Toranth

Don't remember most of my early game, but I remember my firsts: First English game was Knights of Xentar, in 1997. Not really a VN, but still. First Japanese game was Kanon for Dreamcast, in 2000. My, how time flies...

If you think being called a fanboy or fangirl is a compliment, I think you misunderstand the term. Fujoshi is basically a female equivalent of otaku - a bit more specialized, due to the focus on the BL obsession, but otherwise much the same. Remember that otaku literally means 'home' - by your logic, translating it as "geek" or "nerd" (very common) is totally wrong because it loses that meaning. If you are annoyed that "SJW publisher" NISA removed the specific references to pornography, then that's a different thing entirely. But your complaints about the translations of specific words are off target, and your suggested solutions are worse. A lot of Japanese terms do not have perfect equivalents in Western societies. Sometimes these differences are important, and the translators need to work to develop an alternate way to convey the concept. Other times, there's a humorous description of a character as a 'fujoshi' which isn't important, doesn't convey any deep meaning or valuable concepts, and is not worth breaking up a story with cultural lessons or 'made up words' that 99% of the readers will never care about.

Trying to use the Japanese term is a bad idea. It still needs to be explained that it refers to a mental illness or hangup. Then it needs to be explained that it refers specifically to overly affectionate/protective behaviors towards a sister, rather than some other hangup. I think "enthusiast" is a bad translation, barring some specific context. "Obsessive" or some variant of that is probably better. Best is likely abandoning the use of a specific phrase entirely, and just translate the meaning of each sentence, rather than being caught up on trivialities. And 'fangirl' for 'fujoshi' is not bad. It certainly gets the idea across - something that takes fandom a little too far.

You just described Norn, Miel, Dieselmine, and a half-dozen other successful Japanese studios as well It works for them, so I'm not surprised someone has taken the same trash-tier slot in the English market. Oh, yeah, gotta stay on topic. I just finished my first route in Daitoshokan, which I started when the game came out... in May 2013. At this rate, I may finish the game in a mere 15 or 16 years.

Comrade! I played Clannad when it first came out, bug just got bogged down by all the routes I just didn't care about, and took a break before doing After story. A 3 year break, actually. Plus a few months. Some stories are written where there aren't routes - loop games, for example, or non-branching games like Sora-iro no Organ. And, of course, barely branching games like G-sen or Eustia where the 'routes' are more of omake what-if scenarios than real routes. And then there are the occasion game where it writers actually consider ALL the routes simultaneously. Have you ever noticed that in many games, the MC is the only person that can save the heroines from suffering and death (or worse)? And yet, in each route, only one gets 'saved'... whatever happens to the others? Some games actually consider this, and take the 'true' route as an opportunity to deal with everything in one story. Usually this is a harem route, but again - sometimes it works. It just needs to be a story where the romance is an extra to the main story, rather than one where the romance IS the story and all events happen merely to promote the romance. TL;DR: A bad attempt at those ending is bad, but a good one is good. May sound fatuous, but it's true. There is nothing inherently wrong with a non-romantic true ending.

RPGs have real gameplay, where the player has to make choices, devise strategies, manage resources, etc. I have no problems with that sort of gameplay - I'm quite fond of Aselia or most Eushully games, for example. My complaint about Koihime Musou is that the battles are absolutely meaningless, but time consuming. Each battle is an exercise in "push these buttons in this order". If you are trying to win, it's hard to lose once, and even when just playing around it's hard to lose twice. There's no individualization to the battles, even, other than the numbers of each troop type listed. The presence or absence of the protagonists or antagonist characters makes no difference (except as a head in the corner). The battles aren't even long enough or often enough to make the player identify with the characters as an avatar. There's a good reason everyone was thrilled when the patch introduced the ability to skip previously won battles, and why they didn't show up in the later games. You suggest that the gameplay can be used to draw the player into the game, by increasing tension or portraying dangerous scenes... but again, in games like KHM, the battle system doesn't have ANY of that. Instead, after you 'win' a battle, you get a standard series of VN scenes to depict the actions of individual characters. A 5-second animation of fighting, repeated every time, would have been just as effective - and 100 times faster. You'd still have all the tension and character action in the VN part, without losing anything from the 'battle'. Some games manage to do this. But some don't, and you end up with boring, distracting, time-consuming breaks in what can otherwise be a good story. And THAT is the end of the spectrum I dislike. I think that each game should with keep the story going, and make sure that everything else the game does supports it - or make the gameplay the point, and make sure the story supports the gameplay instead.

