Decay

The game throws a few h-scenes at you with flimsy justification in the early portions of the game, then there's a pretty long gap without any, then a couple for each heroine's route. It's really not much. Kamidori is full to the brim with them.

There will almost certainly be no censoring of the dialog. Again, not all-ages, it's 17+. This is why it sucks how people always refer to "no porn" as "all-ages"

Also, since it's Koestl and indirectly Grisaia related, I'll say here that it's been announced that the game Koestl is translating for MangaGamer is Ourai no Gahkthun (or Gahkthun of the Golden Lightning in english). This is the most recent entry in Liar-Soft's steampunk series (also known for Sekien no Inganock and Shikkoku no Sharnoth, which are already in English), and is the game that Koestl postponed the Grisaia no Meikyuu translation to work on. While I might have rather had Meikyuu, Gahkthun seems like a really rad game, and features Nikola Tesla as a hero battling lovecraftian beasts. The other games in the series are also pretty cool, and people who haven't checked them out should do so.

1) There are planned Vita ports of those games 2) Koestl still plans on translating the sequels whether Sekai Project is involved or not 3) There can be sex without explicit sex scenes. The official Kaijitsu release will still have plenty of references to sex and characters having sex as part of the story.

They also pay to license the game and pay Koestl for the work already done and the translation of the extra scenes and whatever polishing that's going to happen. Well, that's the difference between Moenovel and this. Moenovel wanted to make a genuine "all-ages" story while this will certainly not be that, since they're adapting the 17+ Vita version. And that the changes aren't made so haphazardly since they were made by Frontwing.

They're porting the Vita changes to PC, so this is an official edit made by the original creators. The Vita version was a Cero-D release which means 17+, not all-ages.

I think you're really heavily overestimating the routes. Each one is around 30-45 minutes in length. Even the Feris and Ruka ones. They're honestly really short and that's the biggest downside to the game. But it's still worth it.

As a big time fan of the anime, I played the VN a few months ago and really enjoyed it. Maybe give it a time if you just recently watched the anime, but it's definitely worth reading.

I'm glad this game is getting an official localization and that the excellent fan translation is being used. It's seriously the best fan translation of a visual novel ever and Koestl deserves this. Also, it seems this news has completely overshadowed the news of Planetarian getting released by Sekai Project as well. This is also pretty big news, it's the first official localization of a Key game. Perhaps we'll see other Key games get official releases as well.

Your stance is way too extreme. You reject every single possible VN with any amount of gameplay as a VN. An example is the Zero Escape series, which is probably 80-85% story, which has all of the trappings of a VN including heavy usage of novel-style narration, but you've claimed in other threads they're not VNs because you solve puzzles every now and again. That's absolutely ridiculous and you are seriously the only person I have ever seen say this. Don't try to act as an authority when you actually represent some fringe minority opinion. For me, it's basically "Does it read like a novel?" and if so, it's a VN. I mean, novel is in the genre name for a reason. There can be hybrids, like there are of many other genres. It's weird to be so strict about the gameplay thing. Eventually the ratio of gameplay to VN might make the VN parts irrelavent to the point where I wouldn't use it to describe it as a VN anymore, Sengoku Rance approaches this territory, but otherwise I just describe gameplay VNs as hybrids to others. Kamidori is a SRPG/VN, 999 is a room escape/VN, etc.

Were you not expecting any sort of backlash when you went back on your word?

I can't help but feel that you turned away from an acceptable half-measure and adopted the worst possible solution. While I appreciate your translation work, haphazardly cutting away content like that is pretty damn lame. :/

That's pretty much the case. I'm no hacker, so I don't know how they'd do it exactly, but essentially hacking is all about finding out what software someone has installed, and discovering vulnerabilities that will gain them remote access somehow. This could theoretically be a torrent program and that could theoretically make torrents dangerous, as you feared, but none of the popular torrent programs have any known vulnerabilities. That would be surprising. (and if your profile is accurate, you're way off )

An IP address is basically just... a home's front door? Kind of. Knowing the location of a house's front door is possibly the least useful piece of information for a burglar. They still have to actually break into the house, and they likely won't even use that door. It all boils down to your computer being far more secure than you actually think. 99.99% of all compromised computers or accounts happen when a password is stolen due to user carelessness or when the user downloads an infected file (again, due to carelessness). edit: Or when passwords are hacked from a shittily secured server hosted by some company, in which case it had nothing to do with you in the first place.

