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So I'm sure most of you have realized by now that I've finished translating the main story . Never had I translated something faster than any other parts of the story, also because I knew that I was at the last stretch at least for the main story. So now, all that's left is translating the side stories/appendix stories. I will be translating the side stories while the rest of my team handle the editing and QC of the main story, so chances are, I might finish translating the side stories as well before they finished their editing and QC of the main story. My original plan was to release another partial patch covering just Saint Irene's chapter and fixes for Eris' chapter, but seeing that I'm done translating the main story, I might hold out until we're done with everything, including the side stories. But yeah, either way, milestone achieved! Yay!

'Tis a glorious day, for Sprite has announced that they will resume operations! They mention that they want to work on Aokana EXTRA2, and I assume this means the Aokana sequel might be resurrected as well. So, without further ado, let's Announcement (in Japanese)

Amazing work. And yes, it's best to hold off until everything is ready ^^

There were few EVNs in the last few years that I’ve seen seriously hyped up by other VN fans and brought to my attention through multiple recommendations and positive reviews – particularly beyond titles by a handful of relatively well-known and respected creators such as ebi-hime. The game I’ll be writing about today, Soundless -A Modern Salem in Remote Area-, is one of such exceptions, enthusiastic opinions about which intrigued me to a major degree, even though it ended up being two years before I finally picked it up. And this is not where the curious and unusual things about it end: this freeware visual novel was released in late 2017 by a small circle under the name of Milk+ and is heavily influenced by the denpa subgenre of horror – one reliant on distortion of reality and chains of bizarre events, true meaning of which is usually hidden under multiple layers of mystery. It mimics extremely well the visual style and climate of the early 2000s’ Japanese games, offering a now rarely-seen call-back to parts of visual novel history highly nostalgic to many fans. And thankfully, there’s a lot more to it than just the interesting stylisation and riding on memories of the past… Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

Maggot Baits is something of a Holy Grail of dark eroge, highly anticipated guro fans within the Western VN community and often hyped as possibly the greatest achievement of the company that produced it, Clock Up. As one the most gruesome VNs ever produced, and quite likely the most brutal one ever brought to the West, it contains dozens upon dozens of violent sex scenes, all accompanied by intricate CGs, with small variations in them so numerable that they sum to nearly 2500 unique illustrations. All of that placed in a highly-unique, modern-fantasy setting populated by amazingly-crafted characters and tackling interesting philosophical and religious topics. While it’s pretty much the furthest possible thing from what I usually write about on this blog, few games intrigued me as much as this one, particularly after my inconsistent, but extremely interesting experience with Clock Up’s another famous title, euphoria. Everything I’ve heard about Maggot Baits suggested that it was both more extreme and overall better than studio’s other bestseller, and after reading it to completion, I felt the need to share my thoughts about it in detail. Both because it’s a pretty fascinating case of strengths and pitfalls of this breed of eroge, and to warn those interested in it as a piece of storytelling – while in many ways an incredible achievement, this game is extremely hard to recommend for a “normie” reader such as myself. Why is that exactly? Before I go into story details, it’s most important to deal with Maggot Baits’ greatest issue – its structure and general storytelling formula. This game is, at its core, a guro nukige and it’s incredibly dedicated to this template. It throws h-scenes at you at very consistent intervals, disregarding whatever might be going on in the story and sacrificing any sense of pacing or tension so it can constantly offer a new piece of violent hentai. Quite often, the scenes are not important for, or even directly connected to what’s happening in the plot, pretty much pausing the whole narrative to insert a new piece of fanservice. In this, it goes even further than euphoria, which did a much better job intertwining its scenes with the story and had a bit more restraint in the most dramatic and meaningful parts of the plot. Maggot Baits even goes to the length of adding a major side-branch in the first chapter of the story, which is nothing but 3-4 hours of futanari porn leading to a bad ending. All of it narratively empty and pretty much derailing your experience if you expect any kind of interesting reveals or a meaningful conclusion within it. I still don’t understand why it was a part of the main story, and especially inserted so early in the game, before you build any connection to the characters involved or can understand the full implications of what is happening in those scenes. Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

the wind effect in the when they cry series, specially in Ciconia where there's no voice acting to distract you from it

After two long as hell main games and two equally long fandisks, the Majikoi H-scene music made me go insane. It's probably gone by now since years have past, but there used to be a time where I wanted to disable my brain by hitting it into my keyboard over and over. I ended up getting traumatized in my early days, I always turn the Video volume down to 10% or otherwise I'm afraid a cacophony is going to give me tinnitus. Other than that, I also disable system voices and loud menu-sounds, because they just annoy me as a notorious right-clicker and backlog checker.

