Narcosis

Here's a toast for another 30 years. Thanks for all your hard work, I find your musings highly entertaining. That said, ever thought about writing your own digital web novel? As if, haha.

It's already happening. Luckily japanese studios are not the ones doing it.

It's not required. Might be a bug on their side, but if you'll use their booth page and refuse on confirmation to log-in, you can still access the DL links. Their webpages are a mess of empty links and redirects, but the main page for the game looks gorgeous.

This isn't anything new - a bunch of studios experimented with such ways of storytelling. LittleWitch was the most notable company - they developed their own FFD (Floating Frame Director) engine to handle such text bubbles and used them in their games since 2002. Only when you don't know how to handle their engines. Most games don't have them hard-coded and FFD's text bubbles are fully customizable.

I have a particular fondness for heroines, which are vastly different from society they live in - not only in terms of being different in appearance, but psychological standpoint as well. This is perhaps why I love "monster girls" so much. It's particularly interesting to follow their lives between what we'd seemingly call "normal" and see how they cope with all the related problems, which stem from them being plain different to complete hatred from other people only because they are something others aren't. In-between relationships thing and bonds that form between people based on many different factors, I'd have to include maids as well. I'm a fag when it comes to maids and their work. It's the relationships they form with their masters - but not just plain servitude, but complete devotion - both to their work and their masters, often for the rest of their lives. Obviously, it's different from real life, where maids are just paid servants, but the more satisfying it is, when you have a story which is able to delve into that sort of servitude and love (often twisted to some extent), where a maid swears to serve and even protect their masters, both in good and wrong. It's the ultimate sort of affection and loyalty that surpasses any known boundaries. Eternal life and it's implications might be another, especially if related to the previous one. What about heroines, who are forced into eternal lives to serve someone else, especially if it's done against their will? In terms of more plain fetishes... I'd have to include feet and animal ears & tails; a bit of good ol' fashioned S/M isn't bad, either - especially if it involves stepping on people

I rarely play such games, especially those by LoS... but this one, I've been kind of waiting for. Those guilty pleasures of mine

If anything, it only made my life bland and tasteless.

The main issue with EVN's is they often don't strive beyond constraints of their own perception. A lot of people tend to consider them "poor japanese imitations" and oftentimes - rightfully so; it's because being both a developer and a part of this thriving industry, western creators often get that gist literally and feel the need to copy japanese works in order to remain successful. This is partially revelant, because large part of the community in itself is compromised of weebs and people who tend to consume massive ammounts of japanese popculture; catering to them might seem like the only viable way to ensure popularity to a somewhat degree. At the same time, a lot of devs actually show promise with their works, by producing complete derivatives of what typical vn's tend to be, naming Along the Edge as one of the prime examples on how western based vn's can remain original and creative; whether they are successful is another story. Lately I also enjoyed Sweetest Monster as an unique approach to classic horror storytelling and I strongly feel we need more games in a similiar manner. Games, that actually try to tell a story, instead of being just a static, run of the mill animay adventures. I presume we're on the right track, but still have a long way before our western developers create their own unique identity and increase the overall quality of their works. There's a lot of promise hidden within this market and genre. First and foremost, we need skilled creators striving to produce more ambitious works, especially in terms of storytelling, writing and overall composition. We already have too many games that are the same copy-paste of identical stories with different art assets plastered on top of them.

Yeah, it's definitely the "I will rape you in your dreams" kind of face. The earbuds are actually from Samsung, Apple is shit.

Everything. No hands holding. That aside, it actually depends on the game itself and what developers had in store for their playerbase. Some games rely more on actual true routes while other are "multiple route" stories, where each route brings insight to the plot as a whole; there's a lot to be taken into account and ultimately, it depends on you as well. If you're a completionist, you will aim to 100% a vn, whether you enjoy it fully, or not but other people might be satisfied with only reaching a true route or doing a route of their favourite characters.

A lot of people nowadays probably don't even know how I look IRL at the moment. I give you the opportunity to know le watashi now. I feel it's the only picture I recently made, where I look like a half-decent human being. Don't ask me where I live

Only when prose operates on strict usage of honorifics to address people and create a setting, it won't make much of a difference otherwise. Don't be a weeb.

I forgot to add one more thing - seriously, fuck japanese honorifics. They are not required in like 85% of cases. If you want a quality TL, you drop honorifics for the sake of language integration and use western-based equivalents, when possible.

I presume the best possible result can be achieved through: Translating, while maintaining a healthy balance between literal and liberal, when required. Doing at least two TLC runs through the entire script. First one should remove the most obvious errors and mistakes, while second one should aim to fix the translated sentences. Editing to improve the general flow, readability and quality of the english translated text. Skip any of these or half-ass them and you'll get a monstrosity of an english TL in the kinds of SP's late translation attempts or Hikari Field's level of translation "quality". Editors should never fix the translator's mistakes. Their job is to turn the translator's garble into a Shakespeare's level of prose. Likewise, it's not the translator's job to instantly turn their translations into coherent and readable english prose. It's fine, if they can, but most of the times - they can't and really shouldn't even try, for their own sake. This is why professional game localizations are always a team attempt in the first place.

Good threads are always worthy of erecting

A word of advice - japanese don't use the terms shoujo/shonen ai. Those have been both invented and introduced in the west by the community as means to separate more sexually explicit works (which are typically 18+ only) from tamer publications that typically deal only with romance (or both, but don't show the former). In Japan, these are referred to as either yaoi or yuri regardless of their themes and japanese readers typically don't place such distinctions for their works, either.

My personal favourite.

My result. I used to study english pretty hard, when I was younger. Now it's nothing but a faint memory. Might be the fact, that despite not being a native english speaker, I began very early and was exposed to english all the time from cartoons when I was a kid (thanks, Cartoon Network), through comics and literature later on. I had quite skilled teachers in my middle/high school as well and they actually wanted to teach us stuff, which I'm really grateful for. Comparatively to my vocabulary, my english speaking skills are rather rusty and poor, to be honest.

This is literally Winged Cloud's level of business and decision making. Pure cancer.

I typically don't do this, but I'm quite displeased with this sort of moderation at the moment and it's not the first time, either. There was no need to purge. Everyone apologized and you actually did remove an important part of the discussion which was related to the whole topic, including my subsequent post. I'd actually prefer it to be left as it was, people oughta learn something from it. It's one of the points of having a civilized discussion in the first place.

You're making me feel embarrassed. O-okay, you've won.... this time.

Certain games can be quite... dangerous.

Tenkiame NEEDS to be installed in your system. You can't simply move/copy the folder onto your HDD, it won't work that way. That said, Tenkiame also requires your system to be set into japanese locale, albeit it will work without issues with AppLocale or pAppLocale (I recommend the latter, as it's newer and better). Install the game and either set the system locale into japanese or run it through applocale for the game to work.

It's been a while, guys and gals. I don't want to needlessly instigate anyone's hopes, but I'm here to say Tenkiame has been finally picked up for early pre-translation work! TL&DR Your prayers have been heard There is no rough estimate as of now and we're not planning to make any for the meanwhile. TL&DR It'll be finished, when it's done™. We're planning to translate the trial version first. Trial version covers prologue and common route; there are no h-scenes. We want to keep this as low-key as possible for now. We believe it's better to surprise people with sudden releases, instead of promoting the TL for months, just to unexpectedly drop it afterwards. We'll probably post more info here afterwards; it's high likely we might try to put up some simple website for the project, or at least a dedicated thread on the forums, but those will come with more concrete information. Cheers~

Alternatively You're welcome.