ittaku

Great to see another (uncensored) release. Graphics look cute but vndb ratings aren't very promising.

Sssshh!! I wanted to make it look neutral and not just bagging on someone. But yeah thanks, good work and ganbatte

It may not matter to you, but it matters to me, as I like to thank the people who are personally working.

Are you actually involved in this project or just posting updates and getting credited for your posts?

And with that, my promised commitment to this project is over. As I listen to the last movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony and watch the ring dissolve in the fire of mount doom, I bid this project farewell and godspeed.

You're welcome. Thanks for the feedback

Charlotte was a mixed bag for me. About 2/3 of the way through its writing and execution got really disjointed and rushed. Whilst the ending was relatively satisfying, I can't say it had that emotional uplifting effect I'm looking for in an ending. I might add it to the bottom list for you though.

20 years of playing VNs, many in native Japanese. Still can't stand mosaics. Go out of my way to try and only pay money for games that are un/decensored.

Yes I do mean that. Forget the reviews, if they rated the second season down it's just because it still didn't finish conclusively. I didn't find the second season any different to the first. I did that to oreimo on a grander scale BTW; I really enjoyed the first season and really enjoyed the second season... until the last few episodes (of OVAs) and then having never been as angry with an ending in my entire life, I rated it a 1/10, which doesn't really reflect how much I enjoyed the bulk of the season. There's no appalling ending in season 2 of chuuni but it just keeps meandering the way the first season did.

Make sure to watch the movie at the end of the two series for a definitive conclusion.

Added Touch.

For those interested in old arse shows, I finally finished watching Touch, which ended in 1986. This is from the same writer who created Cross Game. Both are baseball romantic comedy dramas. I met an older Japanese person recently who recounted when this show aired in Japan and how people were openly weeping about the events in it. Well I've got to say it was decent, but nowhere near the masterpiece that Cross Game is. The parallels are intense, and you can see that the writer mastered all the ideas they used in Touch, fine tuned the story, compacted it, made the baseball immensely exciting, and the execution was a masterpiece in manga and anime. Touch is a show that's dated quite a bit, like Maison Ikkoku has (from the same era) but had much better animation, visuals, and clearly budget to execute its long arse story of 101 episodes. It's a decent watch, and has plenty of scenery with lots of backgrounds and trains going by, but unlike Maison Ikkoku, they rarely reused anything for these scenes; they were all originally animated for each episode. The fanservice was very rare and weirdly out of place when it occurred. Oddly enough the baseball itself didn't really hold much excitement, and only became a big part of it much later in the story rather than an integral part of it. It did suffer from the pacing problem that old anime suffers, and I had to watch it at +10% speed to not get bored. The baseball was okay, the story was unpredictable enough (except for the obvious march to the finale), the drama was kinda odd tone, the romance was hit and miss, the comedy rarely very funny by today's standards. Harada takes the cake for stealing the show whenever he shows up as the straight but incredibly observant side character yet he's reliably funny. The ending was satisfying, but nothing like the reference happy ending we got in Maison Ikkoku. Again, this would have been a masterpiece 30 years ago, but it has dated so I only give it a 7/10. Compared with Cross Game which I recently rewatched - again - which I still rate as a masterpiece 10/10. Our sensibilities, and what we've come to expect from anime, has changed so much in that time... Everyone should watch Cross Game at some stage, no matter how much they care about sport anime or baseball.

Tama-nee in To Heart 2 is an ojou-sama, but then her ojou-sama lifestyle isn't much the focus of the plot. The one I know that most fits what you're probably looking for is unfortunately untranslated Prima Stella where every heroine is an ojou-sama.

