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Visual Novel Translation Status (05/06/2018) Foreword - It's good that we finally have VNTS again, although currently admin Tay schedule is quite chaotic though so there's no guarantee that we'll gonna have VNTS next week, but at least Decay promised us that he'll do his best to keep VNTS alive even though he warn us that he might not be able to do that at every week. For the title, since we have Chuusotsu released back at almost two weeks ago, I decided to make this week review title as sort of the tribute for the title so we have 'Chuusotsu Graduation Album for this week, because any graduation should at least have some graduation album and Chuusotsu here it's not the exception - because after all they have Chuusotsu! 1st graduation as the game title. I knew that this week image header was Luce from Marrigae though. Of course what I'll be writing here is not the graduation album, but rather this week VNTS Review like usual. As for this week, well it's getting calmer after a bunch of releases at last week and this time we don't have any update from Sekai, but instead we got one release from JAST which is somehow balanced I guess. Lack of update from our Sekai, at least we still have updates from fan translation with Tsurezure be active again, so more or less it's just another usual week in regard of the update. Let's see what I can write for this week as well. While it's good that we finally have JAST give us the release, unfortunately it's not a bombastic title like Muramasa or Majikoi, or if we want to be more down to earth Flowers Summer. But instead what we got is that we have Sweet Home nukige which is their first release at 2018 here. Say whatever you like about JAST if you support them here, but the fact is that currently even Sekai was outrun JAST with the releases here. Not to mention that Sekai's Fatal Twelve is certainly more interesting compared to Sweet Home. Granted comparing nukige to shoujo ai story VN is just like comparing apple and orange, but what I want to say is that even Sekai managed to JAST beat at this year in term of releases, and let's not compare Mangagamer to JAST here in which the former did release more interesting nukige (Sideboob). Back to Sweet Home, the premise is just an university student MC going back to his home because his apartment is burnt and find out that his house became girls boarding house, and MC managed to have sex with the girls whose boarding there. Have fun though if you interested with Sweet Home nukige. As for Momoclo Steam version, finally Frontwing did have the exact date for the release and it'll be at tomorrow so just in case you want Steam version may as well note the date. Other than Momoclo, Frontwing also delayed Sharin release to this month although for now they still won't be so sure about that though, hopefully they'll be able to sort out the release date. As for Tayutama 2, once again very unexpectedly the release was delayed and this time apparently it would be released at this month, in which obviously we don't know if it'll become true or not. We also have Venus Blood Frontier KS, which apparently still in planning so for now we didn't know whether it'll be successful or not - keep in mind that KS usually quite adverse with sex scenes, and Venus Blood franchise is quite infamous with tentacle rape (They released English demo as the translation sample). There's Princess Maker 5 released at Steam as well, and I can only say it's redundant release because we already have it released as fan translated VN. For the last updates, we have Fureraba released at Steam store in which too bad that there's no PSV exclusive CG ported to the Steam version. Nekonyan also have stated that they'll focusing on working at both of Hello Good Bye (HGB) and Sanoba so that they'll be able to release those two VNs in certain months (HGB for August and Sanoba for October). If anything, even if they say that the current release month was delayed from their previous targets, at least now we have almost exact release date so we didn't need to wildly guess as much as before - they'll probably going for the months end in regard of the release time. We have Eustia was at 41.07% translated along with 29.62% edited and 29.25% TLC-ed, Loverable was at 37.47% edited, Harugi's prologue was at 92% translated and one third (33%) edited, Pure Pure Hinata's route was at 81.66% translated and overall was at 72.66% translated, and Witch Garden was at 45% translated. As for LxC 2, unfortunately our Quof right now is swamped with a lot of official projects (Five VNs translation projects for the record) and not to mention that his hacker was recently is getting busier, so as for now LxC 2 is stalled for time being (I just hope that Quof will find the solution for his problem). For the last news, finally after one month and half of absence we have Tsurezure released HatsuKoi append which translate both of Kyou's and Maya's short after story, and for their next plan they'll going to do some rereading + a bit re-TLC at HatsuKoi first translated routes (Common, Midori's and Runa's) alongside their work to translated Yukino's short after story. After all of those finished, they'll going with their work to translate Hoshiori in which personally I hope it'll be happen in near future. That's all for this week VNTS Review, and see you next week. PS - In regard of Higurashi PS3 exclusive arc port, congratulation on Tsukiotoshi patch release and for the next work the translator will work on Taraimawashi which apparently is a short arc. The translator said that it'll be possible if he managed to release Taraimawashi patch by the end of June here.

