Visual Novel Translation Status (07/09/2019)

Zakabox™ 「Turns out if you put all the things that happened in a year in one post, it looks pretty darn massive. Who knew? There’s no way I could comment on all of these, so I guess I’ll have to prioritize. Let’s split this into three features. One: AX. Two: Gems and comments this year. Three: Irresponsible shilling of personal activities.

The E3 of VNs

JAST fails to announce Muramasa despite copious hinting by certain personages. I mean, it’s probably still being worked on. But still. I don’t really have a comment on the titles except I’m pretty sure I strongly enjoyed the H-scene gallery of Yamizome Revenger when I went through it, so maybe that’ll interest some of you.

Sekai Project predictably gets 9:3 and nekopara 4, semi-predictably ditzy demonfuckers 2: fandiscaloo. The 3d titles maks me remember how Decay discovered just how many low-quality 3dcg titles were pouring into vndb by Western developers this one time on the vndb discussion forums; maybe SP wants to hit that market with something a bit higher quality? I’m sure someone will be appreciating the moege titles, probably not me though. That said, ‘The Seventh Sign’ – seriously SP, you take out the catgirl implication from the title? – apparently has the girl call the guy onee-chan, which is one of the things I have always wanted to experience someday. I don’t know why, maybe too much yuri did me in.

The highlight would be Amatsutsumi, which seems interesting from both a plot and moe point of view and had a decent buzz among JOPs on release. If you’re purely there for plot I think it suffers from the common problem of only one route being really good, but you should be used to this by now feelsbadman.

Mangagamer announces… three utterly predictable titles, and Eternal Torment – which will be more familiar to some of you as Mugen Renkan. It’s written by one of the writers for Euphoria but as far as I know it’s not as plot focused, so I hope you like torture porn I guess.

Sol Press picks up Windmill as a partner, flashes some comically unrealistic deadlines, not much new about the latter part of that sentence. I think Clephas posted about Hyper Highspeed Genius, calling it very comedy focused, but he’s Clephas so his opinions should be taken with a pinch of salt. Vikki Hornee is Laplacian’s newest meme and is some kind of nukigeish thing I guess? But meme, because Laplacian. Probably. Witch’s Garden I think actually might be related to the fan project, but nothing confirmed so far. Happiness! 2 Sakura Celebration is a moege.

Aksys announces things I can’t play because they’re on consoles. Nekonyan gets an aokana fandisc, but Sprite is still dead and Aokana 2 still will never happen, much like Pantheon. Spike Chunsoft actually goes for R;N, interesting and could be cool. C;H NoaH, however, is still less licenced than a doornail.

Lemnisca licenses a sci-fi mystery doujinge nobody knew about that seems really cool, actually. EGS has good scores, too. I’m left wondering if I should read the current PC version in Japanese or there will be a PC port of the switch version, which apparently had text corrections/maybe changes and maybe also CGs? The original version is entirely without CGs, apparently.

Considering basically all of AX bar Amatsutsumi and Dei Gratia was a borefest for me (I can’t get excited for R;N for some reason, not sure why…), I guess it’s between those two. I don’t think I’d have heard of Dei Gratia if Lemnisca didn’t announce it, and Amatsutsumi does have that problem with the varying quality I guess.

All in all, Lemnisca wins AX for me due to the limp-dicked performance of everyone else. I guess all you need is a Twitter account to win AX, huh. I’m moderately surprised by this result.

Gems this year

428 seems to both be interesting and have gotten a competent enough translation that I’d feel comfortable reading it in English. But it’s so damn heavy on the filesize that my packrat arse will probably never free up enough HDD space to play it. Rip in piss.

Amrilato ended up having to just ruby-text in the Japanese pronunciation of words in several cases to make things work, apparently. It’s probably still pretty enjoyable, but if you can read it in Japanese, that’s probably a better idea.

The Key to Home ended up actually getting published, finally. I wonder if the part I read in Japanese was the good part and it devolves after, it was a p. decent thriller at some point. Maybe one day I’ll finish it and have a qualified opinion, lol. From a few snippets, the translation looks a bit questionable in places but much better than I would have expected.

Neighbor is notable as one of the few horror VN titles currently available in English. I only read the trial, but it looked interesting and competently translated.

The two CHARON titles, Kaleido Stella and Vanilla, Garden of Judgement, look interesting… in Japanese. I actually were interested in them before they got translated.

In English, they look like a hot mess.

Sigh.

