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Chrono Clock ! Left : Laptop, 1600 X 900 ; Right : 1920 X 1080

This post shows exactly why releasing in English a VN with "Sakura" in the title is a risky decision nowadays. Wait, there are two Sakuras in the title...

And the Chaos:Head patch was released in 2008. It had a show-stopping bug where, if you saved at the wrong time, attempting to load that save would crash the game. Whoever developed that patch never bothered to fix it. It wasn't fixed until earlier this year (or was it late last year?) by a completely different team, and then only because that new group started working on Chaos;Head Noah. Also, you mention fan translation scripts that have been "perfected"? Fan translations vary widely in quality, and many of them are pretty darned crappy. I haven't played it myself, but I am given to understand that even at revision 4, Amaterasu's work on ReWrite just wasn't very good. Finally, while it is true that fan translation patches are free, the games themselves are not. Fan translations ask you to pay the ridiculous Japanese retail price for these games. That's way more than any of the professional releases you mentioned. Of course, if you just pirate the Japanese release, and compare that to paying for Western releases, well then that's not a fair comparison at all.

Of the fan patches you're praising for updates, I've only played Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate, and fairly recently (well over a year after their last release, I believe), and I can attest it's still got a fair number of errors. It's no 11eyes, by a long shot, but it's not as good as a typical release-date MG release, or S;G0. I actually don't understand the fixation on that one; it's seriously fine.

If the missing voices are due to missing voice files in the Japanese release, there is not really anything translators can do about it. However translators can introduce crashes. This would be a crash when displaying a certain line, though this will usually cause a crash even if you try to skip passed it. Not all VN engines are equally friendly towards getting English text and it's can actually be a lot harder to get them working than one might think. Sengoku Rance (the patch, not the MG work in progress) has left some names untranslated because translating them would cause the game to crash. I had to write a program to insert English text into Musumaker because just replacing Japanese text with English will cause crashes and the workaround for that is too tricky to do by hand for each line. It's also worth mentioning that some official translations have been using different engines than the Japanese versions of the same VNs because of engine limitations. For all we know, Fan TLs can crash because of such engine limitations. Fan tls has less freedom when it comes to choice of engine because they can't repack every single data file to match the new engine. Also some VN engines use compiled scripts and moving those to a new engine requires the source code for those scripts. Just like pre-censored CGs, the source code is only available to official translators. In short: yes missing voices and crashes are annoying, but I wouldn't blame the translators for those, at least not without checking that the problems aren't present in the Japanese version or if they are caused by engine limitations. The script errors are due to translators, or rather editors and QC. @Fred the Barber commented pretty well on that part. I was about to write something about how that's not the case and fan tls are progressing etc. (at least those I have internal knowledge of). However your post made me think about this and I have come to realize something. Way back in the dawn of time for English VNs, lets say year 2000, translations were made by a group of people gathering in the same building to work on a translation. Once completed, it was put on CDs, placed in boxes and then the boxes were sold. In other words it was the pre-internet approach. The problem with that approach is that if you happen to live in an area without such a company and you can't or won't move to a location of such a company, the only way to translate is to make a fan tl patch. Sure enough fan tl patches started to appear. Now the one building resulting in CDs approach has died and most (all?) of the companies with it. Today we have some other companies and they have embraced the internet. Suddenly translators can sit in their parent's basement or in some foreign country or whereever they are and work on commercial titles. This means skilled people are no longer forced to only work on fan tl patches. What does this mean for the fan tl patches? Mostly it means brain drain. Skilled people figure why not get paid to do what they currently do for free? Is it the end for fan tls? Not as I see it. The fan tl community will likely shift towards having a bunch of people who does the work to gain experience, which will help them getting a paid job. This means it will not die, but since the official releases will end up with all the skilled and experienced people, we can expect the fan tl quality to drop relative to the official releases. I wouldn't call that dying, but we will likely see fewer masterpieces. Having said that, some people want to translate one specific title and if they can't get paid to do so, they could do it for free, which is likely the main reason why I will say that we might still get masterpieces as fan tls.

