Fred the Barber

Finished Hataraki Man. It kinda tapered off and didn't really give me a satisfying conclusion; I'd say it kinda feels like one of those anime that's intended to drive readership to the source material, except that apparently the source material also went on infinite hiatus, so... yeah. A little disappointing. Still, it did end with a solid promise of what was to come, and it still did a lovely job of doing character stories for a lot of the office. No regrets about watching this short but very solid show. Next up, I'm planning to watch Crest of the Stars and Banner of the Stars, since they're long-standing recommendations to me from @Nandemonai. More retro anime with a recent re-release, here I come!

soon...

The Made in Abyss subs were apparently bad enough to kill any desire for me to watch anime for a few months, but I finally revived them by picking up the recent blu ray release of Hataraki Man, and boy am I glad I did. The show is a delight and satisfies my hunger for shows about ordinary working stiffs. The characters are super relatable for me, though they may be less so for the rest of this forum... but whatever. I think I'm five episodes in, and they're at a point where they're going around focusing on individual characters for each episode, and each character so far has gotten solid growth out of their single episode. So if that's your thing, it's a particularly enjoyable watch. Worth mentioning that the subs are great. I get so used to seeing subs that read like crap nowadays (which I'm sure is at least in part due to the natural result of our race to the bottom on quality: simulcasts) that it's always surprising when I watch something with actually enjoyable subs. They even subbed all the (rather nice) background music lyrics, and you can tell the people responsible really cared about making the song lyrics sound all right. Props to the folks who worked on this one.

DMM game player, yes. It's evil.

Yeah, gotta love that hyper-invasive DRM that somehow managed to bluescreen my computer once But, uhh. Steam is the easiest to buy things on and to play things from, so I guess that's my answer. They all have their obvious drawbacks, not least of which is the fact that there is no one-stop shop...

At the time of the release they hadn't yet loosened up, IIRC, though I could be wrong about the timing... At any rate, worth mentioning that Steam has since apparently tightened up way further than things ever were before, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

+1 for Tropical Liquor in the "worst of 2018" bucket (I didn't play the other Sayori one being mentioned, Monmusu). Even Frontwing's blatant Huniepop clone from back in 2016 had less awful gameplay than Tropical Liquor. And next up would definitely be Magical Marriage Lunatics. Literally everything about it was bad. First off, the art is bad—have you seen those sprite poses? Second off, the story is bad—because there isn't one. Third, the characters are neither likeable nor memorable. Like, I probably spent 10 hours playing this game and it's a major struggle to even dredge up their faces, let alone names. Sorry dude, but I couldn't disagree more. MML is genuinely bad. If you want a game with the same general flavor but which does literally everything right, while MML does literally everything wrong, Ponkotsu Akuma is where it's at.

I guess the "only two releases in 2018" thing came from looking at their Wikipedia article? It's not even remotely accurate, fwiw. I'm seeing more than 20 actual new releases in 2018 according to VNDB: https://vndb.org/p162. Plus, there's at least one release which doesn't appear there and only appears on their Denpasoft VNDB page (I Walk Among Zombies); probably more, but I just happen to have been involved with Zombies: https://vndb.org/p162 Still, I agree they didn't have a ton of big-name releases in 2018, but then again, who did? For me, Ditzy Demons, Re;lord, and I Walk Among Zombies were all solid releases, though I am, again, obviously biased on that last one. I also keep meaning to play Fatal Twelve, since I hear good things. And of course some people cared a lot about Maitetsu in theory, though said people probably also complained bitterly when they got it. All that said, they do still seem to have a pretty substantial backlog that I guess they're working through.

Just to chip in my thoughts on a couple of those points, since some I strongly agree with, and some I disagree with, and I think I have a somewhat balanced view having been on both the fan and pro side of VN loc... Strongly agree with this one. You will see companies pick up things simply because of staff enthusiasm at times, but it's the exception that proves the rule. Generally speaking, fan translation is probably the best shot for localizations for much older, "classic" titles. Official TLs are actually in worse shape here than fan TLs. It's far more common for fan TLs to have someone in a "translation checker"-type capacity than it is for official TLs, since fan TLs have the luxury of time and (oddly enough) resources. There's barely enough money in professional VN loc to pay a (not very good) rate for TL, edit, and QC; unless you're looking at a truly exceptional scenario (Muv Luv and Clannad come to mind as probably having had more resources available than most official loc projects), there's no money at all to pay for extra hands beyond that. These are generally very light-handed, and ultimately more like guidelines than rules. Except in really superficial, stylistic ways, all the releases even from a single given company will vary wildly in their approach to various localization decisions, due to the influence of the many freelance translators and editors employed by each company. Same. Though I'll caution by adding that, at least in my case, I only feel that way as long as the TL in question is delivered with care and quality, just like I'd want from an official TL. If it's a poorly edited google translate job, then it's worse than nothing, since it puts the nail in the coffin for any chance of a quality translation, and I wouldn't want that for any game I cared about. But that can obviously happen with either a fan TL or an official TL, as the recent Tenkiame release for example shows... Neither fan nor official TL has either a monopoly on or a guarantee of quality.

Hey, thanks for your interest! Yep, release is on the way. I have no idea where that image is from, lol, but that is indeed the official logo and whatnot, and we are now targeting a Q1 2019 release instead of Q4 this year, like we were aiming for sometime back (sorry...). Things are going well, and I'm hoping we'll release in the very near future, but it's hard to promise anything more detailed than Q1, since there are still a few unknowns to be worked out. Regarding the size of the game, it's ~700k characters on ~40k lines. It's a "medium"-length game (the bar for a "long" game is probably somewhere around a million characters), but it feels longer because of the game's structure. You'll see ~97% of the game, including all the heroine routes, in one single playthrough. Unlike a typical game of this length, the routes are all part of one continuous story, and that means no starting over and skipping through the common route! Well... at least until you want that last 3%, at which point you have to do that once to see the rest. But you absolutely should play that part! Anyway, we're excited too! Here's hoping for a smooth release in the near future so everybody can enjoy this wonderful game

Actually, the dudes are exactly the reason Little Busters is a good game. The girls are just window dressing and a way to get you to spend some time with the characters and learn to like them all. In the end, it's all about the bromance.

Yeah, I hear you. I sometimes wonder if setting up for a big announcement and then doing the release at the time of the announcement wouldn't actually be more effective than the current state, lack of publicity be damned... or at least maybe announcing just a week in advance of release or something. By the time anything comes out these days, from anyone, it's always like "oh yeah, that thing".

Congrats on the release!

The Steam release is out now too, so go pick up your high-quality zombie giblets in all their glory on Steam or Denpasoft, whatever floats your boat. Can confirm, the porn is pretty damn impactful. Also, it's just a good game and almost bizarrely different from every other localized VN I've ever seen. Go check it out!

Quite often the giblets are drawn, but drawn kind of badly. It's just not the passion (or common practice) of a lot of artists, understandably. If you want to see a demosaiced game that probably would've been better off with the mosaics, check out Evenicle. Well. Really do check out Evenicle anyway, because it's awesome, but, yeah, not the greatest schlongs you've ever seen. There are some real headscratchers in those porn scenes. In contrast, if you want to see some truly impressive demosaiced porn CGs, check out the just-released decensored version of I Walk Among Zombies... It's really just all dependent on the artist. Anyway, I'm glad to hear both of these announcements! Here's to hoping everything goes smoothly and we see another couple of cool games released this coming year by NekoNyan.