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Actually, for some they already are, if you look at the discussions, especially after MG's "big shift" away from the galge market in recent years. It's probably too soon to say this but I'm also surprised that I feel like they are quickly becoming one of the best contenders on the market. Tight release schedule, actual release windows with which they seem to follow through, good announcements. I wasn't terribly excited about the first batch but Hello Lady and AoKana are as top-tier as it gets, save for something like FSN, KKK or SnU. Plus NekoNyan, despite the excessively silly name, seem like literally the only eroge localization company to plan things through. Hopefully they can keep it up, sell well and deliver.

SG+Sekai+Moenovel combines their power to destroy visual novels outside of Japan.

No matter how you look at it, those are two very notable announcements, I think having way more weight than any of the moege they licenced previously. If they can keep the quality high, they're on the right path to becoming everyone's second favourite VN localizer, just after MG. :3

I knew that recently we got so many worrying news in regard of Sakura Games, and to rub the salt in the wound MoeNovel/Pulltop decided to join the fun. So in order to dilute the anger, let's see what NekoNyan did tweet below (And to see of how cute Tsumugi was XD). As for announcement, we obviously still won't know what it is until the announcement. But apparently they decided to split it because apparently there'll be a lot to share, so I'm gonna look forward to this. Feel free to write what you think here. Announcement 1 (8/30) - Hello Lady! Many problems lie ahead for society in the 21st century. The best youths in the country are gathered at the super-elite Amakawa Noble School where they are trained to lead us to a brilliant future. They are led by five bishoujos known as ‘crowns’. One day, the leader of the crowns Saku was the target of a terrorist attack. She was saved by Shinri, who was invited to the school as the sixth crown. However, he is at odds with the school system. He vowed to do things under his accord and bring change to the school. Saku decided that she must keep an eye on him. Announcement 2 (8/31) - Aokana In a world where flying is as simple as riding a bicycle, there is a popular sport called “Flying Circus.” The protagonist once had a bright future ahead of him in that field of sports but due to an overwhelming defeat in addition to a certain other reason, he has left that field. However, he meets the transfer student Kurashina Asuka and regains his passion as he teaches her how to fly. With his situation changed, he participates once again in the Flying Circus. Just how high will he be able to fly this time with Asuka at his side? This is a love story about the two who met while soaring in the skies, and the friends surrounding them.

Well, this is a quick dirty edit. Because in Emote they use the dick to hide the background. So I improvised and added womans parts where there weren't any.

I'm 22 yrs old russian guy. Recently finished uni and been having a little break lately. I've started visual novels with everlasting summer about 4 years ago. I enjoyed it a lot and then decided to try fate stay night. My favorite VNs are Clannad and G-senjou no maou. Having finished virtue's last reward I've been disappointed in english translation (as it is made for slightly altered englisih voiceover) and so one year ago I've set out on an arduous quest of learning japanese on my own. Currently, I am reading Baldr Sky dive 1, which is my third vn in japanese. Finished second route yesterday. Like it a lot with all the mech battle mixups (btw last boss was op). Aiming to go for little busters after this series. Would like to read it in jp but ithvnr can't capture the steam version which complicates things. I'm shy and somewhat socially anxious, so I may not be very active in here, but it seems like a great place. Got my vndb link in profile if you want to know about my general preferences. I also do other gaming and watch anime every now and again with my favorites being angel beats and welcome to nhk. Hope I will get along with everyone and get a place to discuss things I read seeing as there's only one person I know who reads VNs and he only knows Russian, so I can't discuss most of it with him as not many VNs get translated to russian.

Well, IMHO Fureraba's TL was rather good. Editing would benefit from some more QC, as there were some typos and misspellings (like "other <> over" ), and of course the style is matter of taste, but it reads smoothly.

BDSM clothing!!! ヽ(´▽｀)/

ALL OF THEM!

Maybe transparent dicks? as no dicks would be a little weird in most scenes.

BIG surprise!

Works for me, even better than no dick. Quick and dirty edit was great.

Incredible, I don't know what else to say. Thank you so much for doing this.

Something we take for granted when reading a VN (unless it's a kinetic novel) is that it'll have several routes. The way the story splits and branches depends on the particular VN in question, so for example I've come across this recent thread about a "ladder structure" where at some points on the common route you decide whether to go for that heroine route or to stay in the common route until other chance presents itself for another heroine. When someone asks (or if someone asked you, if someone actually cared ) what is a VN and how is it different from reading a novel, you'd probably list some key features like: it has pictures and soundtrack, and sometimes voice acting; it's more focused on dialogue than prose... and most importantly, it has some interaction with the reader in that it allows you to pick some choices along the way that can dramatically change the outcome of the story, giving some videogame vibes to them. Is this last part really true though? I don't think so. Not in all the cases at least. It's undeniably true that picking one option or another does take you through a different story, but what I've noticed with the little experience I have with VNs is that those differences are usually not a natural consequence of the options you chose, and therefore I don't think calling those multiple stories "routes" branching off a main story is the correct term to use. A visual novel that has "true" routes would be one for which the differences between routes are fully explained by the choices the MC/s make/s, so that every other event that is not affected by the choices would still happen in the same way, even if only behind the scenes. This gives the VN a puzzle feeling to it, because different routes can share events which are seen form different perspectives or not seen at all, and it's the reader who must make sense of what's going on. Therefore it's no surprise that mistery VNs make the biggest use of this labyrinth-like structure, such as Higurashi. For other kinds of VNs however, this wouldn't even be practical. If every difference must logically follow from a choice, it'd leave very little room for big divergence, making all the routes very similar. That issue could be patched by having a huge number of possible choices, but that's not feasible from a production standpoint, not even for the big and mighty companies. For mistery VNs this isn't a problem at all though, since for the most part each route will be shrouded in mistery, being all the similarities among them the stepping stone to reconstruct the story, and the differences are either natural consequences of the different choices or a consequence of a change in perspective. It's just so perfect Obviously even if most VNs don't really have routes in the truest sense, the outcomes that don't logically follow from the choices are subtle enough that the reader won't even notice or even if they do, that it still feels like branches of the same story, rather than a collection of different stories that just happen to have the same setting and characters. How subtle they do this varies a lot though, and in some cases I've seen people complaining, like in g-senjou no maou's case for example. So let me open the discussion. Does it bother you whether there are or are not random changes among routes? Can you provide some examples of VNs that you believe have true routes and some that don't but do it well enough so it's almost imperceptible?

