Leaderboard

I make a living in copywriting, but KoiRizo was my first attempt at editing a visual novel. Suffice to say, there were a few bumps along the way. So in the spirit of this blog, here are just a few of the many, many things I wish I had done differently. 1. I should have started out using a style guide. From the very beginning, I should have picked one of the major styles guides and made it my bible. Instead, as I came across questions — Should this be hyphenated? Should that be capitalized? — I just googled the answer. As long as I had a browser open, I might as well have gone to Orbitz and bought myself a one-way ticket to Inconsistencyville. Population: this guy. Thankfully, I quickly realized the error of my ways and was able to minimize the damage early on, but save yourself some pain and don’t repeat my mistake. Pick a style guide. Use it. My formal training is in journalism, so I’m partial to AP style, but most any style guide should do just fine: Chicago, MLA, MHRA, etc. But if you don’t use the Oxford comma, you deserve to die alone.* 2. I should have (mostly) ignored the VO. In hindsight, I spent a bit too much time worrying about how the English script would match up to the exact cadences of the voice over. As a result, I kept in far too many ellipses from the original Japanese. So … at times … the script reads … like this. And, as it turns out, most of those VO pauses weren’t even perceptible enough to warrant their inclusion in the English text. Feh. Lesson learned. Next time, I’ll give priority to the written word. After all, it’s called a “visual novel,” not a “visual audio play.” 3. I should have established character voice cheat sheets early on. This ranks pretty high on the list of things wish I had done differently when editing KoiRizo. The base translation was very literal, so, at least on the page, the characters’ speech patterns all read pretty much the same. The actual content of their dialogue gave them some level of characterization — oh Yuuhi, you so crazy — but still, I wish I’d been able to give everyone a more distinct voice ... Next time out, I plan to make up an index card for each main character with notes on speech patterns, vocal tics, and catchphrases. And then, I’ll spend sufficient time with the translator agreeing on how each character should speak. (I'm just an editor. The nuances of untranslated Japanese speech are a bit beyond my pay grade.) Do they drop their “g”s when talkin’? Does one use painfully proper grammar when one speaks? This should go a long way toward making sure each character maintains a consistent voice, particularly if multiple translators and editors are involved. 4. I should have picked a visual novel I liked more. I know, right? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with KoiRizo. It’s a perfectly fine moege. It’s light and fluffy and inconsequential. (Except for the dramatic bits, which are angsty and fluffy and inconsequential.) I guess that’s partly why I chose it; far easier to hone my craft on lighter titles like KoiRizo, then move onto more substantial fare. But yeah, it never really clicked for me. (My VNDB rating for it has been hovering around a 6, if that tells you anything.) I tend toward VNs that take more narrative and metatextual risks, whereas KoiRizo is perfectly happy being an average, trope-heavy, cookie-cutter moege. Moreover, it had way too many H-scenes for my taste, often at the expense of plot. While it forced me to learn how to edit those types of scripts very quickly — more on that in a later blog post, I’m sure — it wasn’t something I always enjoyed. But still, I never let any of this affect the quality of the output. I work in advertising, and we very rarely have the luxury of actually liking the brands we create campaigns for. You either learn to compartmentalize, or you get weeded out fast. All of which is to say, I always tried to honor both the original authorial intent and the lead TL’s vision for the project as best I could. __________________ So there you go. Just a few of the many editing mistakes I have made, presented here for your approval. May you go forth and learn from my facepalms. Because, as Goro says, forewarned is four-armed. *Or surrounded by cats.

