Darklord Rooke

It has been a while since I bought a new jrpg and played it all the way through in under six months...  To be blunt, most new jrpgs just aren't worth finishing these days.  I gave up on Atelier shortly after Mana Khemia, Square hasn't produced anything interesting in ten years (for a story-addict), and most of the best old series are dead or in semi-permanent hiatus stasis. 
Before this, I played Zestiria, and if you read my comments on it, I mostly liked it, though there were some aspects I wasn't particularly impressed with (the Armatization system, the translation of the skits, etc).  If I were to give Zestiria a 7 out of ten for making a good effort and keeping my interest to the end, I'd rate Tales of Berseria a 10/10... the rarest of things, a modern jrpg kamige. 
I almost never give 10 ratings, whether of VNs or of Jrpgs.  The reason is simple... even kamige rarely get everything right.  In the case of a JRPG, this is even harder than with a VN, since it not only has to have an impressive story and presentation... it has to reach a level with the gameplay, music, and visuals that is impressive as well, if not perfect.  Tales of Berseria is one of those rare games that manages all of that.  Since I'm not a technical critic, my impressions of the visual and sound aspects are emotional reactions more than anything else. 
For character designs, the only character design that set my teeth on edge besides the Normin characters (returning from Zestiria) was Magilou... I have a serious distaste for jester costumes, and Magilou's is just plain ugly to me.  This is an aesthetic comment, based on my personal sense, and I realize it won't be shared by everyone else.   On the other hand, Velvet is... perfect.  The visual change from the village girl, to the ragged prisoner, to the vengeance-seeking daemon in a ragged black coat, red bustier, and skirt was visually striking and very definitive of her in her roles in the early story.  Most female character visual changes during a JRPG tend to be... unpleasant (I love long hair, so that tendency for some of the females to all of the sudden cut their hair drives me insane).  Velvet was a rare exception in that.  For fans of Zestiria, seeing Eizen not as a giant man-eating lizard but as a bad-ass pirate in black was a nice intro to the guy who had so much influence on Edna from the previous game.  His fist-fighting style, his voice (Japanese), and his visual design are all as I would have imagined them, considering how Zaveid refers to him in Zestiria.  In addition, seeing a younger Zaveid, before his Zestiria way of living was established, was a nice treat... and getting the background behind his words in the first game is also nice.  Laphicet, who is essentially Velvet's biggest partner throughout the game's story, has a fairly mediocre design (someone has a shota-complex in that studio), but his magic is fairly awesome to see, and his voice is actually pretty good, for a child-styled voice (most are too high or too low, even in Japanese).  Eleanor has a personality that will grate on some people, and her visuals fit it quite well, since she has a very straight-laced personality (though she does loosen up as time goes by).  Rokurou is probably the third-best design of the group... his facial design, the movements of his eyes and expression during combat scenes, and his hybridized Japanese-style clothing all fit together nicely with his psychotic personality to create a solid character who partners up well with Eizen as one of Laphicet's male role models.
Story-wise, this game is essentially a long revenge story... it isn't about saving the world.  The enemy is 'saving' the world.  No, Velvet doesn't give a flying bit of monkey poo about the world.  She is far more interested in murdering her step-brother for his murder of her younger brother in the incident that stripped her of her humanity and destroyed her village.  She is cold, ruthless, and filled with hatred that, when combined with her daemonic hunger, makes her a pretty scary character.  She would make an excellent second-to-the-last-boss in most JRPGs, simply because of how intense she is, retaining a level of humanity that strikes to the heart while acting in a manner that is almost too focused on the results to be a fully functional human being.  Oh, she has her soft moments... but as the saying goes, even the worst of villains will sometimes be kind to a child or save a puppy. 
That is perhaps what is most exhilarating about this game.  Most of the player characters are unabashedly selfish in motive, acting solely for their own sake, regardless of the cost to those around them.  For a world being consumed by a blight that is actually worse than the one in Zestiria in some ways, this makes them true villains, even if their enemies are just as bad in their own way.  Velvet's fighting style is visceral, brutal, and it perfectly fits the action-oriented battle system of this series.  Feet, fists, and blade all in one ball of fury (literally) that sometimes strikes out with a demonic claw to devour her enemies.
That brings me to the battle system... except for two major elements, this can be considered to be functionally the same as most other Tales games since Abyss.   The first of these elements is the 'souls' system.  In this system, you can gain more action points (SP) for future combat actions by inflicting status ailments or killing enemies, thus strengthening you at their cost... but in exchange, if you let them inflict ailments on you, you lose souls, and this severely limits how you can act once it gets down to one or two.  The solution to this is the second element... the 'soul break', where you can, at three souls or above, sacrifice a single soul to use a special move that has various effects on how you fight.  Since I fought with Velvet throughout the entire game, I'll just speak about hers.  Her ability allows her to strike out with her 'claw' and 'therionize' (eat) a part of her enemies (incidentally also breaking their guard and leaving them open to further attack) and gain a boost of some sort based on the type of enemy she ate.  The primary advantage of this state is that she can continue attacking until the effect runs out, ignoring her remaining number of souls.  It also heals all status ailments and debuffs and some HP, as well as making you invulnerable to ailments and knock-backs.  Unfortunately, it also immediately begins to drain HP, and if you maintain this state for too long, it is entirely possible to run yourself down to a single hp, if you aren't careful about getting hit.  Since killing enemies can also restore hp, this isn't an entirely bad state to be in, and if you have enough souls stored up, you can maintain this state by 'eating' an enemy whenever it is about to run out.  On Normal mode, I felt like I was playing a Tales version of Dynasty Warriors at times (with a greater variety of attacks), lol.
Second in importance for gameplay, at least as far as I was concerned, is the equipment skills... basically, every equipment type has a single skill that the equipable characters can learn permanently by earning enough Grade while wearing it.  I had all of the ones available by the end, and I hate to imagine how much harder most of the game would have been without them.  Why?  Because stat increases due to experience gaining are insanely minimal in this game, leaving you reliant on equipment-enhancement and equipment skills to make up the gap... oh and player skills, but that goes without saying.  On harder difficulties, it only gets worse (believe me, I had some horrible experiences when I set it to the harder modes for the hell of it until I got used to the changed rhythms of battle). 
In any case, now down to the story... to be blunt, no other Tales game even gets close to this game in terms of story and presentation.  Vesperia was good, but it didn't have anywhere near as much of an impact as this one did on me.  I cried, raged, and laughed with the characters from beginning to end, despite having weeks-long gaps between my playing sessions.  That is how deep an impression this game left on me, that I could pick it up after a fairly long hiatus and get just as absorbed into the narrative as if I'd never left.  By the end, I was weeping for both sides of the conflict, while agreeing from the heart with Velvet and her crew, it was easy to empathize with Artorius, despite his inhumane actions and manner.   As revenge stories go, it was far deeper than you'd expect, while retaining the essence of how it began from start to finish... a feat that is greatly impressive to me.  Not to mention that Velvet and crew's journey was never, at any point, about saving the world... a huge advantage over other jrpgs in and of itself.
A few Linguistic comments
In the Japanese language terminology there were some really interesting (for me) differences in how the same elements were referred to between games.  Whereas the Japanese term for the Malak in Zestiria had nuances of divinity to it, the term used in this one referred to them as 'spirits', with a nuance of something that could and should be used as a tool.  As for the daemons, the difference in terms was even more telling between the games.  In Zestiria, they are 'hyouma' (Hellions), a term which can be translated as 'possession demons', divesting the individual in question of built-in responsibility for what he has become.  However, in Berseria, they are called 'gouma', a term which can be translated as 'sin demons'.  This simple alteration of phrasing marks a drastic difference in attitudes between the Shepherd-equivalents (the exorcists) of Berseria's age and Sorey in Zestiria.  This difference in attitude is reflected throughout the story, creating an atmosphere that is drastically different from the one in Zestiria.  'Subtle' isn't a quality you usually ascribe to JRPG makers, so I was all the more impressed with this game for the linguistic aspects.
EDIT: Ah, if you didn't figure it out from the text above, this game made me back into a fanboy for the first time in a while.  Sixty hours across one and a half months plus complete satisfaction in how it ended and the process of how it reached that ending... such a rare experience for me these days.