I seconded Fureraba here, and if you want more comedy VN then you can try both of Noble Works and Dracu Riot. Other than that, if you somehow into very violent tsundere girls who like to abuse MC, then you can try Ikikioi as well. Hope my recommendations will be helpful to you.

I second Grisaia no Kajitsu. It made me cry tears of utter mental suffering―such was its terribleness.

MirrorMoon's fantranslations are pretty grammatically-challenged, from what I recall... and I can say from working on fixing it that Dracu-riot (the version you must have played) had a lot of problems. I'd say about one third of all fantranslations have a translator who is constantly referring to his dictionary and has trouble grasping context clues... or is just grammatically challenged (even if his Japanese understanding is just fine). All of the Eushully games that have patches are basically 'modified machine translations'. The professional scene has gotten better in some ways, worse in others. SP and Mangagamer are producing a consistent level of quality these days... but I still recall the original localizations of Edelweiss, Da Capo, and Suika (think ATLAS machine translations with no attempt to fix the grammar). These days, we are more likely to see that kind of crap out of new companies than the older ones (though Moenovel seems to be incapable of doing anything right) as the Libra and Chuusingura translations show.

Japanese has a super rich vocabulary. Even the most confident translators would often look up words in translations, sometimes just for confirmation, but not infrequently simply because they've never encountered the word before or it's being used in a context that they've never seen it used before thus confirming what other possible uses of the word there may be. From what I've read, most tertiary educated native speakers know approximately 50,000 words. Literature, depending on complexity, often uses infrequently used words for colour, and even native speakers will encounter words they've never seen before - often they can surmise the meaning simply from context simply because it is their native language, but not always. Guessing at a word's meaning is not accurate enough for translation. By the time one is fluent in a second language, they usually know about 10,000 words. The likelihood of needing a dictionary is still high at that level, yet they clearly have the knowledge to translate. The most famous Japanese dictionaries have almost 500,000 words in them...

In March I've brought you two interviews with notable yuri and otome OELVN developers, talking with Nami and Reine Works' founder, Jackie M. Today, however, we're venturing into the world of very, very traditional romance (with equally high levels of cuteness), as my guest is ds-sans, the author of a lovely freeware VN Sounds of Her Love (be sure to check my review of that game) and the upcoming commercial title Chemically Bonded. I encourage you to join us as we discuss the place of all-ages romance in the VN scene, the role of voice acting in OELVNs and more. Plk_Lesiak: Welcome and thank you for accepting my invitation! While many people in the VN community might recognize your nick, they probably don’t know much beyond that. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? ds-sans: I wouldn't really say that I'm that interesting. I'm currently an undergraduate student at university in the UK studying geography, with an interest in anime and related media in my spare time. (Although, that's died down in recent years.) If I were to describe my current background, it'd be fairly cliché, just like the stories of my VNs. I started developing VNs in 2015, while I was 16, but really showed an interest in January 2014. I didn't make it that far though and only really came back to it to prove that I could do something if I tried. PL: Sooo... Where did the "ds-sans" label come from? ds: In all honesty, I don't think the name really means anything. From what I remember, I think I honestly scrambled a few letters together from a car's registration plate, but this was a good 4 years ago. To clarify though, it has nothing to do with Japanese honorifics at least. I'd only started getting into anime a few months prior and still had no clue as to their usage. The story itself isn't that special, but the name stuck and at this point, I feel that it's too late to change it. PL: You create rather tame, cute romances in a market that seem to reward ecchi and h-content over anything else. Why this formula? ds: Pure romance novels have always been very diverse in the EVN industry, in my opinion. From what I've personally seen, many of the tamer romance titles are either a lot more Western in style or are low-scale non-commercial in nature and target a different audience. As far as I'm aware, there are relatively few commercial B x G titles with no 18+ content which take significant influence from Japanese VNs. Reading Clannad was really influential in my decision to focus on cute romance stories as I wanted to emphasize emotional connections between people over physical. If I were to add scenes like that into the stories, they'd need to supplement that motive as opposed to attracting more sales or getting people off. Katawa Shoujo is a good example of a VN which does h-scenes in this way. It's the formula which my inspiration is driven from, but it's not as if I'm not open to expanding into different genres for different audiences in the future. Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