On the other end of the spectrum are the games with pointless, boring gameplay. Be honest, folks - did anyone actually enjoy the "battle system" from Koi Hime Musou, for example?

So, I just finished Mahou Shoujo no Ani, and have one thing to say: タイトル詐欺！ 騙された！！ The title and the content have nothing at all to do with each other. Good points - The game was solidly written, with a surprising number of male characters playing a significant role. Bad points - Too many choices, LOTS of bad ends, some pacing issues (lots of flashbacks), fairly depressing story. It's a one-route game with lots of branching bad ends, but the many choices result in a confusing mess trying to reach the end - use of a walkthrough is almost required. In fact, it's so bad that the first time you reach the 'end', it cuts short. You need to replay the end scene to get another choice which will only then actually resolve the story and get the player to the REAL ending. The bad ends are fairly depressing. No gore, but a fair amount of violence and misfortune. One of the "better" bad endings is when a heroine chooses to become a crack-whore. Surprisingly, there was a lot of H-content in the game (20-25 scenes), given that the true route had almost zero - just one scene with two random nameless mob characters. All the rest of the H content is in the bad ends or the post-game omake scenes. Even the true end had no romantic scenes. And finally, a minor rant about choices and agency. Early on in the game, one character is trying to follow a suspicious person, but loses sight of them. At this point, the character remembers seeing a different suspicious clue earlier, and the player is given the choice between giving up or going back to look at the other suspicious clue. If the player chooses to give up, the scene ends and the story proceeds. If the player chooses to go back and look at the other clue, the character carelessly steps into the street, gets hit by a car, and dies. Game over. WHY is there even a choice there? There's no scene, no CGs, no dialogue, NOTHING. Just a few lines of text. It just gives the player the fleeting impression of choice, but in reality you're being railroaded just as much as if there was never a choice in the first place. It's more insulting than immersing, and it certainly isn't entertaining. Why would anyone ever do this? I'm not sure how I would rate this game. The content ended up being a type of story I strongly dislike, but it was well written with solid production values. For people that like that type of story, it's probably decent. For me, though, I did not enjoy it.

A translation is considered a "derivative work" under most copyright law, which requires permission from the owner of the original work's copyright to reproduce. However, under most copyright systems, creating a translation FOR YOUR OWN USE is legal (assuming you own a legal copy of the original work). In the case of a fan translation patch, the original creation of the translation is usually legal. Distributing it becomes a copyright violation. As Ningen said, this does not change based on whether or not you own a legal copy of the original work. It gets more confusing in that the illegal translation is, itself, a copyrighted work - the original owners cannot just take it and distribute it themselves without violating the copyright of the pirates that violated their copyright. So, just because there is a fan translation out there, it doesn't mean the original owners can just grab it and start selling their game (with the fan translation) in DLSite or other stores. If they did, they could be sued by the fan translators. Of course, doing so would require the original translators to identify themselves in order to sue, which would in turn be a confession to the original copyright violation... any company that did so would probably get away with it. As a reminder to everyone: Copyright law is similar in many countries, because of the many international treaties about IP, but they are NOT identical. For example, the US concept of "Fair Use" is severely restricted or even absent entirely in some places. Always check with a professional lawyer in your own nation if it matters, rather than taking the advice of random people on the internet.