Ho boy this debate again. Then again, I'm not sure I've ever clearly stated my position on this. I have worked on projects where I've translated it both ways - leaving honorifics and a smattering of Japanese terms, and the alternative without leaving a single Japanese'ism in the translation. In my opinion, I think the ideal translation would never have any Japanese terms, except for things like food names and so on as that's how they'd be referred to in the west anyway. HOWEVER, it is extremely hard to do this and capture the nuance and please everyone at the same time (some would say impossible.) What people miss, though, is that if this is done seamlessly, the reader is completely unaware of the use of these terms in Japanese unless they're weaboos (note I consider myself somewhat of a weaboo so I don't mean this only in the derogatory way.) Weaboos are actively LOOKING for Japanese terms in the audio, or have a vague idea of what was in the original script and generally know some Japanese, but are usually not fluent in Japanese themselves. The more Japanese you know, the more forgiving you become of liberal translations since you have a better understanding that nuance is far more important than accuracy (they're subtly different things.) On the flip side, however, the target audience for these translations ARE weaboos, so the reality is they don't actually WANT a good translation, they want their little understanding of Japanese to make them think they understand it better if they're left in. Knowing your target audience is an important thing. Who are you translating it for? If you do an excellent liberal translation dropping honorifics and Japanese terms, you will get a fixed percentage of people that will be annoyed, irrespective of how good the translation is, and if you do a bad one, you'll get a large percentage of people that are annoyed. If you do a translation where you leave the honorifics and Japanese terms in place - provided you don't start making it clunky and literal, you'll actually get very few complaints at all. So in that regard, who are you translating it for if you're killing yourself to make it as liberal as possible? Fan translations are entitled to do whatever the hell they want. Official releases are a different matter... So anyway, if it's a trillion times easier to leave them in, and you end up pleasing more of the audience, why the fuck go about it the hard way? Put a handy translation notes card in with the game release explaining the few terms used for the few newcomers to the art form. This might seem contradictory given I'm currently working on haruuru and we're not using any Japanese terms, but then ours is a fan translation, and some of us really wanted to try to do it without (me included). I think we've done a very good job on this (no dudes here.) Note also we played the game through before beginning the translation too. My translation commitment on that project is also almost complete. However, for games set in Japan, I think from now on if I were to choose, I'd just leave them in.

Well, I've finished this, and I loved it. I think a couple of melodramatic developments were out of place, but otherwise the stories were enjoyable, and with the help of the walkthrough and quick skip feature, going back to redo the same heroine for a different version of the story was relatively painless. It would have killed me to go back without the walkthroughs as some things were not ever going to be obvious. I enjoyed most of the heroine's routes, though Mahiru was really funny until confession, her route got pretty boring after that, and she's too young to lewd for my taste so it was the only disappointing route. QP was the star of the story; very funny, and he had the same VA as Mihiro in Wagamama high spec which I spotted pretty quickly. The stand out thing for me was Rinka's VA has been in every sugar and spice game before this one, and she always played my favourite heroines or side characters, so it was awesome to get her again, especially since I quite enjoyed her route. She even did the 'just kidding' uso da yo thing in her original character in S+S1 so I'm sure they were paying homage to the original game. A couple of endings I thought weren't happy enough, tending to the bitter side too much when they were bitersweet, but overall they were satisfying. I loved the H scenes in general too; there were even some interesting realistic scenes amongst them, though scattered amongst other typical VN fare, and there were plenty for each heroine. The final word on the use of "dude"? We all agree it was a bad choice, and initially I would have liked to have explained it away as the translator choosing it because of Chiho being a tomboy character, but after hearing her in native Japanese, and getting to know the heroine, apart from her calling herself 'boku', there was nothing tomboy about her IMO. It reeks of the translator not having played the game first, and just translating it straight up.

H

Twins ending in To Heart 2

You can prioritise what you like, and I'll go on prioritising what I like.

JAST because they accept bitcoin and there's never a mosaic anywhere in sight...

Alright, maybe I'm overinterpreting it then.

So DAL3 started and while it may be another studio, and perhaps the quality isn't quite the same, it still has that real trashy magic that I love. I'm enjoying it immensely so far.

Don't worry, apparently the DALIII previews were not the quality that will be getting broadcast (hopefully).) The stand out so far is 5-Toubun no Hanayome which is amazing in this world of lousy harem romcoms. The MC doesn't suck, the harem has 5 interesting girls, the comedy seems funny so far, and MOST importantly, they make it absolutely clear the MC chooses a girl by the end. Here's hoping they actually animate to the end (is the manga finished/ing?)