Decay

Okay, so here's a question. How the heck are you supposed to win the Nayuta fight? Well, I can defeat her, but I can't get the crazy 81% approval rating necessary for the actual victory. Her attacks just swing the rating in her favor so much and I can't get above 55% no matter what I do. I have a feeling this isn't something that grinding will resolve. edit: Aaand after multiple tries of course the first try after I make this post I get it. The trick was basically to spam Yumina's shining smile skill which drained green and caused Nayuta to fumble a lot and built up the approval rating. I honestly forgot that skill even existed!

Amane's epilogue was way too much. I don't want to see a character we just spent so much time with have the entire rest of their life summed up in 10 minutes. It feels wrong somehow. And also it leaves nothing to the imagination. It was easily my least favorite epilogue.

The Danganronpa translation team started work on that before there was any decently playable PSP emulator. By the time the patch came out, DR only barely worked on one emulator, PPSSPP, and it required some awkward hacks to make it work. It's a rare case, but I do think some TL teams are fine with releasing patches for games that cannot be played on the PC at all. It just depends on the demand. There were a LOT of people with hacked PSPs wanting a translation of DR, there are way fewer people with hacked PS3s. Also, there are barely any PS3/360 exclusive VNs worth caring about.

Well, you say that, but it doesn't take much effort to start it either. Yurirei's translation was started a year ago, about one or two dozen lines were translated, and then all activity stopped almost as soon as it began. Of course, the TL quality was abysmal so most likely someone thought that it would be easy with a machine translation, saw how much effort it would actually take to edit even a machine TL, and bailed after a single day.

Anyone that attacks the character using that defense skill will will have their logic and spirit attack stats lowered by 12 points for 3 turns, and the user of that skill will have their logic defense lowered by 2 points for 3 turns (that one is because it's a yellow skill, skills with yellow names have different properties randomly assigned to them, and can sometimes be negative). It took me a while to learn how to decipher the skill and item screens. The game's interface is really unintuitive sometimes.

Well, that page was put up around 6 weeks ago and only 4 lines have been translated. Also, Yuri Project's translations are really mixed. Some of the SonoHana games are alright but you see edited machine translations crop up quite often. And nobody commits to anything that isn't SonoHana. Such is the nature of wiki TLs.

There are also other duties to make sure the game works properly with English text. Some VN engines were never designed to properly handle English text. There is also a lot of miscellaneous duties, like making sure word wrapping works correctly, sometimes modifying it so you can extend one line into multiple lines without a problem (English takes up more physical space than Japanese), writing simple scripts to ease translation, etc. Official VN "hackers" who work for Mangagamer or JAST have it harder. They have to make sure that the games run in English applocale, which most fan TLs don't worry about (they just tell you to set your system locale to Japanese). Mangagamer's latest release Really Really ended up with a brand new engine written from scratch in Unity just so they could get around that issue, because Navel didn't have the original game's source code. Japanese companies tend to just delete the source code for their old games, for whatever reason. At this point they're no different from any other employed programmer, but it's still basically an extension of a fan patch hacker's duties taken to an extreme.

I've read Chinami's route and she's still The Worst. Intentionally annoying characters are still annoying, not cute.

Is it? I liked it quite a bit, but I probably liked Makina's and Sachi's more, and I've seen more praise here and elsewhere for those two routes than Amane's.

Clannad is one of the rare visual novels that has sex but no h. It's not like you need h if your VN is going to have sex. Western media has a shitload of sex and it's only explicit in the rare independent french film or whatever. Angel Beats might end up having sex or ecchi but I just don't think Key will bother with actual h ever again. They're trying to establish a public image of themselves that could be ruined by having porn in their games.

I would be really surprised if they did an 18+ version. Well, at first I thought it was an adaptation of an anime but then I found out it was a Key property all along. I still find it unlikely due to the approach they've taken with the entire franchise. I honestly think they're done completely with 18+ content. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't do another h-scene ever again.

I disliked Chinami, Yume, and Mare in hoshimemo, and Aoi was only so-so. I certainly wouldn't say that all of its heroines were likeable for me. Chinami was probably the worst. What an extremely obnoxious character. I almost dropped the game in the prologue before you meet anyone else because she's so freaking annoying. I think I'm the only person on this message board who doesn't love that game, though, so again it's all subjective. Looking at the list of VNs I've played, I'm not sure if there's one for which I could say that I thought ALL of the heroines were likeable. There's usually at least one or two duds for me. Strangely, the ones that come closest are what I feel are more middling VNs. Cho Dengeki Stryker I guess are mostly likeable, even if the game isn't all that great. Actually I think Overdrive is good for this in general, they tend not to put any strongly disagreeable qualities into any of their heroines. But as a result they're often pretty boring and generic. Some of the best VNs are great because they put so much personality into their characters and they either hit big or miss big.