Honestly most of the examples in this thread would probably make her laugh even more as "sex under necessity" typically just justifies the porn existing (or adding more of it) it still doesn't make it not porn. I think convincing your friend is going to be pretty hard friend since she is partially right, most popular Visual Novels with sexual content are stories that include porn. Obviously these visual novels aren't just porn, but the sex scenes themselves absolutely are. There's a pretty huge difference between visual novels where the fact that the characters have sex with each other is necessary/important and visual novels where the sex scenes themselves are necessary/important. There is a huge amount of VNs that fit the first example but those that fit the second example are incredibly rare. Nearly all VNs that I see people praise as having sex scenes for the story and not just for porn only fit the first example. I mean there's nothing wrong with liking porn but I wish we would stop pretending that most sex scenes in visual novels are there for any other reason. I mean in most Visual Novels when you reach a h-scene the story just....stops. The protagonist might be incredibly interesting, full of interesting monologues and funny remarks. Yet as soon as the H-scene comes this is all replaced by things like "I rub her breasts" or "It feels like I'm about to explode". And no matter the heroine's personality she'll turn incredibly meek and docile when the time comes. Unless it's a femdom scene, but even then her personality will be just as stereotypical, completely changed into exactly the sort of person the scene requires. She'll be incredibly embarrassed or even ignorant about sex but then suddenly become incredibly assertive if it's needed. A pretty good litmus test: Could this scene be replaced by a fade to black without losing anything of the story? If you can then it probably isn't necessary. A lot of VNs with medium-to-high sexual content will actually pass this, because even if a lot of the scenes fit my earlier issues with narrative stops and personality changes they still contribute something to the VN as a whole (especially the atmosphere) and removing them would change things quite a lot. A lot of HRPGs for example probably wouldn't be the same without sexual content, even if I'm personally not fond of said content. I mean these scenes are typically still porn but they don't detract from the general experience. The main offenders are the VNs with low sexual content, the stuff people usually talk about when discussing VNs. People will defend them saying that the scenes are important to the story, and sex is an important part of life right? And yeah it is an important part of life but these VNs sure doesn't treat it with the same gravity as it might treat other content. Instead of spending 20 minutes on moans and descriptions of various fluids they could use them to actually add something to the overall narrative. You could use the opportunity to explore the characters at their most vulnerable, in what ways they are the same and in what ways they are different. What do they feel about sex? What does it mean to them and their relationship? There are tons of stuff you could explore yet it is incredibly rare to see this in a visual novel. The only Visual Novels I've read that manage to do this Inganock and Sharnoth as they at least attempt to use the opportunity to reveal some of the characters feeling we might not see in other situations. I wrote a bit of a mini-essay here, but I think the potential uses of sexual content in VN is pretty interesting.

*cough cough*

I see no reason not to use this as advice for any potential instances I feel inclined to... eh... pretend I'm an editor? Nevertheless, I can wallow in others' misery and learn simultaneously. How can this not be a wonderful blog post! "But if you don’t use the Oxford comma, you deserve to die alone." I redirect you to this wonderful translation team with which, I'm sure, you have a great deal in common: http://theoxfordcommaissuperiorsubs.com/ It is highly recommended you read the acutely enlightening blog posts you will find within, relative to the Oxford Comma's Superiority. You will finish an erudite man.

Jast really needs to hire a good marketing adviser who actually goes out of their way to market the product...admittedly being an adult product company does make things a bit difficult but interviews, reviews, discussions on current progress, an actual time table for releases, proper marketing for specific titles (gameplay titles need a completely different type of marketing than most other visual novels), a better presence on steam, and the list continues for quite a bit with ways they could improve their marketing. If they could get Yumina or Aselia on Steam without the pron but have a patch or something to add it back in they'd sell really well. The problem is the cost. Games on Steam that sell well are cheap. People do not want to waste 40 dollars on a game they are simply trying out for the lulz of sorts. It's been said but a good way to release games at least via steam is via chapters, routes, or groups (at least for the regular visual novels). Price them reasonably (5-10 max) and let the word of mouth do the rest. Have the individual chapters cost a bit more on steam and make it so it's a nice discount buying it all together from the main website/j-list. There is a market for visual novels on steam they just have to try a few strategies which work. Jast also does not seem to mind youtube videos or streams of a number of their games so perhaps licensing a few smaller (non-nukige games) might work. Most youtube personalities or streamers simply don't have the time to check out a full game but by separating games into pieces they can check out parts of the game and if the initial reaction is good some might continue or at least give positive word of mouth. It might be good to license a few of these type of games simply for the extra funding so they can hire a bit more staff. I'm a bit sad that Seinarukana is likely not going to release til December if lucky but not completely unexpected even with these few delays JAST has released more games this year than I can remember them doing for a long time if ever. It's a step in the right direction even if they take one step back for every two steps forward.

