Clephas

Otoboku 2 or 3 maybe?

Too bad I'm not interested in rl relationships anymore... I'm a lot more open-minded than I was when I was still interested, lol. That said, I've never been attracted to a rl male... or even most rl females. It takes a peculiarly pinpoint type to get through my instinctive misanthropy to actually make me interested (or at least it did when I was younger). I was definitely S, though... ... and that misanthropy makes it impossible for relationships to last. I don't like people, I don't like spending time with people, and I don't like compromising with other people inside my personal space. That's only gotten worse as I've gotten older, lol.

https://vndb.org/c9481 The one and only time I was seriously tempted.

Yandere

I always rofl when they make mosaic use into a joke in VNs, but I suddenly realized the stories were true when I was playing a decensored game a while back, lol.

I've been trained so that I no longer consider them genitals if there isn't mosaic. *Clephas eyes turn flat and dead briefly*

Something you have to keep in mind is that literal translation from Japanese to English is an oxymoron. It is a lie new translators tell themselves, because they are unaware of just how different the roots and structure are from English. Implied subjects, heavy reliance on context, complexity and subtlety of verb forms, kanji usage... these are all common structural elements that cause the internal inconsistencies that plague most translations/localizations. Another problem is that loaded terms in Japanese are not always properly defined in the J to E dictionaries and textbooks. There were long stretches of time in Japanese history where speaking in layers was the norm for those who did the writing, and the remnants of that exist heavily in the non-dialogue parts of even the least complex VNs... and even in the dialogue at times. In addition, the 'run-on sentence' isn't bad grammar in Japanese, if it is done right. What is permissible and comprehensible in each language is fundamentally different. While a skilled English writer can often get away with murder simply because his prose is beautiful, if not necessarily technically correct grammatically, translators are more restricted. To be blunt, thinking up great prose when you are translating is virtually impossible (that is why editors exist). The language interface between the two is clunky, even if you are good at it. Unfortunately, when you are translating, it can be literally painful to tear apart a beautifully written line, full of abyssal depths of meaning, into several sentences in English... so you can end up with some seriously weird grammatical gymnastics coming out of translators at times born out of attempts to avoid doing so.

He isn't wrong... if I had time, I could probably serve as the full TLC, but I have other obligations... I can usually get 98% of all aspects, but I don't have the time for a full TLC anymore...

Pulltop isn't good about retaining its good writers, so there is usually a huge gap between their good stuff and the rest... the original Lovekami vs the newer ones is a perfect example. Mitsurugi worked on both, but he was only the scenario writer in the original, lol.

It really is the best Pulltop VN, but that is at least in part because Pulltop VNs have been getting increasingly weaker as time has gone by...

The heroine paths in this game are incredibly long and the common routes (there are two of them) are short. This means you spend a lot of time with each individual heroine, which is a huge plus... but it also means that all the character development normally done in the common route gets done in the heroine routes.

If you are making a story with actions scenes, the more detail and description (and the more graphic) the better. If you are making a philosophical ramble, similar. Sci-fi and fantasy are also more tolerant of infodumps and extensive explanation of details. However, if you start going off on explanations of making coffee and cakes in an SOL story about a guy working as the owner of a cafe, then you are probably just going to irritate your readers unless you are a total genius at making it interesting. In that kind of case, you should restrict action descriptions to the 'bare bones', rather than going insane with it. You can get away with spending the equivalent of half a page on the making of a special tea or coffee in a novel, but in a VN, it is just irritating. As an example... Modesitt (the fantasy author who writes the Recluse and Imager series) is a genius at making relatively mundane tasks interesting. However, most people can't do that and shouldn't try. What is your area of mastery? Every writer has one. Mine is setting design and action (violent) scenes. However, I suck at slice-of-life, because it really isn't possible to make something interesting if you don't find it interesting. The key is figuring out how to translate your area of mastery from the novelized format to a VN format.

If you do it in a style similar to Light, there is literally no reason not to use the NVL style and fill the entire screen with text, with the characters and CGs in the background. The one thing you need to do that you probably aren't used to is to firmly separate dialogue and narration lines. In addition 'he said/she said' is unnecessary. Dialogue boxes make that irrelevant. Rather, when narrating, you simply describe their body language or tone of voice to provide emphasis. Honestly, if your game is slice-of-life, you should avoid heavy narration like the plague. Slice-of-life stories just become interminable if you narrate it heavily. Also, adjust your dialogue to narration rate so that dialogue is at least somewhat more heavily favored than it would be if you were writing a novel. Some of your narration will inevitably be made less relevant by the use of sprite poses and expressions, necessitating somewhat less in the way of detail.

