Moenovel teases localization of a new title

[Nier]

8 minutes ago, Shota_Victory said:

Of course it is. That doesn't change the fact that the all-ages games that are actually successful in Japan are few and far between.

They don't sell as well as they would had they the shiny "18" sticker on them but they still sell nonetheless, The House in Fata Morgana was an All-Age title from the start and it is quite successful in Japan so much that is getting a complete definitive voiced version on PS Vita in 2017, 07th Expansion games have always been all ages and they have been successful since Higurashi, Type Moon hasn't made 18+ games since Hollow Ataraxia which was released in 2005, the Science Adventure (Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate, Robotics;Note) series is extremely successful and they have been all ages from the start.

Edited November 22, 2016 by Nier

[Fred the Barber]

Gotta agree with Tiag and Decay, the text in the screenshots looks acceptable, and there are even hints that they actually know what they're doing.

It's kind of a shame the game itself looks like drivel.

1 hour ago, Shota_Victory said:

I would be worried about all the people that seem completely numb to this, but honestly, I couldn't give less shits about whatever Moenovel is doing.

Besides, for this particular company, what Fuwa thinks isn't particularly important. What is important is what the Steam userbase thinks, and I'm worried about them. KonoSora was a success, to put it mildly, and I don't much appreciate us getting censored nukige rather than anything actually worthwhile.

That being said, if the all-ages version is released on MangaGamer again, I'll probably commit suicide.

FYI, calling this "censored" when it hasn't been subjected to any form of official censorship and is, so far as we know, the only version of the game to exist, makes you sound like a crazy person.

[Shota_Victory]

2 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

the only version of the game to exist, makes you sound like a crazy person.

Oh, but I am!

Admittedly, censored isn't quite the right word. This game just gives off all sorts of pandering vibes to me that make me uncomfortable with the people declaring "at least it's better than IMHHW"! I'll wait before passing any more judgement on this game, though I probably won't be picking it up due to the heroines alone-honestly, who designed those characters?

[Nier]

32 minutes ago, Shota_Victory said:

who designed those characters?

https://vndb.org/s5634

Edited November 22, 2016 by Nier

[ChaosRaven]

Man, that title really looks like a nukige. I guess this time the prime target are 16 year old horny french boys instead. 

3 hours ago, Nier said:

They don't sell as well as they would had they the shiny "18" sticker on them but they still sell nonetheless, The House in Fata Morgana was an All-Age title from the start and it is quite successful in Japan so much that is getting a complete definitive voiced version on PS Vita in 2017, 07th Expansion games have always been all ages and they have been successful since Higurashi, Type Moon hasn't made 18+ games since Hollow Ataraxia which was released in 2005, the Science Adventure (Chaos;Head, Steins;Gate, Robotics;Note) series is extremely successful and they have been all ages from the start.

Yes, but those had - what was the word again - ah yeah, a 'story'. 

[Nier]

1 minute ago, ChaosRaven said:

Yes, but those had - what was the word again - ah yeah, a 'story'. 

His claim was that the japanese don't buy non-18+ Visual Novels, so I provided counter examples to his claim. Not only that, I could have also provided the mountains of Visual Novels released on consoles:

PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, PSP, PS Vita, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, 3DS:

https://vndb.org/r?q=;fil=lang-ja.plat-psp~ps1~ps2~ps3~ps4~psv~wii~n3d~xb1~xb3~xbo.patch-0.freeware-0;o=d;s=released

The total amounts to 3433:

https://vndb.org/r?q=;fil=plat-psp~ps1~ps2~ps3~ps4~psv~wii~n3d~xb1~xb3~xbo.freeware-0.lang-ja.patch-0;s=released;o=d;p=69

So much for the japanese not buying non-18+ Visual Novels.

[Yuuko]

18 hours ago, Zenophilious said:

I love how they're implying that no other localization company's releases lets people "enjoy themselves" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean in that context), while simultaneously suggesting that they are unique in having HD assets (1280×720 is HD now?  lmao).  The weird English is just icing on top of the cake.