I don't really think that the visuals are the biggest problem. A CG can add texture to a sex scene just like any other scene in a visual novel, how the character look at each other and how they touch, and what expressions they make can add things to the narrative. The problem with the sex scenes in visual novels is that they are usually so inconsequential that you could just replace them with a black screen that says "and then we had sex" without losing anything. And this goes for both the text and images.

Most fan-translations certainly aren't well done and even if they were there's still no guarantee that we'd have Seinarukana now. I get the frustration with companies picking up almost finished fan-tls (though I personally think official releases are good) but this wasn't the case with Seinarukana. Seinarukana started as a fan-tl back in 2010. The translator was a guy named nighteye. Sometime between october 2010 and april 2011 nighteye disappeared. He was replaced by a guy named Renkosuke. Later the same year, in July 2011 JAST announced that they had licensed Seinarukana, the project was currently 30% translated, far from a completed translation. However sometime during 2012 Renkosuke also disappeared. In february 2013 it was announced that a guy called Inskipp had been called in to replace him. It had also been decided that the old translation was going to be scrapped because of issues with the quality (nighteye's parts in particuliar were apparently pretty bad) and to improve the consistency. A short time afterwards Inskipp is replaced by Aroduc for some unspecified reason. Aroduc finishes his initial rough translation in august 2013. After that there was qc, editing and programming that needed to be done which would've taken a fair bit of time no matter what. This isn't to say that Jast have handled this project well, they haven't and it almost certainly would have been released by now if say, Mangagamer was doing it. But there are actually tons of fan-tls that were way more finished than Seinarukana was when Jast picked it up that still were dropped or stalled. We have no idea if Aroduc would have picked up Seinarukana if he hadn't been hired by Jast. It probably would still have been sitting there, half-finished without a translator just like dozens of other fan-tls.

I find it very surprising that it has not been mentioned yet, but doesn't Fate/Stay Night fit that description perfectly? Most of the sex in there is like "We must have sex because we need mana", which is ridiculous and many people find it to be one of the worst elements of the Visual Novel, but if it's exactly what you're looking for I can think of no better example

+700 lines this week. Too lazy to make any comment.

Thank you for correcting me :v I didn't see the typo. I considered only the "scape" route on my post, but I think all 3 needed sex, in different levels :B

Somehow, Demonbane made it into SRW UX two years ago.

Well that's a good thing, I was about to post a status update about our recent progress! So, last time I posted here, I was talking about how we were having issues in programming and composing. Well, good news for both, those issues have been solved! We've recruited a lot of fresh blood, and we gained a lot of dynamic and made quite a lot of progress, thanks to : - Zuka, who joined the team as a programmer and who is taking care of the GUI - jbonesy, who also joined as a programmer, and who is taking care of Narrative scripting - breeze, Ultrakitsune, Yunyunsae and Ziassan who all joined as composers for the project (damn, I was complaining about not findig any composer one month ago, and now we have four). - Zander, who will produce SFX for us. - Suna who joined our ranks as a writer It's probably a legitimate question to wonder if having so many composers won't be counter-productive. Well, I can't deny that there is a risk, but at the same time, putting all the workload on only one composer would be way too unreasonable, and having more hands allow us to create more tracks to fit specific situations, instead of having to content ourselves with generic OST that try to fit everywhere. Musical consistency might suffer a bit, but it's a risk we're willing to take to tell the truth. I'm pretty sure everyone would want some more concrete news though, so here we go : - First of all, we decided to release a new demo for January 2016. I can't give a precise day yet, not can I guarantee that it won't be delayed by several weeks, but we'll try our best to respect this deadline. - This demo will include the entirety of common route. As a reminder, Common route spans over 13 days, and should pretty much last you for something between 5 hours (for the fastest readers) and 7-8 hours. - Despite what you could have believed from our previous demo, the pace is not going to be a 13-days slice of life comedy without any plot progression. First 5 days are pretty much exposition, character introductions and comedy, days 5 to 8 get into the heart of the mystery and has a much more tensed ambiance, while days 9 to 13 will be the climax of common route. - Interestingly enough, common route can be seen pretty much as a standalone story/arc in the greater scheme of the Lucid9 universe. Several reasons to that, mainly, it will allow us to release a demo that has a complete development story-wise, and give some sort of satisfaction to the reader. Kinda comparable to a reader finishing the first tome of a book series (not exactly the same, but you get my idea). Some people will like it and ask for more, some others won't and will question our choices, we're aware that we can't please everyone, but nevertheless this will be the story we wanted to tell. - The days 1 to 4 of this demo have been reworked a bit, so there will be new and changed content compared to the previous demo (the most noteworthy being a rework on Misaki's personality). - The demo will be released on ren'py as a downloadable. For those who were wondering, the current demo you can find on cloudnovel won't be worked on anymore and will be discontinued in favor of the ren'py version. We're already working on implementing the script on ren'py, and most of the GUI has already been created and implemented (as you can see here : Well that's about it! I'll try to give more updates as things progress! Since it was a pretty long post, here is a potato a drawing as a reward : Akira, drawn by Yuuko, our BG artist.