VNDB being full of shit again... How can the VN be labeled "Medium (10 - 30 hours)" if you have a whooping 60k+ lines?! For comparison purposes, Miazora is around 45k lines (labeled "long" on VNDB), and the most complete version of Cocoro Function is around 57k of lines (also labeled "long" on VNDB). This shit makes 0 sense. Anyway, I remembered this thread as I was thinking about grabbing scripts from older G-Collection VNs. Sadly, yeah, it seems the scripts are always encrypted differently, and there doesn't seem to be any tool that can deal with them universally. What a pain in the ass, sigh...

It's the same regardless... you either have to mount the virtual disc or have the disc inserted.

No. 3rdEye's games always need the disc inserted. It is a pain in the butt, but that flaw is universal to that company's games.

I just found out about this project and wanted to say thank you for all the hard work. Whether or not the project does get finished we all appreciate the effort you're all putting in.

Buy the official version. Pirate release is still bugged from what I know.

We made it!!! The game is out now on Steam as well as Mangagamer, JAST, and Denpasoft. Enjoy!!!!!!

I know it’s a bit overrated, but when I played Katawa Shoujo, I got emotionally attached to it for several reasons. First, because I have a developmental disability which forced me to take medication every day. At first I was sad that this will destroy my already scarce interactions with people, but after I saw the protagonist managing to bond with the girls, I realized that this is by no means the worst thing that could happen to me, and I begun to have faith in humanity. Second, I wasn’t interested into mainstream media, and this gave me an escape to the norms I was supposed to follow. And I know this will sound weird, but even though this is an American VN, I was sick of most mainstream movies, since I found most of them are extremely violent (when I started the game), so KS showed that there is an alternative to the “American way of life” of becoming happy. As my mother said when we where in a cultural festival, “you see most American movies filled with death and violence, whereas you enjoy something that is more peaceful”. Sorry for not bringing anything else, university and a severe block stopped me from actualy enjoying another VN, let alone try an untranslated one.

I’m going to be frank with you about this VN. Maggot Baits is in no way, shape, or form a story with good guys. Everyone in this VN is a monster or scum. This VN has way too much guro, even for a VN focused on the grotesque, and it is actually made worse by the high-quality writing, lol. That said… story-wise, if you skip through 90% of the H-scenes, this VN is actually pretty good. Unfortunately, if you don’t skip those h-scenes, it is very hard not to see this as one big snuff-film turned VN. Horror… it is that. It is definitely horror. Unfortunately, it is pretty obvious that the writers were just being self-indulgent with the sheer number of such h-scenes (was it really necessary to have multiple mind-break scenes for every single Witch introduced, even the ones who weren’t really significant to the main story?) The writing in this VN, ironically, is first-class. The problem is, there is so much torture – sexual and otherwise – that it was pretty hard to maintain my interest through large parts of the early VN, where they kept digressing to look at h-scenes of witches that the protagonist never encounters. To be blunt, this is a failure of scenario design, despite the VN as a whole being very well-written. Visually… the VN is about as high-quality as it gets. Unfortunately, that high-quality just means that those with weak stomachs will spend a lot of time vomiting. The audio in this VN (I’m ignoring the voices, since way too many of them are h-related) is fairly high-quality, with a focus on death metal tunes and dark techno. What’s most ironic about this VN is Ending 2, which is the closest thing you can get to a ‘good’ ending. Ending 1 isn’t a bad ending… but it is very much an Akiha from Tsukihime-style ‘normal’ ending. Well, in the sense that there really isn’t any sweetness and a lot of loss. There is a bad ending early on, but it is more like an ‘oops, you screwed up, time to die’ ending, and it feels kind of tacked on, considering you can only access Ending 2 after completing 1. On the bright side, Ending 2 is actually pretty touching, leaving a definite impression and a sense of salvation Ending 1 didn't have. The protagonist... think of someone who has gone completely over the edge due to his desire for revenge and reduced himself to being a killing machine, willing to use anyone and anything for the sake of his goals, and you will have a decent picture of the guy. In Ending 2, he shows off a softer side, but throughout the path leading to Ending 1, he is a cold-blooded bastard. Overall… what can I say about this VN? It is a party for those who like extreme guro, but for anyone else, this is going to be a high-stress VN that they probably won’t even get halfway through before dropping. This VN is tailor-made for a niche within a niche in the VN community that generally doesn’t see much high-quality work (that isn’t a remake of old stuff) anymore. That said, it didn’t appeal to me, except once I basically excised the h-scenes and thought about it that way. This VN is a major failure though, from a scenario design perspective, simply because too much effort was put into inserting extra gratuitous sexual violence scenes that just made the entire thing seem monotonous after a while.

