Mangagamer Releases

[Agent Francis York Morgan]

For a long time I've been hearing people talk about how bad Mangagamer butchers their releases with missing CG, features, or voice acting that was once present in the JPN versions. Some of these include: changing music in Higurashi and shortening the length of their new VN "If My Heart Had Wings" (also removing CGs that were in the JPN release). I know personally I've noticed some pretty bad flubs when it comes to their release of Kira*Kira (iOS) with the voices being mixed up and even a line of dialogue being left untranslated (these issues were later fixed through patches).

In regards to "If My Heart Had Wings", I'd like to maybe purchase it in the future, but if it is missing a ton of content (someone said it might be missing 30 hours - though I'm pretty sure that might be inaccurate) I'd rather not waste my money on a butchered product.

While I understand all of these issues (and their recent release might have been about decisions from the actual translators Moenovel), I was wondering what other people think about Mangagamer. Are they generally reviled like I seem to hear all the time, or is it just Internet hate propelled out of control?

[RusAnon]

Some of these include: changing music in Higurashi and shortening the length of their new VN "If My Heart Had Wings" (also removing CGs that were in the JPN release).

WTF? KonoSora is in no way affiliated with MangaGamer. MangaGamer, J-List, PlayAsia are just shops who sell digital copies.

As for Higurashi, it was inevitable. You cannot just take someone's work and release it officially, its violation of copyright law. They couldn't acquire music licenses and HAD to release w/out it.

I hate when companies butcher games, but blaming them in cases where they are not guilty is not healthy for industry.

[Agent Francis York Morgan]

WTF? KonoSora is in no way affiliated with MangaGamer. MangaGamer, J-List, PlayAsia are just shops who sell digital copies.

As for Higurashi, it was inevitable. You cannot just take someone's work and release it officially, its violation of copyright law. They couldn't acquire music licenses and HAD to release w/out it.

I hate when companies butcher games, but blaming them in cases where they are not guilty is not healthy for industry.

When you open KonoSora the Mangagamer logo showed up, so I just assumed that they were involved at some level with the production. After some further research though, I noticed that Moenovel was actually the company that did the localization work.

For Higurashi, didn't they also modify the interface, or something similar? I'm only bringing these things up because I'm hazy on the details when it comes to the VN market.

[RusAnon]

For Higurashi, didn't they also modify the interface, or something similar? I'm only bringing these things up because I'm hazy on the details when it comes to the VN market.

Yeah, they removed some mini-games since they couldn't port them to their english engine. AFAIK they do not affect story in any way.

[sanahtlig]

For a long time I've been hearing people talk about how bad Mangagamer butchers their releases with missing CG, features, or voice acting that was once present in the JPN versions. Some of these include: changing music in Higurashi and shortening the length of their new VN "If My Heart Had Wings" (also removing CGs that were in the JPN release). I know personally I've noticed some pretty bad flubs when it comes to their release of Kira*Kira (iOS) with the voices being mixed up and even a line of dialogue being left untranslated (these issues were later fixed through patches).

You're confusing licensing issues with censorship. Mangagamer doesn't censor any of their releases. They occasionally release games without voice because their games don't sell well enough to cover the exorbitant licensing fees that are sometimes demanded. The Higurashi incident was another example of licensing issues that were particularly problematic because it was a doujin title and wasn't completely legitimate to begin with (elements were "borrowed" without explicit consent of the rights holders). I don't believe Mangagamer was involved in the release of Kira Kira iOS, although their translated scripts might've been used. Mangagamer was not involved in the localization of "If My Heart Had Wings". For more information on that, see this post / thread:

[sanahtlig]

When you open KonoSora the Mangagamer logo showed up

Mangagamer denies this allegation. Can anyone that's installed the demo confirm this?

[Agent Francis York Morgan]

Mangagamer denies this allegation. Can anyone that's installed the demo confirm this?

Wow, I must have been really tired last night - the demo does NOT have their logo appear on the version that I downloaded. I must have confused the two VNs I was playing last night, as one of them was Deardrops - really sorry for all the confusion on this one. (Mangagamer is in no way related to the development/localization of "If My Heart Had Wings" - my apologies once again.)

On another note, it would be interesting to hear what people think of Manhagamer in general - I've only started playing their VNs a little while ago, so I'm pretty impartial when it comes to their games.

[sanahtlig]

Mangagamer had an early history of bad translations, although their translations have improved in recent releases. They have some decent titles, but unfortunately these titles tend to be marred by said poor translations or voice licensing issues. Mangagamer's releases overall have failed to impress / interest me, and their lineup for this year is mostly nukige. Barring surprise announcements at Anime Expo, Mangagamer hasn't given me a lot to be excited about.

Mangagamer titles I've played and enjoyed:

Soul Link

Shuffle!

Mangagamer titles on my "to play" list:

Kara no Shoujo

Ef

Tick Tack!

Koihime Musou really disappointed me, but that's not really Mangagamer's fault.

JAST USA on the other hand has released some good games in the past few years, and it has some very good titles in the pipeline.