So, I finished Yang's route in Pygmalion now, and I think I'll leave it at that. To be honest, I think I only made it that far because I enjoyed its music so much. I really have to try to extract its music somehow or get a download for it since it would be a waste to just have it gone. In that regard its similar strong or maybe even better than Tokyo Babel which also had a quite good soundtrack overall. For all their flaws, Propeller did have a good sense of music. Unfortunately, the VN had a lot of other flaws that couldn't just be compensated by the music. First and foremost the weak character cast, followed by a very chaotic story flow. And the top offender was Mina itself, the protagonist. If I would be forced to find a word that describes everything about her, personality, attitude, character strength, everything in one word, then this word would be "Huh?!". Nothing else describes her complete cluelessness, lack of common sense and character strength better than this word. You can literally talk her into every crime with just a half-assed explanation because she will believe everything or just be too timid to doubt you. You can totally expect stuff like "Huh, how could I have known that the kid will be dead after I shot it?!". Overall, she acts like a 5 year old child for the most part of the VN which gets VERY annoying after a while. The rest of the 'yuri circle' - Riko and Jessica - also didn't exactly stand out through particular smartness. Riko was as bland and boring as it gets while Jessica was at least bearable and actually has some decent scenes. Another top offender was Madame Leifang who could be considered the leader of 'Team Ruka'. Her main agenda seemed to be to cause as much infighting as possible and get her team killed as fast as possible. She also constantly seemed to change her attitude through the VN to a point where I had the strong suspicion that she might constantly having her days. At some point I just gave up trying to understand what she actually wants. Yang, her daughter, was better and some of the characters who acted a bit more mature. Though she was essentially not more than a side character. She only appears for a short time at the start and then just joins much later on. And most of her 'route' consisted of sitting in a car and talking with Jay, which was surprisingly one of the more relaxing parts of the VN's. And speaking of Jay, he was probably the best written character by a long mile. Calm, composed and loyal - I really liked him. He would have been a way better protagonist than Mina. Art was hit and miss. The artist had frequent problems finding the right facial and body proportions. At its best there were some really nice and beautiful CG's, but more often than not it just turned out as weird and distorted. For the story itself, it had potential, but the weak character cast and chaotic story flow more less killed it. Character ranking: Jay > Yang > Jessica >> Riko > Madame Leifang >> Mina (I use a character ranking instead of a heroine ranking this time so I can include Jay) Overall rating: 6/10 Regarding other translated VN's I'm currently reading, I'm half through with Chrono Clock. Makoto's route was pretty good although a bit short. Misaki's and Michiru's routes felt really unnecessary and tagged on though, with a much lower quality than Makoto's route. They dragged quite a bit and it took me several breaks to dig through them. Currently at DD's route which I'm not sure yet how it'll turn out. But the VN certainly lives from its charming characters. Finished Kasumi's route in Dies which wasn't that great and getting to the end of Kei's route I think. Seems a bit better than Kasumi's, but it's still rather bland and predictable. I think I've never experienced a writer that had such a tendency to blather like in Dies. Ask anyone for directions and he'll just say "Just over there, 200 meters from here on the left side.", ask Masada and you get a half hour sermon about 'going against the forces or nature', 'wilth full spirit', 'even if it costs you your life', 'and never give up' and stuff like that - you get the picture. It's only possible to digest in small doses... -.- Also started with Fata Morgana and it's rather promising so far. In contrast to most others I didn't like the music at all and replaced it with the soundtrack from Beyond two Souls from Lorne Balfe which somehow fits the gothic atmosphere better. The original soundtrack also had too much (bad) singing and I find atmospheric music with singing horribly distracting. The sprites are good, the backgrounds... not - in half of the cases I can't even figure out what the background image is supposed to show. Oddly enough, as long as the sprites are good the weak backgrounds don't hurt the experience as much as I thought. But the writing is overall spot on so far and compensates for a lot of its other shortcomings.

Update: There's an issue with the way I remotely authenticate and access the server. I messaged @Nayleen and as soon as we get that resolved, I'll get themes and all forums software updated and, hopefully, "fixed." PSA: Rooke's Crappy Default Theme MAY be the "best working" theme at the moment, but it's gauche and sucks. It's not worth it. Do not listen to Rooke.

Randomly found this on Pixiv. Been a while since I've changed my wallpaper, so I decided to crop the black bars a little and set it. Source: https://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=9427&from_sid=2748886235 Cropped and resized for 1080p monitors: http://i.imgur.com/m0ZHOw6.png

I've seen people say they won't buy it because Sakura games suck.