No, it doesn't. All exposing your IP address does is basically make people aware of your presence and location. They still need the actual means and motivation to do so. Literally nobody hacks random IPs they find on a torrent because to do so would be hugely time efficient. There are far more efficient ways to do things, like distributing files infected with keyloggers or phishing. The only time an IP might be used in a hack attempt is when the hacker is really freaking serious about it, maybe doing corporate espionage or other high-stakes hacks. If they want your credit card number, they'll just keylog you. This conversation is pretty funny because it's like talking to my grandmother. "This banner said my IP is exposed to the internet!! Can you fix this??"

Not for the xbox 360, no.

But didn't you say just a few weeks ago that you'd leave them in untranslated? I'm confused.

It's not about the percentage of story content to gameplay. There are VNs with less story content than Fire Emblem. Fire Emblem is not written like a novel, simply put. All of the text is dialog or internal monologue. Visual Novels actually have to be written like a novel, at least that's how most of the english community sees it. I swear we've been having this conversation a lot lately.

There are a ton of VN SRPGs, and Fire Emblem isn't one of them (it's not a VN). The most popular one to be translated to English is Kamidori Alchemy Meister. There's also Eien no Aselia/Aselia the Eternal, in english, with the sequel getting a translation. There aren't really any other noteworthy ones in English but there are a whole lot of them in Japanese.

I don't intend to open a can of worms, but I'm just curious, what's the status of the h-scenes in this patch? Included? Translated or not? I know you were looking for someone to TL them for you but I'm not sure if you ever got anyone to do it. Thanks for the hard work!

OELVN = Original English Language VN. As in, made outside of Japan.

More like stuck in 2002. No, they're not popular at all in Japan anymore. They kind of never were all that popular, it's just that the rise of moege in the mid 2000s superseded dating sims for a large portion of its audience. People got more of what they wanted out of moege than they could out of dating sims. Turns out, people didn't want to work for their dates even in a video game. That's probably the best way to describe the difference between VN and dating sim without delving into mechanics. In a dating sim, the player has to work to earn the love of another. In a visual novel, they just read a story about love (if it is a romance VN).

If you want english translated, there really aren't any options. There are a handful of VNs that have a bunch of female heroines and one male crossdressing "heroine" but they aren't very plentiful. Pure Girl by Frontwing is one example. Here's a list that's bigger than I would have expected: http://vndb.org/v/all?q=&fil=tag_inc-388.tag_exc-1840.tagspoil-2 Most of those are nukige, only a tiny handful are in english and they are mostly just bad OELVNs.

No, this is not correct. VNs are not dating sims, and dating sims are not VNs. You could draw a venn diagram where there would be a small cross-section between the two but they are mostly separate.

With Utwarerumono, I'm waiting on the translation of the PSP version, which has a much improved battle system. Honestly, I think most VNs are overrated, not underrated. I can think of a lot that I've played and thought "really, people were raving over this?" but not really of many that I've liked more than the consensus. I mean, I guess technically I rated Steins;Gate on VNDB higher than its average, but I'm not about to say "It only has a 9??" There's also perhaps the fact that I haven't played enough to find any hidden gems or underrated games, since I'm restricted to english language games. Thinking back, maybe the closest one I can think of that might be underappreciated (probably not underrated), is Suika. It's not a game you see mentioned anywhere. Its average score on VNDB is pitifully under 7 (making it the 756th top rated game). It's actually a pretty interesting VN. Sure, there are definitely some (or many?) bad points to it. Bad art, it received a pretty bad translation from MangaGamer, some of the stories weren't very good, and it also had a structure that's unusual for translated VNs (it's linear series of separate short stories). But it's perhaps noteworthy for its approach to death, which deviates from the norm in VNs. Suika is all about death. But unlike most VNs, it's not about avoiding it at all costs or going against fate. It's about embracing and seeing the beauty in death. Each story expresses this in a different way, some worse than others, but the message it tries to tell struck me as being very different from what you usually see. This probably led me to believe it was a better VN than it really was, and I've since lowered my evaluation on it now that I've had time to think about it, but I think it should perhaps get at least slightly more notice than it currently does. I think it would have been better with a more traditional structure and a focus around the story with the painters, since that was the best one.