Fred the Barber

Nearly every line sounds awkward. It's bad enough that you can easily find examples even from the screenshots they elected to put up on the game's Steam page that sound like ass: Or that are just bad English: There was also a fair bit of obvious mistranslation in the short part I could bring myself to read, but it's been a long time ago since I tried, and I no longer have the pile of cringe-worthy screenshots I took (also, uploading screenshots is kind of a pain anyway...). This is, unfortunately, not true. It's pretty rare for anybody who is both capable of criticizing and willing to criticize translation quality to read a bad translation, and it's even rarer for them to actually go talk about it. It's also worth mentioning that the opposite happens: you'll sometimes see a lot of noise raised about perceived bad translations in games that are, generally, at least solidly mediocre, because someone picks up on one thing and manages to make it snowball. Most releases have some problems, so it's honestly pretty easy to make nearly anything look bad, if you're dedicated. So teasing out the consistently bad works from the ones that are generally fine is pretty hard, if you're just following along with the discourse and not judging these things for yourself. But the general VN discussion seems to often pillory things that simply occasionally make a mistake, but happen to make an obvious one, or even just do something that annoys the community because of certain predilections, like, say, the ever popular hate for cursing in translation even though cursing is an everyday thing in English. This sentiment I agree with, but it implies the Little Busters! translation is decent, which is, unfortunately, also not true (at least by my lights). Just to draw a controversial comparison: I would say that Chrono Clock has a vastly better translation, both from an accuracy perspective and a readability perspective, than Little Busters. CC has more than its share of problems, of course, but it has actually good moments, which Little Busters does not; Little Busters just consistently (as in, nearly every line) sounds like it was written by somebody who has no idea how you should write English, whereas Chrono Clock only sounds like that somewhat infrequently. Little Busters is consistently awkward and unnatural and translation-y, whereas an ideal translation shouldn't sound like a translation; it should just sound like written English. Chrono Clock also frequently sounds like the editor was trying way too hard, and as a result also sounds unnatural, but in a slightly different way than people are used to, which I'm sure is why people complain about it so much. My personal preference is that I'd rather have what CC delivers than the bland, undertranslated, mistranslated, and just generally botched Little Busters translation, but I can understand why that's not a common view. I dunno. Like other people have said, I do have high standards, and I do complain a lot, so you obviously you have to take my complaints with a grain of salt. But I don't make them lightly, and I don't make them without foundation. Reading Little Busters was such a bad experience for me that I had to drop it after about an hour, even though I was initially excited and was planning on reviewing it; I honestly could not handle reading something that read so poorly. After that I read Karakara 2, and the difference was night and day. The Karakara games have marvelous translations, and I loved every minute of reading that one. It's a shame that work of that quality is so rare, and even more a shame that it's even more rarely recognized... Anyway, sorry for the wild tangent here. FWIW, though, I do think the bad translations for Key games (specifically for Harmonia and Little Busters, that I'm aware of; Clannad was fine IIRC, and I don't know anything about the others) are probably keeping them from having broader appeal, but I agree with what others have said, that the only reason Clannad did so well was a combination of the KyoAni anime and the resulting popularity of the Kickstarter getting out to a bigger audience than VNs usually see.

All these complaints about Little Busters, and not one person slamming the horrible translation. That said, I suspect people are right about the reasons it isn't selling well, and that the bad TL isn't a significant contributor to the poor sales, but for what it's worth, if it did have a nice translation, I'd be out there evangelizing it to people, because I love the daylights out of the game. Unfortunately, it doesn't, so I'm not. Here's to hoping Rewrite gets a good translation, at least, or maybe Summer Pockets (though reception to it in Japan is lukewarm, I hear?).

Well, I Walk Among Zombies came out a couple days ago, and as a zombie survival story, it certainly seems to fit the bill.

Sorry, I don't think these are generally questions I can answer in much detail due to contractual obligations, even in cases where I know the answer. I will say that I don't even know the answer to some of these questions: for instance, I have no idea if they had a desire to license this particular game already, regardless of the project, or if they were interested in it because of the possibility of working with an existing TL project. I will also say that we first approached them, not the other way around, a very long time ago now.

Oh god, I would be in tears. Thankfully, yes, we're working together, and progress is progressing progressively!

I read this one, and it was all right. Definitely a different breed of nukige than what I can recall seeing before, but nothing wrong with different. The "naughty" route didn't do much for me, but the "nice" route was, in fact, very nice. The characters are lovable across the board, and it ends up being a surprisingly feel-good VN? I love the translation, too; they nailed the humor. Also, as much as Reiji's little sister is a sweetheart, I'm sorry, but you have to be blind not to see that Sakahogi is best girl.

Yeah, by all accounts, the correct answer is "none of them". The official translation from Moenovel is quite possibly the worst, though, if that helps you make a decision.

