Decay

The story in g-senjou isn't particularly unique, and neither is the art... I'd say try Liar Soft's Steampunk games. For VNs, the setting is very unique, and they change up the art style in every game. A very interesting series. You can start with Sekien no Inganock. Their other translated games are pretty unique among VNs as well.

An all-ages version of Euphoria is more or less impossible. That's not even worth entertaining. An all-ages version of KnS is theoretically possible without ruining it, but Innocent Grey hasn't done it. It would require a lot of CG censoring. Well, JAST is doing that with Romanesque but it would probably look less natural in KnS. I don't think MG is going to bother doing that themselves.

I'm re-reading ef right now during my current quest to play all of the translated Minori games one after the other, now that eden is coming out very soon. Well, there's only going to be three, so it's not a difficult quest. Anyways, I'm on the Chihiro chapter and the production values are really striking. I noticed it a little when I first read it, but it was one of the first VNs I've read so it didn't strike me as too unusual. But man, they really threw a hell of a lot of money into the art budget, didn't they? I also like how every chapter has a different soundtrack befitting its mood. That one Chihiro h-scene probably had as much budget as many entire nukige. I have to know if the Gremlins reference in the beginning of chapter 4 is in the original script. I mean, freaking Gremlins??

Everything I've heard about Evangile makes it seem thoroughly unremarkable. It has a decent vdnb score, but eh. MangaGamer is really good at picking the most uninspiring moege out there. Remember that 2013's big moege release was Harukoi Otome, lol. edit: And before that was Otoboku. They also did Edelweiss many years ago, and let's not forget Kara no Shoujo. What is with MG and all-girls schools? I want to say it's just coincidence, but it's a little unusual to say the least.

The PC version never had voices to begin with. There is a voice patch that adds voices, but it's imperfect, many lines won't have them. Usually it's when a character speaks for multiple lines straight, but it's not entirely consistent. From what I heard, the reason for this is that the only way to automate the process made it so those lines were missing voices, and nobody is willing to put in the work to manually add the correct voice samples for every line (the work would be monumental). Anyways, here's the voice patch: http://www.mediafire.com/?4713yot211t0k

I don't think you understand... That's just a standard multiple heroine route structure that is in the large majority of VNs we talk about here. Grisaia is actually notable for having extremely few choices.

Making Chocula talk in the third person alters her character far more drastically than making her use first person pronouns would.

People who are saying the VN community prefers nukige: not necessarily true. I'd say that most of the people who buy VNs prefer nukige. but most of the VN community are also pirates who don't pay for anything. MG caters to their actual customers. They've talked in the past about how the number of people who pirate their games outnumber the number of people who buy them by a pretty large amount. I wouldn't be surprised if the overall audience actually didn't prefer nukige, but for as long as they're not buying anything, they won't matter as much to MG. This is where Steam can help shift things. Although we've seen a tendency for ecchi nonsense to outsell serious titles, I don't think the sample size on Steam is large enough to draw any concrete conclusions, nor is there any proof that the trends will continue as they are forever. I could see stuff like Sakura Spirit being a trend that dies out eventually, but I could also see that not happening. Well, I guess my point is that what people pay money for and don't pay money for will likely be very different on Steam. We'll see what happens when more large VNs with renown and marketing behind them are released on the platform, right now Cho Dengeki Stryker is the only title of its kind on Steam, and it's an obscure one that no one outside of the VN community has ever heard of. I remain optimistic for Grisaia no Kajitsu, as think it has a chance to even outsell every other VN released to Steam thus far. Don't think the few months of trends established thus far are an ironclad rule. Fads will die down, the market will become more diverse, customers will become more experienced and discerning, and so on. And since I know people are afraid of it, this doesn't mean the death of 18+ either. I don't see them dropping the eroge market for a couple reasons. One, the only real selection they have is eroge. That's what their partners make, that's what their parent companies make (they're jointly owned by companies like Circus and Hobibox), and that's what the majority of quality titles from Japan are. So those are the titles they will localize, and it will be worthwhile for them to localize and release two alternate versions as opposed to one single version. Two, if they play their cards right, Steam won't decrease sales of 18+ versions, but increase them as people become more aware of MangaGamer and eroge in general. There will continue to be money in eroge, I predict. The one thing that might change is that they may begin shying away from titles that can't be easily adapted to an all-ages version. Maybe games like Kara no Shoujo will be considered as much lower priority titles for localization, which would be a shame.