Because of my blog, I have a baseline for VN of the Month quality. I won't rate anything that isn't worthy of a VN of the Month (meets the basic criteria) above a 7.9. If the game meets basic quality standards (industry standards) for visuals and audio, I give it an automatic five points. Slice of life quality is two points, and the rest is story... However, if the story turns out to be shit, I'll subtract points, up to five. Exceptional quality in various areas (like visuals and music) will also add increments to the point total. For example, Minori's visual quality is generally exceptional, so they start out with a basic 6. Purple Software usually has exceptional audio quality, so it generally starts with the same. By definition, negatives take away points, so the end issue is always going to be the storytelling and writing, but that is where most of my VNs start out.

A bad translation is often noticeable by internal inconsistency or inconsistency with the actual events that are going on. For people who are actually reading a VN or playing a game for its story, it is definitely noticeable, even when they don't know Japanese. Otherwise there wouldn't have been so many complaints about the localizations for the old FF games, lol.

Umm... I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not terribly fond of Astronauts' irregular ventures off into the lands of dark fantasy gameplay hybrids, and as a result, I chose not to play this one when it came out. My experiences with the original Demonion, which, while the story was decent, was incredibly tedious when it came to the gameplay, made me not want to have anything to do with this game. I won't say that this game surprised me... the story is straightforward Astronauts-style (lots of sex, immorality, and violence) combined with the classic dungeon-crawler setup. I'll be straight with you... I think the resurrection of dungeon-crawlers is what killed the classic jrpg, so I automatically subtract points from any game that looks like or acts like a dungeon-crawler. I even felt the same way about Persona 3 and Persona 4, which tells you just how much I dislike the genre. Why? Because I've never seen the point in a story centering around diving into the same dungeon over and over. Adventuring doesn't seem like fun to me (I got over that phase in middle school), and the stories tend to be ridiculously easy to predict, even for Japanese games. Regalias focuses on the city of Ishgalia, which was built over a labyrinth made from the ruins of a floating magic city that fell to the ground a few centuries back. The former mercenary, Orias, enters the city with the hope of finding the secrets to his past deep within the labyrinth. Now, let's set aside the craziness of monsters infinitely welling up from the depths of a ruined magical city. If I were to complain about that particular tired trope, we'd be here all day. I'll even set aside my need to question how the city wouldn't have been completely explored after decades of people going into its depths. What I won't do is gloss over the way I began to feel by the end... which was tired of finding my way through a bland set of dungeons. I honestly recommend that this game be played in stages, as the dungeon is exhausting and the story sections are not quite frequent enough to break the experience off into manageable bits. Essentially, you form a party of five characters (from an eventual roster of nine), and the battles are classic-style turn-based, which most enemies and your characters having one action per turn (the exception being certain 'special' enemies and bosses). On normal, the beginning of the game was the single hardest part of the entire thing. For some reason, the special enemies early on can frequently one-shot you even if you are overleveled for the part of the dungeon you are in, which is ridiculous. Since the only resurrection option early on is to return to town, this is frustrating and irritating, since it isn't always possible to avoid the enemy. On the other hand, in the late game, you'll most likely be faced with a distinct lack of challenges... or at least, I was. I had to go back to town every once in a while when I ran out of mp, but I rarely died or even had a character killed after the fourth chapter (there are ten, including the final one). Part of that is that Orias and Shizuku are overpowered when using the double-sword passive skill (believe me, this is great for both normal enemies and bosses). The other part of it was that I had the range of skills I needed to wipe out enemy parties in a single turn. One thing I seriously hated about this game was the way it essentially forces to stick with your original party... because the other four girls are significantly less capable than the first four to join the party. Dora is almost as capable as Edna as a mage, but Nemu is half-assed (they obviously couldn't decide whether to make her a true attack mage or a healer... and it shows). The less said about Meriel and Zenobia, the better (think, 'magician who couldn't kill a fly' and 'swordswoman with a ridiculous number of support magic that verges on being useless late-game). The characters in this game are actually pretty good... though you spend an inordinate amount of time with them naked (five or more non-rape h-scenes for all the female characters except Fortuna and Zenobia). They all have realistic motivations for their actions and background to explain their personalities... which isn't surprising from the company that produced Erect! which is notable for being my favorite borderline nukige in existence. Story-wise... it is fairly predictable. Honestly, the presentation isn't bad... in fact, it is good. However, I found the lateness of certain revelations to be irritating (since they weren't really revelations by the time they came out and said them outright), and I found the antagonists less than inspiring... The end of the main story was actually pretty decent, and a good happy ending overall. There are also plenty of post-game events for the 'finish everything' freaks, including hints at what the characters might do afterward. However, I was disappointed there wasn't a final epilogue...