He means the recommendations sticky, not the list of english translated VNs.

It was an all-ages shoujo ai game. It surprised a lot of people, but mostly because it was all-ages when Innocent Grey used to go pretty heavy on the sex. I guess since this is the subject of the topic, I should say that Innocent Grey specializes in mystery. They're known for having surreal or fantastical plot elements combined with a very down-to-earth art style, and most of their games being rather gory. Then this studio suddenly put out an innocent shoujo-ai high school romantic drama called "Flowers". Yeah.

It really isn't. I'd rather not read a story ever than try to decipher a horribly butchered version of it.

"The rest" is pretty dang important and leaving it to machine translators is a crappy way to experience the games.

As I said before, all-ages versions often have alternate content written by the original creators. When they don't, they're lazy ports that should have had more effort put into them. When they do, that's a perfectly valid way to remove h-scenes. A translator just snipping content out is not a valid way to remove h-scenes, in my opinion. This conversation isn't about whether or not h-scenes are integral to an experience, it's about whether or not translators should be making that judgement call. They shouldn't be.

Killer Queen has no non-h version, at least not the one they're translating. Killer Queen is a little weird, 2 years later they remade it into a greatly expanded version with multiple routes, and it came out on consoles first as a 17+ game, which is Secret Game. The translation team is doing Killer Queen first and moving on to Secret Game, and then onto Rebellions Secret Game 2nd Stage which is remade version of Code:Revise. Each version of the game they're translating has h-content that they'll be removing. I do not believe that they'll be using any content from the console versions, especially since the PC h-games all have more content and routes than the console ones. edit: I do not know to what extent the games are influenced by the sexual content, but the translator's page states "However, references to ero content itself will remain. Furthermore, this is still not recommended to anyone under the age of 17 due to heavy sexual themes, as well as written depictions of graphic violence." It sounds like the content they're removing could be pretty relevant to the overall story. Outright removing sex scenes from a game with heavy sexual themes is just so bizarre.

I think translators should avoid taking any serious liberties on the game as much as possible. Removing h-scenes haphazardly is something I disagree with, and pretty much every TL project that does so falls into the "haphazardly" category. Even if they think it's for the better, it's not the translator's job to improve on the game. Please just give us the original work as the creators made it, and let us be the judge of its strengths and weaknesses. Taking out parts of it because you think they're not good just strikes me as really arrogant. This is what the Killer Queen/Secret Game translators are doing and I just don't like it because you get the impression they're doing it for philosophical reasons and not just personal ones. In the middle ground, there's the Lamune translation which is leaving the h-scenes in but are not translating them. I'd still prefer they translate it so we can see everything that makes up the game, warts and all, but if they really don't enjoy translating them, then hey, they're unpaid amateurs. Official all-ages alternate versions are another thing entirely, because the replacement content is often written by the original writers and can be even better than the original content sometimes (like in Eien no Aselia). You can consider that content as part of the creators' vision. I make this post as someone who doesn't get off on h-scenes and generally doesn't enjoy them.

The prologue, which is just a small part of the common route.

The team planning to translate Soukoku no Arterial is going to work on Witch's Garden first. They're small and slow, progress on their first project is slow and that might not even be done for another couple years. And only then can they start on Soukoku no Arterial. To be honest, I don't even know why they announced their next project when they're so incredibly far away from it.

If it was fully translated, it would say so on that page. It is not fully translated.

I haven't played them but both Ushinawareta Mirai wo Motomete and Bokura no Ue ni Sora wa Mawaru feature astronomy clubs. I do not know how prominently they feature actual astronomy, astrology, or crazy star magic.

Both, I think. They're making a web translation for now but I think they plan on making a patch at some point as well.

Sure, comedy can fill in that gap. Why not? People really praise the Grisaia no Kaijitsu common route and it's even longer than LB's and even less stuff happens in it. As for the abundance of drama in the heroine routes, this is a VN we're talking about, right? Would you rather have the routes be really simple and boring?Sometimes it's overly melodramatic, I'll agree there. But you make it sound like all of them having drama at all is a bad thing and I don't really understand that complaint.