Yep. I like Fureraba's translation because I can just hear my younger sister's friends talking exactly like the teens in Fureraba. Not quite as ridiculous, but otherwise very similar to the typical choice of words and swearing every three that I am used to. I can't comment too much because I'm not a native, but I have little doubt that English-speaking high-schoolers speak like that to a greater extent than the mostly Japanese filtered manner in which such dialogue is usually translated.

Lack of proper romance!?!? Absolutely disgusting. Look at me just skimming those bullet points.

Could you maybe give a quick / rushed example of what that might look like? That actually sounds pretty awesome.

Some of Nekonyan translators were well known translator, so you didn't need to worry about machine translation here. Although I'm quite worry though with a lot of job for them there, but perhaps they may find a way to solve that. As for me, both of those were quite well known even when untranslated and a lot of request were given to the company. So it's nice to see that finally we got those two to be translated, especially in regard of Aokana in which it's been cursed even since Ren's outburst after he 'accidentally' delete the scripts (More like half a year after that though). Too bad though that Sekai didn't get Aokana, because I still think that Astro was the one who deserved to localized his friend's hard work lol, but it's not like I'll have the problem with whoever will translate this in the first place though. For the last word here, good luck to the team and hopefully the work will going well.

NekoNyanSoft are relatively new. They translated and released Fureraba back in March. Their next release will be Sanoba Witch this October. They do translate and sell VNs and they're handled by some native staff, though a lot of them are actually based in Europe. None of the machine translation nonsense, but they haven't put out many titles themselves to judge by. Only Fureraba thus far. At any rate, they have seven projects thus far, and a lot of them are popular stuff.

https://melissafolson.com/what-the-hell-is-urban-fantasy/

Another good news is that Chinese localizers are willing to cooperate with English ones. Who knows maybe soon we will have SakuraGames & Sekai duo

There's a lot of hype around Hello Lady! I might pick it up. Looks like a fun ride. Aokana looks a bit more like the usual VN fare. I don't think it's for me.

Well you can make your own introduction thread here though. Anyway, welcome to Fuwanovel and nice to meet you here as well. I hope that you'll have fun here, and feel free to ask some VN recommendations if you need it.

Steins;Gate felt pretty different rereading it. Not as amazing as when first read it, but I still really enjoyed it nonetheless. The plot twists and shocking moments didn't felt as impactful, of course, but some of the more emotional scenes still felt really effective, having better understanding of character motivations and such. I also came to appreciate the first half of Steins;Gate more than before. People often complain it's boring and pointless, but I feel like it's really on point with humor and how it characterises everyone, something which went unnoticed and was overshadowed by the rest of the story the first time through. Conversely the latter half, especially the chapters focusing on the side-characters, felt almost pointless at times reading them again.

like minds... :-) It's no wonder ittaku is aprilia1k's favorite translator...

Happy to have no dicks too.

Hello Lady is indeed good news. I'll almost certainly pick that up. Technically, I'd also be interested in Sakura Game's Fortissimo and Midori no Umi, but those translations are pretty hard to stomach, even for my lowly standards.

Having choices during the common route is all fine, but not when they're like "enter the hallway", "stay and wait", "go back home" etc and it's all a gamble who the choices corresponds to.

I have grand plans to reread Konosora, this time with the re translation and in preparation for Flight Diaries. HYPE.

Not in full - but I read Kotori's route in Konosora twice. First time I dropped the VN after it, 'cause Ageha's route was unreadable, and then when retranslation patch was released I read whole VN again.

You guys should read the whole thread. The announcement has been made already. So, the more sales that occur on Steam, the more visible your game is on their storefront. Sol Press is operating under the principle that the best way to maximize sales is to get as many people to buy the game on Steam as possible, thus enhancing its visibility on the storefront and making it more likely that other people will notice the game and buy it. There are a lot of people who are willing to buy games wherever they are, and if you release first outside of Steam, the hardcore fans will buy it outside of steam, and then you end up with fewer steam reviews, fewer community hub contributions and forum posts, and lower sales chart performance (and also will make it less likely that valve is willing to spotlight your game in special events and such, though that's always a crapshoot anyway). So, shepherding people to Steam first and foremost and then exploring other platforms later is a valid business strategy.

Don't worry about it. Well with the quote you have at least perserved the list in its current state which can be a bit fun for me to look back on after a while when more titles are added. On another note I would like to remove the only phone part of the list, seeing as it can be found in the quote I don't really feel like keeping it in the main list. The visual novels only released on phone are pretty much all otome games with almost no votes on vndb and due to the share amount of recently released ones are the worst part of the list to maintain If anyone wants it to be kept inn please say so, if I don't hear anything by the begining of next month I will remove it. Also I would like to note that I have no intention of removing anything other than the only phone part so be assured that all the other things are safe on the list.