LoveKami is 1080p

[Yuuko]

4 minutes ago, Zenophilious said:

They're not translating LoveKami, though.  Are you talking about LoveKami -Divinity Stage-?  Because if you are, could you link to a spec list?  I haven't seen anything to indicate it'll be in 1080p.  It would be pretty sad if it wasn't, though, I have to say.

Actually never mind. For some idiotic reason Steam adds .1920x1080 to every file name.

[Chuee]

12 hours ago, Nier said:

His claim was that the japanese don't buy non-18+ Visual Novels, so I provided counter examples to his claim. Not only that, I could have also provided the mountains of Visual Novels released on consoles:

PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, PSP, PS Vita, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, 3DS:

https://vndb.org/r?q=;fil=lang-ja.plat-psp~ps1~ps2~ps3~ps4~psv~wii~n3d~xb1~xb3~xbo.patch-0.freeware-0;o=d;s=released

The total amounts to 3433:

https://vndb.org/r?q=;fil=plat-psp~ps1~ps2~ps3~ps4~psv~wii~n3d~xb1~xb3~xbo.freeware-0.lang-ja.patch-0;s=released;o=d;p=69

So much for the japanese not buying non-18+ Visual Novels.

What is this list supposed to prove? The large majority of vita VN releases in Japan are vita ports of games that were originally 18+. Where a lot of sales come from fans of the original. The only non-18+ VNs that sell in Japan are ones that come from companies that basically don't make 18+ VNs to begin with. These companies typically use other mediums to promote their VNs outside of the typical VN consumer-base. This is why almost all of these VNs get adapted into anime, LNs, etc. Besides, most of the hyped non-18+ PC releases this year sold like crap (Island, Kouya). 

 

16 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

FYI, calling this "censored" when it hasn't been subjected to any form of official censorship and is, so far as we know, the only version of the game to exist, makes you sound like a crazy person.

I don't know, with all the girls having balloon tits that spill out of their clothing I can't really say this is much better. 

[Nandemonai]

17 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

Gotta agree with Tiag and Decay, the text in the screenshots looks acceptable, and there are even hints that they actually know what they're doing.

It's kind of a shame the game itself looks like drivel.

FYI, calling this "censored" when it hasn't been subjected to any form of official censorship and is, so far as we know, the only version of the game to exist, makes you sound like a crazy person.

My reaction in a nutshell.

They still aren't willing to release 18+ content, which irks me.  But at least now they aren't taking a game where the 18+ content was essential, gutting it anyway, turning the routes that depended on it to incomprehensible gibberish, and translating the rest poorly.  They created a new game with no 18+ content to remove.  It seems like they listened to all the people upset at them.  That's ... enough to get them off my go to hell list, even if it's not quite enough to make me interested in their game.

After all, MangaGamer was a pretty shady outfit, when it first launched.  They made a terrible first impression.  You might remember how they'd occasionally launch games before they intended to, because their website coding couldn't handle TBA?  Well, they launched their entire site early.  Had to go dig for quite awhile to find the proof - their prices were originally listed in Euros only, and were closer to Japanese prices.  Games had release dates in the future, but could be bought, if you found the internal links that weren't on the main page (which we did).  And the translations ... well, they were the god-awful dreck anyone who played any of their very earliest releases remembers.  (As I recall, when MangaGamer management found out that people had actually bought stuff from them, they shut the site down - and to their credit, refunded everybody's money and let them keep the games.)  Hell, when their site went live, there was a lot of concern that they were a pirate site!

And look at MangaGamer now.  What a difference a few years makes, eh?

Edited November 23, 2016 by Nandemonai

[Chuee]

8 minutes ago, Zenophilious said:

Huh, I hadn't heard that Island sold like crap.  Is there a source for that?  I'm just curious as to what its sales numbers are.

http://www.getchu.com/pc/salesranking201604.html

It placed pretty low considering it's supposed to be one of the best games of the year according to some. And it's not that all-ages games just aren't popular on getchu. For example, Angel Beats placed first in it's month http://www.getchu.com/pc/salesranking201506.html

[WinterfuryZX]

PC is not the right place to release japanese games without ero. Simply as that.

