Decay

I like how you said if astro would confirm dovac's lifestyle you'd believe him and back down. And when astro confirmed his lifestyle after actually staying at his house, you didn't believe him and refused to back down. Why are we even talking about this? How does his dietary habits and whether he's destitute or simply poor have anything to do with G-Senjou no Maou's steam release? Why do you not find prying into his personal life with such incredible detail inappropriate? This conversation is actually absurdly disrespectful and inappropriate and is actually making even me a little uncomfortable despite not having anything to do with anyone involved. This is ridiculous.

Do you not understand hyperbole? The fact that you'd even use this as a basis of argument is pretty mindblowing.

I can't really comment, tech stuff goes above my head, but it's not SP's decision, it would be the Japanese devs. Sounds like a feasible workaround (but I'm clueless,) but the people you'd need to comment wouldn't be SP. A general comment regarding 'wasting artist's/writer's efforts: So I wanted to expand on this a little because I tend to see it from time to time. To put it bluntly, if you’re the sort of person concerned overly about ‘wasting people's efforts’ then you can forget about being on the creative side of things in storytelling. One of the first things you are always reminded of in the process of telling a story, is to “kill your darlings.” It’s termed so because it’s extremely traumatic for some, and yet it is viewed to be for the betterment of your story. It means to kill your most precious, most beloved, most time-consuming pieces of prose, those pieces you spent weeks writing, rewriting, ironing out, and agonising over. That is because the most important thing is the story, and things must always be viewed with that goal in mind. The same sort of attitude is applied to art, and indeed all aspects of the development process. Relating this back to the issue in question, the VN company in question (I don't know the name, sue me ) has obviously decided that the story will be better received by this generation if it is in widescreen, and so it has made the decision to crop images. You can view it as a lazy decision, whatever, that's the decision they made to try and best convey this story to the West. You may not agree with it, but it’s the sort of decision made all the time during story development. If you shy away from these processes not wanting to waste ‘people’s hard work’, then your story will suffer. That doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to disagree with the decision, I’m not saying that at all. It DOES reduce information, it DOES feel like you're getting an incomplete copy, there COULD be other options available. Sure. What I AM saying is a) ‘the waste of artist’s effort’ isn’t a valid reason to leave material in, 'effort' is valued cheaply in these processes and b) to have some perspective on the issue. Everything related to SP is always overblown by the fans these days, and whenever they have an issue they use it as an opportunity to air all their grievances with the company and then Godwin's law is invariably applied, this time by Bats, and then we get sacrifices, and blood, and naked dancing, and it starts to feel like the weird parties we had in 1999... All the people who go on about authorial intent, wastes of effort, how the works of the creators should be preserved at all costs, and so on, would be utterly shocked at how games are made. You don't want to know how many committees look at the typical game's script and decide on what gets thrown out, what stays, and what gets drastically changed, based on a huge number of factors. I'm sure G-Senjou no Maou went through this process with the writing, art, music, sound effects, and voicework. Most creative works, including VNs, aren't made by individuals in isolation but entire companies. Some people looking at the CGs and backgrounds years later determining what else to cut is just another extension of this.

Oh, by the way, this is releasing tomorrow. Really.

Koestl was definitely paid for his Grisaia translations, he has said as much. And we don't have any proof that Dovac isn't taking a bigger cut, but we do have good reason to believe him. If he was pocketing as big of a percentage of that money as you think he is, SP would not have been able to expand at nearly the rate it has been able to. Like, I don't know how you don't realize this, but their expansion was insanely rapid, taking on way more projects, way sooner in its life than practically any publisher in all of video games. You don't do this if the CEO is siphoning away most of the revenue for personal gain. I don't think he's doing it for the public good or anything as he stands to make a large amount of money from this business in the future, I'm just being realistic here. You can't have these kinds of unrealistic kneejerk reactions and should focus criticism in the areas where they're actually applicable and needed, such as their troubled interactions with the fanbase or lack of transparency with 18+ content. Also, yet again, people are forgetting that the Japanese companies partnered with SP/MG/JAST exist. And you better believe that they are the ones actually making the lion's share of the money here.

I'll say nothing of anything else being said right now but by all accounts, Dovac lives a pretty impoverished lifestyle. None of the money seems to be going to him, at least. SP has been expanding super rapidly over the last two years, taking on an enormous amount of work and nabbing up a ton of licenses, many of which are without Kickstarter's help. That's probably where the money is going.

No, not being able to complain about not seeing Gonzou's plate isn't even close to comparable to the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany. And you don't have the freedom of speech on message boards, not even on Fuwanovel. That's how it works, deal with it.

