Decay

Bug: Reputation Activity doesn't work. Most profiles I check list no activity whatsoever. On Tay's profile, you only see three likes he gave from October. http://forums.fuwanovel.net/profile/221-tay/reputation/

Yes, it was released in December. What this ultimately means is that none of the physical goods yet to be shipped will be shipped, the voices won't ever be patched into the game like they were supposed to be, and it will be delisted from Steam, meaning no one will be able to buy it anymore.

It seems like SRL was into all kinds of shady shit.

Also, lol if you think the bad translation will mean that people won't buy it. You clearly don't know how the VN market works if you think that.

Because that's the one you can easily point to and laugh at. JAST isn't going to fix the terrible writing style the translation is plagued with, no matter how much we complain.

They're not, of course. We should resign ourselves to this being a shitty release. They need a TLC pass, an editing pass, and a proofreading pass, all before release. They are not going to finish all of these. They may not finish even one of them. Actually what they need to do is scrap the entire script and start over again, but that's certainly not going to happen. My current speculation is that JAST won't delay this release. They can't delay this release. If they do, they may risk losing the license for the next three games. I'm guessing that they're rushing this release out in order to meet a deadline imposed by their licensing agreement. If IG wanted to wait for a high-quality release, they would have just stuck with MangaGamer, after all.

Delightful!

His KnS2 port probably belongs to MG and they wouldn't be able to use it for Flowers.

it was a ghost

Another issue that has been bothering me is that when you're in a PM and get a notification about new replies, and those replies extend to a new page, clicking the notification takes you to an error page instead of the new page like it's supposed to.

Okay, sure, they can say that, but all they've said previously was that the translation is finished and they're in editing, but they need MUCH more than just editing to fix the translation. And they'll have to do it in 3.5 weeks. Something tells me that they don't have the most sound game plan if they're still trying to contact people who actually know Japanese, desperately asking for help.

Peter Payne is in full damage control mode and seems pretty annoyed at the response. But uh, that's a demo you released, dude. Demos are meant to be representative samples of the final product you're releasing. If you wanted people to forgive mistakes, you should have called it a pre-release alpha instead of a demo. There's still the question of how it's going to be ready in time for release when it's still listed as being at 60% editing and moving at 5% a week. There's usually all those other polishing steps after editing, too...

Tay gave the credit to the GMs when I talked to him. I'm not sure what the fix was. Praise be to @Nosebleed, for once you didn't break something horribly!

There's nothing to be happy about. What we've seen of Closing Chapter so far has been utter garbage. The White Album 2 translation is of abominable quality, and it's not something you should be looking forward to. Pretend it doesn't exist, and you'll be better off for it.

Tenshin Ranman characters: https://vndb.org/v1322/chars#chars Yuzusoft likes putting the previous game's characters in as background characters as little easter eggs.

Want to know what's funny? Like two lines before it they refer to it as Wuthering Heights. Yeah, it's kind of confusing if you don't put 2 and 2 together! I told you. This demo is a travesty. Among all of the other issues, it's completely inconsistent with honorifics. Sometimes they keep them, sometimes they don't. I can't find any rhyme or reason.

There are in fact several your = you're mistakes. It keeps happening, and it kills me a little every time.

The first one I posted just because I didn't like how one word overflowed into a new text box. That the kind of thing that should be avoided and the fact that it happens shows that they didn't put much care into this. Second one has some minor grammar errors and weird formatting. If those examples didn't please you, have another!

Maybe they decided to scrap their plans for a port since they wanted to release it quicker? Or maybe Doddler was just wrong, since he was the one who said it wasn't a port. Either way, there are technical issues. It's not the final version, but a demo is meant to be a representative example of their product. This goes pretty far beyond that time you bitched about Princess Evangile (and MG DID fix that up, thankfully!), so I wonder how much they can really improve by the release date.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a compiled list of criticisms levied by MangaGamer translator Black Dragon Hunt, with commentary. JAST says they will try to fix all of the problems before release. So, today JAST released the Flowers demo on Steam and announced a tentative release date of March 20th. Great! I've been looking forward to this one for a while, so let's see how it is! Okay, so there are a lot of grammatical errors. A LOT of them. But a proofreading pass can help fix things up, right? Well... the whole thing reads really awkwardly. I would seriously doubt it if the translator was a native english speaker. It reads like a newbie fan TL instead of a proper official translation. Not even the most awkward of Sekai Project scripts read this poorly. It's not just poorly written, it's also inaccurately translated. Here's a boatload of chronicled mistranslations. Not only that, but the game has some technical issues. One that I kept running into was that any time I changed any option in the config menu, the music got all stuttery and I'd have to quit and reload the game. Sometimes interface buttons just randomly wouldn't work and had to be clicked multiple times. This game runs on the same engine as Kara no Shoujo 2, and MangaGamer had to port that to Unity so it would work properly, JAST did no such thing with this release, hence the issues. Also there are minor aesthetic issues, such how large and spaced out the text is, causing text to overflow into multiple boxes. Really, this whole release is a giant mess from head to toe. Every facet of it sucks. It's really disappointing since I was looking forward to it, but I'm also disappointed because I felt like JAST has been doing well recently on the translation quality front. I expected better from them, and instead we get... this. Flowers has suddenly turned into a huge bummer. How much do you think will get fixed in the next three and a half weeks?

Historically, most major western VN releases are around the $50 USD mark. I believe MG has lowered their prices on new games a tad, recently.

You wouldn't add scenes to the DVD release, but rip its translation and insert it into the PC release. I figure nobody thinks it's worth the effort because Hirameki's translations are terrible.

The document serves as a tool to inform users of alternate versions available and where to obtain them. Which came first is irrelevant.

I should have edited faster. I have no idea if you can even still buy these anywhere.

Phantom of Inferno should be on the list. Only available english version is the interactive DVD version, rated at 15+. As far as I know, there's no "remedy." edit: Several other Hirameki International releases also count. Yu-u-e-n-chi/Amusement Park, KoiYoubi/Day of Love, Natsuiro no Sunadokei/Hourglass of Summer, Majo no Ocha Kai/Tea Society of a Witch, Ishika & Honori, and Exodus Guilty. For all of these, the english releases were done via interactive DVDs and had the adult content removed. Natsuiro no Sunadokei and Exodus Guilty had all-ages console versions as their initial releases, then the adult versions were released, and then Hirameki International did their usual stuff.