I'm just going to jump right in and give you the answer: imagine you're telling someone a story about something that happened to you a month ago. It's that easy. Ingrain that mindset into your brain, and you, too, can write in past tense without sounding like a madman.
Before I launch into an example, I do want to point out that there's nothing inherently wrong or right with writing in either the present tense or the past tense. Some things come off better in one or the other, and both are common choices in VN localizations. I have a personal slight preference for past tense, even though it's a little harder to write in, even once you know the trick, but either is fine.
That said, I firmly believe that a localization should make a conscious choice for the tense in which the flow of narration proceeds and should then stick to it. All too often, even in professional localizations, there will clearly be an intended tense for the events in the flow of narration, but then the tense will slip back and forth between that choice and the alternative. This reads really unnaturally, and it frankly bugs the crap out of me, keeping me from being able to fully enjoy what I'm reading. It's one thing to intentionally switch, for instance by consciously employing the historic present (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_present), but it's another thing entirely to just be sloppily jumping back and forth because you don't know what you're doing.
So, here, let me make up a story and write it the way I would tell it to you out loud if you were sitting next to me, and then let me write it the way it would hypothetically have been written in some of the localizations I've read recently. After that, I'll break down the pieces and explain why and how I'm doing things differently, and even a little bit of why things that may look questionable are okay, in this example.
Now, here's the way you'd see this sort of thing written in a couple of the localizations I've read recently:
"The night before" vs. "Last night" and "By that night" vs. "Tonight."
This is, honestly, the big one, and the way I snuck in a present tense verb into the very last sentence after "tonight" is a clear sign of the problem (and is exactly how it would have been written in some of the things I've looked at recently, mixed-tense sentence and all). You cannot say "last night" to describe something that happened a month and one day ago; people don't do that. When you write "last night," that "last night" is relative to the person narrating the story, and you're narrating something that happened in the past, so that means "last night" should be, in all likelihood, in the future, relative to the story you're telling. The result is nonsense. The same thing happens with "tonight." The word is relative to the present you, not relative to the past you, and no gymnastics with the verb are going to prevent that interpretation. Trying to write these words into the flow of events in the past tense makes you sound like a madman.
There are a lot of other words with the same behavior, to some degree or other: "now," (probably the very worst), "here," "this," "these," and so on. Picture yourself sitting across from someone, telling a story, and try to use those words in the story, and you'll realize they simply don't work correctly. Take "here" for example: "here" is where you are. If you're sitting in the office, telling your coworker about your amusement park trip a month ago, and you drop the word "here", they're going to naturally expect you mean the office, and when you're trying to use that word to refer to the amusement park, they're going to get horribly confused. Those words all have to refer to something around you at present, not something that was around you a month ago at the time of the story. You have to swap them out for words like "then," "there," "that," and "those." Basically, you need words with an appropriate sense of distance to them. I see this kind of line all the time in VN translations:
Every time I see it, it makes me want to cry. I suspect there are a couple reasons why so many VN localizations fall into the trap of using words like this as part of past tense narration:
They write individual isolated narration lines, often surrounded by long stretches of dialogue. Of course, dialogue isn't rewritten into the past tense, like the narration, but delivered naturally as the character delivered them, so you simply end up seeing lots of dialogue for a while, and you start to get some cognitive dissonance pushing you towards present tense. VN narration is always surrounded by images and voice acting, which lends everything a sense of immediacy. This gives an even stronger push towards the feel that everything is happening "now," unconsciously biasing the writer towards present tense. However, you'll never find this kind of word usage in the past tense in a professionally-published novel, where those two conditions don't apply. You could use those two reasons as an argument for why VNs should be written in present: maybe, arguably, it's just easier on the brain. I personally don't really think so, but ultimately, you can choose what tense you want. If you want to write present tense, go for it. If you want to write past tense, though, you need to overcome all of that and start using the right words.
"Hadn't been able to sleep" vs. "couldn't sleep."
This one kind of sucks because it's more verbose in the past perfect, but this is a necessary consequence you have to accept when the flow of events narrated is in the past tense. How should you describe events which happened prior to the flow of narration? Grammatically speaking, what happened before the past? That's the past perfect tense. "I went to the store, but before that I had gone to the bank to make a withdrawal so I could buy groceries." If you don't put the past perfect tense on events which already happened relative to the past, the order isn't as obvious. Yes, you absolutely can say "I went to the store, but before that I went to the back to make a withdrawal," but when you do this it's more like a mental rewind. You start playing the narration forward with the first clause, but then you say, but wait, before we can do that, I need to actually rewind the narration and tell you about this bank trip. In this example it's fine, but imagine you're telling a long complicated story (like, say, narrating a VN), and at some point you need to refer back to an event that was already narrated, maybe something days in the past relative to the flow of narration. You can't do a mental rewind in that circumstance. You can do a flashback, but usually such thoughts aren't a full-on flashback, which itself is basically that mental rewind that resets the flow of events; these are much more often simply the narrator reflecting on something happening in the past relative to the current flow of events. You need to put that recollected past event relative to your past narration into the past perfect tense.
What's that present-tense clause doing there?
"They've got great thrill rides there" is a particularly interesting clause, being in the present tense, so I want to talk about it for a moment. This is basically an aside (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aside), and as such it's bound by different rules. It's a statement directly addressed at you, the reader, rather than a part of the narration of the story. In the case of an aside, it's perfectly reasonable to make an observation about the present state of things. That said, in VN writing, I try to avoid this entirely. Of necessity, an aside is breaking the fourth wall. This is fine if you're doing it for a good reason (maybe you're Deadpool and you just love breaking the fourth wall), but not so fine when it's not stylistically important, and it's just making a simple observation. In this circumstance, it would be a needless disruption, in a VN. That said, it does feel perfectly natural when I'm just informally telling a story. IMO, this is one point where the process of telling a story and the process of writing VN narration diverge. The trick isn't completely foolproof; it's just a hell of a lot better than writing without any guidance at all, wandering aimlessly between tenses.

