Nandemonai

What difficulties? The game's in beta testing right now.

Hear, hear. A guy by the name of Paul Otlet invented the internet. In 1910. He had all the main ideas, more or less. (The only thing they hadn't cottoned on to was user-driven content, like Wikipedia, being king; but nobody predicted that would be as successful as it was.) The only problem was, there was no way to actually implement his grand vision in a way that could get decent market penetration. It ended up being forgotten for several decades before being rediscovered a few years ago.

Uh, no, it's not? Those are comments from the translator. That's not the only thing involved here. I am the editor, and there is no way this game releases this year.

Lolita is just a diminutive affectionate form of another female name, Lola. It had a brief stint as a popular baby name (according to the SSA's data - you can find the name if you search before the 80's). The book's use of the name put the kibosh on that basically for good.

Yeah, uh... Don't hold your breath for an SKM release anytime soon. Edit: What am I looking forward to? Ponkotsu Akuma, Magical Marriage Lunatics, DameKoi, Sideboob Fantasy, Hapymaher, Sona-Nyl, Maidens of Michael, Evenicle, G-Senjou uncensored, Nanairo Reincarnation, and Majikoi. Edit: What would I like to see? I want Sumaga and Django to come out, so Jast can announce more Nitroplus games. The Steins;Gate romance alternate timeline VN sounds good, and there's a game called Tsuma Shibori which I liked the anime for. If Pulltop would pull their heads out of their behinds and quit releasing censored-only releases, that's be good too. Edit: Oh, and more Propeller releases. Tokyo Babel and Shadows of Pygmalion were not enough.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy MLK Day. It's progress update time again: 45.0% 29.4% edited. Edit: I have no idea where 45% came from, but it's wrong.

I'll actually recommend Steins;Gate. Sure, the romance in it isn't super deep. But it is there, and boy does that game ever have drama.

Uhh... What? If you don't like catgirls, why did you pick up anything past Nekopara 1? As someone with a weakness for monster girls myself, Nekopara 1 was still just barely good enough to hold my interest. I can't imagine playing Nekopara 1 if I wasn't into catgirls, and then saying 'you know what? I want to play Nekopara 2'.

Koihime Musou's got a great scene where Sei doesn't know as much about sex as she thinks she does, so she thinks they're about to have a pillow fight. There's apparently a scene in Newton and the Apple Tree where one of the (mad scientists) girls uses a potion which swaps around sex organs, so she gets your dick and you get her pussy. Then she fucks you. I'm not sure, but it might be in the demo.

No. I'm sorry, but Imouto Paradise is a nukige through and through. Moonstone Cherry is Moonstone's special brand for nukige, and, I mean, come on. What's Imouto Paradise about? It's about banging your imoutos. Sex is the primary focus of that game, and that's the definition of nukige. Nukige does not mean "has no story". Funbag Fantasy is clearly a nukige. And yes, having a harem route is one of the hallmark signs of being a nukige (although it's not a perfect tell; some things that have harem routes are not nukige.) "Moenukige" is not a thing. There could be examples of a game that might be hard to classify as one or the other, but until you can show me a large group of such games, that is not a subgenre.

It's about how much screentime is devoted to these things, and how well the experience holds up without the sex scenes. In Imopara the girls might have well defined personalities, but they play a minor role in the game and most of the time is spent sleeping with your imouto(s). And nobody would pay even $5 for a version of Imopara with no h-scenes.

The pink blood is there because if it was realistic looking blood, the rating would have shot up a few levels.

He's doing all this work for free. You're awfully entitled. No, he doesn't owe you anything. You didn't pay him anything, he didn't sign any contract agreeing to deliver the patch.

Sure you can. Disappearing from the Internet is easy, if you set yourself up right. You set up an email account that you only use for that purpose, and you use that to register accounts for (say) creating your website. Then you pick some alias that you've never used before. Then disappearing is easy. Just walk away from all that stuff. Poof, you're gone. Also, you're right: he doesn't have to finish the translation. But you're wrong that he has to tell anyone what the status is. He can do whatever he wants. He doesn't owe you, or anyone, anything.

Really? All of them? The pickings were awful slim in those days, but not so slim I can buy getting through everything in 4 months. Tsukihime released after G-Collections went under, and their library has more than 25 games. That's a lot, and that's just G-C. Then there's Jast USA, and Himeya-soft, and the dozen or so released by various minor companies who did a few titles then folded. You actually went back and played all those really old kusoge? Terrible games like DOR, or Cobra Mission, or Pro Les-Ring, or Time Stripper Mako? As for me, well, I had an interest in "hentai" before I even knew what anime was. (I discovered it back when I discovered you could just type porn into search engines and actually find porn. This was in the very early days of the internet.) My interest in "hentai games" grew out of that. Three Sisters' Story, Seasons of the Sakura, and Nocturnal Illusion were the games that convinced me there was something worth looking into (for more than just pr0n reasons). I converted into a paying customer when I found out exactly how poorly all these games sold. The first game I paid for was Snow Drop, which at the time I liked (and which I can't imagine liking now, 15 years since I last messed with it). And, well, nearly 20 years later, here I am.

I think there's a pretty good chance that would be true, yeah. If Steins;Gate were listed as a science fiction book, and you could buy it in the iBookstore, and read it on your Kindle? I definitely think that would help quite a bit.

