Decay

He's talking about the screenshot function obviously... They're in your My Documents folder, specifically Documents\みなとそふと\マジこい！\ScreenShot

It was funny. The primary point of Grisaia was the comedy and the drama in the heroine routes was only something extra to spice things up. I'm not sure what else you want out of a comedy game but Grisaia's common route was hilarious from start to finish so I was never bored by it.

... eventually. I have a feeling that you're reading muv-luv for the wrong reasons, or are going in with the wrong expectations. It is not an action story, and is not primarily focused on mech combat versus aliens, although there is a little bit of that in alternative.

It's a PS3/Vita version of higurashi so yeah, it's in 16:9. I don't believe they redrew any of the art that was in the PS2 version, so I don't know how well it upscales or what the original source resolution of their assets were. Also you have to keep in mind that computer tech adoption rates in general are much lower in Japan. 4:3 monitors are still very common there. VNs have very low requirements, so people run them on ancient clunkers. When your core customer base is running your product on a decade-old computer with a 4:3 CRT, it makes you reluctant to have super high res versions. This is further exacerbated by the fact that 2D art becomes much more expensive to produce the higher res you go, so developers are double-incentivized to go low-res. They don't want to waste resources producing assets that won't be fully utilized by most of their customer base. Most modern VNs are 720p now, but 1080p VNs from Japan are very rare and it will be a long time before that becomes widespread.

Both of those also have abnormally long common routes. Just because Majikoi's isn't as long as those doesn't mean it isn't long. I dunno, Majikoi's felt really long compared to a lot of other VNs.

The common route is definitely really long, much longer than your typical VN. The VN is just kind of huge in general, after the long common route there are five main heroine routes, one lengthy unlockable "true" route, and a bunch of side-routes that are surprisingly long for what they are.

The most serious Majikoi gets is during the Wanko route probably, where it forgets to be funny for a few scenes. But it never lasts long. In all other routes, even at its most serious, it's still completely and utterly absurd. It is, it's this, specifically: https://vndb.org/r37226 edit: 19 chapters, that shit is way too bloated. Higurashi badly needs a "Director's Cut". A release where Ryukushi chops out all the fat and releases a "compact" definitive version. I have a feeling that would just be chapters 1-8, though (the original story).

His argument is specifically based on a small percentage of people choosing not to pay, so I think it's safe to say he hasn't forgotten. As for payment options, I don't think they would increase sales by a whole lot by expanding their options. I don't know, something just tells me that isn't a significant reason why people choose not to buy games from them. In america, it's trivial to get a debit card from your bank that works virtually anywhere that also accepts credit cards. It's even easier to get prepaid cards. They would have to look at their data to see how many potential customers come from the rest of the world and then end up not buying anything. As for why they don't do it anyways, Paypal specifically does not allow people to use it on sites that provide free pornographic material, and paypal considers sample CGs and demos this. They would have to restructure their site, possibly in a way that would generate a net loss. edit: beaten to the punch

The JAST twitter account retweeted something from fuwanovel's, that's pretty big progress. The last time someone from one of the big three interacted with us, it was when Dovac asked us to take down grisaia and started ranting about us and pirates.

There have been plenty of people who can afford to buy games but didn't, and pirated them instead. I think Steam has proven this handily, a LOT of pirates jumped ship and started buying stuff on Steam often. I know several. They still pirate things from time to time but they also buy a lot of stuff now, too. Valve has talked at length about how they worked hard to get pirates to buy games off their platform by offering a better service. Previously, pirating games was not only cheaper, but also much easier than buying. Nowadays, it's the other way around. Valve looked at the rampant piracy and saw a sea of potential customers, and that's how they got to where they are today. This does mean that to some extent, piracy is lost sales. It's not 1:1, but I'm confident there are people out there who pirate every VN who could somehow be convinced to buy some VNs every once in a while instead. I don't have the answer, but these people exist and probably make up a bigger portion of pirates than you may expect.

I haaaaate Ikinari Anata ni Koishiteiru with a passion. Do try out Majikoi and Grisaia no Kajitsu, though. Grisaia is pretty much the funniest VN translated to english by a large margin.

I find it entirely believable that reddit of all places would vote him as the best male character. (see my previous post where I posit that he's a closet poster at /r/MensRights/)

Most eroge made in the last decade have very few choices that actually matter. The route choice system majikoi went with was a neat idea, but they ultimately didn't really do anything interesting with it.

I think so? MangaGamer expects everyone to run their possible fan projects through them first regardless if MG has a related partnership or not. And what about JAST and Sekai Project? Presumably they're also interested in acquiring new licenses. Anyone else we need to bow down and grovel to in order to get permission to translate something that has nothing to do with them? It's a really insulting position, to be honest.

There have been, the Shin Koihime Musou team is the most notable example.