Nutaku has been caught censoring dialogues implying non-consensual sex in free-to-play ero-RPG Kamihime Project R, reneging on earlier promises.
Rape scenes censored in Nutaku's Kamihime Project R

One of the single biggest elements of most VNs in existence is slice-of-life.  This entire post is based on this fact, and it isn't one that can seriously be argued against by anyone who has read more than a hundred VNs.
So what is slice-of-life?  With VNs, it is a type of scene where bits and pieces of daily life, without any particular conflict, are portrayed.  These can be humorous, mildly touching, or informative. 
So what is the value of slice-of-life as a tool for storytelling?  For one thing, it provides an opportunity to portray and develop the characters in their most 'natural' setting.  Do you want to know what a character is like in peaceful times?  Slice-of-life scenes are generally the tool used.  Do you want to slowly develop a mild romance between two characters?  Then slice-of-life is your friend. 
In this sense, slice-of-life is a highly valuable tool.  While extreme scenes, such as violent scenes or ones with psychological or intellectual conflict, are also valuable for developing characters and their relationships, it is the slice-of-life scenes that form the skeleton to which the conflict and/or drama adds flesh later on. 
However, the problem with slice-of-life is that it is basically an exclusion of extremity.  It is difficult - virtually impossible - to give flesh to a character with only slice-of-life.  For better or worse, people bare their true strength and value (or weakness and uselessness) in situations where they are being tested by circumstance or opposition (whether intense or mild).  This applies to VN characters, as well. 
Slice-of-life is your friend... unless that's all there is.  Sadly, a lot of writers make the mistake of thinking otherwise.  I can't count how many VNs I've experienced that make this mistake, to one extent or another.  Slice-of-life as a tool is a valuable friend and ally... but as the sole tool for constructing a story, it falls pathetically short all too often.
Edit: Understand, I came to these conclusions as a result of playing numerous VNs that made that particular mistake... and I'm including 'standard Vn romance' as slice-of-life.  Romance is something I'll touch on separately in the next entry.

Ambiguity is a fascinating element of language, one an editor both struggles with and celebrates regularly. On the celebration side of things, ambiguity is an essential tool in the setup of a lot of short jokes, for one. As an example, an ambiguous statement leads to a misunderstanding, and in a VN said misunderstanding usually leads to an accidental love confession, resulting in the unfortunate victim stammering outrageously while blushing like a sunset. How cute. Ambiguity can also be a powerful tool in foreshadowing, since it allows a single statement to be interpreted in two ways, of which one can be applicable to the immediate present, thus making it a perfectly reasonable line to have in the present, and the other only meaningful when considering future events, usually causing the reader to look back and say, "Ahh-hah, now I see what it really meant." Ambiguity is also absolutely essential in writing clever blog post titles. But on the struggling side, ambiguity is often an enemy getting in the way of your reader enjoying your text.
As you read, your brain furiously analyzes words as they come in, building up and tearing down many possible syntactical structures for the sentence and many possible semantic interpretations of the various words and phrases, before eventually trimming this all down to a single interpretation of the sentence, typically over the course of a tiny fraction of a second. However, there are many stumbling blocks which can lengthen this process or thwart it entirely, notably including actual errors (misspellings, dropped words, incorrect grammar, etc.,), which is probably the chief reason why such errors are so frowned-upon in typical writing. Slowing down the reader's understanding, or preventing it entirely, is generally not the author's goal, assuming said author is not James Joyce.
Setting aside actual errors, ambiguity is one of the main impediments to a reader's understanding. Since one of a VN editor's chief goals is to ensure a script flows well for a reader, eliminating unintentional ambiguity is an important sub-goal. Even outside of intentional usage like in the cases mentioned in the first paragraph, ambiguity in English is still incredibly common, with small ambiguities cropping up constantly while reading essentially any text. Let's take a look at an example of a super-small ambiguity which slows down the reader just a tiny bit, a sentence containing my least favorite word:
Looks fine, right? As a whole the sentence is totally unambiguous. But while you're reading it, you're going to run into "that", and "that"'s a problem. "That" is an incredibly flexible word in the English language: it's a pronoun, a determiner, an adverb, and a relative pronoun. It's actually even more flexible in British English, where it can act as a subordinating conjunction, and even though most VN translations are written in American English, the lines there are pretty fuzzy, and it wouldn't be surprising or confusing to see a sentence like "He asked that she go" in a VN.
Now, in the sentence above, "that" is being used as a relative pronoun, but the prefix of this sentence, "I told you that" is also a perfectly well-formed English sentence in which it's instead being used as a pronoun, and if your brain follows such an interpretation immediately as you read the sentence, it'll take it a few extra milliseconds for your brain to unwedge itself, reorganize into treating "that" as a relative pronoun, and continue on forming the correct interpretation.
All right, doesn't sound like a big deal, does it? You're right. This particular, single instance isn't. But they add up, and you can do better, so you might as well. To put it in super technical jargon I didn't know until I was writing up this post, English has a so-called "zero relative pronoun" which can be used in place of relative pronouns like "that" which are introducing restrictive relative clauses. To give an example, since the previous jargon is so technical as to be basically useless, instead of the above sentence, you can just drop "that" and write:
Now, look, I'm not saying this makes a huge difference, but doesn't this version feel a tiny bit better when you read it? Eliminating usage of overly-flexible words like "that" is a good way to reduce some ambiguity, but keep in mind this is a single example of a specific case. It just happened to be the one which prompted this blog post. However, I assure you, if you start reading your work with a careful eye out for the clarity of each line, you'll find tons of small, unintentional ambiguities popping out at you which you want to correct. Training yourself to look for them and to clean them up is one part of helping your text flow better.
I guess that's that. I hope you got something out of that, and I ask that, if you have questions, comments, or problems regarding this or "that", you leave a note below to that effect.