Okay, I wanted to respond earlier, but got swamped with work. I'm glad to see another fan of kitsune and miko outfits~ It just so happens I've actually bought Tenkiame a while ago and I'm loving every second of it. I have to admit, when I came upon the first news about the game, I instantly feel in love with it and couldn't wait for release. The game had that something special - perhaps it was the setting, characters and quality; maybe it was the overall atmosphere (the game is quite similiar to Monobeno in that manner), or a mixture of all of them. At first glance you might think it's no different than any moege, but this game is actually a classic, laidback slice of life romance drama with japanese folklore and supernatural elements. You may argue it's not really that special - and that might be true, as decent the game remains, but it's incredibly good at what it aims to be. Right now I am certain Sun Shower is definately the best August release and possibly, one of the best vn's released in a longer while. Regarding translation... I was curious myself, therefore I took the game apart. To be honest, Sun Shower really deserves to be translated and I'd be glad to see that happen as well. On the other hand, I'm not really the kind of person, that sits doing nothing; especially, when it's about things I adore. In the end, I decided to give it a try. And this is the result: Some screenshots I did during the testing, along with a quick translation. It didn't took me long to figure it out. Game uses SystemC along with E-mote plugin for the live animations. I'll be honest - Tenkiame would be incredibly easy to translate. The only troublesome thing I found about the game was the data repacking, but I guess nothing's impossible when you're so madly in love with your resident fox girls. So yeah, here you have it. Unfortunately, I don't really feel proficient enough to tackle the translation myself, but I'm willing to help anyone serious enough to start a translation project. Aside from that, Tenkiame has literally everything I need: Kitsune + cheerful imouto + sweet older sister + shrine maiden outfits + countryside + folklore Is this how true happiness looks like?

Probably because it sounds really unprofessional and self-wanky, it's pretty much an inside joke for fans that could potentialy turn off people who have not already read the series.

I think my first go took me 8 hours and every route after that 4.

*hype hype* Of course, there's always a careful choice of words to consider. For instance, "soon" relatively to the time it takes for the Solar System to rotate around the centre of the Milky Way would only be about a couple million years.

Playing Majikoi, already finished Wanko's route which was a pretty big letdown since very little happened very quickly in it and then it was over. Shame, because she's the only cute one of the main grills. Doing Miyako's route now, and at least there's some interesting stuff going on (and I'm not talking about the excessive sex)

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. This gets me excited! Oh yes it does!

Saw this on Imgur and I wanted to make sure I posted it before it went away in a few days. A very long image, but worth it if you ever need to find out an anime you want to watch. The extended version is organized by category in case you don't figure that out right away, so look for the red boxes with bold lettering to find the appropriate section. Enjoy! Please note the "not worth mentioning" of SAO in the short version.