The difference is that many of them actually add something other than sex to the series... to be straight, I could forgive them for A for Margrit's after, the Ryouzanpaku paths, and the various Kuki maid paths alone.

People who follow their hobbies obsessively are often seen as eccentric or childish... but immaturity is relative. One of my best rl friends is a heavy-duty otaku with a family who works in the embassy of a certain African nation (though, because of that I haven't seen him in years). I know plenty of people who are serious and live fulfilled lives around me who also happen to be otakus... and if you don't seem childish while indulging your hobbies, they probably aren't a hobby. That is because a hobby is something you are supposed to take joy in pursuing, as opposed to working at. That said... in any community, a certain percentage of those involved are going to be immature trolls (trolls being immature by definition). I won't deny that some people, excluding myself of course *bats his eyes innocently* have made decisions others might consider... immature. However, there is no absolute definition of maturity, beyond the ability to rationally make your own decisions based on what you want from life and be capable of rational discussion with people who disagree with you... or at least avoid exploding in their faces.

(Note: Right now I'm playing Dungeon of Regalias, on a long-standing request for me to make an assessment. This doesn't have anything to do with my statements below.) One of my pet peeves is companies that depend on their reputation to sell their games, regardless of quality. Pulltop, Navel, and Circus are the most frequent offenders on this side... Pulltop, in particular, has developed a habit of releasing second-rate games under existing IPs (the second and third Lovekami and their sex-focused FDs) that add nothing to the series. Navel has a habit of excessive sequels (Tsuki ni Yorisou Otome no Sahou and Shuffle) and trips off into side-story wonderland. Circus has a habit of endless sequels (D.C.). I call this 'resting on your laurels' because these companies are basically milking successful IPs to death in order to stay afloat, rather than generating really new content. Oh, I will be the first to admit that Shuffle really, really did need the rewrites it got later on, and the afterstories and voice patch for the original Tsuki ni Yorisou were hugely beneficial. However, Tsuki ni Yorisou, Otome no Sahou 2, despite the hopes of those of us who were interested to see how they would handle a second generation, turned out to be greatly substandard to the original, flopping massively in the heroine paths despite a promising beginning in the common route (which is probably why they've been releasing so many mini-fandiscs to 'rebuild trust'). As for Pulltop... The original Lovekami was actually a first-class VN that showed off the best of what a fantasy charage can be. However, its successors were... immature and pathetic in comparison (obviously written as moe-bait rather than serious efforts to continue the series). Koi no Resort was a rather blatant effort to make a spiritual successor to the kamige Haruka ni Aogi, Uruwashi no that failed massively (primarily due to the lack of comparable sensitivity in the writing, depth of the characters, and independent strength of the heroine paths... in other words, everything). Even Oozora and Miagete Goran visibly suffer from an excess of ambition and a lack of the ability and patience to achieve it (believe me, every time I go into a new main-company Pulltop game of late, I leave wanting to cry from disappointment). This is pretty sad, considering that Pulltop started out as one of my favorite companies after blowing me away with Uruwashi no and Lovekami in rapid succession... I don't think I should even have to describe what Circus does with Da Capo, lol (I could, but it would just start a salt fight). However, it isn't just charage companies that are the culprits. Even my beloved chuunige companies can fall victim to this kind of intellectual laziness. Propeller, the second it lost its primary writers, forced out two massively flawed works in rapid succession (one of which - Pygmalion - , to my despair, actually got localized *spits in disgust*) that weren't even worth playing (though Pygmalion probably would have been good if they'd used a different writer and actually put forth the effort to make it into a real story). Light, the producer of so many awesome chuunige, put out a work of penultimate laziness just a few months ago (Sora no Baroque). Nitroplus, in a rather pathetic effort to sharpen its skills at psychedelic stories, went off the beaten track with Sumaga and Axanael. Even Akatsuki Works, which has always been consistent, if nothing else, has of late been lowering its standards somewhat. Understand, I am perfectly willing to accept that companies will not produce a kamige with every single project. The idea that any company could manage that, given the limited