Decay

There's actually a third version, the Umineko Project version, which goes far beyond what the UmiTweak patch did. They coded a whole new engine from scratch which replicates the PS3 version near-exactly, with lots of special effects and features the UmiTweak version didn't have, and at the same time they TLCed and edited the Witch Hunt translation, separately from MangaGamer. Both Umineko Project and MangaGamer translations are improved by a pretty large amount, but I haven't really dug into either so I can't get into the specific differences.

Anyone know if there are any bonus routes/side routes? The five main heroines are Ricca, Himeno, Charles, Sara, and Aoi, right? There was a choice specifically for MIkoto so I'm wondering if there's any meaning to that beyond seeing a short scene featuring her.

Everyone has been saying that it doesn't really matter. The Otome route gives you the most background on the nature of the everlasting tree. The Sakura route isn't actually a route, it's more like a side story that explains what she was up to before and during DC2. None of this seems to be required knowledge, DC3 likely explains that stuff decently enough. There was a MangaGamer blog post about Sakura that seems to explain everything you need to know: http://blog.mangagamer.org/2017/01/19/sakura-yoshino/

Gross Profit != Gross Revenue. Gross profit is how much you get after operating costs. In this case, they are probably subtracting gross revenue by the cost of localization and licensing, and probably royalties and such as well. I'm not 100% sure on the formula they're using, because it seems like they're adding revenue from every sale starting from sale #1, even though they need to account for cost of localization and licensing which happens usually in full before the product goes on sale.

The scene that is being censored is the spanking scene in the first of the two games. It's a pretty incidental scene. It's the only bit of censorship Atlus is claiming the two games will have, and they're basically forced to do it to comply to standards.

https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2017/01/18/himawari-the-sunflower/ So this game was moderately hyped and I personally was really excited for it. I didn't exactly like it as much as a lot of other people, though. For funsies, here's a list of VNs I think are better than this legendary doujin kamige, according to my VNDB ratings: Princess Evangile Noble ☆ Works Osananajimi wa Daitouryou: My Girlfriend is the President. Maji de Watashi ni Koishinasai! S Deardrops Games I think are exactly as good as Himawari, according to my VNDB ratings: Edelweiss Duel Savior What great company Himawari keeps.

1) Translation is expensive. Probably more expensive than you're imagining. 2) They're asking for $100k, not $200k. 3) They never said that every dollar would be spent on localization of that specific title. They most likely just want to make sure that the games aren't just profitable, but profitable enough to justify it over other games they could be translating instead. That means the series needs to meet certain sales expectations and such before they consider it worthwhile. This isn't a crowdfund. They aren't asking people to give them money just for this. This is just a very transparent way for them to track their minori profits and the viability of translation of future Minori titles.

Let's see... http://www.mangagamer.org/minori/ Things are going slow, it might be a while before they reach their Chapter 2 funding goal. MG will be releasing the upcoming Minori VN Trinoline. Perhaps the sales for that will go into this bucket as well. On a related note, it seems that the English sales for Eden* are the highest sales figures for any Minori VN ever, according to Kouryuu. Steamspy puts the number of owners on Steam in the 60 - 75k range. That's not counting current sales made on MangaGamer.com but I believe everyone who bought it there prior to December 2015 received a Steam key so it likely covers the majority of sales there. This puts a little bit of perspective on the Japanese eroge scene, considering Minori is one of the higher profile eroge developers, and probably the one with the highest budgets (at least, in the pure VN space).

Yuuji is basically Batman.

Spoilers for the end of Meikyuu/Labyrinth in addition to Kajitsu/Fruit:

Koestl on translation, Herkz on editing.

I don't actually know what the plus disc is, and couldn't find any reliable information on it. Splitting the five main entries took long enough as it is so I kinda checked out for the day after the main job. Anyone can add new entries to VNDB though and they're welcome to for the plus disc.

After some discussion, we on VNDB decided that it made no sense for all of the Majikoi A VNs to share a single entry. They comprise of entirely separate, unconnected stories, and are simply a series of fandiscs. Them sharing one entry also gives us a lower fidelity of data, the ratings can't be for individual parts and the tags are less useful. As such, we split them. However, in this process we are also getting rid of all old votes, since the old ones weren't tied to any specific release. If you have rated Majikoi A on VNDB in the past, please rerate each entry you have played. Everyone who has rated A in the past should receive a notification about its deletion with this information contained within, but I'd like to be thorough, so I'm letting everyone here know in case any of you don't regularly visit the site. Some tips from VNDB's admin Yorhel: Be sure to recast those votes! Thanks to the split, you can now cast a different vote for each individual entry, giving a more accurate representation of how much you enjoyed each one. And apologies to everyone for the inconvenience. The new entries: A-1, A-2, A-3, A-4, A-5

You can buy an orb with red tickets, the things you get from beating the extra hard fights you can see in the dungeons. It's not a bad idea to get an early orb or two, but it's generally advisable to spend most of your tickets on presents.