MangaGamer's top 10 list only includes sales from their site, not steam sales. If they counted Steam sales Go Go Nippon would be #1 and Cho Dengeki Stryker, one of their more unpopular titles, would have taken the #2 spot, which is surprising considering how it looked like it was performing at first glance. But what it actually tells you is how their games traditionally perform when sold through their own site (previously the only way to get them). This is also why they paid their translators far below the industry standards and shied away from difficult projects. It's easy to look at that article and get depressed over how nukige continues to outsell their other stuff. But I tend to have a more optimistic outlook. First, MangaGamer continues to make a strong push for non-nukige titles despite them being demonstrably less profitable. It shows that they really don't consider profit to be the primary factor when choosing which titles to localize. The other big thing here, the advent of steam, is also a strong positive. I think it will actually push things away from nukige. When an average, relatively unpopular title manages to top everything but their #1 nukige just by being on steam, you begin to get the idea that all-ages steam releases could be the new nukige for MangaGamer. They'll continue to release all-ages ports on Steam, and if they perform as well or better than CDS, the company won't have to push out a crapload of cheap nukige to survive anymore. I also don't think it's bad for "normal" eroge, either, MangaGamer will continue pushing both all-ages and 18+ versions of their future releases (if viable). I can actually see this opening up a lot more doors for them. I can guarantee you that Neko Para and Sakura Spirit both sold way more than Mangagamer's products. The two may have sold more than MG's entire catalog combined. I wouldn't consider that "falling short". I don't know how far short the rest of their stuff fell, but I really doubt it was unprofitable. I expect that Kajitsu will end up selling very well on Steam once that is released. edit: And if you really want to feel down, you should recognize that it's highly likely that in its first week of release, HuniePop probably outsold everything listed in this thread.

Nekopara's translation is actually identical across all versions of the game. Narcissu and Planetarian also use the same translations that were previously released but may be lightly edited (if they are, I don't know to what extent). The Insani translation released for Planetarian, which is what was used in the Steam release, is alright. If a VN can hold up without the porn, I don't see any real reason not to get the Steam versions if that's what you want. Like, Cho Dengeki Stryker has barely any h-scenes at all and they're not particularly good and contribute nothing to the rest of the game, so the all-ages version of that is fine. But for Nekopara, it doesn't have enough substance to appreciate on its own merits, so I don't know why anyone would get the censored version.

I'm a little unsure of what the bottleneck is due to the way he's talking. They're adapting a youtube translation, and I think he's referring to adding those translations to the script files as editing, which isn't what we usually call editing. As far as I know, almost all of the translations except for what Ouraibaa is looking at now are already edited, using that word properly.

Those are two of the longest common routes out there, it's definitely shorter than them, but I recall it being a little bit on the long side. I didn't feel like it outstayed its welcome, though (although I didn't feel that way in grisaia or rewrite, either).

^^^^^^ Yeah, that's more or less what I thought. I knew I read about this issue before but I didn't have sources or a firm recollection. That only applies to America though, Japan is a whole different ballgame thanks to their different fair use laws/interpretations. In America that shit wouldn't fly, so it's ironic that the country with stricter copyright laws ends up being lax towards selling unofficial goods that violate trademarks. But ultimately, it's up to the companies themselves to police trademark. There are no governmental organizations that monitor this kind of thing, so each trademark and copyright holder has to be vigilant in protecting their property, and in Japan they intentionally turn a blind eye to doujin. That doesn't mean it's legal, just that the intellectual property owners don't act out against it. This happens for two reasons, one being that they acknowledge that these fan works tend to raise awareness for their brands and can actually promote sales of their own products. They don't compete, but complement each other. The other reason is that suing creators of doujin works for infringement earns a LOT of ire in Japan, even from people way outside the doujin's target audience. There have been controversies over this in the past, and it doesn't usually end well for the plaintiffs. So these companies would rather let sleeping dogs lie.

Japan has a very weak fair use law, while the US's fair use clause is pretty strong. That said, I'm uncertain on your coke example. I think mentioning coke on your TV show is perfectly legal in the US. It might even be legal to show it. These companies take advertising very seriously, and companies pay money to have their products featured on TV shows, which means they don't want to do it for free for anyone. In the US, you can call out specific people, make references to other works, and do all sorts of stuff without paying a dime in royalties, but in Japan they're very strict about that. You can't mention anyone or anything by name because fair use is so flimsy there. That's why you hear occasional censorship bleeps or see so much clever rewording, it's a legal issue there. In Steins;Gate's case, they probably had to get permission to use real life locations. Japanese copyright law is too strict to freely allow that, while a VN produced in America would be able to show that without any problems. All of this is one of the reasons why parody isn't as common of a comedy style in Japan, it's hard to skirt around these issues.

