KuroganeHomura

The cost of developing an entire professional quality VN is around $200k I think. Adding new content isn't that hard or costly, but rather than squeeze another route in they'd likely make a fandisc. The cost of doing so would probably be $50k or less, which makes for a very reasonable stretch goal. Unfortunately, Kickstarter stretch goals aren't designed to provide value to backers on a cost basis; they're designed to be cheap gimmicks that prime the PR machine without adding much to costs, making most of the revenue after the initial goal is met pure profit. In short, there's simply no incentive to provide stretch goals that wouldn't be profitable. No stretch goal at all is better from a business perspective than a stretch goal where revenue equals cost. That's not entirely true. It depends on whether the stretch goal provides incentive for people to back the project that otherwise wouldn't have. I could definitely see the addition of an Iris route getting people to back this that otherwise weren't sure whether to back this or would have decided to wait for the game to be released to buy (or pirate) it. Plus, the same applies for sales after release. If it's an additional route, it will likely get sales after release from people that otherwise wouldn't have bought the game, and if it's a fandisk, they can sell that separately after release, too. For that matter, if they went the fandisk route, they could sell it in Japan, too. I think in this particular case, either option would make good business sense.

Read through えむリア！～俺がドＭになったのはどう考えてもお前らが悪い～, except for Haruka's route. I'll get to that sooner or later. It's pretty nice as a femdom VN, although there are some parts I could have done without. Like the MC forcing himself on the heroine in one of the routes. Really, the MC's just kind of annoying in general. But it was cute and had some pretty good H scenes, so I can forgive that. Also read Killer Queen, which I liked a lot. I usually tend to stay away from VNs with art like that, but I guess I should stop doing that. Really loved the second route in particular.

There's https://vndb.org/v6021 & https://vndb.org/v17377. Not quite the same, but they do have the theme of zombie survival. Haven't played any of the Kansen titles so I couldn't say how they compare.

There's a lot of tentacles, though not much in the way of ishukan. Game seems to be doing really well in Japan. erogamescape has a median of 90 so far, too. Obviously it's too early to tell where the score will end up eventually, but the votes so far seem higher than they were for euphoria when that came out and certainly a lot higher than Fraternite. Also, 非抜きゲー.

Yeah, I think the story is of similar quality as euphoria, although it's quite a different kind of story, obviously. I forgot to say, in case you haven't seen the tweet from Clock Up, they've released a patch http://clockup.net/maggotbaits/download.html.

I skipped over most of the H- and gore scenes, for the most part only stopping at parts that seemed important, and my evaluation is based on reading it that way. So I think it boils down to the same question as with euphoria: Do you mind the fact that those kinds of scenes are in it? If not, I think the story is really enjoyable. If you do, well, the game isn't for you, obviously. And if you're into that stuff, then obviously the game is for you, too. Just that in euphoria's case it was scat and torture, whereas here it's outright gore instead of scat. If anything, for both games, the experience is probably even better if you're not mostly desensitized to seeing that stuff. I am, so in the case of Fraternite, where I found the story boring and didn't give a fuck about any of the characters, I was just bored throughout. Considering I really liked euphoria and Maggot Baits, on the other hand, I think it's safe to say that both games have worth beyond appealing to people into that stuff. Well, there are some people who liked Fraternite's story, too, so I guess that applies to that VN, too. Although I'm pretty damn sure Maggot Baits' eventual popularity will be more like euphoria's than Fraternite's. Kawasumi: I took around 25 hours to read all of it. If you don't skip anything, I think you'll probably take like 40-50 hours, depending on your reading speed.

Finished playing through the whole VN. It's great. I'm not good at writing reviews, so I'll just say play the demo, then if you like that, buy the game. I enjoyed reading all of it. About the content, there's no scat this time around. There's no sex or gore with a character like Mei from Fraternite, either. So if you want to avoid those, there's none of that in this VN. Now, about the gore. Well. The game's certainly a lot more brutal than Fraternite was, never mind euphoria. To the point where I don't think you could really make it any more brutal. I remember seeing CGs from different VNs that had somewhat more detailed gore and whatnot, but in terms of impact, I don't think you can top this. There are mosaics over gore a few times, but that's limited to scenes that have rape and gore simultaneously. If you're not sure if you can take it, try the demo. If you can stand what happens there, I can think you can take the rest, too.

Imagine Winged Cloud saying "We're not releasing any more Sakura games because we want to avoid discussions about the depiction of womens in our games". Can you still take this seriously after imagining that? I can't, at least.

Part of the way through Maggot Baits. I'm liking it quite a lot so far. I have a feeling this is gonna be considerably more popular over here than Fraternite was. If euphoria was horror&mystery and Fraternite was a tragedy, this is action with a dash of mystery.

One more day till release.

It takes around a week or two before the data from that site becomes somewhat accurate. Even then, anything under 30k is pretty unreliable.