This is the latest release by Saga Planets, the makers of Hatsuyuki Sakura and Natsuyume Nagisa. This, like many of the games by this company, is an emotional game that sort of edges around being a straight-out charage, though it can't really be called a story-focused or a true nakige. This kind of genre ambiguity is common to this company's better works, so in that sense, it probably wasn't a bad choice, overall. First, I should say I skipped Akane's path. I played the first three heroine paths and enjoyed them, but Akane's path was so... cliched that I had to skip it after the midpoint. I was also impatient to get to Ria's path, lol. Anyway, this game begins with Ichimatsu Ouro, the protagonist, encountering the princess of a fictional north-European superpower, and her dragging him to a school for elites as a result. I'll be straight with you about this... disregard the getchu page info entirely. Even the best of the info there is misleading, probably deliberately. Anyway, Ouro, who was looking to get away from his life anyway, takes advantage of entering the new school, getting along with Sylvia, Elle (Sylvia's bodyguard), Rena (a friendly fashionista who is also Sylvia's friend), and Ria (a smoker and delinquent girl he meets on the rooftop) while managing to gradually make his own niche at a school mostly full of rich people. Now, it needs to be said... there should have been an Ayaka path in this game. Ayaka is a snarky little ass at the beginning, but she would have made a great heroine. Moreover, it was rather obvious that the writer wanted her to be one (there are lots of elements that could turn her deredere at a moment's notice), so I'm expecting an FD with an Ayaka route, later, lol. Getting back to the rest of the game (I'm writing this at nine in the morning, after not sleeping to finish it), Sylvia's path is easily the strongest of the three heroines that are available from the beginning. Part of this is because of her generally affectionate nature, part of it is because of her position in life (Princess with insanely loyal followers), and part of it is because she is just that great of a character in general. Her path actually has two different endings, depending on whether you've seen Ria's ending or not. The second ending is basically an additional epilogue based several years after the end of the story, and it is obvious to see why you needed to see it only after seeing Ria's ending. Elle... is the classic straight-laced heroine that goes insanely deredere once she falls in love. I honestly enjoyed her path immensely, even as I felt they were stretching credulity a bit with some of the twists and turns (based on Elle's personality, I honestly couldn't see her making some of the choices she did, even with Sylvia's encouragement). Nonetheless, if you want to see a seemingly hard-edged woman go all soft and mushy, this is a great path. Rena... is the classic 'close friends suddenly become lovers' path. The beginning of their romantic relationship is hilarious and the lead up into the ending is excellent, with a perfect epilogue, given the path they chose in life. I will say that this is the only path where the protagonist stands up to his recent past in its entirety, so in that sense, it is perhaps the most complete of the paths up to this point. Ria's path... is the game's main path. Ria herself is not much of a delinquent... for all that she is foul-mouthed and a smoker, she is at the same time kind-hearted and very much at ease with the protagonist after a few initial bumps. However, for her path... this is the path that threatens to define this game as a nakige... with good reason. If you paid attention to the extensive foreshadowing in the other heroine paths, you will probably be able to figure out what the core crisis of this path is, but this is also the path where Ouro shows himself at his best, right to the very end. Now, I need to go into Ouro, which I normally would have done first. Ouro is mostly your average guy... save for the fact that he is insanely thoughtful and good in a crisis. However, what is stronger about him is that he generally knows when he is at his limit and finds someone to lean on at the right times, without going all dependent and whiny. That said, I really, really, really wish they hadn't made him of average-level intelligence and lazy when it comes to studying. That particular trope is one I wish they'd chop up then wash down the drain in pieces, forever. Overall, this is an enjoyable game... the foreshadowing for Ria's path is a bit excessive, Akane's path was unnecessary, and this game needed an Ayaka path... However, this was still a fun game to play. I left this game behind with a feeling of satisfaction, and, if I still keep going back to wanting an Ayaka path (yes, I do), I'm sure Saga Planets will eventually oblige, lol. Edit: I should also mention that the reason Akane's path is not enjoyable is primarily because it doesn't 'fit'. It doesn't fulfill a need the others don't, and Akane herself pales compared to the other heroines. Worse, she is the only girl with a sprite who doesn't fit into that close 'circle' they have going, so there is almost no development of her character outside her own path. In addition to Ayaka, this game could have also used a Mina path, if only because Mina (Sylvia's little sister) is so obviously on the edge of falling for the protagonist anyway in several of the paths... in the sense that a woman who loves 'reforming' men falls in love with one of her projects, lol.

