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First, apologies to those who actually want to read about some of August's releases. I went on vacation (vacation being a word open to interpretation when it comes to sleeping in unfamiliar beds and helping with my brother's kids), and when I got back, I found I had absolutely no urge whatsoever to pick up a VN. I guess that taking a true break from VNs for the first time in almost a decade (no VNs for five days straight) was enough to free me from the spell of my obsession. That said, Jinkou Bato was pretty amusing, so I had every intention of getting back to it, eventually. This game is based fifty years in the future, fifteen years after a disaster caused by technology (deliberately) gone wrong wiped out the global internet and reduced people to using wires and letters to communicate. This disaster was caused by artificial lifeforms based on the pigeon that originally served as self-replicating flying antennas. The maker of these 'artificial pigeons' made them begin to 'eat' radio and electromagnetic waves, literally stopping all signals not passed through a wire. This resulted in innumerable deaths, and it was such a huge economic and technological blow that the characters of the story are quite aware of how they live in a much-reduced world. Sora, the protagonist, is an orphan who hates the artificial pigeons more than anyone, as he lost his parents the day of the disaster. Living with this adopted family, he succeeds in building a set of radios that can communicate with one another without being stopped by the pigeons, and from there the story begins. Mmm... I'm going to be straight about my feelings on this game. First, I like the character dynamics. There is a lot to laugh about early on, and the intensity of Sora and friends when they make a certain discovery is pleasing to me, as I'm a bit tired of characters living without a sense of purpose in my VNs, lol. That Sora and the others are college students at a vocational university rather than high schoolers is nice as well... and an adult heroine who is bisexual is also nice, hahaha. That said, both Mizuki's and Akina's paths are weaker than the Tsubaki and Kaguya paths due to the fact that only Tsubaki's and Kaguya's paths actually confront the central issues head on. Mizuki's and Akina's paths both stink of escapism, and while that is fine on its own... it left me feeling a sense of distaste for the characters involved (yes, I want my characters to be better or stronger people than me). Tsubaki and Kaguya's paths are the true path. No, I'm not saying that they are separately the true path... rather, together they form a single path, in a really weird (if familiar from other otaku media) way. The path is... extremely emotional, and I honestly felt that Sora, from beginning to end, fulfilled his potential as a character... something that is pretty unusual for VN protagonists in general. Lets be clear, this isn't a kamige or even VN of the Year material. This is a nakige with a great main path and two so-so side paths. I say 'great', but the game's pace is really fast after the initial, lighter stages of the story. That said, there is no sense of choppiness to the pacing, and it feels like the events actually occur in the time you see them happen in the game (less than two months), as there are no excess SOL scenes whatsoever. If you want a relatively quick nakige with some amusement early on, this is a good choice. I honestly can't recommend it for someone who wants a grand and sweeping opera, though.

Hello, I'm new here and I'm willing to help anyone need of translator (especially Japanese), I got 18 hours a day to translate and 20 hours on weekends.

I personally think that VNs are simply not a good formula for horror, at least not the "scary" type - you can have suspenseful moments in an average-lenght VN, but you can't reasonably keep it like that all the way through like you could with a movie. "Disturbing", on the other way, is something that VNs can do amazingly well, as evident by Saya no Uta, Lynne, Soundless, or even Clock Up titles (I don't think calling euphoria or Maggot Baits horrors would not be that much of a stretch). So, you'll more often see good VNs with horror themes/elements than straight up horrors, unless it's some kind of short, indie stuff. Also, what others said is very valid - it's moe and ero content that sells, you have some niche fetishes that work with horror, but generally, it's not what's the most profitable or "safest" to make.

Issue with Germany is about lack of proper age verification on Steam - from what I read you need a third party, reliable system to legally sell porn in Germany, to make sure it can't be purchased by minors - not the kind of law that many companies would care about, knowing how internet works, but I imagine both Valve and publishers would rather play it safe at this point.

Yes I have 67% efficiency in translating Japanese to English, and I can increase it to at most 73% in certain circumstances.

Thank you for your inputs, As far as we plan to do we are planning to make this game better and better. of course we don't plan to rework everything from ground up. from the inputs we get about story, events, and anything we get from this game. we will try to input these to the next game. *after all if we fix everything in comments we will not release any games even though we are still learning we hope for your assistance in these points. Thank you

There isn't just a lack of horror VN's, there is a lack of story VN's in general. Most VN developers seem to stick to an annual release cycle nowadays, because a longer development time is usually too expensive and risky. And creating a 'good' story VN with decent length in just one year is almost impossible to do, especially since you also need a skilled writer for that. But a typical slice of life VN with little to no plot, but backed up by some decent H-scenes can be easily produced in one year and you don't necessarily need a particular talented writer for it - just a good artist. And story VN's often don't sell that well, which is another problem. Just look at Innocent Grey's list of releases on VNDB. KnS1 and especially KnS2 did take several years to make, but with their yuri series Flowers, they changed to a fixed annual release cycle as well, while KnS3 is in development for probably more than five years now. It's not hard to guess that they use Flowers to finance KnS3. And Innocent Grey is already one of the more popular story VN producers. Others like Propeller already did bite the dust. There's probably a better chance for shorter story/horror VN's like Saya no Uta nowadays, but that doesn't change the fact that some cheaply produced moeges still sell even better.