Non-adult PC games (VNs) generally don't sell very well in Japan. Having adult scenes is expected by the fanbase, and NOT having them will result in a large portion of your potential market ignoring you product. So whether Iren wanted to have them or not, they were basically required to have them. Same thing with the fandisk - the fans wanted to screw the rest of the cast, so those sex scenes had to be forced in there. But if you notice, the vast majority of the fan disk wasn't sex scenes... it told a strong story covering a questionable plot whole from the original game without sex scenes for the dozen+ new characters. The localization is terrible. Fortunately, you can get the Japanese text and voices through the Steam version. However, as I've said before and I will say again, there is exactly ONE adult scene in the entire game where the adult content is related to the story at all. In every other scene, you could remove the adult parts without losing much. In that one scene, the surrounding content was re-written a little to include some of what was in the adult scene, so you still get the gist of it. Unfortunately, they didn't do that for some of the slice-of-life nudity. Does losing that bath scene mean that Sayo and the other children are missing some character development? Sure. But does that character development matter to the story? Not in the least. Same with the rest of it. The 'censorship' isn't the problem with the English release of ChuSinGura. The translation is.

It really doesn't matter, since they're pretty much all the same. It's just pick your fetish - Older sisters, goddesses, maids, elfses, whatever, and there's a game for it. About the only difference is that Miel has rape games in their catalog.

Asami Junko (麻見 順子), aka Akashi Anna (赤白 杏奈). Not many roles, and not big ones, but damn, that voice... Ever since she voiced Stella, the main girl in Pizzicato Polka, I've been a fan.

??? SAGAOZ works for me: コミュ -黒い竜と優しい王国- http://sagaoz.net/savedata/ka/com_mon.zip

Yay, Setsuei! One of my favorite VNs. I hope you're playing the prettier original version, rather than the generic meoblob remake. Actually, I'm just happy someone is playing it - I really hope you play it through the end, as I think it's entirely worth it.

Photobucket changed their TOU to require a large fee for 3rd party hosting services a few weeks back. It was very sudden, and has messed up a lot. Basically, time to switch to a different image hosting provider. All the old images, though, are probably lost.

Dieselmine games without H... This concept is wrong. At least the Debunosu rogue-like had a game to go with the 100 H scenes, so something was left. DOES NOT COMPUTE. DOES NOT COMPUTE.

In the lower left corner, it says 18kin, so yes, presumably it will have H-scenes.

As Down said, the main story of KT cannot be directly linked to an ending of Tsukihime. You'll understand a bit more of 'Why' as you keep going, but even once you're done, there will still be some things that just cannot match up. Of course, it's a fandisk, so in the words of Nasu "Don't think about it too much".

Soooo many rabid fanboys. If it ends up Grisaia vs Umineko, I will cry.

I did not like it, but many other people did - YMMV. My biggest complaint is that it is different in tone and feel from Fate/Stay Night and other Nasu works. It wasn't written by Nasu, so that really shouldn't be a surprise. It also doesn't actually mesh with FSN either, but Nasu went ahead and explained it as an alternate timeline, so "don't think too much about it."

Well, I'd suggest Kagetsu Tohya first, then Mahoyo, but I'll admit to having a soft spot for KT. I'd also suggest skipping Fate/Zero entirely.

fault milestone one - 9J8WY-KAY0M-G5T83

Actually, that's pretty much the way I learned Japanese back when I was starting. It works, if you really put the time into it. It is hardly the most efficient method, but it is practicing the same time as actually doing the fun activity that is your goal. It took me a full year or so to get good enough to read something like Kanon without needing to look up much. It's all about constant practice. About the only suggestion I would make is to also practice writing, especially the kana. I used to spend a lot of down time on the train writing out all the kana - left to right, then right to left, top to bottom then back, sometimes hiragana, others katakana. Also practiced a few of the more common kanji (pronouns, basic words like 'go' or 'hot'), and a bunch of conjugations. After a year of that, it was easy to pass the JLPT level 2, which meant that aside from vocabulary most VNs were also pretty easy. Well, actually, one more suggestion - Buy a decent reference book or three. I've gotten a great deal of use out of "A Dictionary of [Basic | Intermediate | Advanced] Japanese Grammar", a set of three books that are excellent references for grammar. With their help, even the most, er, 'interesting' writers (Nasu, you punk) can make sense. It looks like those specific books may have gone out of print, so are expensive, but finding a good grammar reference is pretty essential.

I'm sure the translator got Bs in English. Why would they need anyone else? /s

You might find more luck getting help if you: a) Explain the problem you are having, b) Explain your system set-up and configuration, c) Explain what you've already done to attempt to fix the problem, d) Use less cursing and more courtesy when asking for help.