For those of you familiar with my tendency to bitch and moan about this kind of story-structure, I don't really need to explain... but I'll do so anyway.  The 'ladder-style' story structure is the style used in games such as G-senjou, Aiyoku no Eustia, and Sen no Hatou.  While it does make it easy to fit in a 'true' path (the true path being main street) and breaking things down into 'arcs' makes for a more expansive story, that is at the cost of increasing irritation in a way that would never have come up in a kinetic novel (which all VNs using ladder-style should be). 
What is that irritation?  Meaningless heroine routes. 
There are two types of heroine in a ladder-style VN.  There is the true heroine and the 'fake' heroine.  I'm not kidding... all heroines other than the true one are fakes, as are their paths, in most cases.  Amatsutsumi was an exception, but it was a rare one, lol. 
Now, in order to explain this, I'll outline how most of the games using this style tend to play out.  There is a main story going on, both in the foreground and the background.  In most cases, the background elements of the story that don't come out until you are in the true heroine's path preclude all possibility of the sub-heroines' paths actually existing in the context of the greater setting. 
Another quality of these games is that the true heroine is almost always one of the least-interesting/attractive heroines in the group, both personality-wise and setting-wise.  Airheads, ditzes, weak-willed victims, naive princesses, and overconfident self-proclaimed geniuses with an impenetrable belief in their own correctness (if you haven't figured it out Eutia>Hatou>G-senjou)... the list goes on, but you get the picture (again, Amatsutsumi is the exception rather than the rule).  I honestly have no idea of why all these companies that choose to use this style do it this way...
Now, frequently the true path itself has excellent storytelling with round antagonists and protagonists whose value as a character far outweighs the weakness of the true heroine... but this brings up another issue.  This issue is: the other heroines.  The elements of the setting, the personality and objectives of the antagonists, and even the personality of the protagonist sometimes render all other heroine paths as literally impossible in most cases.  If you don't mind SPOILERS for Eustia and Sen no Hatou, I'll give you some examples below.
 


Now, as to why that's a problem... I know it is nitpicking... but when I empathize with a heroine, fall in love with her by proxy, and see her off to a happy ending, there is nothing that can possibly drive me more insane with rage than the 'true' ending of the heroine path completely invalidating the possibility of that small happiness even occurring.  Eustia's best heroines are all 'fake' heroines, the same goes for G-senjou and Sen no Hatou as well.  The Leyline trilogy also suffers from this particular issue.
So do you understand now why I hate this type of VN structure?  I have good reason to despise it.  I still respect the makers of Namima no Kuni no Faust for choosing to make the game kinetic and just add the other heroines 'endings' as 'what if' scenarios in the extras far more than I will ever respect the makers of the games I mentioned above.
This isn't even mentioning that, by having heroine paths split off earlier, you lose a great deal of the story meant to develop the characters in the first place.
 
Why did I bring this up again...?  Because, for the fourth time this year, I've come across a VN that I was interested in that uses this never-to-be-sufficiently-damned story structure, Sora no Tsukurikata.  Damn all non-charage makers who follow fads like this particular one to hell, I say.

Understand, I'm not a huge fan of the moege and charage umbrella genres.  This is something I'm sure anyone who reads this blog is already well-aware of (to the point of exasperation in some cases) and at this point, it isn't something I need to reemphasize.  However, I've noticed that I've never really mentioned what I do like about moege/charage and their positive elements...  and I thought I'd go ahead and put that down here.
 
1. Charage do make decent breaks from my workday, as they don't require much in the way of brain activity to enjoy.
2. Generally, their visuals are maintained at a level where they are pleasant to look at (some other genres use really odd art-styles... in the case of 07th Expansion, outright ugly ones, lol).
3.  Junai (pure love) is a romantic genre that puts you at ease, in general.  After all, you know that a happy ending is coming and there is no reason whatsoever to fear for the characters' future.
4.  Comedy- Most charage at least attempt to be comedic.  That they don't always succeed (increasingly, they don't succeed in recent years) doesn't detract from the fact that it is a quality of the genre.
5.  Slice-of-life- Though you need to take it with a grain of salt, charage are actually much better as tools for learning about modern Japanese culture (outside of subculture) than anime and manga are, simply by the nature of a story with narration.  That said, it is ultimately an exaggerated, compartmentalized, and idealized version of 'everyday life', lol. 
 