Hello, sorry for the delay, kind of a long night last night. I just updated the Majo Koi thread as well, but yeah, the Denpasoft release of Majo Koi Nikki will be based off the fan translation project. I would say "it will be the fan translation", except that that hasn't been QCed yet, let alone made into a release, and you wouldn't want an un-QCed unimplemented translation! 9 is a pretty straightforward Chuunige, at least as much as I've seen of it (volume 1). Also, as @Kiriririri mentioned, cliffhangers are definitely the order of the day for the series, and the series isn't finished yet in Japan, which can be a source of frustration for some. That said, the game is fun, and has very pretty sprite art and a few solid characters. But, usual disclaimer: I'm working on it, so my view is a bit biased Lastly, I'm gonna put in one more plug for the Re;lord series, which some friends of mine worked on. The gameplay is actually really good! It needs some rebalancing in volume 1, but from what I hear, they actually did a great job tuning it and making the gameplay angle more entertaining in volume 2. Even better, while volume 1 is pretty much pure comedy, volume 2 starts to reveal the big plot motivating the series (which is finished in Japan and totals 3 volumes, though SP/Denpasoft has only announced volumes 1 and 2 so far). At any rate, I exhort you all to go buy Re;lord volume 1, and then volume 2 when it comes out, so they feel motivated to pick up volume 3

Hi folks! Bumping this thread since I Walk Among Zombies volume 1 was quietly released last night! This was announced at the Denpasoft panel, but I haven't seen a tweet about it yet... at any rate, get it here: https://denpasoft.com/products/i-walk-among-zombies This is the first game I worked on to get an official release, so I'm excited to hear what you all have to say about it!

Hi folks! As I can see a few of you already noticed, our project was picked up for official localization, with a target release date of Q4 2018, and got officially announced at the Denpasoft panel. As I've mentioned before elsewhere, I tend to think it's a good thing when fan translations get picked up for official release: it means more people end up seeing and enjoying the work, and it almost invariably means a higher-quality release (not to mention: more money for the folks who work hard on these things). Our status is more or less unchanged from what I've said previously: engine work is still ongoing, image editing still needs to be done, and then final QC once everything's implemented. It's not a short game, and there are a few unknowns still, hence the current target date in spite of the script having been basically locked for a while, but I'm sure you're all going to be very happy with the release when it's out, and I can't wait for that day to come!

Can confirm all of this. I'm playing the game now and enjoying the heck out of it (the Yaegashi Nan art is certainly helping with that!), but the combat isn't particularly involved or strategic or difficult, at least so far; I'm admittedly not that far in. It is also a little punishing in terms of sheer number of random encounters, unless you're religious about sticking to the roads, and who wants to do that in an RPG? It's a major step up from any other H-RPG I've played (side-bar required at this point: I haven't played Rance), but it's not on par with any non-H RPG I would consider worth playing. But the characters are fun, and there are a whole lot of them, so I'm going to go back to playing it right now!

Wait, are you all telling me @Darklord Rooke is even older now? Wow. Happy birthday, Rooke.

This is the world's randomest location for a Phantom Trigger conversation, but I'll bite. I actually edited Phantom Trigger volume 5, so uhh, I might be just a tiny bit biased, but I'd encourage you to read the series. I hadn't read any of the previous volumes until I got the job, but I have now, and Phantom Trigger is actually pretty solid. Nothing amazing or earth-shattering, but good, solid fun. The first volume starts things off a bit slow, since it has so many characters to introduce and isn't all that long (they're all on the short side), so it doesn't really get much plot done, but the subsequent volumes have a good mix of introducing new characters, fleshing out backgrounds for the main characters (vol. 2 - Rena; 3 - Tohka, 4 - Chris, and now 5 is the last remaining of the original four girls, Murasaki), and slowly building up pieces of an overarching plot. The games are maybe 20% slice-of-life, 40% character development, and 40% action? I dunno, numbers made up and very subjective. At any rate, I had a lot of fun with it, so I hope people pick it up and give it a try.

Speaking of Mitsuda, I just realized a few days ago that the Xenoblade Chronicles 2 OST came out fairly recently. I loved everything about the game, and the soundtrack was an integral part of the experience. Sadly, it's way better in the context of the game than it is for standalone listening, but it's still got some amazing stuff that takes my breath away to listen to. 0:56 is fucking magic, as is the guitar solo around 3:25. 3:47 also kicks my ass. The only unfortunate thing about this soundtrack is that the song titles got a lot of Engrish translations, which is especially disappointing given how phenomenal the game's translation was.

It's kind of unclear who you're worried about getting into trouble with. The law? No. I'm not a lawyer, so take this with the requisite grain of salt, but still, no. You're not going to get into legal trouble for buying The Fruit of Grisaia or WagaHigh off the Denpasoft site (or anything else off the Denpasoft site, or anything off MangaGamer or JAST USA, for that matter) if you live in the US, any more than if you bought High School DxD off Amazon. Some countries have much stricter pornography laws, though. Are you going to get into trouble with your parents? Who can say. Edit: Actually, a better analogy. You're not going to get into trouble for buying those 18+ VNs any more than you would for buying Lolita off Amazon.