He did a very, very good job at editing it (very thorough). The reason machine translations became such a huge stigma later on was because of later abortive efforts by others, including the aforementioned incidents with Edelweiss, where the machine translations were basically presented without any grammatical fixes at all. Of course, what he did was a full TLC/edit, but the fact is he based it off a machine translation. I played it, and while - from a purely translation point of view - it has issues, as reading material, it is mostly just fine. He ran extensive fixes for internal consistency, and he made a serious effort to make it readable in general. A lot of the reason why it was so successful was because Kamidori, in general, is not one of the harder Eushully games linguistically (I wouldn't want to see him make the same effort with IMZ, for instance). There is little attempt at the kind of large-scale world-building you see in IMZ or the later games by Eushully, and the story itself is relatively straightforward and is not a 'heroic epic' like the IM games, so the narration is more simplistic. Understand, the reason most translators bash attempts at machine translation (other than elitism) is because the people who are using them don't have the Japanese or the English skills necessary to know when the output they are getting is wrong and/or needs modification. That wasn't the case with the Kamidori fantranslation... and at the time, nobody really cared it was based off of MTL. After all, it was a readable VN at a time when the localization industry was basically JAST and the nascent MG.

Trying to be Sadness- now? smh

I'm a 37-38 year old man, who is very difficult to make cry ever. Though apparently, I'm more sentimental then I thought... Here's a few VN's that have managed to do so... Grisaia no Kajitsu https://vndb.org/v5154 . My first VN, and the first (and second) time I ever cried playing a game. One scene reduced me into a sobbing mess of despair, the other was an amazing bittersweet ending (the type that is typical in KEY novels). And one certain flashback will probably haunt you. Don't let the over the top comedy (in the common route), and the loveable sex crazed cast fool you... Clannad https://vndb.org/v4 . If THIS doesn't milk your tears dry, I don't know what will. I cried over 25 times reading this (probably more then I did in my entire life). Pretty much anything made by KEY will milk you for tears... Both of those are really long though (especially Clannad).

I am hoping I am wrong here but I have been looking for one, because I recently made one just now. So, do we have a discord server or not? If so, I would like to be invited please If not, why not make one?