Now, Ruitomo is one of 'those legendary VNs', the first kamige written by the Akatsuki Works team.  It is well-known and often discussed amongst vets of playing untranslated VNs, and you can see how this was the formative stage for a team that would go on to make numerous great games in the future, most of them chuunige.
First off, Ruitomo isn't a chuunige, at least in the classic sense.  The protagonist is a trap who is bound by an inherited curse not to reveal his true gender, and the story begins with him encountering several others that also possess similar curses, as well as powers that he doesn't possess.  Ruitomo is one of those games that doesn't easily fall into a genre or sub-genre, as it has elements of action, mystery, mindfuck, fantasy, and romance all wrapped into one big bundle.  So, I just have to shrug and call it a 'story-focused VN', lol (as vague a term as moege or charage, haha). 
One thing that you should know about all Hino Wataru-written Akatsuki Works VNs... in every one of them a version of Akaneko (the final heroine of this one) appears, with the same personality, similar habits, and the same voice actor (Akaneko, Eru from Hello, Lady, Yuki from Comyu).  Similarly, there is always at least one 'straight-man' heroine who tends to prefer correctness over everything else (Iyo in Ruitomo, Saku in Hello, Lady, Benio in Comyu, etc)
I once read a crappy review that said this was a VN about friendship *spews laughter*.  Sorry, but that was one reviewer who mistook one element of the story for the whole point of it.  The real central theme of this VN is isolation, social ostracism, and moral relativity.  Technically, all Akatsuki Works VNs indulge in moral relativity, so you can just ignore that one, since it is Hino Wataru's favorite dog to beat.  The isolation and social ostracism elements are fairly obvious from the beginning.  All the heroines and the protagonist are social outcasts by means of their curses.  The protagonist is the most obvious example as it forces him to lie and distance others from himself, but others have their own issues.  For instance, Rui's curse, the inability to make promises of any kind, is crippling in a modern world, where you have to be able to sign a contract just to find a place to live or 'promise' to be at work on time.  To one extent or another, the others' curses hold them isolated and ostracized from society as well. 
Tomo is driven by a strong desire to escape his curse, intensified as time goes on by his growing fondness for his fellow curse-bearers and the guilt for deceiving them.  I honestly can't help but like Tomo... he is selfish enough to be human but selfless enough when it comes to his friends to give his all for them.  A lot of people who hate Akihito from Comyu will probably find Tomo to be far more pleasant, as that other's less pleasant qualities are diluted and his more pleasant ones enhanced in Tomo.  He lacks Akihito's female-directed philanthropic spirit, but he does have a strong generosity of spirit to him... without the somewhat indiscriminate sexual mores of Akihito.
One thing I think a lot of people who try to read this VN have trouble with, besides the somewhat complex turns of phrase that are endemic to all Hino Wataru works, is the way so much of the dialogue between the characters, even in the slice-of-life scenes, is... oblique, requiring reading between the lines to grasp the full content.  A lot of this comes from the curses, both referencing them, avoiding referencing them, and avoiding activating them.  However, at least some of it is simply an extension of how relatively easy with one another the group is in normal situations, despite their often conflicting personalities.  These conversations are easier to follow if you get the characters' personalities and roles in the group, but if you have trouble with that kind of thing, you'll probably be left behind at times.
Ruitomo has a definite playing order, with you being forced to play Rui's path before reading Atori's, Koyori's, and Iyo's (preferably in that order, or at least with Iyo as the last of the second three) and completing those four opening up Akaneko's path (the true path).  I'll be blunt when I say that grasping the whole of the story without reading the first four paths is virtually impossible, so 'cheaters' who use 100% save files to get the true end first will just be screwing themselves over, lol.
This VN's story starts out in the middle... one of Hino Wataru's questionable habits.  For better or worse, he likes to thrust you into the middle of the prologue before dragging you back to the beginning of it, and Ruitomo is the VN that suffers the most for it, in my experience.  To be blunt, it is really hard to figure out what is going on during the first scene, so about one-third of the people I've talked to that tried to read this VN dropped it or stalled within the first quarter of the prologue.  However, as the VN goes on, its characters, their personalities, their troubles, and their experiences grow on you rapidly, until you can't help but be entranced. 
One thing that I was seriously impressed about, coming back to play this through a second time, was the meticulous way Hino Wataru designed the common route and the paths... he made sure everything was perfectly consistent as a whole, even if it didn't seem like it at first, and every single scene had at least some meaning in the greater context of the game as a whole, even if it might have seemed irrelevant or secondary in the path in which it existed.  This shows off the rather impressive capacity for 'management of the details' that a very few writers in the VN world manage to display.  There is a good reason why creating a large-scale story-focused VN (whether chuunige or not) tends to be rare.  Most writers simply can't manage to maintain the internal consistency that you see in a VN like this one.
Overall, I was actually more impressed this time around than I was the first time I played this.  It is called a kamige for a reason... brilliance of design, emotional stimulation, intellectual stimulation, etc.  The fact is that VNs on this level are exceedingly rare and always worth the price I pay to buy them.
PS: I'll play the fandisc soon, though I might or might not manage to replay it before I begin playing this month's releases.
 

