Decay

Apparently people have gotten their jastusa.com download codes for preorders, although it still isn't available for purchase on Steam.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/452440/ Surprise! Although this time we had slightly more hype than what we've typically been getting, the suddenness still feels jarring. The game will unlock on Steam in approximately four hours from the time of this post, according to Steam's countdown timer. Many of you may remember the demo debacle from this spring. JAST seemed to have taken that criticism to heart and really spent a lot of time heavily retooling the translation. I've talked to @meru, the new main translator on the team dedicated to fixing the translation, and it sounds like a lot of work has been put into making it better. As for what Flowers actually is, check out this extensive review from Golden Sneer. https://goldensneer.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/flowers-le-volume-sur-printemps/

DC3 definitely progressed slower than a VN of its size normally does even with one translator. MG has had similarly sized projects that have progressed much faster, such as Princess Evangile, which was announced and released within the duration DC3 was in translation for. And even that was delayed for like six months during the beta testing process. Kouryuu often has other duties at MangaGamer as their head translator, though, which probably accounts for DC3's delays. I don't think anyone would dispute this, Kouryuu himself was saying how they were aiming for a 2014 release back when they announced it. They really were expecting it to finish and release it a good two years ago. Shit happens, though. Aaeru was basically machine translating it. You shouldn't use her speed as a judge of anything. I don't fully trust that DC3 is as long as MangaGamer would lead us to believe. From what I can tell, it's about on par with Princess Evangile and many of the other long-ish moege getting translated out there. It's not some incredible epic of unprecedented length. And if MangaGamer's forums were still up you could see posts in 2013 from Kouryuu stating they were aiming for a spring/summer 2014 release. Again though, I don't really blame MangaGamer and I'm not harping on them for this. As for SP, they haven't really been announcing any Japanese VN translations outside of cons for the last few months to my knowledge.

The only in-progress translation from SP I'm really confused about is Ley Line. But then again, I never fully understood what was holding it up when it was a fan project, either. I think what's most telling of SP's situation is Wagamama High Spec. They announced it long before the game's release, said they wanted to release it this spring and even entertained the possibility of a simultaneous release. Then after some delays they finally started listing progress a month ago, and it was at like 23% translation. It basically seems like Sekai Project has a manpower issue, they seem to have had some staff turnover issues that have kept some projects from progressing and generally don't have as many translators as they thought they would for handling everything in their pipeline. SP actually have been announcing fewer big translations lately, though. At least, ones they'd have to handle from scratch. They announced SakuSaku and Baldr Sky at AX, both of which were adopted fan translations. Koikuma will be the big "everything must be done from scratch" project from AX. And nothing of particular note was announced at Otakon. As some of their smaller titles are releasing they're shifting staff onto bigger projects and are still finding new talent from outside the VN industry, which is a talent pool other companies haven't been able to tap into . The person they hired just a few weeks ago for Tenshin Ranman will have that as their first VN translation, for instance. So basically, things actually are progressing there now, and I think they're done announcing a large number of huge projects for the time being. It's interesting that the topic of SP announcing too much stuff for them to handle happened right after the con where they basically announced nothing.

Holding this poll before all of the announcements for the year are over is a little weird. Also you missed this one: https://sekaiproject.com/products/connie-amarance/

BBH was successful but this is more due to the fact that the translations for both 5D and VI have been complete for a good year now when they were just fan translation projects, and the translators behind them have been hired to work for MangaGamer already. So releasing them is "easy," relatively speaking. And it makes sense to release them together since 5D is a smaller and by all accounts worse game than VI, so they're basically selling VI with 5D tacked on.

He dropped those plans in like 2014 when MangaGamer first announced Gahkthun.

Sorcery Jokers looks neat, I know Conjueror was talking it up a lot as he played it recently. Suspiciously recently, I wonder if he's working on that.

Bump. Reminder that this is happening tomorrow, and Sekai Project's panel is in about 15-ish hours. I don't know what the streaming situation looks like. I'll also probably be asleep when SP's panel starts, oh well. I haven't been paying attention to the latest rumors too closely, but I have noticed Bad End being particularly excited. It's seeming exceedingly likely that a new Alicesoft game is being announced at MG's panel.

They still do monthly Kickstarter updates: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sekaiproject/the-human-reignition-project-an-english-visual-nov/updates There will be "big news" at Otakon this weekend.

Favorite character was Chihaya, least favorite route was Chihaya, funny how that works out. Actually, I've seen a LOT of similar opinions so I don't think I'm the crazy one here. I think my favorite was Akane's, I really enjoyed the darker and more serious tone to it.

