don't really believe in their title(s), nor care. .. All right, let me now quickly share with you guys how we're planning to go about things in general, and the direction we want to take this endeavor. ... - No crowdfunding. The first few releases have already been fully funded using our own, private money, so no worries there. We're likely going to offer pre-orders, though, and throw in some extras there for those who really want to support us ahead of release. Don't worry though, pre-order bonuses will also be included in all purchases up to a few weeks after release.

Nekonyan deserves to take flak for this. In January when they first launched, they sure talked big about Japanese companies disliking localizers 'relying on Kickstarters', even though only two VN companies have a history of that. They went on about it at some length. Then it turns out that running a company is harder than talking trash, so before they've even released all their initial announcements they're turning to Kickstarter. I'm glad they're around and releasing games. Even with them and Sol Press new on the scene, there's still far too many good games to ever have all of them released. But the least they could do is acknowledge they publicly and disdainfully denounced a practice they're now considering embracing not even a year later. Just pretending the first statement never happened isn't fooling anybody.

I think it means 'no announcements this weekend', but he could just be pulling our chain.

So, you're announcing your announcement displeasure at their announcement of a forthcoming announcement? I do declare...

Propeller is a sub-brand of Will, and they're still around. DameKoi's brand - Hermit - is far deader than Propeller. DameKoi was that company's final game (they only made three) and it released in 2007. If that game can be licensed, that significantly increases the chances that Propeller games can be licensed. Also, MG's Propeller releases took place after the company stopped releasing anything in Japan. So I wouldn't rule them out altogether. Someone might want some of their other stuff.

Well, you put everything on a continuum even though it's not really a continuum. (I.e. there's two different variables here - skill with English, and skill with Japanese). So I'd be careful with these results.

And now you know why many of these companies are uneasy about allowing unmosaic'ed releases. They are worried about legal exposure from Japanese people buying the US release, then patching in Japanese text. In Japan, that may or may not be enough to get them in trouble. H-OVA releases dried up because the places to sell said DVD's dried up (or so I recall hearing) but also because Japanese customers figured out that overseas releases were half the price and uncensored. That happens too.

I played, like, one route from the PSP release of HakuOki. It was... underwhelming. (Not least of which because I failed to get on a route and ended up on the fallback generic route, which is supposed to be kind of underwhelming.) Mainly I bought it because it was the first time anything like that had ever been released and I was willing to give it a shot, and to try and give a little support to the otome fans (who were a much-underserved segment before then). I've picked up a few others - FLML, Ozmafia, and some of the Vita ones - and Fxxk Me Royally looks great. But I haven't actually played any of them. My backlog is the stuff of legends.

Shinji, you suck. Get in the robot. Yeah, the backend is old and using deprecated crap. But this is still pretty funny.

No, they really couldn't, for the same reason you can't use them to gauge popularity.

This is an easily-gamed metric. It's decently useful, but definitely not perfect, because of review bombing and other such shenanigans. (For example, there was that one game Sekai Project had to kill stone cold dead because they caught the dev hiring paid reviewers.)

The original has some kind of anti-aliasing filter on it. You can tell in the picture of blue-hair with the baseball mitt. Look at the really long, elaborate braid. You can see the jaggies much more cleanly on the English version. Also, the faces are cleaner. The antialiasing filter makes the headshot in the textbox look fuzzy in the Japanese version. I don't like that.

Peter's comment when asked about MoeNovel was that "Will wanted to try something different". That may or may not be what really happened (he's not really at liberty to say too much about how licensing works or how the business relationship is, those details are always private), but it is what he said. And I have a hard time believing that - given the high quality of some of Pulltop's titles - no localizer ever contacted them asking for anything. Jast already has a game from them, and they're still around. MangaGamer was around when MoeNovel launched, and Sekai Project launched about a year later. Most recently we have Sol Press and Nekonyan. So yes, it's possible. But I think it's a fairly unlikely possibility.