Agobarrier, who was the writer of Shuffle (the work most familiar to people here) was one of my favorite non-chuuni VN writers.  Ironically, his best works were all written after leaving Navel and its massive stream of liquid cash to form Rosebleu, my favorite comedy company.  I started going back through his entire library of works (or at least the ones I've played and own) since I heard of his death in mid-April, and as I replay his final work, Valkyrie Runabout, I feel a need to look back on what he did for me, personally (though he obviously had no idea I exist). 
First, for those who don't know what works I'm talking about, the Tiny Dungeon series, which is on the second level of my Beginner recommendations list, is a harem/fantasy/action/comedy based in a multiverse where four worlds, inhabited by four distinct races that just recently ended a horrible inter-world war.  One of the nastier revelations at the end of the war was that it was a human and mostly human interests who had instigated the war's beginning and kept it going through some seriously Machiavellian manipulations.  As a result, the human protagonist, Shirasagi Hime, is a target for prejudice, contempt, and outright hatred regardless of his personal character at Trinity, the school built to encourage peaceful interactions between the three non-human races (humans weren't forbidden from entering the school, but remaining there was kind of... difficult, to say the least).  The series stretches across four games, three of them exploring the possibility of Hime choosing one of the three main heroines (the demon lord Veil, the divine princess Note, or the Queen of the Dragons, Ururu) and the resulting victories and tragedies that result.  The fourth game, Brave or Slave, ties up the series and brings it to a true ending, and Endless Dungeon (the fifth game that serves as a sort of fandisc/extra story) completes the saga.
The Tiny Dungeon series relies on a mix of the various common types of humor found in Japanese VNs in general (manzai, personality-humor, running jokes) and it shows the various eras Agobarrier worked through (from the turn of the century to last year).  In addition, it did what he probably wanted to do with Shuffle... ended things with a harem, lol.
His other works as Rosebleu's jack-of-all-trades (he apparently worked at least a little in every position... and I wouldn't surprised if the COD was overwork, considering this) all shared that sense of humor and maintained a level of quality that reflected his experience in the industry.  The fact is that, setting aside the fact that Rosebleu's games are mid to low-budget affairs, they were all written well and used what they had to its fullest to entertain the reader.
And so I, as one of those who has read every one of his works since he helped found Rosebleu, will soon finish my own period of mourning.  To be honest, his loss hit me almost as hard as the death of David Eddings (one of my favorite authors), and I often find myself purging myself of my grief through the cathartic scenes in his VNs.  I am still young enough to have rarely lost one of the authors I truly fell in love with, so each of them hits me hard...  harder than I really expected, really. 
Edit: My posts on the Tiny Dungeon series
 
Valkyrie Runabout
 
 

I want to preface this by saying that I enjoyed Highway Blossoms. But if I want to see better stuff out there in English language Visual Novels, whether OELVN or in translation, people are going to have to start criticizing the problems they have, and I didn't see criticism of the problems I found in Highway Blossoms. So, so that the creators (be they OELVN writers or translators) can learn and benefit from criticism and hopefully come back with something stronger next time around, and so that potential readers know what they're getting into, here's my critique of some of the flaws I found in Highway Blossoms's writing.
I'm really just talking about the writing here. I'll start by talking about macro-scale problems: issues I had with themes and how they were handled, and problems that should have been solved in developmental editing. I'm, frankly, not very good at seeing these kinds of problems: I'm better at seeing small-scale (line-by-line) problems. I'll talk about those second.
For what it's worth, I think the macro-scale issues are not that bad, but the micro-scale issues are pretty bad. If your reaction to the broader problems I talk about first is "yes, but all games have issues like this, and many/most are much worse about it", let's be clear that I'm totally with you on that one. I just think that this game could be made better by addressing some of them, so I want to talk about them a little bit. Let's start there.
 
Themes - Americana and music
"Americana" is a big overarching theme for this game, but in spite of that, the VN includes a lot of Japanese-isms. Why is an earthy late-teens American girl fretting about "indirect kisses" (scare quotes courtesy of the original text) like a typical Japanese schoolgirl eroge heroine? Why are both of the heroines flashing peace signs in a photograph, again for all the world like Japanese schoolgirls? In one scene that I blocked out of my mind until I found it in my screenshots, some late-teenage American guy is bowing repeatedly. Highway Blossoms wants to be about the rural American south-west, but these weeaboisms, in part, compromise that goal. Examples:
The topic of music was treated very oddly. It was almost constantly there, hanging over the conversation and the action, but it somehow never made its way into being a focus. One character liked to talk about music, and it seemed to hold a deep meaning for her as a personal connection to her grandfather, but the others just kind of nodded or frowned along when the topic came up - they understood and accepted the importance, but there was no real discourse about it, just constant name-dropping. Music as a theme featured prominently in both minor scenes and key scenes, but somehow never felt particularly important to the narrative. When I was done reading, I still didn't really feel that Marina and Amber had connected over music, and I still didn't have a good handle on what music meant to Amber. By way of contrast, I read VA-11 Hall-A about a week after I read Highway Blossoms. In the space of three drinks with Kira Miki, I learned more about the significance of music to that character than I did throughout all of Highway Blossoms's music mentions.
 
An unnecessary scene
Lastly on macro-scale problems, I did feel that there was at least one whole scene that should have been cut from Highway Blossoms: the Jumbo scene. The actions of the main characters in this scene actually subverted their characterization: I don't view Amber as the sort of person to commit petty vandalism against an individual, nor Marina the sort of person to laugh prettily about it afterwards, even if the victim was a redneck who wouldn't stop hitting on both of them. This scene was, I guess, meant to be comic relief? But it didn't succeed, at least for me. It just introduced a flat side character who served no purpose but to be the butt of a bad joke. Cut it.
 
Telling rather than showing
At a micro scale, which admittedly is something I'm more picky about, the writing has a few big problems. First, it tends to tell rather than show, a fair amount of the time. Examples:
The telling/showing issues are at their worst when the narration adopts what I can only call a first-person omniscient point of view, where the narrating character somehow reads the mind of the other main character and narrates all of her emotions directly. The first time I saw this, it was just a straight-up description of complex emotions and motivations; this does not make for an interesting or compelling read. In contrast, the very next line was a solid example of showing: it described actions in a way that vibrantly communicated the underlying emotions. The potential for solid work is here, but it's headed off by missteps like the above examples.
 
Purple prose
Second, verbosity and purple prose are a serious problem. Examples:
Most of these are not describing crucial events, and even the ones that are need better handling. For the second screenshot, for instance, all that needs to be communicated is "we drank a lot of beer" (not necessarily in those words; just that idea). Instead, it's been turned into a mess of mixed metaphors and unnecessarily complex verbiage. Unfortunately, this is par for the course - every well-executed line is balanced by one full of dead weight. Important lines fade into the background because descriptors are bloating the unimportant lines as well. Economy is an essential element to good writing, and it's sorely lacking in Highway Blossoms.
 
