Visual Novel Translation Status (19/09/2015)

Other

Stuff from me/Decay/Zaka/helpful friends:

• Miu-path of “Dracu-Riot!” going on here.
• Code: Realize ~Guardian of Rebirth~ Hits PS Vita This Fall (link).
• Norn9: Var Commons Coming to PS Vita This Fall (link).
• Wish Tale of the Sixteenth Night – Kickstarter successfully funded.

Stuff from /jp/ poster VNTS (thank her/him, not me, if you find this helpful!):

• Eiyuu Senki – Delayed until…. later this year?
• Moenovel is working on another title
• Lucky Dog – Possible iOS released based on the ongoing text only fanTL
• Harvest December – 3DS ports being released

Zakabox™ Commentary

「」 It turns out that Zaka is NOT dead! Sadly: he’s not able to write a Zakabox this week.

(Tl;dr: still alive, but dead to us)

Decay’s Musings

Today, I’m pretty frustrated. I’m not necessarily angry, but tired and disappointed. On the day of this writing, the 18th of September, we were met with a “surprise.” That being JAST USA’s delay of Shiny Days from September 18th to September 30th, digital version on the 25th. I’m disappointed because this isn’t really much of a surprise at all, it’s something we have come to expect from JAST. I’m tired because this keeps happening, it has happened twice now with Shiny Days, it has happened with Starless, it happened with Hanachirasu, it happened with Romanesque, it just keeps happening over and over again with everything JAST releases. And it’s frustrating because they waited until the last possible moment, yet again, to inform us. They want us to be understanding. It’s beyond their control, they say. There’s only “2.5” of them, I guess. They have their hands full with a website relaunch. The game is just too big for them to easily work with and create an installer for. There’s a whole slate of excuses they want to serve us, but should we really be understanding and accepting of this?

I don’t actually understand. JAST has been doing this for a very long time now. 18 years, in fact. They’ve worked with disc printers and have had physical game launches dozens of times. They’re familiar with how their partners in physical goods manufacturing operate, they know the ranges of delays possible for them, they should have a better idea of the timeframes they’re working with, and they’re capable of communicating this to us more clearly. I don’t get how they didn’t anticipate ahead of time a 16GB web download being a problem for them, when they’ve had all the time in the world to deal with this issue before it became an issue. There is also virtually no way that they shouldn’t know until today that they wouldn’t be able to ship the game out until 12 days later. I’m trying to work out in my mind how that makes sense, but I’m sorry to say that I can’t. I can’t actually understand how any of these problems are taking JAST by surprise.

There’s also the problem of how this affects Seinarukana. This was ostensibly slated for a September release. Not long ago I got a somewhat solid word that this was still on the books. I wasn’t fully sold, but stranger things have happened. But now with this delay, surely Seinarukana is affected as well. I don’t know the intimate details of how JAST operates, but I’m assuming they only have one partner for physical goods assembly and shipping, and right now all hands are on deck for Shiny Days. Even if everything was ready to go for Seinarukana, they will have to wait for Shiny Days to ship off before starting on that. So at the very least, we can rule off a possible September release for Seinarukana, and maybe October is starting to look like a pipe dream. At least this may finally give them an opportunity to actually market that game, which they weren’t willing to do before. But it almost seems like they just want to ship that one off to die before recouping what little funds it can with no further budget allocated to it.

JAST will tell us all that all of this is beyond their control. But the most frustrating part is that an awful lot of it is indeed within their control, and it us who have no control. We’re hapless as JAST takes us on yet another rollercoaster of hype and disappointment, and I think I’m ready to get off this ride. Chalk up one more casualty of the chronic JAST delays.

TAYsteful™ Thoughts

I suspect most of you are rapidly scanning the rest of this post before you jump into the comments and respond to Decay’s essay. That’s fine. I’ll save my actual commentary for next week. The paragraphs below are just for fun — go ahead and skip down to the comment box and whip out those keyboards!

Funny story: I got another email specifically asking if Zaka was either A) dead, or B) divorcing and leaving me. As far as I know, neither of those things have happened — he’s just unavailable atm to write a Zakabox. Probably.

Stephen King Update: Thank you (very much) to everyone who posted/emailed me advice for what my next Stephen King novel should be. The winner of the great SK Queue debate was “It“. The beginning has been quite slow (I’m at 22%), but it’s finally picking up now that the chess board has been properly set up. I won’t be reading much of it this week, unfortunately, because I need to finish “A Dance with Dragons” in order to get out of the horrible reading-more-than-one-fiction-book-at-once blues.

This week’s image comes from Koi ga Saku Koro Sakura Doki! Great to see the project’s updates : ). Have a good week, everyone!