Holy shit we recorded this back when Summer Pockets had just come out. Anyway, in this lovely podcast me, @babiker, @Zander, and @Barry Benson (rip in permaban) talk about fan TL today (spoiler: it's dead, or maybe it's not dead, or maybe it's complicated). Then we talk about the past and present of today's Fuwanovel. Turn up the volume when bee speaks, he can't into audio editing.

The koi series: Kirikoi Yuukoi Amekoi FloralFlowkoi Irotoridori no Sekoi

Hmm I've heard that VNs and even anime are not a good medium for terror a lot, and yeah, I agree to a certain degree, but I think it also depends on how you are to define "terror". There's also the fact that what is scary or not obviously is a completely subjective experience, so I can only speak for myself. Honestly I don't think I've ever consumed any form of media or literature that I found genuinely scary. Fear is a very strong emotional response to a threat or danger, and there's no way in hell I'm gonna feel threatened reading some piece of fiction. That's not to say that I can't feel uneasy and uncomfortable on my seat reading something that is meant to be scary. In that sense, I can't see why VNs can't be as effective as your typical novel. Anime is different in my opinion. One reason people often give for its uneffectiveness in terror is that the animation makes it easier to separate between reality and fiction, and I tend to agree. VNs however don't have that constraint since they can decide what to show at any moment and what to leave in the dark or up to the descriptive narrative. The only thing that isn't really available to VNs are obviously the freaking jumpscares you see in Hollywood movies, but yeah, that's a very cheap and shabby way to scare people. There's absolutely no merit in that. So TL;DR, as for me a piece of fiction can only make me uneasy, and both VNs and books have accomplished that, I can't really understand where people are coming from when they say they don't get the same reaction from VNs compared to other mediums. Another different matter is the fact that there are not many terror VNs (translated, at least) in comparison to other genres like fantasy, sci-fi or romance, but I don't know if it's necessarily because the medium is less suited for terror

First showing of the space shuttle called Enterprise, 42 years ago today.

Nah, I bought first episode, but I think I'll wait until it's complete. I know, there are some VNs (mostly moeges) that are internally divided into anime-like "episodes" (Princess Evangile, Heart de Roommate, Koi iro Chu! Lips etc), but releasing each such episode as separate "game" is too much for me

I'm a huge fan of those. Your game looks nice and I see a lot of effort being put into everything. Sadly, there seems to be not much that could actually interest me enough to even give it a try. If you're willing to listen to feedback, let me tell you this. One of the biggest pet peeves of the industry is that monster girls genre relies too much on fetishism and erotic content, instead of trying to tell stories. I'd say 90% of games and vns including monster girls are typically rpgs or rpg maker porn games and it became stale years ago. I don't mind them being fetish fuel (it's only understandable from such perspective) and there's nothing wrong with porn either, but it's about time devs should try to actually start telling interesting stories, or at least try to incorporate those into the gameplay. Old folks like me get bored with the same exact thing being done over and over again. I'd like to see more games, that bring something new to the table. I think monster girls are an interesting subject for fantasy-based stories, which could discuss interracial relationships, racism and prejudice or even practical outcomes from such beings existing alongside other races (obviously, we're talking about us - humans - most of the time). It's definitely something that gives a lot of space and freedom for really interesting tales to be told and more or less - something I truly root for.

"I'm currently translating a game. It's a good visual novel but I can't remember it's name." Zakamutt 2018

Had a phase where I was obssessed with romance stories, mostly manga. A shit ton of good romance mangas end quickly, and if they dont end quickly, it's probably because there's no progress in the story at all(Not that i'm saying everything is like this but mostly). Got tired of the medium and heard about visual novels where the romance is actually more involved as a reader and most importantly, actually has a proper progression where I also don't have to wait every week for a new upload. Heard about routes and choices which at that moment I was also a fan of choose your own adventure games and it was a mix of all the things I wanted. For some reason I don't remember, even if my goal was playing romance vn's, I played fate/stay night first which was the start of my jump into the abyss of VN's.

Hello again. From now on, I'll be doing bi-weekly updates for you guys. Now, let's get into the updates. Translation Prologue - 100% (1791/1791) Main School - 100% (2691/2691) Tonoko Route - 64% (5549/8709) Branch School - 27% (1587/5846) Total - 17% (11618/68206) TLC Prologue - 100% (1791/1791) Main School - 6% (157/2691) Branch School - 3% (187/5846) Total - 3% (2135/68206) Edit Prologue - 100% (1791/1791) Main School - 6% (157/2691) Branch School - 18% (1051/5846) Total - 4% (2970/68206) As you can see, TL progress is still consistently going up and @Pomelo is working hard on editing. We are still looking for a permanent TLC to work on this project. Please PM me if you're interested in working as a TLC for this project. That's all for this week. See you in a couple of weeks for another progress update.

Finally on my new PC build! Hooray! Gotta finish putting on essential programs, then I'm re-downloading MUV-LUV...

Man, that would be nice to see Kara No Shoujo on steam. It would probably do pretty well with it's distinguishing art style and all. Well I am actually glad at something steam has done for once unless they completely reverse course again like they have done constantly like some kind of bipolar asshole. The unfortunate thing is that steam will really start seeming like another dlsite and a lot of the quality vns will get buried under porn garbage.

Hello, new person! ... It might be a strange question, but are you a bee? Or THE Bee?