Fred the Barber

It's short enough that you could probably find time to read it on pretty literally any day, even if you're a busy person. Definitely won't take you an hour to see everything.

It's out! https://store.steampowered.com/app/913450/DareSora_Tears_for_an_Unknown_Sky/ Go buy it! It's good! I want to work on the rest of it. It's also short and weird. Get it now for a whole 30 cents off!

Yeah, I might already have to walk back my earlier statements. Steam has been talking about this for ages, but at least it seems like maybe they're giving this a chance now. We'll have to see how it goes. I'd still be very wary if I were an eroge publisher, just because tying their livelihood to Steam has proven risky in the past, but at least there's a chance things work out now. That said, I'm wondering whether the new way things work will actually make Steam a viable storefront for eroge publishers. The settings to enable seeing this content are off by default and pretty difficult to find, and if you don't have those settings enabled, Steam literally gives you a "that doesn't exist" page, not like an "are you sure you want to see this content" page, as far as I understand. The main value for publishers being on Steam is the big exposure and the chance to grow the market, but I don't know if they get that with the way this content filtering is implemented.

You're being way too optimistic. Steam may have added a checkbox on the consumer side, but that doesn't mean anything until they actually publish a policy so developers and publishers can know what's allowed and what's not allowed (they haven't done this), and actually start applying said policy (they also aren't doing this). This isn't done until we start seeing the games we expect there getting published back to the platform. Maidens of St. Michael will probably be a good bellwether, since you can bet MG wants to get it back on there ASAP and is just waiting on Steam. If you see it on Steam, maybe there's some progress. If not, then everybody's almost certainly still stuck in this same crappy situation we've been in for the past half a year or so. Regardless, you certainly shouldn't get your hopes up for KonoSora or other Pulltop releases. I doubt they have any interest, on their own side, of releasing the full versions of their games, and even if they do, god only knows what quality we'll get with their translation agency roulette game. Lastly... this is all kind of irrelevant to the OP's topic! At least, it is unless you think having the uncensored versions available on Steam will make a big difference in sales or revenue, which I honestly kind of doubt.

Dear all you people talking about Grisaia and complaining about it getting stale: seriously, give Phantom Trigger a try. Same solid humor, way better pacing.

I haven't posted anything particularly editorial in a while, nor have I landed a new FuwaReview in a while; I've been busy with one thing or another, and also I just haven't had that much to write about. However, today I finished reading new shiny new Kokoro Connect: Hito Random release, and when I finished, I knew I had to write something up about it. I first watched Kokoro Connect way back when I didn't know who to ask for recommendations and was still finding my way around anime. I was mostly just going through things that were highly ranked on AnimeNewsNetwork's overall rankings, that were accessible without pirating, and that sounded interesting. But I didn't pick it up without some trepidation. Back then, I was a little put off by fanservice in general, and the show's description was selling the perverted body-swapping angle really hard, so I was concerned it was just some shallow fanservice show. Still, I decided to take the plunge anyway, thinking there had to be more to it given the show's reception, and boy was I ever glad I did. Nothing pushes my buttons like Kokoro Connect. The story it tells is as closely tailored to my own preferences as anything I could ever ask for: coherent and interesting characters, immensely human drama, realistic romantic development, clear story beats and plot arcs accumulating to bigger themes, and a little spritz of magic to grease the wheels of the plot. Hell, the anime even got a great dub, featuring the immensely talented Luci Christian as best girl Inaba. It's an all-time favorite for me, something I can happily recommend to anyone. One of my favorite elements of the show is that each arc feels so complete. In 3-5 episodes, a new twist emerges, a plot unfolds around it, the characters grow in response, and at the end it resolves fully, always in a satisfying way. The one season and the OVA together had four such arcs all together, and while I was immensely satisfied with where it ended after each one, when I finished the last OVA, I still thought to myself, man, I wish there was more of this. What I eventually learned, when I finished the show and went to read about its origins, was that the reason for the tight storytelling was that the show was based on an existing series of light novels, of which the show only covered the first four out of ten (eleven of you count a volume of short stories). There was a whole lot of content out there I hadn't seen yet! Except, it wasn't available in English... And that brings us to today, when I got to read the first English volume of the English release. And let me tell you guys, it is gooood. The translation is fluid, natural, and well-written. The characters pop right out of the page, and the narration is consistently solid and occasionally beautiful. Props to the localization team on their work here! I do have a couple minor gripes, of course: leaving people's heights in centimeters, which is totally bizarre in an American English translation (sure I can do the calculation, but talk about kicking you out of the immersion. Fortunately this only happened once); and not translating the per-volume titles ("hito random" ain't exactly my idea of a punchy title). So how did it hold up, revisiting the material again after all these years? It's still awesome! I had to stifle my laughter a few times so I didn't look like a weirdo laughing out loud in the middle of a plane flight. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I felt tears welling up in my eyes at a couple of particularly touching scenes, and had to fight just as hard to hold them back. And while there's nothing major that's new here, versus what you'd see in the first five volumes of the anime, there are little bits and pieces that make it worth the time, especially in the narration, something inherently missing from an anime. So what are you waiting for? There's a criminally neglected property out there finally getting a great English release, and it deserves your attention. Go out and give it a try! https://j-novel.club/v/kokoro-connect-hito-random