Some notable titles I've played and enjoyed:

Princess Waltz

School Days HQ

Demonbane

Family Project

Saya no Uta

[Down]

I don't have specific feelings toward Mangagamer. I played two of their games:

Higurashi is... Well I heard there was missing stuff like music, which is kinda sad. Translation is good but would have benefited from a more thorough editing.

Kara no Shoujo is a very good release, the voices are missing but I personally don't care, and other than that the TL is very good.

[Beato]

For Higurashi I'm just going to play the French release (since the both the TL and the release is much better) and use the English translation as help when things get to hard for me (Like the end scrolls scroll by too fast for me to make sense of in French). And then google translate for the vocab I don't know (which is pretty much the only thing google translate is good for really. Much quicker to use than wiktionary).

[sanahtlig]

There's better ways to look up untranslated words than Google Translate. For Japanese, I use JParser + Translation Aggregator.

[Beato]

I have yet to find any text hookers that work with the french release of Higurashi I'm afraid. I don't think there's any french dictionaries that work with them anyway. And google translate is pretty competent in regards to vocab for european languages (not whole sentences single words only). If I need a better definition or some grammar explanation I'll obviously go look into a dictionary but the point is that I can have it on my phone and quickly tap in the word so I'll get an translation immediately.

I'd rather use a dictionary app but most of the better ones aren't free.

[Forythos]

I wanted to buy the french version of Higurashi since french is my native language, but amazon.fr won't ship games to Canada. :(/>/>

As for Mangagamer, I'm uninterested in their nukige, but I intend to buy Kara no Shoujo and Ef eventually, though I'm waiting for the second part of Ef to see if they'll release a phyical bundle of the two. I might eventualy be interested in buy Da Capo 2 and Shuffle!, but for now there are too many other games that I want for me to consider them. There's a few JAST releases I'm intereted in as well, mainly Demonbane, Princess Waltz, Kana Little Sister and Saya no Uta I guess.

(As for Moenovel's release, I was thinking of giving a chance after all, but it seems my PC is too shitty to make it run anyway.)

[sanahtlig]

Indications that it might be time for a PC upgrade:

1. Despite having a good ISP, web pages take forever to load and/or display with horizontal scroll bars.

2. You can't use instant messaging or e-mail services without major slowdown.

3. You can't even run VNs anymore.

[Forythos]

Indications that it might be time for a PC upgrade:

1. Despite having a good ISP, web pages take forever to load and/or display with horizontal scroll bars.

2. You can't use instant messaging or e-mail services without major slowdown.

3. You can't even run VNs anymore.

Haha it's true, I've been due to upgrade for a while. To be fair Kono Sora and Steins Gate are the the only ones I've encountered so far that I couldn't run. (SG because of some compatibility problems with my graphics card if I remember correctly) I've played more recent VNs such as Rewrite which runs just fine.

[sanahtlig]

If you can't get "If my Heart had Wings" to run, then JAST's upcoming Yumina the Ethereal is probably out of the question. For Yumina, you even need a video card with 64MB of VRAM!

[Forythos]

If you can't get "If my Heart had Wings" to run, then JAST's upcoming Yumina the Ethereal is probably out of the question. For Yumina, you even need a video card with 64GB of VRAM!

Well, my Radeon 9700 Pro is supposed to get to 128mb of VRAM, but my main problem with If my Heart had Wings is the processor, it requires a minimum of 3Ghz, which is more than I have, 1.83Ghz with 1GB of ram. From what I've seen on the box of Yumina, my PC would probably be fine for it, but I wasn't really interested for now anyway.

[Zakamutt]

I haven't really read many mangagamer releases,. but Kira Kira and Deardrops were pretty good (and almost typo free, <10 in each game afaik.).

[sanahtlig]

Kira Kira had a good translation? Even Mangagamer admits the translation was subpar:

Higurashi and Kira Kira are both from our earlier years when our translation wasn't so hot, so we'll be discontinuing [hard copy sales of] those until we fix the translation issues with those games (which may or may not happen ever.)

http://forums.mangagamer.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=33&hilit=kira+kira#p767

[Zakamutt]

Hmm, I thought it was fine actually. No idea how well it was originally written, but I don't think the script lost that much power from the translation.

[RusAnon]

I didn't notice any bad english in KiraKira as well.

[Kreweta]

Hmmm, so they have admitted that it was poorly translated... Hmmm... I guess it's nice not to understand Japanese sometimes! I believe, it can be quite irritating when you are reading through poor translation, whereas I simply didn't notice.

[zoom909]

I think the way the translation turns out can affect your impression of the VN, though. Maybe not a difference between "like" and "dislike", but it could cause a difference between "good" and "great", or something like that.

By the way, does anyone know if they ever fixed Da Capo?

(I know they fixed Shuffle for the boxed release, they said so on their site, some hundreds of problems were fixed...and I heard a patch was made available for the original DL customers as well)

[sanahtlig]

I'm not aware of any changes to Da capo since its release. Then again, I'd never heard of changes to Shuffle either. The translation of Shuffle seemed fine at the time.

[torbin12]

Slightly on topic, IIRC Edelweiss is a Mangagamer release, so I was wondering if anyone knew if their translation of that one was good or not, before I get it, since we're on the topic?