No, that can't be it. Actual reading is significantly more popular than Visual Novels. Just look at the amount of actual novels that come out every year. There must be something else going on here. I have long believed one of the biggest problems with VNs is that they tend to get classified with games. When they get news coverage, it's by video game websites like Kotaku or Siliconera. The type of audience that might be drawn to visual novels probably overlaps a lot more with people who like a good book. If I had a marketing budget for (say) Steins;Gate, I'd probably spend a signficant chunk of it advertising the game as if it were a new science fiction novel: sending review copies to sci-fi book reviewers, showing up at sci-fi book conventions, and so on. Unfortunately, the most natural fit for games with love scenes would be romance novels; the demographics for those aren't very promising for most VNs (but otome games would work fine). In large part I think visual novels have a lot of trouble because they're trying to sell to the wrong crowd. Selling to the gaming crowd is problematic because, well, VNs don't look a lot like most other types of video game.

They aren't pure girls. They aren't girls at all. They're figments of the writer's imagination and the artist's pen. Certainly there have been times where I've ended up less interested in the h-scenes in a game than I am in the story. But that's about me. What appeals to me. It's not about the girls in the game (who don't even exist).

The last update posted in 2016, and the previous update said the guy didn't have a lot of time anymore. At this point I have to say, there's a good chance it never happens at all, unfortunately.

Why would they do that? First of all, the goal was never $300K. I checked the Wayback Machine, the goal for ch. 3-5 was always 'pending'. When they announced the goal it was $150K each for the new chapters. It never had an amount before tht. Second, minori apparently really wanted to do more Supipara, but it bombed. Why would they go to all this trouble to pretend to get ready to make more? Why is it easier to believe they're deviously and dishonestly manipulating the facts, than to believe their plan failed? And if they didn't want the plan to succeed, why would they count sales of Trinoline towards this goal? (I looked for a cite for that, but couldn't find anything. I believe it was announced at Anime Boston 2017.) We don't know exactly, but sure we do. Their tracker page says this: "When the combined gross profit of eden* and Supipara reaches... " Yeah, that's the difference between gross profit and gross revenue. Even if SteamSpy is accurate, the game only costs $20 now. And it went down to $2 for the Christmas sale in 2017. Basically, you can't count on eden* to move that needle in any significant way anymore. The game is old and cheap. It seems like you were expecting profits from eden would continue indefinitely? Games are hit driven. They get most of their sales up front. The profits were always going to dry up eventually. After a quick initial burst, sales fall off. The only real significant sales eden* will have seen since then will be the big Steam sales. You're ignoring the other game included in this fundraiser. The point was that Supipara would come to fund itself after getting a kick start from sales of eden*. Each new volume of Supipara would create a new spike of direct sales of the new volume, but would also (theoretically) ignite new interest in minori's other games. Except that apparently Supipara volume 1 bombed in English too. Or to look at it another way: Supipara 1 and Eden* between them have a profit of $225K right now. Suppose that number was a little higher, though. It seems reasonable to suppose that Eden* made $185K or so, and Supipara 1 made about 40K. Suppose instead that Eden* had made the $225K all by itself, and Supipara 1 hadn't bombed. Then it might have pulled in $100-125K. Then things would be very different. It would be close to the goal for volume 3, maybe even at it already. And the release of volumes 2 and 3 would bring in another $100K each, minimum, guaranteeing the release of volume 4. In other words, the fundraiser was set up so Eden* would provide the initial push for sales of Supipara, and that if Supipara took off, it would fund itself. That plan doesn't seem likely to work, so they appear to have changed it to include Trinoline's profits as well.

I'm not a big fan of this type of moderation, especially after the fact instead of during the parts that could reasonably be called a flamewar. But I think this was a pretty clear-cut case where something needed to be done. The discussion dwarfed the original topic. I'm much more annoyed over the mods killing that silly nukige thread. They took a thread that basically existed for the purpose of goofing off and generating discussion, and which in fact was the most active thread the board had seen for weeks, and killed it. Boggles my mind. They have access to Norn games. This isn't a Norn game. If they could, I'd love for them to work on it. But they have to work with what they've got until they can build up their reputation a little bit and start looking for other deals.

Are you quite sure you want me to answer that question?

So the translation can't be THAT bad, then. That's good news.

That's a very interesting blog post. In fact, I was 100% on board with all of it until about 2/3 of the way through where it said that the Telltale games aren't visual novels. To me, the Telltale games are more clearly Visual Novels than Gone Home. They're all VNs, Night in the Woods is a VN. Hell, you might even be able to convince me that certain extremely text- or cutscene-heavy RPGS are VNs, like Xenosaga 1 or Trails in the Sky or Persona 3/4/5. Definitely the fighting game spinoffs Persona 4 Arena/Ultimax are VNs. If Aselia and the really old school adventure game titles, like Nocturnal Illusion and 3 Sisters Story are VNs, then "visual novel" has a very broad definition. I did, actually. It's true. You can button mash through any fight in minutes, because the game gets easier every retry and eventually you just crush everything no matter how terrible the commands you mash in. And it's not very deep. But if you actually try to work out how to do well, it's just complex enough that I found it a decent diversion. Plus the pacing of that game would feel off if they weren't there. RPGs are the same way. If you took your average RPG and made a book (or more like a TV show) out of all the cutscenes, the pacing would be off. (In fact, the few RPGs I know of, that did get made into anime? Those anime are usually not great.) The segments of going around fighting mess with the internal pacing in a way that's hard to explain. Koihime's battle sections are the same way. The battles are used to add tension to the story. It makes it feel more like the stakes are real. Books or TV shows have a hard time doing that. Games can just throw fights at you to emphasize that no, things are really at stake here. Or that yes, that guy really is a badass. You know he is cause he just opened up a can of whupass. Same with Koihime. When that game wants to make you feel outnumbered, it can do more than just talk up how outnumbered you are. It can throw you into a fight where you're outnumbered 10 to 1, and it's all you can do to not die until your reinforcements show up.

MangaGamer also released new translations of Shuffle! and (I think) Edelweiss. Then they got too busy to keep doing it, I think.