In my last article, I talked about ALcot before they’ve started their journey with Clover Heart’s, and also briefly mentioned some of their fairly old doujin titles, such as Tenshi no Oshigoto and Stay. -Fragments of Memories-. They are easy games to find online nor easy to legally acquire; recently, however, a new fan translation group was born with the intention of not only translating these titles, but make them more accessible: their name is eien, and you can check their website here!
Today I’ve come to present you, my fellow readers, an interview with Ciox—one of eien’s leaders! You’ll learn more about the group and what to expect from them. Without further ado, let’s start the questions.
Welcome! Thank you for accepting our interview request! Can you introduce yourself to those who haven’t heard of you?
Ciox: Hi! I’m Ciox, and I’m passionate about the Japanese language and reading. Besides books, I’m a big fan of visual novels, especially those from Key and Tactics.
Recently, I started helping with a translation group’s new port and translation of Little Busters! That experience sparked my interest in translation and porting old Visual Novels and inspired me to start a new group called eien. Here, we’re focused on breathing new life into hidden gems and making them accessible to a wider audience, with a focus on open collaboration.
Could you tell us more about your group, starting with a brief introduction? How did eien start?
eien is a group dedicated to archiving, porting, and localization. Unlike other groups, we emphasize open collaboration. Our goal is to be transparent about our ports and tools, building everything as a community rather than a traditional hierarchical group. This means anyone can contribute and freely use our tools and ports. We’re still in the early stages, but our ambitions are high and we’re excited about the future.
eien started from my own frustrations with finding and playing certain visual novels, and the challenges I faced with the secrecy and hierarchy in traditional translation groups. Some visual novels are incredibly hard to find—they might be hidden in Google Drive links on specific Discord servers, require access to a private tracker like animebytes, or involve sifting through broken and shady links on obscure forums, only to end up with a bad rip or hastily put together port.
With eien, we aim to change that by providing a platform where people can easily and safely download and access old, obscure visual novels. Our mission is to make these gems more accessible, and we welcome anyone to contribute and use what we create freely.
eien’s first project was Tenshi no Oshigoto, a doujin title that expands on one of Kanon‘s routes. Why did you choose that title in particular as your debut project?
Tenshi no Oshigoto perfectly fits the criteria eien was founded to address. It was really difficult to find a downloadable copy online. Before I ended up shipping a physical copy from Japan to make my own rip, the only download link I found was buried on an obscure forum with a lot of broken and shady links. It wouldn’t install on Windows 10 either, so I had to set up a virtual machine running a Japanese copy of Windows 98 just to get it installed. Even then, it needed a CD for the music, and the old version of NScripter it used lacked many features you’d expect in a modern visual novel.
Despite these hurdles, it’s a fantastic visual novel. The soundtrack is amazing, the writing is great, and visually, it’s stunning. It’s a must-read for any Kanon fan, especially if you loved Shiori’s route. But with it being in Japanese, hard to find, and difficult to run on modern hardware, not many people could enjoy it without our intervention. APPLE project stopped making visual novels ages ago, and copies haven’t been sold for decades, making it a prime candidate for archival. Having said that, we still plan to reach out to Miyazou from APPLE project to ask for formal permission to archive, port, and localize their old visual novels and make them available for free.
That’s why we decided to create a modern port and archive the original files to ensure no future group or individual would have to go through the same trouble. Using ONScripter-EN, a modern open-source continuation of NScripter, made it relatively easy to develop a modern port and showcase what can be done to revitalize these old visual novels.
As a follow-up, I heard that eien’s plans are to translate and archive every Apple project’s works. As one of the translators involved, what do you think is the most interesting thing about them, and why were their titles chosen to be translated first?
What stands out the most about APPLE project’s works is definitely their excellent soundtracks, especially the voiced tracks done in collaboration with the vocalist REM. The vocals add so much to the experience, which is pretty rare for doujin titles. Miyazou’s writing also offers a more realistic depiction of grief, avoiding some of the pitfalls that Tactics and Key titles can fall into. This gives the stories a new depth and makes them great additions to the storylines in Kanon and ONE ~Kagayaku Kisetsu e~.
We chose APPLE project’s titles first because they’re short and manageable, which is perfect for eien as we’re still getting started. Working on these smaller projects helps us gain experience and develop our tools. For instance, our work on Stay. -Fragments of Memories- has already led to new tools and enhancements that we plan to retroactively apply to our earlier port of Tenshi no Oshigoto. As we grow, we’ll be ready to tackle more complex and longer titles from other groups, but APPLE project’s works are proving to be excellent starting points!
Do you mind sharing eien’s future plans with us, and what to expect in the next few months or years?
We’ve already fully translated Stay. -Fragments of Memories- and hope to have a port ready in about a month. Following that, we have another APPLE project title, Another ONE, that we’re planning to port, which should be done in a few months as well. Meanwhile, we aim to continuously enhance our previous ports to ensure consistent quality across all our releases as our tools and expertise grow.
After we finish with the APPLE project titles, we’re still deciding which producer to tackle next. Stage-Nana releases are a possibility, but we’re always open to suggestions and collaboration! We also want to design workflows for digitizing light novels and to provide copies and localizations of those works.
Beyond porting visual novels, we aim to document and provide guides for our tools and workflows. We are collecting links and files to handle a variety of visual novel engines. Plus, we plan to put all our rips on archive.com to make them easily accessible. Over the next few years, we want to provide not only an archive of visual novels and their related media but also an archive of tools and workflows to help with porting them.
Since your work is far from over, are you recruiting team members? If so, what positions are you looking for and how do people apply?
Absolutely! As I mentioned earlier, eien is built around open collaboration. Anyone can join, contribute, and access the things we create. Right now, I’m handling a lot of tasks myself, with Galladite providing invaluable help on the engine side. However, we really need more team members in all areas to better achieve eien’s goals.
The two critical roles we don’t have anyone for yet are:
- Graphic Designers: We need talented individuals to help with visual elements.
- Japanese Communicators: We need people who are confident in their Japanese language skills to help make our website and tools accessible to Japanese audiences and to reach out to the creators of the source material of our ports for permission.
But honestly, any contribution is welcome. The more people we have working on things, the more projects we can complete, and the higher the quality of our projects becomes.
If you’re interested in joining, just reach out to us through our website or Discord. We’d love to have you on board and work together to bring these amazing visual novels to a wider audience!
Any last words for our readers?
If you’ve been longing for a translation or scan of a specific visual novel or related media, or if you need assistance with your own project, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
While we’re still growing, our goal is to build a vast repository of resources, expertise, and supportive collaborators. Your input and requests help us steer in the right direction and ensure we provide what’s truly needed.
If you enjoy our work, please follow us on Twitter for more visual novel content and join the community in our forums and discord server: we’re pretty active there!
In addition, you can also support us on Patreon or by buying us a Ko-fi.