I love my cat. Let’s get that out of the way from the beginning. Even though she is gone, as of today, I have never, for one moment, believed that I would ever stop loving her. For seventeen years and eight months, this calico wonder has made her home in my heart, never failing to wrap me around her paw and jerk me around by my heart strings. As the undisputed mistress of all she surveyed (all eleven rooms and corridors of it), she has dominated the lives and conversation of our family for almost long enough for a child to have graduated from high school. In a very real sense, she was one of the most important pillars of our family, and her presence both lightened the atmosphere and gave us something to talk about even in the darkest of times. My cat loved people… primarily because she knew a few stares and quiet nuzzles could get any given person to pet her or give her what she believed she wanted at any given moment. She liked being with people, even if it was just in the same room, completely ignoring one another (incidentally, her favorite game). In her youth, distant as that is to me now, she was a rambunctious and hyperactive ball of calico fluff, her medium-length fur usually disheveled from one event or another until she chose to let us smooth it out. When we got saltillo tile on the first floor, she could be found with red dust on her belly constantly until it was sealed. When new carpet was put into the master bathroom, she was the first to roll on the floor, and when new furniture was brought into the house, she was always the first to ‘test’ it. Heck, I couldn’t keep her out of my computer chair when I wasn’t sitting in it. As she grew older, she retained many of her kitten-ish traits, being enthusiastic and affectionate to often extreme degrees, given our previous experiences with cats. She purred loudly, meowed insistently, ran at ridiculous speeds only to slam into walls, and generally made us laugh and smile. When we went out of town, she always made her displeasure known upon our return. She was an inside cat, mostly by our choice. While she enjoyed short periods outdoors, she could generally be trusted to want back in whenever her slaves decided to go back in, due to an incident with a coyote in her misspent (I can hear her indignant meow at the thought of her time ever being misspent in my head, even now) youth. If her life was a somewhat boring one by feline standards, she made up for it by being loved and lovable in general. When she first became ill, over a year ago, I had my first close encounter with absolute panic. The cat, as we always referred to her (subcontext: Empress) as being, was listless, had lost her appetite, and she had, for some reason, decided that my sink was her new home. We took her to the vet, where she was diagnosed as having thyroid problems, as is typical in elderly cats (as she was by this time). We began giving her medicine on a daily basis, and for some time, she was doing relatively better, even if she never quite regained the spunk and vigor of the now-lost past. However, a month ago, what vigor had returned to her was rapidly lost. She gradually ceased to eat, began to have bowel problems… and she began to starve to death. The only time she seemed happy was when she was sleeping on one of us, being lightly caressed, comforting herself with her own purrs. It was with a heavy heart that we listened to the vet start speaking of quality of life, a typical speech made whenever a loved one nears death… and, our hearts already broken, we eventually assented to euthanasia. Less than five hours later, I don’t know if it was the right choice. Was it a mercy, an act of love? Was it a betrayal of the absolute trust one can only gain from an animal when that pet is treated as family? Or was it something in between… I can never know. While I understood many things about my cat, I will never know what she thought on this, her last day, what she felt toward us as she went into the final sleep. I will never know. There are so many things about that last day that I will never know. I feel my heart breaking all over again as I write this. I feel the empty feeling of loss. The standard words are no comfort. The euphemisms and trite words of comfort that come out of people’s mouths at times like this feel like excuses and obfuscations. The bitter flavor of grief sours food in my mouth and makes the world a darker place. I can’t even make the excuse that she wouldn’t want me to grieve for her… because she is a cat, and no cat would ever miss out on a chance to be the center of attention.