It's been explained multiple times, the secret project in question is NOT the winner of the moe game award for gameplay. That was sukisuki. You are making a misunderstanding here.

It's not like they're going to suddenly lose their only opportunity to translate 428. I wouldn't be surprised if they translate both. Or hell, maybe they won't translate either.

I thought you were talking about Koisuru having engrossing gameplay and I got very confused for a second.

Nah. It may be a mega-huge announcement, but it will still just happen out of the blue one day, or with a minimal amount of fanfare attached. It was previously going to be announced on twitter via a countdown from some random translators most people don't actually follow, lol. There's a very real fear from the team that the announcement and marketing will be mishandled and they don't seem to have much confidence in the japanese company that hired them. One part of that tweet is talking about SukiSuki, the other part is talking about his second, unannounced gameplay project. He's basically saying "While sukisuki won a gameplay award for some reason [despite having only barebones interactivity], I'm also working on a REAL gameplay title."

At this point whether they announce Evenicle or Rance, there will probably be an equal amount of backlash from whiney babies not getting what they want. So if any of you were planning on being one of those babies, please don't. If MG happens to announce a cool game that isn't the cool game you want, just be happy that the AS/MG relationship is working and hope for something more up your alley next time! (I'd rather have Evenicle)

I was comparing it to whatever con they were apparently at a week or two ago and didn't announce anything at.

I would not put money on that actually being announced at Otakon. It will most probably be announced abruptly with no fanfare in the middle of some random week, and not anywhere interesting like an actual convention.

I do wonder what's holding up ley line. The translation has basically been finalized for many months now, so it's just tech work and red tape holding it back. That, or SP is making major changes to the translation, which seems unlikely. edit: I will say that SP has been hyping up Otakon a little. Pretty much right after AX, they switched the AX discussion channel on their discord to Otakon, indicating that would be the next con where they will actually have something interesting to talk about.

Seems too soon for a DC3 release date, the tech work still isn't done for it and then they have to do plenty of testing. Release date announcements wouldn't take up an actual announcement slot anyway.

I wouldn't get your hopes up for any further Favorite game announcements until Hoshimemo is finished.

It's almost convention time again! This month's big convention is Otakon, being held between August 12th to the 14th. Expect this to be another big event for VN news and announcements. MangaGamer and Sekai Project are confirmed to be there, each with a booth and a panel. It appears that JAST is once again a no-show, unfortunately. Still, the others are hoping to make up for their absence. MangaGamer MG's panel will be held at 10:30pm EDT Saturday evening. They currently have five announcements planned, two from new partners. There have been some hints dropped various places so we know a little about what to expect from them. Alicesoft translator Arunaru has teased his other project, a gameplay title that is "what you assume it is or relatively similar." Basically: more Alicesoft. Arunaru's fellow Alicesoft-translating cohort has also been teasing something related to that company. Unless there have been some last minute delays, it is likely that the next English Alicesoft release will be announced on Friday. Grisaia and Gahkthun translator Koestl has also been teasing his next project at MangaGamer. Whatever hints he could drop would be "too obvious." It is probable that another Steampunk game will be announced, but that one seems a bit shakier than my Alicesoft prediction. As for the rest, who knows! While most of us had a good idea that a Chuablesoft announcement would be made at AX, I haven't seen any plausible speculation on their new partners this time around. Sekai Project SP's panel will be held at 12:45 PM EDT Saturday afternoon. As usual, I don't have a good idea as to what SP is actually up to. I think we can once again expect a mix of everything, doujin stuff, indie games, bigger commercial VNs, etc. They said they ran out of time in their AX panel for their 18+ stuff, will they finally have the time for it at Otakon? Or will there be another inexplicably long informational video on one of their OELVNs taking up most of their time? Ohh, the excitement! The personnel shake up at SP might make things a little dodgy, or it might not have any real effect at all. I suppose this will be a test to see whether SP is truly falling apart or not (hint: they're almost certainly not, sorry haters). So, what are you guys expecting?

For some reason you move the slider to the left to speed up the text, not right. Note that they didn't bother adapting the text speed for english text so the second fastest setting still moves very slowly and the fastest is instant.

I'd feel okay living in a number of different countries but I would not want to live in Japan. From everything I've read, foreigners really get the short end of the stick there more than many other countries, and I actually pretty strongly dislike most of their cultural and moral values. I have nothing to gain by moving there.

Hey, you can do whatever you want, it's a free world. But that doesn't mean there aren't things you shouldn't do, or things you'd be a dick for doing. I actually agree, for the most part. But like you said, that's a discussion for another time. We should probably just end this whole derail here and now.