Well, fair. I've read my share of the Dresden Files. But DareSora definitely isn't that, either. Edit: Also, it's not a magic school. Honestly, it's hard to describe without going into spoiler territory, sorry...

?? When I hear "fantasy setting", I think of sword and horse and wizard robes and shit, which is definitely not DareSora. Though admittedly, I'm not sure what to call it other than "mystery". Also, I edited volume 1 Edit: Oh god, bad typo.

Yeah, I agree with @Corrupted: I don't think you can consider Grisaia in this camp (assuming we're talking about Fruit here; I don't know how the other games work). Looking through the VNs I've marked completed on VNDB, the only one which I recall working this way is Funbag Fantasy, which does a full split off into a different ending for the other girls if you stop off the "true route" path early to pick one of the girls. That said, even it doesn't perfectly match this structure, since it kind of has a pair of full-length endings.

Whew, yeah, that's going to be a tough one to explain. If she has even an iota of taste, she's going to judge you pretty hard for Magical Marriage Lunatics. Could at least set your background to be something from one of those ImoParas on the taskbar instead.

I loved everything about this show, and the OP was no exception. That big guitar+keyboard hook it leads with is great stuff.

You're obviously trying to spin it as representative. There are bad agents in every system. In the fan TL scene, you see machine TL garbage on a daily basis. At the end of the day, I have my opinions, but they're not terribly data-oriented (nor are anybody else's...), and I doubt anybody has the wherewithal to do the actual hard work of gauging translation quality on such a broad scale to make this into a meaningful argument. Can we all agree to take this on a case-by-case basis instead of making stupid arguments for which we have no evidence? Or do I have to resort to the "fake data" route of going through and citing example after example after example after example after example of high-quality official TLs (note: I'm limiting myself strictly to games that I've personally read and that were released this year, or I'd be here all day, and am not including my own because I can't claim to be impartial...) until you all get sick of it?

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you've never talked to any of the people actually involved with an official VN translation. If you want to say shit like this about the business types managing the licensing and whatnot, fine, I can see that. You may even be right. But the many professional translators, editors, and programmers I've met are universally passionate individuals who care deeply and want nothing but the best for the games they work on. They are sometimes more constrained by deadlines, due to the generally poor pay in the industry, but they all work hard. And if you think anybody is in the VN localization industry to make a quick buck, you clearly don't know anything about the pay rates...

You do realize this is a dumb statement, right?

"Oi" could just mean the TL is a Brit, or just that they like the sound of that particular word. I wouldn't read too much into that. Frankly, I think this is too small a sample size to make any kind of judgment.