I dunno, I can't get myself worked up over cropped CGs. I'd prefer uncropped but... meh. I don't know why or how so many people are getting so upset.

Yep, AkabeiSoft are the ones handling all the development of their new HD PC version and they're in control of what gets cropped and what doesn't. When it comes to these official releases, people tend to forget that the original developers still exist and usually hold more control over what happens when publishing their games. Is it really that much of a wonder if this is how 90%+ of VN companies will operate? You hear about it less with MG because the friction they encounter with their partners is much less public. JAST, though, has been full of woes dealing with 0verflow/Klon and the speed at which they've been addressing Shiny Days issues, and it's well known how much trouble they had with Nitro+ when that relationship was new. Visual Novel companies aren't very friendly, period. Or perhaps more accurately, they tend to be very difficult to work with.

I get the sense that more than anything, this Kickstarter was about Age finally finding an opportunity to sell off a warehouse full of unsold muv-luv merchandise.

I don't particularly mind the graphics. It's ugly, but it's what we expected from the pre-release footage. What gets me is the game itself. It's practically the same goddamn game as Fallout 3. Skyrim had tons of advances over Oblivion but Fallout 4 is pretty much just Fallout 3.5. It looks more like a lateral step much like New Vegas. Except unlike New Vegas, they won't have Obsidian's superior writers and quest designers. So I'm actually expecting a step backwards.

Meh, if it's not important enough to be in the game already, it's not important enough for me to care.

It lasts a solid 5 to 6 hours. The story and characters within it are fine but it has some really jarring placement within the VN. A prologue featuring the same old KnS crew and BAM, hours of new people doing a completely unrelated thing. You should probably just power through it. The payoff is good. One thing that weirded me out is that the village is actually just Hinamizawa. Or more accurately, based on the same village.

edit: WOW, this is the wrong thread. I don't do that very often. Here, look, I'll salvage this and actually post a response! When I first saw the thread title I thought this actually was going to be yet another ineffectual whine at how the youth is ruining the English language with slang and memes. But instead it's about corporations ruining the language. I can get behind that. I've been seeing that kind of language creep into journalism and other areas and I've gotten pretty frustrated at it. It makes it more difficult to understand what anyone is actually thinking. I'm sure I'm guilty of this to an extent as well. It's not anything I consciously try to avoid doing.

By having a separate cut version without the sex.

Started playing KnS2. It opens with a flashback sequence featuring new characters. I heard it's really lengthy, too. Not the best way to start a sequel.

The name of that game is actually Sacrament Sheep. I thought maybe I'd tell them that they were spelling it wrong on their own twitter account but... nah.

If you can't afford good voices then you shouldn't have voices at all. Even though people will complain when there are no voices, that usually causes people to be less upset than having really bad voicework. There's probably a better way for the team to spend that money. As far as length goes, the main problem is one of scope. AJTilley's games tend to overreach, trying to be bigger than they're really capable of being. The result is a multi-route game that doesn't end up properly developing any of its characters, or a poorly executed episodic format in Beach Bounce's case. If Divine Slice of Life had just one or two heroines, it could have possibly been a much better game. But they'd also have to get a decent writer first.

Hope you all enjoy your million dollar Ixrec translation.

AJTilley strikes again. All of their games seem to be low effort trash like this. Ehhh, nah. They're not too much more similar than any other two anime art styles. The coloring in particular is completely different. This game's art seems more amateurish in general.

The National's front man launched a side project with another group, EL VY. It's really good.

No need to be so judgemental, if the man likes Halo 5 more than the others then that's fine. Also a game's age is irrelevant. Doom was and still is a masterpiece.

Nope, never heard of them before. Google isn't helping. Anyways, source: http://doki.co/2015/10/31/tomoyo-after-and-little-busters-licensed-to-be-released-on-steam The best part of this is that they're throwing out the Baka Tsuki portions of the translation, which were actually really awful.

There's also piss drinking! Starless caters to pretty much every fetish under the sun. Ranging from some fairly vanilla stuff (not much of that, though) to coprophagia, with the whole spectrum in between. Hairy armpits, face sitting, futanaris, you name, it they have it. People single it out for having scat and talk only about that, but it's a small percentage of the content in the game.

In the case of Tomoyo After, there is an (all-ages only) Memorial Edition that is much expanded and has a new ending. People tell me it's much better than the original. If that's the version they're bringing over, then that's a pretty big benefit for us since only the original has been translated until now.