sanahtlig

Rapelay developer Illusion boldly promotes its upcoming virtual reality sex simulator VR Kanojo with a Steam Greenlight for the non-adult trial version. Illusion reaches out to English fans with Steam trial of VR Kanojo Fuwanovel discussion thread

I get my JP release news from a combination of Hau Omochikaeri, VNDB, and Getchu's monthly release page.

Criminal Girls wasn't butchered for Steam. It was butchered for the console release, and they simply didn't bother to fix it up for Steam. For eroge, I think of Steam as an advertising platform, and apparently so does Illusion.

The English official site is instructive. This will be an adult-only release. It looks like only the demo is being released on Steam. http://vrkanojo.com/index_en.php#2 The English is poor--they can't seem to construct actual sentences expressing a coherent thought--but it's not machine-translated at least. The VR-only platform requirement is going to extremely limit their audience for this particular title. Only extreme early adopters would be willing to pay the $600 or so for the headsets, much less the extra $300 or more for the necessary GPU/hardware upgrade. And only a very small subset of those would even be interested in a hentai game, much less one of Illusion's simple sex sims. I doubt this title will do well in either Japan or overseas, at least while VR adoption is low. In a Venn diagram, the overlap between eroge fans and early VR adopters is probably minimal; eroge fans tend to have less capable hardware than your typical gamer since the majority of eroge have very low system requirements. This is basically a demographic paradox: their primary audience won't have the hardware to play their game, and the few who DO have the hardware are unlikely to be interested. That Illusion has finally taken an interest in the English market is great news. However, this is a terrible product to test market demand for their games. It's almost doomed to fail due to a low install base coupled with a niche product. That said, the YouTube trailer is a smash hit. Too bad they won't be able to translate that marketing triumph into sales.

Wait, so Illusion is taking one of their trademark tech demo-style games that are only good for the ero and releasing it on Steam without the ero? Brilliant! Nonetheless, with an English interface and much of the dialogue translated, the rabid Illusion modding community on HongFire is almost certain to finish the job, provided the translated elements can be easily imported onto the full version.

It's new game+ content that some people want. It's simply dangled there as a carrot for these people to play the game again. The simple presence of this bonus content doesn't make it a "grindy game".

Kamidori isn't a grindy game unless you want it to be. The gameplay is about as refined as I've seen in an H-RPG.

As @Palas mentioned, OELVNs are more likely to feature gameplay, and dating sims in particular are likely to have English origin. If you're looking for characters and settings with feminist values, non-virgins, or have zero tolerance for moe, then OELVNs might also be the place to look. If you're looking for porn with story, then OELVNs are probably NOT the place to look. Western culture is still far behind the curve there due to a strongly-rooted preconception that porn and strong storytelling cannot coexist. Another consideration is that the vast majority of OELVNs are essentially doujin works. Production values are low and the creators are typically inexperienced by Japanese standards.

Keep in mind this is the same company that hired a translator to translate the game (poorly, yet at least comprehensibly), yet literally machine-translated the promotional materials (e.g., image text on Steam). This is a company that clearly has no clue about the English market OR business in general.

Ironically enough, we also get companies like Debonosu who insist that translating the H-scenes would "cost too much".

So you're looking for someone to translate the H-scenes in Chusungura? That's probably doable. You just need to interest a translation group that cares about censorship. Translating a few H-scenes could take as little as a few days. Inserting the text into the game could be the larger issue. But as the KonoSora restoraton project shows, such projects are certainly doable and even finishable in a relatively short timeframe--provided the original translation is actually worth adding to.

Yes, VNR has a method for manually selecting text threads (like ITHVNR), though it's buried deep in the menu options.

http://sanahtlig.blogspot.com/2015/08/windows-10-vn-compatibility-list.html

Don't use VNR to parse. VNR is optimized for machine translation. Also last I heard VNR is no longer being maintained, while ITHVNR still gets occasional updates. ITHVNR has the best compatibility of all the text hookers AFAIK. There's still a few that require ITH, however (some H-codes don't seem to work with ITHVNR for whatever reason).