I have actually used that tag before to help me determine which VN to read. So many VNs have faceless protagonists.

F/SN only has three routes, and you play them in sequential order. But there are a lot of choices that can lead to many bad ends. You can look at the More Than Seven Heroines tag on VNDB: https://vndb.org/g743?fil=tagspoil-0.tag_inc-743;m=0;o=d;s=pop Some notes about that, LB only qualifies when you consider the untranslated EX version, DC2 only qualifies with the untranslated Plus Communication version although the translated version has six routes and many choices along the way (although they only determine which of six routes you end up on), Majikoi only qualifies when looking at the side heroines, although those side routes can be surprisingly lengthy. To Heart 2 is alright but half of it is untranslated. Many of the gameplay ones have many heroines but you often just end up screwing them along the way in one of a select few routes. Ultimately, what you want isn't available in a many translated VNs. If you're looking for VNs with a complicated route structure with many choices, maybe you should look at Tsukihime and Clannad.

Almost all projects either have the translators and editors work in the script files directly from the start or have automated processes for this kind of thing. You really should try to work out a solution ApolloFortyNine. I hope you guys can get the help you need.

Then I guess the question should be how long should one have to wait to ensure that JAST will never release it? What if they never make a firm statement but also never intend on releasing the game? Is there a period of time that makes this okay?

No, Kikokugai is a special case that they have talked about. It has specific engine issues that they have been unable to resolve, it will not work on Windows 8. And they don't have the license for the remake. The way they talk, it seems likely that their version will never be released.

There may be some people who stick with the old version anyways just for the uncut h-scenes. Either way, I don't think this would make things that much worse for JAST, they'd already be competing with the old fan patch even without your efforts. Ultimately, the prospects of them releasing Kikokugai are so slim that I don't see this changing things. The only thing that comes to mind that would make this matter for them is if they were planning on using Doddler to do an engine port. They recently recruited him to port Schatten to Unity, after all, maybe they were planning on Kikokugai next? But with no indication that this is actually the case, its prospects for release continues to look really poor, and a fan releasing a patch for the remake seems like an inevitable conclusion. Unethical? Maybe, but you snooze, you loose. Seems like JAST lost their chance. As someone who has yet to read Kikokugai, I was following your posts on /jp/ and eagerly await this patch so I can experience the best version of the game.

Most VNs tend to have a lot comedy during the common route. Comedy is an important feature of storytelling no matter what you're writing, after all. VNs that focus mainly on the comedy from start to finish are much more rare. There are very few that are actually translated. I'd say My Girlfriend is the President, Dra Koi, and Majikoi are good ones. Ikikoi is a not-so-good one. Also, the DanganRonpa series probably qualifies. They're often mystery first, but with pretty strong comedic elements that persist throughout the entire series, never becoming particularly dramatic even during the most extreme circumstances. Recommendations like Clannad and Little Busters are semi-valid because the common routes are full of comedy, but once they start to branch they become very dramatic, sometimes forgoing comedy entirely. Ikikoi is an unintentional parody of itself.

I rarely fap to hentai and so I barely read nukige unless it triggers some specific fetishes. I guess I'm about to unveil something dark about me, but eh, whatever. If you're into real-world (no tentacles allowed) sexual slavery/bdsm, Tsurumiku is pretty much the best there is for that, imo. I love the art and the scenes hit all the right buttons for me. None of it their work is translated, unfortunately.

My guess is that it will take quite some time for the $100k goal to be reached but it will happen eventually. I'm doubtful that the $200k goal will ever be reached. They're being a bit too ambitious.

God no, if anything, I'd rather leave the quality stuff to people who are paid to do it and do a better job of it. BTW, you're a pirate for downloading the games even if you're using a free translation patch. There is literally no difference, either way you're playing the game without giving money to the creators. It's interesting to see such an arbitrary line drawn. edit: I'm kind of surprised at the lack of loli games being recommended by our users considering amount of lolicons being harbored here. On that note: http://mangagamerstaff.tumblr.com/post/108985580034/are-there-any-series-or-specific-genres-themes Monobeno? No bueno.