Nandemonai

Incredibly nitty nitpick: honorifics are not completely alien in English. We actually have an almost identical concept. It's just that it's such a small part of the language that it's almost died out, because the situations that spawned it relate to social structures that basically haven't existed for hundreds of years; whereas in Japan it's still highly relevant to daily life. When you're in court, what do you call the judge? Your honor. The judge is introduced as The honorable so-and-so. And it is always only for other people. Consider this classic Three Stooges bit. Why is it funny? Because everyone knows that you call a judge your honor to show proper respect, and you certainly never call them "Mister Court". And because the very idea of anyone using this form of address as My honor is inherently ridiculous. No judge ever refers to him or her self as my honor. It simply is not done. They always refer to themselves in an impersonal way as the court. Likewise, when was the last time any Pope ever referred to himself as My Holiness? Does the Queen of England refer to herself as My Majesty? Certainly not. That's what the royal we is for; it is a humbling form of address, implying it isn't even really a person talking but a mouthpiece on behalf of the nation itself. Now, honorifics in Japanese indicate precise levels of respect and/or familiarity between the speaker and whoever they're referring to. Not adding one when you need to, or using an overly informal one, is insulting. When you get right down to it, forms of address like Your Grace are almost exactly the same in English in this respect as honorifics in Japanese, and they're even often combined with the individual's name in a very similar way. Someone who is entitled to be called Your Grace will be very put out if you don't do it. And while today, very few people could tell you the precise difference between Your Grace and Your Excellency, that did not used to be the case. They're not exactly the same: It is more common in English to use the honorific alone, because usually when you need one, it's unambiguous who it refers to. But if there happens to be more than one judge in the room, you fall back to Judge So-and-so which is even more like an honorific. So yes, English actually has honorifics. They're like the appendix of English; basically useless, but still technically there. So unimportant that most people wouldn't even recognize that that's what it is. (Hell, for years I would have said we didn't have honorifics.)

They announced the game would be available in July at AX.

Eroge sales have been slowly declining year-over-year for, what, like ten years now? So a series that started years ago will naturally have a wider appeal. But also, a series that was a smash hit years ago will have sold many more copies than what passes for a smash hit today. Kind of making it "more famous" by definition (which was the OP's question). Also, you seem to have glossed over an important detail: it isn't just that Rance was the first of its genre. It's that it was the first of its genre, and it's still around. How many JRPG series, adult or not, make it to entry number ten? Not many. Not even Persona has made it that far (and now that the director of 3-5 has moved on, who knows what will happen). So if these last 2 Rance titles really are the grand finale that AliceSoft is saying, and if Evenicle does start its own series, then in 20 years' time perhaps we will see the release of Evenicle 11. But odds are good that we won't, simply because most series don't last that long. And that doesnb't really even say anything about the quality of Evenicle. It's just a fact. Megahits are extremely rare. Look at Moonstone Cherry: Imouto Paradise did well. Not only is it their only game to get a sequel, it's got two. But do you really think 2025 will bring Imouto Paradise 7? Probably not.

That's a very odd glitch. No, the translation is missing. It looks like all the missing lines have \n embedded within them in Japanese. That's almost certainly a coded reference (in the ripping tool) to a newline character. From a quick look at the line, it appears that the chopped-off part that's present roughly corresponds to the stuff before the first newline in the line. What's weird about this glitch is that there seem to be other newlines in this script that are handled just fine. Somehow these particular lines got chopped off in English at the newline.

I'm not sure I understand. People clamored for Rance so much that MangaGamer had to straight up tell them "look if nobody buys Beat Blades Haruka cause you all want Rance, you're not going to get Rance", and they are still pretty vocal about wanting the rest of the series. How is announcing more Rance 'snubbing their fans'? Same for BL. I personally am not interested in BL (at all!) but MangaGamer has a healthy and growing group of fans of otome and BL. Throwing them a bone is the farthest thing from 'snubbing their fans' MangaGamer could possibly be doing, since BL/otome fans are typically not interested in the standard male-oriented fare that is 95% of MangaGamer's output. They would be much more open to accusations of 'snubbing their fans' if they were to ignore that demographic entirely!

Because the results when companies go it alone are much much worse, and the licensors all know it. When you get right down to it, Sekai Project's releases are far from flawless, but they are a far cry from (say) SakuraGame. SP has done a lot of questionable things, but they never "released" a game with Google Translated script files that crash the game immediately.

Considering the game went to "stalled waiting on third party" on Sekai's official Trello board multiple times in response to developments in QA, it seems quite reasonable to suppose the statements on Dovac's twitter about not being able to touch the game themselves are accurate. I don't understand why this isn't believable; so what that Lose never released the specific mix of assets we saw in Japan? The claim is that they insist on doing all the technical work themselves. I've heard this about other localization projects in the past and Lose developing the US version in-house is very believable to me.

That's exactly what he did. Someone came here and started a thread for the project and basically was told "this is not worth doing". I guess they decided to press on and do it anyway. If people prefer their game that way, I guess more power to them, but it really was not an improvement. DD is totally a weeb, and it is in fact annoying, but it was annoying in the original game too.

Further update: Nick says this: "With Nitroplus titles we put our best translator on their games to be in charge of either the TL or TLC. Work has been done for Django, but other newer titles keep pushing its priority down. I personally would like to see Django out before 2020, so I'll be talking to our team about that. "

It's been four months since I updated this last? Huh. That's no good. Editing is now at 71.0%

Well, that was fast. A Jast USA employee responded to my post saying "That's a misunderstanding. It's still in the works." So I guess Django is not cancelled. Edit: Ninja'ed again. Someone should call some pirates and get those scurvy dogs off the forum, arrr

So am I. Sumaga seems to have completely stalled the same as Django, literally no progress in a very long time. My thread is here: http://discuss.jastusa.com/discussion/255270/so-outlaw-django-is-officially-cancelled-now/p1?new=1 (And yes, if anyone cares (probably not) I am the same Nandemonai whose account on that board dates back to, like, 2001.)