Trump's platform isn't even coherent. He can't even articulate a coherent conservative position like "I'm against abortion and would restrict abortion access by penalizing providers or de-funding non-profit organizations that provide abortion care". Instead he says "I would penalize women who abort their pregnancy". That's not being "straightforward". That's being ignorant. He doesn't even conceptually understand the mainstream policy arguments, much less the details of their implementation!

You're mixing up different messages. To clarify: I'm somewhat opposed to crowdfunding in general. It's anti-consumer and forfeits standard consumer protections. Professional companies shouldn't rely on it, and if they do use it they should compensate backers appropriately for the risk involved. I'm less opposed to the stated intent of the Chrono Clock Kickstarter campaign, which was to solicit pre-orders to ensure producing the physical items was worth it. Though as Nandemonai pointed out, this wasn't the ideal way to do this. Economies of scale apply to production of physical items, especially print runs. Ideally, stretch goals, if reached, would lower the cost of each tier. Mixing in digital orders actually distracts from the central purpose. If the goal was to drive economies of scale and reward backers for promoting the game in their communities, the project wasn't well-conceived to achieve this. I was directly responding to a claim that raising $80k showed that Kickstarter is still "viable" for crowdfunding VNs in general (especially relatively unknown titles). I argued that the result of this campaign does not support that conclusion, and on the contrary would tend to refute it.

Tell that to all the companies that presumably won't proceed with the project if the Kickstarter funding goal (meant to cover all costs ahead of time) isn't met. I agree that demanding all costs be covered in "pre-orders" doesn't make sense if you're an established company that routinely invests money in projects that won't generate income for 12-24 months. Yet that's exactly what most VN companies on Kickstarter are doing.

Libra did well because MiKandi JP is a likable publisher. They earned that support because of their attention to what fans wanted and their ability to galvanize fans to rally around them. $100k is not good. That won't cover costs for most professional VN localization projects for titles of any significant length. It wouldn't fund Shin Koihime Musou, for example, which is a title that MangaGamer continues to avoid because they don't think they could recoup costs on it.

$80k is well below most Kickstarter funding goals for professional VNs. Libra of the Vampire Princess, probably a "similar tier" title, pulled in $180k, and most of SP's other Kickstarter campaigns attracted more funding too. My guess is that only highly anticipated titles (Muv Luv series), novel and exciting partnerships (light), and companies with a rallying message (MiKandi JP) will succeed on Kickstarter (enough to cover all localization costs) going forward.

I thought some more about what I like about NTR: I like the rivalry. And like any good rivalry, you should be able to both win or lose, and the rival character should be well-characterized. Winning should either be challenging or require sacrifices (i.e., betraying a friend or having another love interest NTR'd). Ideally, the process should involve the heroine being hit on or slowly seduced by the rival, which fosters a sense of jealousy. In a sense, NTR is as much an element of gameplay as a theme to me.

I recently upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and haven't had any issue with ITHVNR.

I like the NTR in School Days. It doesn't dominate the story. It's just one of several possible (bad) outcomes that helps build dramatic tension.

If you want an actually hard game, try this. https://vndb.org/v13066 It's not only hard mechanics-wise, but most of the text is in spaced hiragana. It'll test the flexibility of your Japanese knowledge. Also, the game isn't hookable without special modifications to the game code.

I played Raidy 1 in Japanese before I knew any useful amount of Japanese, likely with machine translation, and no walkthrough that I can recall. I can vouch that it's not a "hard" game. The game just pads the low amount of content by forcing you to engage in an inordinate amount of random battles to reach stat equivalence with the enemies (grind). Forcing you to explore the map doesn't add to the "challenge". Unexpected traps and puzzles are par for the course in any halfway-decent dungeon crawler. It's expected.

The first Raidy title had my favorite art, but the game is too short given the price. If you want value for your money, get 2 or 3 instead. 2 is about 3x as long as 1. 1 is also extremely grindy. It's not "challenging", just annoying.