Keep spreading the word everyone. Post on your twitter/facebook 10x a day, alert your grandparents, hand out fliers outside of school, heck teach your pet gold fish how to play Visual Novels so they'll appreciate Muv Luv too! 1mil pledges IS TOTALLY HAPPENING! Keep it coming like Zerglings feasting on a poor Terran base.

Someone help me on how to react to this.

This album melts me. Unbelievably gorgeous.

Play it for Sora. Play it for the sex. But that's about it

Magenkyou 3 had a nice story and setting viewed as a nukige, but it was really unsatisfying as a story work because they didn't pursue the potential or deepen the characters more. I'll chip in these titles. Hotel Ergriffen Koukyuu Shoufu The boundary between ero and plot (Hotel Ergriffen doesn't really have plot since cause it's a step in sensorial dream land) is pretty much non-existent. It ranks pretty high in terms of the ero being inseparable or integral to the work (both games have prostitution as a central theme). Not saying the games weren't coined with that in mind...but it's a strange thing when a nukige has a stronger atmosphere than most story games. It's the purple text (your mileage may very), painting-style art, music, ero, and content, all being in-sync towards creating a unified quality/atmosphere for the work, that turns these two games from bad to intriguingly notable.

I hope it will be meaningfull, becase lately Sanji was dropping down, he have not won a single fight since timeskip and i like his character, that one Mr.Prince stuff from Arabasta arc is stil one of my most favorite moments in One Piece, and i dont want Sanji to fall behind that badly....atm im not even sure he can be considered as a member of Monster Trio.

finished my grinding That's enough for T1 Also, because i had to grind so much, I ended up near the top of daily score ranking (as usual)

Kimi to kanojo to kanojo no koi

I cried for days when I found Benkei, Seiso, and Yoshitsune on Majikoi S were fandisc exclusives. They were my favorites. But luckily on KoiRizo, Konami gets some very steamy scenes and I believe has a .

In fact, it's important for two of the three heroines. For (very good) psychological reasons. And for the third girl, I can't spoil CeruleanGamer, you have THE vn you were looking for

Well as eroge have taught us, turning into monsters isn't so bad, especially if you have tentacles

Still hoping for that Codex stretch goal I do love me some lore, and a codex always makes me happy as I waste a bunch of time pouring over every entry. Crossing my fingers for that, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

This question has no answer, since it's not necessary to "show" anything at all to tell a story. But then you don't have a visual novel, you have a novel. Unless you're making the argument that even novels with descriptions of sex are automatically porn just for acknowledging that sex exists. To illustrate in a different way how extreme that opinion would be, think about how much of the average person's daily life involves sex. The human race historically couldn't have existed without it. That makes it pretty important. Now think about how much of our lives we spend consuming food or readying food for consumption. Many visual novels portray scenes based around eating or cooking because those are natural and integral parts of every day life. Is every visual novel food scene just "food porn" and unnecessary to storytelling? For some reason many of us classify sex as something extraneous, unnecessary and distasteful that should be kept behind closed doors, even though there are only a few other things in our lives that are as important and natural. I find that distinction arbitrary.

Well, RIP gold. I also opened my second Thalnos. I don't even get why I feel like spending all my gold in packs. I've got pretty much everything I want already. Oh well. Probably the knowledge that I can grind one arena per day if I really want to and that if I ever feel like it I could become an infinite arena player coupled with the fun of opening packs makes me act like an idiot. Guess I'm better off just accepting it and keeping this up. It'll go exactly like Naxx and I'll start grinding gold obsessively one week before the new expansion comes,though. RIP future me. This was a dream deck, though. Kinda rare to get such a nice draft. The lategame was double Kraken, Champion and Sprint, btw.

It really depends on spreading the word out there. The internet is vast and the western market has a lot of targets to penetrate (no pun intended), so we as VN lovers can help the campaign through word of mouth/social medias.

Hey guys. Thanks for doing this, however it seems I've encountered a bug. For some reason best girl doesn't have a route.

