Joystiq (but first Kotaku) actually blogged about a fan translation back in 12th of Feb for a Square-Enix major title. David Hinkle urging on translators in article titled, ‘Final Fantasy Type-0 fan translation could use some help‘. The last time joystiq spoke about fan translations was end of 2010 for Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers. Not that I’m complaining, I think it’s a pretty good thing. It shows that despite the copyright infringement it is still possible for fan TLs to get publicized by big commercial blogs. That means VNs are no exception. I just wish stuff like Rewrite could get covered by Japanator or Siliconera, it just seems fitting for their site, and I think it is something that they can afford to test the waters with. And I think I hope that it is news that people care to hear about. (Although only the people with the numbers can know the answer to that! Which is not us.)
David Hinkle (Joystiq): Back in the day, used to be that when a game wasn’t released in a certain area, that area never got to experience that game. After a year and a half of being on Japanese store shelves, Final Fantasy Type-O doesn’t look like it’s getting localized in the US. Luckily, a few fans are up to the immense task of translating the PSP RPG.
GBA Temp forum poster SkyBladeCloud has laid bare all his programming work on the Final Fantasy Type-O ROM on the forums, producing the above shaky-cam video of his work so far. He’s not necessarily soliciting translators for assistance, but has made it much easier for fan translation to succeed by reverse-engineering a majority of the game engine. Now Japanese-fluent gamers can help make a translation a reality.
To me, Clannad was a pretty big anime, and Rewrite and Little Busters by the same company getting translated is pretty big news imo. Or perhaps am I the only one who feels that way?
Edit: messed up, forgot to check date of article
Visual Novels aren’t exactly the sort of thing that “gamers” find interesting.
Then again, Siliconera does cover quite a lot of VN news from Japan so who knows?
Any good visual novels getting translated is an insanely big news for me (exaggerating much). Rewrite’s translation was epicly fast though, compared to LB’s. I initially thought Rewrite’s would took longer then that.