Planetarian from me. It's really short, but still great. Actually, gives an example to the other Key VNs that you don't need to be 100 hours long to be emotional and have a meaningful story. Other than that, Narcissu probably won't make you cry, but it'll almost certainly make you feel like shit.

Yay! Two catgirl harems in one month!!! lol Anyway, this is the newest game by Moonstone's crappy subsidiary, Moonstone Honey. It is a straight-out catgirl harem moege from beginning to end... which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The game is set on an island that has been completely built up with leisure facilities of various types (amusement park, pool, beach, a mall, etc), and the protagonist is a young man in his early twenties who is given a chance to take charge of resurrecting the stagnant pool business. I'm going to be blunt (as usual) here... there really isn't a lot to this VN except endless ichaicha between the protagonist and the three catgirls. The protagonist accepts the catgirls' presence and change to a human form with relative ease, and within a few days, he has them working part time at the indoor pool he is running. While problems pop up along the way, they are solved quickly and with relative ease, and the girls make the transition from 'just pets' to his harem rather early on (albeit without h-scenes). The catgirls' names are Mikan, Lime, and Lemon. Mikan is the innocently affectionate type, constantly trying to be helpful and showing her love for her master in an honest and straightforward manner. Lime is a mischievous type, showing her affection and trust by teasing and playing small pranks on the people she likes. Lemon is... a classic tsundere. Don't expect a real story or any kind of drama in this game. The whole point of the game is to enjoy the ichaicha between the protagonist and the catgirls, so there isn't a whole lot extra outside of that. How the girls transformed is never explained (in fact, it is pretty much forgotten ten seconds after they first emerge), and there is no step-up of affection from them toward the protagonist, as they already love him pretty much from the beginning (it just changes to romantic love later on). This is a kinetic novel, the choices only deciding whether you see a CG or not. There is no H content during the main part of the game, but the rather long after story contains about twelve h-scenes for those who are interested. Overall, if you just want some catgirl harem action, this is a decent choice, but if you don't want what amounts to an old-style moege (not a charage) this probably isn't a good choice.

The demo encompassing the first day of Welcome Week is out! There is an 18+ version and 16+ version. Itself is still unpolished, and I admit that I had rushed it out. All assets have now been acquired. The music tracks were the last assets I was waiting for and it was certainly worth the wait. The composers did a fantastic job and I couldn't be happier. The next step of the journey for me now is to continue working on the game for the full release.