budgets most VN companies have to work with, is fundamentally ridiculous. I am quite willing to enjoy trips off into the wilds on occasion (such as Pulltop's surprisingly high-quality Natsuiro Recipe or Moonstone's Sakura no Mori Dreamers). I am also willing to accept that sequels rarely match the originals. However, I do think, if they can't match the original, they should at least build something of close to equal quality in a slightly different direction, instead. To be specific, there was absolutely no reason to make every aspect of Tsuki ni Yorisou 2 to echo the original's beginning framework so closely (to be specific, the way he suddenly became less capable than before when the heroine paths started made me want to various unpleasant things to the writer). I am also willing to admit that a new set of writers means inevitable hiccups... I could have accepted that Propeller's works would need to be a bit different after Yuuichirou left the company. I would have even been willing to shrug off Pygmalion as a fluke. However, the way the company, rather than pulling in a single capable freelance veteran writer (of which there are plenty in the industry), dragged in a massive number of writers (all of which were mostly nukige writers) to make Jaeger. Light... has no excuse. Light's fanbase, whether they started with Dies Irae or have been following the company for much longer, is accustomed to high quality long games with extensive setting and character development and highly complex stories where every last element of the setting is squeezed for everything it is worth. Sora no Baroque was a slap in the face, a game that departed greatly from the company's style, even aside from the raw quality issues. Nitroplus did have an excuse... they were a company that was always seen as 'weird'. Experimentation has always been their norm (which is probably why it takes them so long to recover after each release), so Sumaga, while being a massively boring abomination from the perspective of people who liked their earlier works, was understandable and forgivable. However, Axanael... wasn't. To be blunt, it takes a peculiar type of brain to actually enjoy those two games, even if you aren't a Nitroplus fan. Akatsuki Works' gradual descent really has been so gradual as to have been barely noticed. While their characters and situations have mostly maintained the quality we, the readers/players, are accustomed to, it has to be said that the gradual decreases in length and detail in the stories have been apparent for some time. I honestly enjoyed Suisei Ginka and thought it was one of the most conceptually exceptional of the company's games in years. However, it was also relatively short (less than fifteen hours for me is short for a chuunige) and generally over reliant on the 'Akatsuki Works Style' of VN design to keep the reader's interest. The 'style' is proven to work at keeping the reader's interest, but it is also so recognizable that anyone who has been reading this company's works since Ruitomo will recognize it instantly. In other words, I just needed to spout salt about the companies I feel have gotten intellectually lazy due to past success, lol.

'Shikatanai' is probably one of the most commonly-used expressions of resignation in both verbal and written Japanese... you probably won't see it disappear. It is a cultural disease at all levels of society.

Less 'average guy' protagonists, regardless of age or setting. Less meaningless (doesn't progress the story or develop the characters) slice of life. Less unreasonably violent tsundere. Less osananajimi heroines (side-characters are fine, though) Less making a great setting then not using it in any of the heroine paths. Less meaningless/random h-scenes. Less meaningless choices/false player agency. Stop having school as the main setting for 90% of all VNs. Less romance as the pinpoint focus of a VN (don't get rid of it, just stop making it 90% of the focus of most VNs) No more ladder-style story structure (ex: G-senjou no Maou, Hatou, Eustia, etc)

We will probably be able to trust machines to translate most languages' objective writing (non-prose, informational stuff) relatively early on. However, realistically, machines are unlikely to be able to handle cultural and emotional context and the nuance of prose before we manage to create a perfect human emulator AI, lol.

We'll probably see perfect machine translations between romance and germanic languages in relatively little time (even as soon as next year, given the basic similarities between the languages and their usage). However, I give it at least thirty years before they manage to perfectly manage the transition from an Asian language to English.

Elise Rosenthal (Otherwise known as 'standard koneko tsundere #umpteen') from Minamijuujisei Renka.

Probably only between compatible languages. I wouldn't get your hopes up for perfect machine translations from Japanese to English, and I seriously doubt that this will work perfectly for Chinese.