Reddit is saying that in the Q&A, Jast said Django won't be coming because it doesn't work on Windows 10. I've asked for confirmation in Jast's forum. Edit: Damn ninjas. Quit reading my mind like that, Decay. You'll go blind. That would explain why Django was stuck in 'awaiting translation' for literally years. They put it on the back burner when Win10 released. Three years ago. Did they say anything about Sumaga? That game was 70% through editing but it seems to have also completely stalled. So Django joins La Voyeur: Used Condom and Newscaster Mariko and Slave Bazaar, and one other Nitroplus title Jingai Makyou. Hopefully they won't now start denying they ever announced it (like they did to JM!)

It's good to hear that Trample on Schatten is coming out soon. That's honestly a surprise. But N+C has something like eight titles. Did they really just announce all of them? Or did they announce they have access to them? KtKtKnK is also a good announcement, but they didn't have anything to add for Sumaga or Django?

I hadn't realized Himeya Soft released 9 games. Of course among the really good fare there's stuff like Love Potion (which ... is not good). And yes, Himeya is the company that ran an eroge import shop until the sudden appreciation of the yen in 2010 (apparently) made them "temporarily suspend" orders, which of course killed their business.

All things go in cycles. The hot new thing never stays hot forever. Eventually only the best examples are fondly remembered. Westerns used to be big on US TV; ninjas used to be big in Japan. Now they're both essentially played out. Police procedurals have been hot for a long time, but they won't be forever. Marvel superhero movies can't keep going the way they have been forever. In the case of VNs, the market seems to have been captured by one very specific kind of VN. That's a recipe for burnout. It's a fact that compared to, say, ten years ago (or so) sales are significantly down. The extreme homogeneity probably plays a role in this (the stereotypes have been there for a very long time) but to what extent, it's hard to say. (For example, to what extent do Japan's shifting demographics explain it? To what extend do mobile devices displacing computers explain it?)

Really? Because "minimal character development, no strong central plot, character interactions based solely upon surface character qualities born of the archetype in question, etc " seems to me to describe everything that's wrong with Magical Marriage Lunatics. Or at least of the two routes that I played.

Nope, that's governed by this test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action There is absolutely no way that the school shooter game would run afoul of this. It's 100% legal. Valve also is entitled not to sell it if they don't want to - that's also 100% legal - but nobody is going to prison because they were involved in the creation of that game. As for the 'they didn't specify where it's illegal' thing, they already deal with that. Legal restrictions are only applied in the relevant territory. Otherwise all those WW2 games with Nazi insignia wouldn't be on Steam at all; that's illegal in Germany too. So no, if Valve actually follows through with this, there is nothing preventing Active Shooter from being sold on Steam, or basically anything. Being a white supremacist is not illegal. Advocating for white supremacy is also not illegal. Making white supremacist propaganda is not illegal either.

Of course they did. There specifically was a huge clusterfuffle over 'anime games' not even a month before this was announced. This is as close to them publicly addressing that controversy as we're likely ever to see.

It's not illegal to be a white supremacist or a Holocaust denialist. (Well, it's illegal to be a Holocaust denialist in Germany, but not in the US)

After giving it some thought, I can't see this new policy working for Valve. I see another train wreck in the future, and it goes like this: White supremacists (or, say, Holocaust denialists) will start putting stuff on Steam Valve and/or the public will freak out over it The controversy becomes so great that they have to change course Once again, Valve will have told people 'this is okay' and then come back and change their minds

Pulltop released a game with Jast USA in the past - Princess Waltz. I would recommend buying that game instead. Giving MoeNovel money will only tell them that their current strategy of releasing badly-translated censored games is working. If you don't like that strategy, and you don't really want the game if it's censored, then you shouldn't buy it. In a way, them not releasing anything at all is better in the long term, if you don't want censored-only releases. There is always the chance other companies see what MoeNovel is doing, and decide 'hey this sounds like a great idea'.

Japanese sales have, I understand, been steadily declining for years. Part of it is that there are more releases than ever chasing after a roughly fixed pool of money, but that pool of money has also been slowly shrinking. The same thing happened to manga, too. I suspect (but don't quote me on this) that a lot of the money that used to go into these things shifted into going to mobile devices - likely free-to-play gatcha - instead. The population shrinking probably doesn't help either. The demographics of people who buy VNs and video games skew young. (I believe most VN customers are only customers for a few years before they stop buying? I forget where I heard that.) So the shrinking of those demographics really hurts.

Makes sense. Then the total money they are making probably is way better than MangaGamer, even if the amount they make from their English-language versions specifically probably isn't. But that doesn't really matter; their business as a whole is much more profitable which makes it appealing to those licensors who don't care about quality.

Except that the average MangaGamer game goes for roughly 40x as much money. If SakuraGame moves 40x as many units as MangaGamer, then their revenue is broadly comparable. And MangaGamer's translation rates are low, so their expenses aren't going to be that much more per game's. It's closer than you think. And I doubt very much SakuraGame's "success" will continue indefinitely if they keep this up. (Of course, if they're actually producing real Chinese translations, and if the Chinese versions are priced traditionally, then all bets are off. I wouldn't know about that.)