I guess it’s a good thing it doesn’t matter to me these days…

Uninhibited Shilling Bonanza

Loyal readers with elephantine memory banks may remember that I talked about this VN translation I was going to release like, soon a year or two ago. I finally got myself together and actually finalized the script after I’d translated 50% of shinimasu, so here it is: The world ends tomorrow. Since I’ve already shilled one short doujinge of questionable quality, this released literally today and is probably better, try it out.

Other than that yesterday I translated 59 lines and damn, Watashi wa Kyou Koko de Shinimasu – This is where I die today – is as short and actually translatable by a slacker as ever. The translation % popped up from 89 to 92 with like 2 hours’ work. Nice.

Of course, while I don’t exactly do ‘rough’ initial translations, this doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do a second pass. 100% is sorta far from done, and then I want to arrange tlc, editing, image editing, and my technical guy has to do his part (didn’t seem too hard when I talked to him last at least).

With that said, I’m still changing my avatars on 100%, for kabbalistic symbolic reasons. Look forward to it, I guess.

I also am involved with two other projects for short VNs; one is waiting for image editing (and only that, I’ve had so much time I even added an injoke easter egg mode you’ll never get unless you extract the scripts or know me) which might take a while, one was waiting for editing but the editor actually did something yesterday while I was asleep so who knows? Maybe I’ll actually have to work on getting the scripts inserted soon, spooky.

And I guess that’s it, huh. Oh yeah wait I finished my first longer VN in Japanese, Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo, this year. It was very, very good. It’s now scored higher than Ever17 on my vndb. I still can barely believe it. If Moogy or Chrono or somebody ever translates it or whatever, or you know Japanese, do give it a try.

Right, I’ve typed out enough characters to almost equal the first VN I translated in length, maybe I should wrap it up and give Decay a chance to speak his mind… Until next time, folks.

」

Decay’s MusingsHey guys, what’s up? Have you had a good ten and a half months? Mine have been eh. Nothing has been going quite as planned, but then again, what ever does? Fuwanovel’s extended absence was definitely not in the plans, that’s for sure.

First of all, I want to give HUGE props to people in the community who kept the VNTS spirit alive in our absence. Especially littleshogun. I cannot express enough how grateful we are for your efforts. Thank you for being awesome.

So, what happened? A combination of tech issues, burnout, and the complete and total absence of Tay. So here’s the deal: we encountered a variety of crippling tech issues stemming from our plugin choice. Tay hasn’t been around to look into the issue. I was feeling heavy burnout and not really feeling up to the task of completely reformatting the VNTS posts, especially since I didn’t know what other tech issues would crop up. And since Tay has been absent, I didn’t want to hand the torch off to someone else. I still don’t. It’s not my site, not my decision to make. Anyway, I noticed some recent updates to some of the plugins causing issues before, and lo and behold, we can now make VNTS updates like we used to again mostly without issue. And so, we’re back… sorta.

The next few months are looking like they’ll be a period of crunch for me. I don’t know how much free time I’ll have to do VNTS updates. Probably not much, but I don’t want give up on VNTS entirely. To be blunt, doing this update SUUUCKED. It took me around 15 hours to make, probably. I’ve been made brutally aware of how painful these updates get when you let them go for too long, so I want to at least try to keep up somewhat. Maybe bi-weekly? I dunno. We’ll have to see how grueling my schedule ends up looking.

I’m also aware of and definitely bothered by how dead the rest of the site is. I’d love nothing more than to assist in a full-scale revitalization of the site, but there’s not much we can do while Tay is still absent. Major structural change, additions/changes to managerial staff, etc, needs to happen with his approval at the very least. I don’t want you to be too harsh on him, though. Dude’s been living in a Caribbean backwater for the last year with limited internet access while working obscene hours in a clinic. He hasn’t outright abandoned the site or anything. Hopefully things get easier for him soon. In the meantime, I’ll do the little I can to keep things semi-active. This means more VNTS updates for now, but I’d like to support the news and reviews side of the site eventually as well. It’ll be slow going for the next few months, in any case.

Anyway, whew… That’s it for the boring site update stuff for this week. What was your favorite AX announcement? For me, it’s gotta be Robotics;Notes. I wasn’t in love with the anime when it first aired, but unlike Steins;Gate, the anime actually cut a LOT out of the VN’s story and seemingly everyone says the VN was way better. And DaSH is apparently pretty damn good. I can’t wait to play these games. What about you?