Awkward prose
Finally, there's a lot of simply unnatural phrasing and odd language choice, some of it even apparently intentional. Examples:
 
In closing.
When the writing avoids all of these issues, or when (as happened to me in one noteworthy scene) the music and CG combine to carry the reader pell-mell through a scene, so that you skim the text rather than actually reading it, the VN has some great moments. Unfortunately, a whole lot of the time, it does fall victim to one or more of the above issues and becomes a lot less of a joy to read.
Now, look, I know that all sounds pretty bad; it probably sounds like I hated this game. I didn't. I think the art was generally gorgeous, especially the background art and some of the CGs. I rather liked the soundtrack, and I thought it fit the setting well. On that topic, I love the setting — different is good! I am always up for VNs outside of high schools and outside of Japan. But the bulk of the experience in a visual novel, for me at least, is the novel part. It's the script, the writing. The writing in Highway Blossoms, especially when looked at line-by-line, comes up short.

Nutaku has a long history of undisclosed censorship, but this is surprisingly little known among eroge fans. DMCA abuses suggest a deliberate cover-up.
Nutaku caught abusing DMCA takedowns to censor evidence of censorship
Fuwanovel forum thread

Hello everyone, Aizen-Sama here. I’ve been only around this community and forums for around 6 months by now, and even though I may not be the most knowledgeable when it comes to VN’s in general, I think that I possess enough knowledge about the translation scene. That’s right, today I’m not writing a post about Luna Translations, but one about my opinion on the translation scene, translation groups, and the community revolving them.

Let us establish how this community and market actually exist in the first place. Piracy and fan translating, they are both mutually exclusive to each other and they are the foundations of what we consider as the “western visual novel community”.
After some years where piracy slowly started to decrease and official releases started to be a thing I can safely assume that there are three types of people now, one who will support every single game localization and buy the Visual Novels instead of pirating them, one who will pirate everything and anything, or one that will mix between these two because either there is no other access to the game in Japanese to apply the English patch (in other words, you can’t buy the game legally because the Japanese market is already a very difficult place to access with Western VPN’s, mostly because Japanese publishers block them to not let people outside Japan buy these games online, which is usually the only way to get them in the first place) or the individual simply doesn’t support some releases or companies that release VN’s in particular (I’ll set people that want to buy legally a game with a fan-translated patch but can’t do it, so they have to pirate the VN even if they don’t want to as an example).
This last example leads to another concerning issue, the relationship between translation groups and the community itself. It’s partly human nature; when a group establishes itself and releases a patch (no matter whether it’s full or partial) we automatically create what is called a “power level” between these two types of people, the users that translate and work on translating games in one way or another (editing, QC’ing, etc…) and the users that simply play the releases made by the first ones.
This so called “power level” is what should be avoided at all costs, sometimes the community must remember that the people that belong to translation groups (whether they are official or not) are part of the community as well, and have their own stances and way of doing things.
Those “power levels” are automatically made, and they are the primary reason of this community’s fragmentation into several “sub-communities”, which is a problem mainly for the translation groups. What I’m trying to say here is that what is constantly happening right now is that what this “power division” has made is to categorize groups by number of patches released (the more they have released the more praised they are) and that has ultimately lead to two things; groups distancing themselves from the community, which is a very bad thing for both of the parties involved, and groups distancing from each other.
What I mean by this last statement is that there is no communication between teams, which leads to what is happening in the actual society that we live in: the individualization of people (Tl-teams in this case). But regarding that aspect, some groups have managed to find a solution to this matter. Let’s put @Arcadeotic's (Euphemic Translation) and @oystein's (Elevator TL) groups for example; both of them have found a way to make the community feel closer to their groups thanks to their “Public Discord Server Policy” (that’s how I call it) and both of them are in the TL Leaders Discord Server (basically a group to try to unite translation teams more, an initiative from Arcadeotic and I). That group has opened my eyes in many aspects regarding team stances towards piracy as well as opinions about the community and it's relation with the Tl teams. This group has also helped me in getting to know people that otherwise I would have never met even if we were active members of this forum and interacted with each other sometimes, like for example Dergonu, Oystein, Kardororororo, and many more.
What I’m ultimately trying to say is that banding together is a rare thing for groups now, and this is the first step to create a community feel again, something that, in my opinion, is being lost little by little and needs to be stopped.
I’ll mention another issue that many people find itchy, and that is the topic of “the sense of entitlement of a loud minority”.
I’d like to make myself very clear about this; I know that there is a silent positive majority, and that compared to the amount of people that complain about things about projects and English patches this majority vastly overcomes the “minority”, but the matter of fact is that this “loud minority” is what gives people that are new to the community a bad impression about it from the start.
I’ll set two examples to demonstrate the last point I mentioned: firstly, I’d like to address the Koiken Otome Project, one that took approximately three years to finish. It’s a topic full of controversy, firstly because people firstly speculated that Flying Pantsu was going to “definitely sell out to the localization companies” and they made a ruckus about it.

First of all, what if they really “sold out” to one of them? That is, in my opinion, a good thing (primarily because I belong to the “buy everything” type of guy instead of pirating unless it can’t be avoided and tend to support official releases), but mostly because, the fact of the matter is that they spent working on an English patch of a game that contains more than 40K lines three years, and the entire effort is theirs, that means that even if they decided to not release the patch for whatever reason, I would have been totally in favor. Why? Because it’s THEIR work and THEY did it, not the people that feel entitled to have the English patch.
Same goes with the problem that revolved around the time of release. Again, I’ll repeat, the matter of fact is that they could’ve released that patch whenever they wanted because since THEY did the patch, they decide when to release it, simple.