I can get behind that.

Reading Kafka's The Castle and I have been convinced since like the fifth page that I am too young to remotely even comprehend this shit. After I stop reading after a 30-minute session, my mind is in a garbled, murky state of confusion. Everything written makes sense, but you never feel you have an actual grasp on anything. Deceit upon deceit brings you down. There's a never before seen depth to everything buried under a murky layer of complex affairs.

Finished Hatsuyuku Sakura. I wasn't expecting much from it, but I was pretty impressed in the end. What acts like a moege tries its best to push its way into the utsuge territory, and while it does fall back onto nakige (and its magical twists) in some parts, the majority of the endings actually end on a pleasantly bittersweet note. It actually tackles its darker themes more responsibly than I expected it to at first, and for that the writer has my respect. What I can't praise is the author's tendency to write twists just for the sake of having twists at places (there are a few random ones) and his habit of outright skipping fight scenes altogether (why even have them in, then?), but those are my only complaints about the writing. Not much to say about the art, but the OST is easily the highlight of this VN - it quickly made its spot amongst my favourites. All in all, a very enjoyable 8/10 from me, definitely give it a read if you're looking for some feels with entertaining comedy and interesting plot. Other than that, I've slowly resumed Sui (finally!), and I'm making my way through Meakashi. I think I'm around the last third, but damn this arc is long! More and more of dai's goodness is sneaking its way into the OST, and Ryukishi's hilarious writing is reaching a legendary status in my head. It feels hilarious and endearing in a different language, but I do have to wonder how I would feel about reading something like this in my native language. At the very least, I can definitely see why some people hate it. Anyway, now that I'm done with HatsuSaku, I might get back to re-reading Kara no Shoujo and then finally jump on that sequel... or maybe go back and read Cartagra first.

Hey Fuwa, long time no post. Sorry about that. Here's the state of things: We finished up our Kickstarter back in mid-July. We had a crazy amount of support, reaching over double our funding goal to cruise in at 48k raised. We got about 15k more on Backerkit off of merch sales, so we're doing pretty well budget-wise. We probably won't be able to spring for the opening animation like we wanted to, mostly because we underestimated production costs when devising stretch goals (and also kinda forgot about taxes... Whoops.) That said, we've been in discussion lately about potential options for our opening theme song. Anyone you'd like to hear? General progress updates are probably gonna be a bit less frequent now than they have been (on our blog and KS too, not just here) because we'll be getting into the meat of the project, and there won't be as much stuff to show off or post about, since we don't wanna spoil too much prior to release. I'll try to make some blog posts every now and then, but I'm not entirely sure what to write about. If you've got anything you'd like to know about (the development process, the team itself, certain characters, whatever) I'm open to suggestions. Right now our sprite artist is working on some character design upgrades for a few of the main cast, and we'll show the results of that once it's finished. Should coincide with the cover art for our game being completed as well. Dunno if anyone will be at AWA in Atlanta in a few weeks, but I will be, as well as some of my teammates. You might catch us around Sekai Project's table in the vendor hall, and we'll also be announcing something cool (and not HRP related) during Sekai Project's panel. Cheers!

Except that painting is making something original, and this is taking someone elses work and giving another fanbase a mangled copy of it. Apples and oranges. You would be amazed at the amount of translations people do (mostly attempt to do) while openly admitting that they haven't even read the game before, or people that pick up something while not even breaking the year mark in studying just because they are bored and 'want practice'. It's far from the minority of fan TL's. I agree that blindly bashing TL's isn't constructive nor productive, that's true. But people will defend any TL to the absolute maximum even if the writing style is stilted and isn't the same (this applying to people who play the game in japanese and talk bad about a translation) or the english is horrendous. That's silly. People should absolutely be allowed to criticize it regardless if it's a Fan TL. It promotes better quality. This fanbase doesn't allow for that because every translation is some sort of holy relic that we should all just deal with because people put time into it. People who criticize TL's aren't always just people who ride the hate train, they are also people who've read the original and are sad to see a subpar translation come out of it. And only in EXTREMELY rare cases are people going to ever retranslate something, way more often than not that bad translation will always be the one people go with, and the name is forever tarnished. If people TL'd scripts, showed them around, got some criticism/experience and grew from that, that's fine. I don't think thats faultable. This is a 20+ hour commitment of reading that you are giving to THOUSANDS of people. That needs quality control. That's not in the same scale of drawing sketches and showing it to friends.