Edited November 23, 2016 by WinterfuryZX

[Fred the Barber]

10 hours ago, Chuee said:

I don't know, with all the girls having balloon tits that spill out of their clothing I can't really say this is much better. 

I wasn't talking about whether it's "better"; like I said, the game looks like drivel. But we get so many people crying censorship over nearly every release these days, and most of those claims are iffy at best per any reasonable definition of censorship, that when a clear-cut situation like this comes up I feel a need to correct it before half the forum gets their panties in a bunch over nothing.

Edited November 23, 2016 by Fred the Barber
grammer

[jetpack003]

Looks like VNDB shows that this game is for people who are 17+ years. Which means, no ero scenes...

 

I mean, come on, you have all these characters with revealing clothes, high sex appeal and big boobs and you decided not to add in any ero-scenes for it?

This game is just literally cock-teasing you with all these revealing characters being shown around.

[Dergonu]

I think they are trying their best to make loads of fanservice to draw in the 18+ crowd, while still keeping the game safe for an all-ages release. Honestly not a bad idea to get more sales.

Though, they should just go ahead and make a patch with some ero or something, like Corona Blossom did. That would probably make it sell even more, though it seems like Moenovel is really set in their ways on not actually giving fans any 18+ content. They seem to have changed a lot since If my heart had wings at least though, gotta give them that.

 

Anyways, I probably won't be getting the game. It does look like a nukige with no H tbh, which seems utterly pointless to me. Guess the steam crowd will be happy to get some more fanservice games though...

[Shota_Victory]

31 minutes ago, jetpack003 said:

high sex appeal

???

[Nandemonai]

5 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

I wasn't talking about whether it's "better"; like I said, the game looks like drivel. But we get so many people crying censorship over nearly every release these days, and most of those claims are iffy at best per any reasonable definition of censorship, that when a clear-cut situation like this comes up I feel a need to correct it before half the forum gets their panties in a bunch over nothing.

Even this isn't quite 100% cut and dried.  Sure, right now, it's obvious: there's no ero version to be censored.  But that doesn't mean they can't have censored anything.  All censorship requires is that content be suppressed because some might find it objectionable.  MoeNovel is deliberately choosing not to bring over adults-only titles for exactly that reason, probably for marketing reasons.

If it turns out that this game gets a Japanese release, especially if that Japanese release happens almost at the same time as the US release, and that Japanese version is 18+, it will be fairly reasonable to presume the title was conceived with the dual-release in mind, and that therefore the content was censored from the Western release.  I believe others in this thread have already raised that possibility.

Hell, it wouldn't be wrong, necessarily, to claim that this game was censored even if that doesn't happen.  Pulltop makes eroge.  It seems like a pretty reasonable assumption that a game like this probably would have had ero-scenes if it were intended for the Japanese market.  Pulltop chose not to even write the ero-scenes in the first place, where otherwise they probably would have, to avoid controversy from objectionable content.  In the courts, they call this a chilling effect.  It would be extremist, but usually even extremist positions make sense and are defensible from a certain point of view.

[Kaito1]

According to VNDB, the game is actually for ages 17+. And also from the PV, it seems the game will have some fan-service with the characters' breast bouncing. LoveKami Divinity Stage. 

[jetpack003]

6 hours ago, Shota_Victory said:

???

You can see their poses shown in the poster art. The pink-haired girl has her back turned showing her butt with her see-through clothes while the black-haired one is winking with clothes just barely covering her private areas.

Also, take a look at the character description on the official website. That clevage: http://moenovel.com/lovekami

 

Edited November 23, 2016 by jetpack003

[Shota_Victory]

47 minutes ago, jetpack003 said:

You can see their poses shown in the poster art. The pink-haired girl has her back turned showing her butt with her see-through clothes while the black-haired one is winking with clothes just barely covering her private areas.