I'd say that it's almost good that CC has deceived you two, but that deception has almost made you not experience the real Cross Channel at all, so I'm not sure how to feel about that, heh. The initial twist is pretty widely spoiled and I think even the VNDB description spoils it. It's pretty hard to get people to play it if they aren't spoiled on it, because it's a hard sell otherwise.

$100k for translations into six new languages, after you account for Kickstarter fees, payment processing fees, taxes, reward fulfillment, and other misc fees, is perhaps more than they need, but not by a lot. The $200k goal for a mini-VN is much more "overpriced." That will perhaps make up for the fact that $500k minus all previously-mentioned additional expenses isn't actually enough to cover the cost of a 60 minute OVA. Essentially, the stretch goals will compensate for the fact that they are losing money on the first $500k, and that's also fine. You know, the ideal stretch goal setups are either 1) no stretch goals, or 2) overpriced stretch goals. In both scenarios, they don't exactly inspire tons of additional backers to hop on board, but they do prevent the companies from digging themselves a hole with them, which is actually very common. I've read way too many stories from developers who made promises with stretch goals that later became infeasible, or more expensive than estimated, or for features that turned out to be less interesting than other ideas they later came up with. Often times, even when they are fairly priced, you pigeonhole yourself down a specific path for your company, forcing you to follow through with a plan even if it later turns out that doing something else would be better. Like 99% of all kickstarters end up with the companies doing the kickstarting taking a loss. They're expensive to run, and they almost always don't generate enough money to cover all of your development expenses. They make their KS goals less than what they need and then take huge pay cuts or even cover the rest out of pocket. Too many of these companies price their stretch goals with the same philosophy they price the lowballed base goals. "Asking for $50k for this feature that actually costs $100k will allow us to fit in more stretch goals, which will get people more excited to give us money!" They continue to balloon the size and scope of their project while getting only a portion of the funds needed to make it happen. It's one of the prime reasons Kickstarters fail post-funding, actually, and if they don't fail, they create enormous amounts of stress and financial hardship for very little gain on the developer's part. They promise to improve their game in specific ways, only receive half the money needed to do so, and in the end of day it's impossible to tell how much those features affected sales and it's very possible they didn't at all. Sounds great! A lot of game devs have preached about how you should avoid stretch goals altogether. Some say you should just make a vague promise of a better product with more money earned, and then figure out what you can do with it all after the fact. But having a small handful of stretch goals with very conservative prices are another option. That's basically what's happening here, and that's just fine. They don't owe you anything beyond what they promise in the basic feature set. With this KS specifically, you're paying for the OVA and whatever extra goods you want. Don't back if that's not enough for you. Edit: There's also the fact that all aspects of game development, from creation, to yes, even translation, are far more expensive than you're imagining. You see kickstarters for entire full-featured indie games with $100k goals and wonder why a VN translation would need a similar goal. The trick: That full-featured game is actually being done on a desperate shoe-string budget for $500k and they're only asking for a fifth of the needed funds. In a way, this anime kickstarter is the same. Maybe making a 60 minute OVA costs $500,000, but they actually aren't getting $500k for actual anime production until they're making around $900k off the Kickstarter, most likely. You can easily say the solution to these problems is to price your Kickstarter goals at what they actually need, all fees and such accounted for, but then you'll end up with $500k-$1mil goals for small games and goals at many millions for much bigger games, and how likely are these projects to succeed? I'm reminded of how people bitched endlessly at how overpriced the Skullgirls crowdfunding projects were, even though they still probably weren't breaking even on those. tl;dr: Development is fucking expensive, and whatever you're imagining this stuff costs is almost certainly far lower than what the figures actually are. Having stretch goals that are actually appropriately priced isn't a bad thing.

It's an original game that has very little to do with the original LoveKami except for aspects of the basic premise.

Aqua's route comes after the 2048 stuff.

This isn't actually Aqua's route you're on, by the way.

I will admit that the storytelling takes some shortcuts and is sometimes a little too convenient for me to suspend my disbelief for.

To be fair, I don't think most VNs are for Vorathiel.

Kindred Spirits is just a simple, feel-good VN. There aren't enough of those, to be honest. With almost all other VNs, you either hop aboard the drama train or you get mountains of moe and/or ecchi practically shoved into your face. Kindred Spirits is interested in none of that, and it makes for a pretty great change of pace.

It should be said that surpassing Fata Morgana in sales is not exactly an impressive feat.

Steam sales are not included in that. In past years, they said that steam sales outdid on-site sales by a significant margin. They haven't talked about that in a while however, so it's hard to say what the status of that is now. It's reasonably safe to guess that Steam sales still outweigh on-site sales. Which means that it's likely that Kindred Spirits was MG's top selling title overall for the year. It's hard to say with Himawari since it was released late in the year. Although yeah, Conjueror seemed down on its performance.

By all accounts, the previous game in that series was better, but they chose to localize that one instead. Alas...