I don't think I should be writing anything in this topic, because I don't like translations in general. Even their inherent, unavoidable flaws bother me to some extent (untranslatable details, jokes, cultural differences, all that stuff). It's not limited to VNs, I always prefer the original work, as long as can read it of course. Well, that's why I learned Japanese to begin with. But well, I prefer the translations to be as faithful as possible. Note that "faithful" does not mean "literal". Often quite the contrary - overly literal translation can actually twist the original meaning - ENG and JP differ a lot after all. As long as the translation conveys the same information and emotions, it can use completely different words and expressions if necessary. Well, basically what Decay said. That aside, this thread seems like a good place to talk about the usage of honorifics, brought up by OriginalRen in MoeNovel topic (https://forums.fuwanovel.net/index.php?/topic/7346-moenovel-announcing-something-monday-1711/?p=191342), so I'll continue the discussion here. Including honorifics in the TL can seem like an "otaku translator/editor mindset", but it's not that simple. Sometimes they can be omitted or replaced easily, without affecting anything too much. However, that isn't always the case. Using KonoSora as an example, there are quite a few occasions where honorifics are vital for characters' interactions and jokes. Omitting them would require writing multiple conversations from scratch (what MoeNovel did, which resulted in killed jokes and/or nonsensical dialogue most of the time). When it comes to Kotori alone, there are 2 or 3 conversations centered on Aoi triying to convince her to start addressing him without the "-kun" honorific and there were a few dialogues where Aoi complains about it, Kotori drops it accidentally (and Aoi comments on that), etc.. Good luck with rewriting all that into English without destroying jokes and characters' interactions. Is it doable? Probably. But it would require a more liberal translation - and doing that right requires quite a lot of skill and extra work. Is it worth the effort? In my opinion - no. Not in this case anyway. And that was the main reason why I decided to keep honorifics in KonoSora. It's just easier to do it that way. The majority of potential readers know them anyway, so it's not a huge issue. My preference to stay faithful to the original text comes after those. EDIT: by the way, I forgot to mention that MoeNovel's "TL" also uses some honorifics (there's An-chan, Ma-bou doesn't sound very English either), so I only make it consistent. I also try to keep references to Japanese pop culture, but again, keeping it understandable for the reader is the priority. One Piece is popular, so there's no harm in leaving a reference to a character from this franchise. 2chan slang however, isn't known at all, so it can't be included. Fortunately, it's possible to convert it into fitting internet slang equivalents to keep the references understandable, but still reasonably faithful. And a minor reference to a running gag from Ikkyu-san can be skipped without affecting anything at all (this anime was apparently very popular in Asia, but on the West? Did anyone hear about it?). The story is set in Japan and it's a translation, not a localization. Characters will be eating Japanese food, watching Japanese TV shows etc.. There's no need to change everything, just the important and/or the most confusing stuff.

There are also some really great translations that are at least on par with Grisaia but the games themselves aren't popular here so no one mentions them. Like Hanachirasu. Its translator, Makoto, is extremely skilled and Hanachirasu had a great translation. I think one of the things a lot of people mistake about translation is that conveying the original author's intent does not always mean providing a literal translation. I see the philosophy a lot where translators will just translate the words and then try to make them fit into a mostly proper english sentence. These usually read awkwardly and comes across as stiff. When this happens, the personalities of the characters don't come across as well, the humor isn't as funny, the emotional beats aren't as strong. Basically, there's no heart in it when it's translated that way. I think trying to understand and convey what the author was trying to say is almost more important than simply telling us what the words mean. This is where translations like Grisaia shine, because Koestl seemed to understand the work very well and was able to express that in English brilliantly.