I honestly don't like this attitude from MangaGamer. They got burned on ef not because it was fan translated first, but because they completely failed to adequately market it. ef was a lightly popular anime, they could have tried to get fans of the show to pay attention to the VN release, but they didn't. They could have tried to push it to fans of romance as it's a fairly serious romance title, but they didn't. They could have advertised it at common otaku sites like 4chan, but they didn't. They did literally no external advertising for it whatsoever and only told people about it through their own site and newsletters. No shit it failed. They now use this negative experience to campaign against fan translations in general, claiming they hurt the industry. The failings are on their end. When JAST is given a fan translation, they polish the hell out of it and release it better than ever before (the ef script was barely changed in the MG release) and advertise the hell out of it. You could see Saya no Uta ads at a lot of common otaku-frequented sites. MangaGamer should exercise some self-reflection before criticising others. Their message pretty much comes off as "please stop". Not "don't translate titles from our partners" but "don't release any complete patches for any VNs at all because it makes contract negotiations hard". Meanwhile, Doddler, their twitter idol, is working with Arudoc to release complete translations for multiple games, Maria is working on a complete Rance Quest fan patch, and Cafe ostensibly will finish Aoire Rinne some day. The behavior of their own staff goes against what they say. They should either get their own ducks in a row before standing on a soapbox or shut up, preferably the latter. I will also say that fan translations obviously have very many benefits for the industry. They suggest that all fan translators only translate trials. I would have never read my first eroge, Fate/Stay Night, if there was only a trial patch available. I would never have given any eroge company a penny of my money if it wasn't for multiple complete translation patches that drew my attention. The industry is still so niche that it can't survive without a thriving fan scene. I can guarantee that MangaGamer would be nowhere if fan translations weren't around and they'd be in serious trouble in the future if all fan translations suddenly ceased. They may seem like an evil to MangaGamer, but at the very least they're a necessary evil as they provide the lifeblood of the industry.

I hope MangaGamer licenses White Album 2 because it is good and the fan translation thus far is kind of garbage. Also I don't think it's entirely unrealistic since Aquaplus seems willing to release stuff in the west, so it may not be impossible for a company like MangaGamer to license their eroge. Atlus did TtT2, but obviously they wouldn't touch eroge. People are much more likely to voice complaints than complacence. Nobody loves DRM, so nobody is going to sing its praises. But as someone who is fine with it, that's kind of an apathetic emotion. I just sort of don't care, so obviously I'm not going to get on a soap box over the issue. Haters are always much more vocal.

x86 and x64 processors are not easy to emulate. If they were easy to emulate we'd have a working xbox (original) emulator by now. They are actually very hard to emulate and doing it on a x64 OS surprisingly doesn't make it any easier. This does go against a lot of peoples' common sense but it's true. With actual true emulation, it doesn't matter how many operations are the same on the emulated system and the system it's being emulated on. Here is a writeup on the difficulty of x86 emulation by an actual emulator developer. x64 emulation would be even more difficult. However, the shared architecture and instruction set does make it easier to port games. Porting an XBox One or PS4 game to PC is pretty easy. Also you have a misunderstanding on the nature of the agreement between 5pb and JAST. In that, there isn't one, really. Noah not being translated is 100% on 5pb. JAST's agreement is with Nitro+ and 5pb owns the Science Adventures IP as well as the rights to sell Noah and they control practically the entire franchise. JAST's agreement with Nitro+ got their foot in the door with 5pb but it's clear that 5pb no longer wants to work with them on anything and any future english releases in the Science Adventures series will be done through other companies. 5pb is the reason why Steins;Gate isn't on Steam, why Noah is never going to get localized, and why Child's prospects are grim. No, this is not how it works. There will need to be some porting necessary.

"That good MangaGamer editor" aka Ritobito. I believe he did Cartagra, and is currently handling KnS2 and Gahkthun, possibly Euphoria too but i don't remember. He was the editor on the Dangan Ronpa 1 fan translation, which was better than XSeed's official one. He's pretty dang good at what he does. Edit: Scratch that, he's not doing Euphoria but is doing the two others I mentioned as well as Fata Morgana and Da Capo 3. The fact that they put him on DC3, possibly their most important project, tells you how much MG respects his ability. The nukige is like a trial for translators. Almost all prospective translators have to work on some nukige before getting something else. I don't think the fact that they translate nukige has much to do with the quality of the other games' translation staff.

This isn't how time works. Nothing Sekai Project does involving the Sakura series has any impact whatsoever on the speed at which Grisaia is translated and released. edit: I suppose it may have a positive impact if the Sakura series keeps making SP boatloads of money and they could hire additional help for their localization projects. But absolutely none of the translation, editing, or programming staff working on Grisaia is involved with the Sakura series.

A lot of people here are ESLs and simply don't notice the flaws. Or if they notice but don't actually care, to be perfectly frank, they're wrong for not caring. The more people telling them that they should care, the better.

Yep, it's real good. Modest Mouse is pretty much my favorite band so it's good to see that after an eight year lull, they've still got it. edit: This thread is a real death zone for those with crappy PCs, I'm sure.

As a palette cleanser, here's some great music instead: edit: Fuuuuuuuuuck, hold the fucking phones, their new album leaked yesterday. Time to stop everything and enjoy some new modest freaking mouse.