Why Is Denuvo Anti-consumer? If you have a problem with your payment method on a later game purchase, your account will be disabled blocking all your Denuvo games from working. Steam support is notoriously slow to respond so your account may be disabled for weeks or months. Supporting the ability of platforms to disable your entire game library is anti-consumer. Denuvo stops games from supporting Linux or OS X. Not only do the publishers not release ports, but using Denuvo means third parties like the Wine project can't support them either. Games like Inside, the sequel to Limbo, are an example of Denuvo stopping Linux support. Limbo supported Linux and OS X, and Inside is built using Unity engine which can easily make Linux builds. But because they are using Denuvo, it can't be played on any other operating system. Another example is Doom 2016. The beta version worked great on Linux when used with Wine project. But the final release came encumbered with Denuvo, effectively stopping Wine from supporting the game on Linux and OS X. Preventing games from working on other operating systems is anti-consumer. Denuvo games require reactivation if you haven't played them in a while or if you change any of your computer's hardware, and you must authenticate with Denuvo servers every time you receive an update (Simply allowing Steam to update is not enough. You must also open the game once while connected to the internet after each update). They don't require always online, but they do require sometimes online. Some people don't believe this, so here's proof: This is from a user that left it in offline mode for a week or so and didn't play it. This wasn't their first launch. Denuvo makes it difficult or impossible to play games without some form of internet connection. Sure lots of people have internet connections, but not everyone does. Requiring an internet connection for offline single-player games is anti-consumer. If your internet drops without preparing for offline beforehand you can't play your Denuvo crapware. If at some point in the future any part of their DRM service chain is shut down due to internet outage or a company going bankrupt, games will be inaccessible. Some people reply "but surely these companies will provide a method access if they are shutting down servers!" If a company is in bankruptcy and there's an outcry to get patches out for 15 year old games, I doubt they're going to make it a priority to devote resources and development time to creating patches. It wouldn't be the first time a library of DRM-encumbered crapware went poof. Remember the single-player game Darkspore? It is impossible for anyone to play it anymore. Neither pirates nor customers can play it. They didn't release a patch to make it work offline. Here's what it shows up as on Origin: Supporting an ecosystem which could disappear your games is anti-consumer. In many cases after an online game has their servers shut down, modders can get the online portion working again by modifying the executable to work with a new master server list. With Denuvo, when EA says the online fun is over that's the end of it because modders won't be able to fix the game. That's anti-consumer. Having Denuvo on your games means that if a game comes out that's Oculus Rift only and has strong anti-tamper protections, you'll have no way to ever get it working on other VR platforms. Anti-consumer vendor lock-in. Denuvo locks you into your purchase platform for now to eternity. If you purchase a Denuvo game on Steam, you must use Steam forever or abandon your purchases to the wind. If your Steam account gets hacked or locked, your games are gone, because they were never really yours, and you never really even had a copy of them. You can't make playable back-ups of your games. This isn't helping the consumer. A large point of Denuvo is to enable vendors and publishers to lock down the functionality of their games and provide them with a simplified means of doing all the bad anti-consumer things they've always wanted to do. While Denuvo copy protection may not in and of itself do the something bad ("see Denuvo does nothing wrong!") it enables the publishers to do it. Source: Why Is Denuvo Bad? by Lexarie

There is, actually.

This is the second game in the 9 -nine- series, a half-chuunige series that began last year. For my comments on the first game, look below. I'm going to be blunt... all my complaints about the previous game in the series still apply here. While a little more information is revealed in the second game than the first, and two of the characters (Haruka and Sora) come to life a great deal more than in the first game, it has to be said that the sense that I should have waited for all the games in the series to come out before I played it is unchanged. Oh, I liked Sora as a heroine (the interplay between her and the protagonist is frequently worthy of laughs). However, I absolutely hated the way it trailed off at the end, right after revealing something of absolute importance. The battle scene in this one (there is precisely one worthy of the name) is good, and the writing (of course) is first-class... but playing a game like this in pieces is immensely frustrating.

Usually when I cry it's more from tears of happiness than sadness, especially when there is a real heartwarming moment. With that being said, there were quite a few moments In My Love Story that really made me tear up. Especially that one moment with Takeo and the fire. Oh and Yusuke's funeral scene in the very first episode of Yu Yu Hakusho makes me cry every time I see it. That scene really helped me out of some real dark moments.

The very first novel i read was Katawa Shoujo, i guess i became experienced right from the get to go :p.

Pretty fucking awful, right? And you watched it all in one go? Jesus, your eyes were probably the size of golf balls by the time the last credits rolled on.

For me, no matter how compact or lightweight the DRM is, I can always notice it. The starting up of the game is already a big giveaway given that a DRM-protected game needs to go through additional steps to connect, authenticate, and decrypt all necessary files to be able to run. For DRMs that require you to be online in order to continuously authenticate, you will notice that the constant authentication will eat up network bandwidth along with CPU power and memory... wasting resources that could be better used on the game itself. It doesn't have a noticeable effect with slow 2D or 2.5D games like most VNs, but it will for games that demand intense graphical and computation power.

how about "for busy people" series??? thats definetely not moege

A room full of crumpled tissues

Autism and/or a two-digit number of anti-mainstream reviews on Fuwanovel.net.

DRM can just die (for the most part at least). Sharing is human nature. Information (and culture) exists to be free. No one will tell me otherwise.... Yeah, not the most objective post from me. But that's how I feel.