Clannad made it to rank 3 of current Top Sellers. I guess that's a good start alright. I don't mind the price, it's about as much as euphoria is selling for and a bit less than Maggot Baits. I'll be skipping this one, though. Already skipped the After Story part of the anime, nakige just aren't my cup of tea.

Well, they did differentiate between sentences where it's used normally and ones where you wouldn't attach desu in normal speech. If a character has a habit of using grammar in a non-standard way, that should be reflected in the translation - but yeah, not by just leaving the particle as is. Now that I've actually watched the video, I've noticed びく wasn't translated and a TL note directly attached instead. I don't think that's a good idea. Keeping onomatopoeia untranslated is something you certainly can do, but I don't think you should for ones that an English speaker wouldn't understand. And definitely not with a translation note following it.

Higurashi has a decent amount of this and other ticks in it, iirc, both the VN and the anime. Forgot how they were handled in the respective translations, though.

The experience of reading a translation should be as close as possible to that of reading the original, without requiring knowledge of the original language. Ask yourself whether the Japanese readers need footnotes to understand what they're reading. I won't say adding TL notes is bad in and of itself, particularly if a work has a lot of references to stuff specific to a certain culture. Food, historical events, mythology and such. But generally speaking, that should be supplementary material.

May be related to this

Mosaics are applied on the original CGs to produce the censored CGs. It's a bit of an issue because the original version is already censored, so on the one hand, releasing a translated version with no further censorship applied is in a sense uncensored, yet at the same, still has mosaic censorship. Honestly, I don't think the term uncensored should be used for something that still has mosaics on it. Relating to Japanese pornographic media, "uncensored" is pretty much synonymous with "has mosaics removed (and nothing else cut out)", not just with VNs, but also JAV and adult manga & anime. I'm not entirely sure what term to use instead, but perhaps "uncut" could work, seeing as that's more generally used to refer to something that has no parts of it cut out (like a movie that has no scenes removed).

The site is in all likelihood dead, yes. Reason unknown. Revert to using sadpanda instead.

Between the two, go with geology. If you like history, there's no reason you can't read related books and whatnot in your free time.

http://news.livedoor.com/article/detail/10817446/ Edit: Parody works in Japan won't get fucked at this point in time, basically.

Touhou is clearly worse. But yeah, both are danmaku shooters. Touhou is based off of the various arcade shooters predating it. Touhou on easy mode (and normal in a few select games, mainly Imperishable Night and Perfect Cherry Blossom) is probably a bit easier to get into, but in terms of difficulty, they're not much different from Mushihime-sama's novice modes. Touhou games tend to be more lenient in terms of bombs and extra lives you get, but the lunatic modes are generally on par with Cave games, sans the TLB and perhaps some of the 2nd loops in some Cave games. So, what I'm saying is, give Cave and/or Touhou and/or danmaku games in general a shot. It's not like you have to start on the highest difficulty level or anything.

Dunno about that. Fraternite in particular certainly has a decent amount of gore in it, but what actually killed that one was it just being a flat-out boring read. Well, for that particular one, I don't know how much better they could have done without straying from what they wanted to do with the theme, though. Might just be me who didn't like it. Now, as for Maggot baits, despite having gore even in the trailer, the game made it into amazon.jp's bestseller list https://twitter.com/shigeo_h/status/662615531426476033 at some point. So at least in Japan, it doesn't appear to be all that ultra niche. euphoria, on the other hand, has a reputation for being way way over the top extreme, but in terms of gore, it really isn't. There's not much of it and what there is is for the most part avoidable. I kind of wish Dasaku was required reading so we'd have some actual metric for what constitutes extreme or niche. That game certainly applies. It's a really interesting read despite nominally being essentially a nukige, but it's probably very hard to appreciate for anyone outside a pretty niche group of readers. I mean, I dunno, but going by the general response so far, it seems to me euphoria at least is going to do pretty well. Which is kind of at odds with the idea of it being extremely niche, unless that particular niche makes up a pretty big fraction of the VN niche in the West as a whole.

I did think it was kind of weird how we had someone with a maggot baits sig but no dedicated thread. I admit I partially did that now in hopes of squeezing a few more pre-orders out. The game seems to luckily have been doing really well so far, anyway, though. Might still be worth it to make a general Clock Up thread, anyway. And yeah, the game is pretty badass. I'm slightly miffed there probably won't be anything like an イザベル route, but I'm certainly looking forward to it regardless.

So this the next VN to be released by Clock Up on November 27th. OP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNK7WZRVZtQ Trial version http://clockup.net/maggotbaits/download.html or http://www.getchu.com/soft.phtml?id=867581 Story http://clockup.net/maggotbaits/story.html A bit more stuff about the VN http://clockup.net/staff/date/2015/09/ Seems like it might pick up where euphoria left off in terms of "might be a nukige, but definitely worth playing for the story, anyway". Also, the OP is pretty cool.