ittaku

I watched Sukitte Ii Na yo - Say I love you. This was a little gem of a romance that somehow had flown under my radar till now. It was clearly shoujo romance which seems to always be more satisfying than anything written for boys. The latter half wasn't quite as good as the first half, with lots of convenient stereotypical resolutions to the various dramas but it was still a delight to watch and ultimately satisfying. 8/10

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.

Machine translators can't deal with scene context, implied subjects, and the extended sentences common to Japanese grammar.  In addition, they often misinterpret verb forms and completely mess up the sentence to the point where it is unrecognizable.  This is the reason why only the simplest of sentences that have a clearly delineated subject and use the simplest verb forms actually translate properly (and often not even then).  Before even considering playing untranslated, you should at least know the grammar so you can tell when something is off...  you can fill out your vocab along the way using a parser (puts romaji or kana above kanji). 
If you don't want to learn Japanese, you are out of luck.  Machine translations will be inadequate until we can hook a person with a complete vocabulary and grammar knowledge of both languages up to a machine and download an entire copy of his brain directly into the digital realm (in other words, we won't see it in our lifetimes).  The language just isn't suited for machine translation, especially since there are no languages directly related to it (romance and germanic languages are relatively easy to machine translate to English due to a large swathe of shared concepts and essential structural similarities).  It doesn't even translate well into mandarin or modern Chinese, despite the languages partially sharing a writing system.

And this is literally 95% of all Japanese dialogue ever, so... yeah. 

Today I watched Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! Movie: Take On Me, thus completing the show. @ittaku was 100% right - it gives very nice conclusion to the series, and definitely puts the whole show on the list of "anime with satisfying endings". Very nice tale about love and growing up. I liked it about as much as Toradora! - which it resembled to me a bit.
9/10
(1st season - 9, 2nd season - 8, movie - 9 - and when considered as a whole - 9)
 
 

I don’t think it’s unreasonable or ‘chauvinistic’ for me to expect the reviewers I read to have a certain level of reading comprehension for the VNs that they review, and frankly MTL just doesn’t meet that level yet.

You don’t even know English, how would you understand Japanese
You don’t even understand the basics of language or writing, how would you understand 99.9% of what you read
That would be true if gaining the ability to read a poor approximation of something was progress but lmao

Why do you review untranslated games if you can't read Japanese?

It's a brilliant series, but save a box of tissues for later on...

I've watched through One Punch Man and... It's good? I don't think it's THAT fantastic, as it's practically recycling one joke over and over again through the whole season. It effectively puts all the shounen conventions on their head and is masterfully produced, but it didn't really captivate me. A strong 8/10, but I'd still consider it overhyped. Well, maybe overhyped to the point where it couldn't possibly match the expectations, but even if we're talking about this particular author's work, I think Mob Psycho 100 is a way better series - it uses some similar themes, like the absurdly OP and unassuming protagonist, but does much more interesting things with them.
On the other hand, I'm now more than half-way through A Place Further Than the Universe and it might be my first 10/10 rating. I mean, can you really do better with kind of slice-of-life/adventure anime? With how likeable and believable the characters are, how good and usually subtle the humour is, how genuine the drama feels... I definitely won't try to claim that it's the best anime ever, but in its own category it feels like pure excellence. At least, if it can keep up the quality until the end. I'll probably finish it around the weekend, as I have some more-urgent things in the next few days and this series deserves taking your time and paying proper attention to it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

No Nut November is bullshit, Destroy Dick December is the real shit

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.