Also, take a look at the character description on the official website. That clevage: http://moenovel.com/lovekami

 

I don't know. It just feels like they're trying too hard.

[Decay]

A couple more details from their twitter account: It will be $15 and will actually be a route based game with three routes. The latter is at least somewhat encouraging, a lot of these kinds of cheaper cash-ins tend to be short and linear with weak romances. This one may still be short but at least it might have actual romance with each of the heroines? 

[Dergonu]

3 minutes ago, Zenophilious said:

All that does is piss off the more extreme sides, though.  The people that don't want copious amounts of fanservice in their VNs won't touch it, and the people that want full-on h-scenes in theirs will do the same, leaving only people that like ecchi, except it's still a visual novel, so it'll never have the same success that ecchi harem anime does, on average.  Not to mention they now have to compete with all the SakuraShit, and unless it's priced accordingly, it probably won't do too well.  They're going to have to market it better than "Visual Novel HD with teh b00bies" if they want a decent amount of success, but I have a feeling that they're expecting a smash hit that was only really possible before Nekopara, when there weren't that many VNs on Steam to choose from.

Just my two cents, which is obviously purely speculation.

Yeeeah, probably. Will be interesting to see how well this sells. It's coming from a company that is highly discredited beacuse of their last release, and the market has grown an incredible amount since then, so they can't get away with "it's the best you can get, so just take it", anymore. Guess we'll see what happens.

[Fred the Barber]

4 hours ago, Nandemonai said:

Pulltop chose not to even write the ero-scenes in the first place, where otherwise they probably would have, to avoid controversy from objectionable content.  In the courts, they call this a chilling effect.  It would be extremist, but usually even extremist positions make sense and are defensible from a certain point of view.

That's not defensible at all; it's a combination of conjecture and nonsense. If you read the article you yourself linked, it specifically uses "threat of legal sanction" in the definition of a chilling effect. There is no such threat: at least dozens of eroge are released in the US every year, and obviously Pulltop is well aware of that since they sold IMHHW through the very same vendors who are hawking that eroge. There is no chilling effect towards eroge in the US, so let's stop throwing an incorrect term around here.

If you even relax that a bit and just say they're worried about the controversy of objectionable content (which is a different argument entirely, and which by the way is now way far afield of anything any sensible person would call censorship), then, what controversy are we even talking about? Do MangaGamer's roughly monthly releases of eroge stir up a ton of controversy that I'm missing? I'm sure there's some, of course, but I'm equally sure it's nothing to write home about, or I assume I would've seen it somewhere. If I'm not seeing it, where would they? What sensible grounds would Pulltop have for thinking that releasing a plain vanilla moege in the US is going to stir up some kind of firestorm of controversy?

I'll also throw out a roughly equally baseless hypothesis, but one that I happen to believe: they're releasing a non-eroge because they think it'll make them more money. Plain and simple. Sucks if you like eroge, but there it is, and it's unfortunately not something you can blame the government or SJWs for. Go change it with your wallet, and get more people to do likewise, if it's important to you.

[Nandemonai]

1 hour ago, Dergonu said:

Yeeeah, probably. Will be interesting to see how well this sells. It's coming from a company that is highly discredited beacuse of their last release, and the market has grown an incredible amount since then, so they can't get away with "it's the best you can get, so just take it", anymore. Guess we'll see what happens.

Didn't IMHHW's original Japanese version win an award for its story?  Whereas this has 'excuse plot' written all over it.  So they can't even lean on the underlying quality of the source material this time.  At least they seem to have figured out the appropriate price point for such things.

It's good that they seem to be responding to their critics by changing their strategy, but I'm not sure this really has the potential to be anywhere near as successful for them as their previous release.

[Mr Poltroon]

Damn. I forgot I'd for sure be in the minority who is interested this "drivel". Especially after hearing it has routes. Somewhat discouraging to see, but I'll just blame it on the fact that I'm limiting myself to reading posts on an Eroge site that values H-scenes and hates on the Sakura series disproportionately.