Decay

Flyable Heart and Kimi no Nagori wa Shizuka Yurete being on this list is a little heartbreaking. That's cruel, getting people's hopes up like that. The machine translations available are so bad that you may as well say there aren't any real TLs available.

Dovac and Sekai Project love to play the "hide as much information as possible in order to slowly string people along" game which is the wrong way to play your cards when there are heavy justified concerns regarding the potential quality of your work. They should have been out there on the day of the announcement informing people of what's happening with the project in order to avoid backlash, but SP doesn't seem to get this and then Dovac gets angsty on twitter when people just don't understand. It's hard to understand you when you say almost nothing at all. Dovac made a tweet recently where he said something along the lines of "It's hard to give interviews because either you give too little information or people start to figure things out." How would that be a bad thing??? Your biggest PR problem is that nobody is figuring out the positive aspects of your projects and everyone is assuming the worst.

There's always a chance but I'd say it's not particularly high. It's not even the most popular untranslated game made by Propeller.

That... doesn't sound all that good. Even the most epic fights I think shouldn't go on too long.

Mayuki's and Ayaya's routes are kind of focused on them, but Benio's and Hisoka's are more focused on the wider story.

Hashing can be a form of encryption when using it to obfuscate passwords. The problem is that it was a really simple hash algorithm (md5) and the hashes weren't salted. So while it wasn't exactly strong encryption, it's still encryption. Using something like SHA-2 and salting it would be a whole lot better.

Haru's route is several better than anything that came before, so enjoy. I usually recommend that people just skip past all of the side routes on your first time through g-senjou but I think a lot of people disagree. Min-max your enjoyment, I say.

I've noticed a lot of shared engines between VNs. I'm not familiar enough to name them, but you can tell that Aiyoku no Eustia uses the same engine as Konosora (If My Heart Had Wings), Majikoi uses the same engine as Duel Savior, and Edelweiss uses the same engine as Da Capo. Because VNs are so much simpler, I think you see engine licensing much more often. Japanese developers of other kinds of games are starting to use more standardized engines as well. Fox Engine is meant to be Konami's one-size-fits-all engine, Capcom made MT Framework to do that a while ago, and I've seen some Japanese developers use Unreal Engine.

More like I got ninja'd! Your changes reverted some of mine. I'll resubmit my changes to the personality traits if you're okay with how they are here: http://vndb.org/c400.9

She's not deredere. She turns dere at some point, but that's all "classic tsunderes", that's what that means. They go from full hate/disdain, to full love mode. Classic Tsundere is fine. Also, listing any of that as a spoiler is awfully silly so I'd make it a non-spoiler. edit: Ahh, this is bothering me so I'll just edit it myself.

You can't be kuudere without being tsundere, it's a subset.

So lately I randomly decided I'd give ToHeart2 a shot. I've played most of the routes in the partial translation patch right now and figured I'd give some thoughts. At first I was thinking that it was better than expected, but then once I completed some routes, I felt very disappointed. Each story typically ends immediately after confession with only a short epilogue. Some of them end right when it feels like they're just starting to get going. It seems almost random where they decided to focus their efforts, for whatever reason the Twins route is way longer than even the main heroine's route. Maybe they did that because she had a lot of scenes in the common route? I also don't like the way your main group of friends, and pretty much everyone else, disappears from the picture completely in each of the heroine routes (except for the Twins route, it really feels like they spent the most effort on that one for some reason). For the plus sides, some of the scenes are kinda funny, and... hrm, I'm actually having difficulty naming more plus sides. I don't think I'm going to finish out the last few routes in the partial, nor do I think I'll play the completed version when that eventually comes out. On a side note: The translation quality is unfortunately pretty bad. This is for supposedly TLCed and edited routes, too. Hopefully that gets better in future versions of the patch. Chihaya's route is shounen battle manga as all hell, except it had some of the worst qualities of the genre. I didn't like that route much :/. It's a shame because Chihaya is one of my favorites in the common route.

English language medieval fantasy options are really limited. If only Eustia's translation was complete... Well, if you want gameplay-light options, there's Duel Savior. It's honestly not very good, but it has a few merits, I think the comedy parts are actually pretty funny. The gameplay is like a 2D brawler, but it's rather infrequent and easy and never lasts long. Utawarerumono isn't european medieval fantasy but more like Sengoku Fantasy? Kinda, but it's also heavily influenced by Ainu culture. It's an SRPG but it has way less combat than Kamidori and much more story, and a better one to boot, and it doesn't have nearly as much H. It's not grindy at all, I'd say it's more story than game focused. I think I ended up liking it more than I thought I would, it may be Leaf's best game outside of WA2. And Ayakashibito! It's pretty good chuuni/urban fantasy stuff. Aoishiro takes place in modern times but it's not really "urban" as it takes place in the middle of nowhere. It's heavily steeped in Japanese mythology.

They're going to be using the TL he already made for it, and he will translate the new scenes. If they license the sequels, it is almost guaranteed that they'll bring him back on board for those.

I would say that no, machine translation is actually much worse than no translation.

I dunno, I managed to get into both the Miu and Erina routes my first time without thinking too hard about it. The choices made sense to me.

Every time I look a game up on VNDB and see the words 'Soandso is just your average high school student..." I almost instinctively close the window.

The only perverted protagonist I've liked was the one from Dual Savior. That's largely because his voice acting was fantastic. I'm really glad the english patch ripped the voice from the PS2 version and put it in the PC version. The rest of that game is kinda shit, though.

lol at that, divi-dead is total shit. ... and School Days? Really?

How would you say Senshinkan compared difficulty-wise?

A lot of Light's stuff qualifies, but none of them are in english.

You're right there with the rest of us now. Miu's route, so close yet so far. Erina's has been described by a lot of people as the worst route, and it's the only one in the patch. I feel like we are being punished for something.

Muramasa was never officially picked up by jast, just a translator there said he wanted to do it. He's a highly capable translator who is perhaps one of the few in the community who could do Muramasa justice, but it's such a big project and this is JAST we're talking about. I'm talking about Makoto, the guy who translated Hanachirasu, Saya no Uta, and some other N+ titles. According to TLwiki he translated Muramasa's common route before he was roped in by jast but he's been doing Django instead since and who knows what else (probably touching up Hanachirasu for official release, maybe they'll announce Muramasa after those two are out sometime next decade).

I've actually been playing this for the last few days. I think it would be pretty good if the translation wasn't so bad. However, I would say that in almost all of the routes it ends almost immediately after they discover their love. It doesn't really seem like what he wants. All of the slice of life stuff happens prior to the romance rather than after. edit: Coupled with the Canvas 2 suggestion, I'm still not sure you actually understand what he's looking for. Well, canvas 2 might be better for that kind of thing than to heart 2, at least.