The second example I’ll highlight in this post talks about Shinku Translations and the controversy that revolved around the SakuSaku patch. If you don’t know what happened regarding this project I’ll quickly sum it up: Shinku Translations made a deal with Sekai Project to release the game officially, what ultimately made people who were waiting for a fan-patch very pissed. The comments on their website were mostly full of “sellouts” and “I already bought the game in Japanese, now I’ll have to buy it again, gg boys” and many more that blew my mind. That was the perfect demonstration of the entitlement that people slowly begin to have when a project is close to being finished.
 I’ll repeat myself once again, just like Koiken Otome and Flying Pantsu, it was THEIR work, so they had the right to make a deal with Sekai Project and do whatever they wanted to the patch. And, as Akerou explained in one of the comments, it could lead to more titles being localized, which, in my opinion, are good news!
 People have to start realizing that sooner or later, the entire scope if not most of the translation scope will shift towards official releases instead of fan-patches.
As a last argument regarding this matter, I’ll mention a couple of YouTube comments that I found in the official OP video of SakuSaku published by Sekai Project’s YouTube channel, they basically said this:
“That's a low punch SP. That's just low. The guy translating it is almost done. If you buy the translation from him and release it in the next 2 months I might forgive you. If you do it less than a month you are forgiven.”
“Well just pirate the release when it comes out. This is one of the cases when piracy is completely justified.”
These two comments are part of the “entitlement problem” that I’ve addressed before, and I hope they highlight what I’ve been trying to tackle (take into account that these comments are just the surface, just look at the ones in Shinku’s page and you’ll get a grasp of what this community broods sometimes).

Last but not least, I’d like to address Fuwanovel as a platform for translation projects and my opinion about it as a Leader of a translation group (in this case, Luna Translations).
Don’t get me wrong when I say that. I love Fuwanovel as a site. It’s one of the principal, if not the main responsible for the appearance of a community that revolves around Visual Novels in general. I love this site, and I appreciate the people that back this site paying monthly (I hope I can do it as well when I get the chance) and the mods for doing their jobs correctly and every other person that supports this site. But, I’d like to tackle the issue of trying to host translation projects in a forum-based website.
 I’d like to point out that the system created in Fuwa worked very VERY well at the beginning stages of the creation of this community. Basically, the “Fan Translator Skills” thread and the “Translation Projects” thread were probably very useful and effective back when the community was niche and not a lot of projects and teams crowded the scene (I’m not directing this towards the “Fan TL Discussion” thread, by the way).
But, as a leader of a translation team (and I’m sure that many people will agree with me on this) I just think that Fuwa’s way of hosting projects is not as effective as it was probably two or three years ago.
What I’m trying to say here is that, just like VNDB exists, a platform that focuses solely on helping teams and individuals to work on projects will certainly appear at some point, or at least needs to appear at some point. Summing up, Fuwanovel as a forum focused on the discussion of Visual Novels and the fan translation scene is a very good and positive website, and it’s totally needed for the community to keep growing, but! Fuwanovel (the forums) used as a platform to support projects and teams may have been very effective in the past but not anymore, since now the scope is very broad and more complex compared to when all of this started.
Finally, to close this rant, I’d like to say that if I had to sum up things probably the most important issue would be that the community is losing the sense of being together, and groups, as well as individuals, are distancing themselves from each other, which is something that has to be avoided at all costs. I’ll personally try to do whatever I can about this matter and little by little this problem will hopefully be solved in the future, because together we can do great things.
Let’s try to make the translation world great again, as Trump as it sounds.
 
 
 

Yes, I went ahead and played this, having pre-ordered it on Steam. I've been pumping about three hours a day into it since it came out and my final level for my main party was 47 (which seems to be low, but that is apparently because people go for the 'beat the boss without weakening him first' trophy, pfft).  This is a game designed to bring nostalgia to the minds of those who are fans of the SNES and PS1 eras, and in that sense, it definitely succeeds.  It utilizes a battle system copied from one of the most famous kamige jrpgs of all time, Chrono Trigger... with a number of additions, both big and small.  The world map is also reminiscent of that estimable game... but the resemblance pretty much stops there, save for a few other superficial elements.
First, I'll give you a basic rundown on the story concept.  Endir, a mercenary swordsman, is sent to a certain island to assassinate a young girl, and it is there that he finds out that she is destined to die in any case, giving her life for the sake of the world, to appease the monsters.  It really is, from the very beginning, a story of compassion, driven almost entirely by Setsuna herself, with Endir as a sounding board, more than anything else (your choices as Endir are fairly irrelevant). 
It is easy to love Setsuna.  She is kind-hearted and genuinely compassionate, as one would have to expect of someone who is going willingly to their death to save the world.  As a character, she has, of course, been 'done before', but that isn't as problematic as you might think, considering how the entire VN is meant to stab you with nostalgia about as subtly as driving a nail into someone's forehead, lol.
The world map's design style is identical to Chrono Trigger's (albeit with modern graphics), and many of the skills are drawn straight from that game, name and all... though there are about five times as many skills total.  All skills, save for a few found in chests and a few defaults, are obtained by selling items gotten from monsters to the Magic Associations, which gives you their 'Spritnite' if you sold them enough of the right item.  There is no need for more than one of the 'command' type spritnite, as each character's techniques and magic are unique to them, so don't waste your 'budget' of sold items by getting more than one of any of them, lol.  Support spritnite are another thing entirely... these give various effects, ranging from stat boosts to healing you when you kill enemies, and using them strategically can make the game immensely easier. 
Most monster drops need you to meet certain conditions for them to be dropped, ranging from killing enemies with a specific element, killing them with damage close to their exact hp, or overkilling them (there are other conditions, but those are listed in the monster encyclopedia, so there is no need for me to go into detail here).  This can be a bit of a pain when it comes to items from bosses, but you can re-fight bosses in certain dungeons opened up in the late game, so don't worry too much about it, lol.
One of the positives of this game is that there are multiple characters capable of healing... to be specific, both Setsuna and Endir can serve as healers, as well as damage dealers.  Not being bound to keep any one character in your party just to survive can be immensely helpful... especially when their attack element is useless against the local enemies, hahaha.
The atmosphere of this game is not just shaped by the setting... but also by the music and the world itself.  Piano music dominates this game, giving it a somewhat 'realer' feeling than a lot of the half-synthesized music that is common in mid to low budget jrpgs.  However, while the tunes are just fine for activating your emotions, they tend to blend into one another after a while.  The world... is defined by snow.  Literally.  Blizzards, your feet leaving a path through snow drifts, monsters rolling balls of snow both before and during battle... this game is based in winter, and it doesn't even try to be anything other than a world in winter, hahaha.  Both aspects can leave you numb after a while... but the game is short enough that it isn't that noticeable if you play it in digestible bites of a few hours at a time.
Story-wise... I'd say that the writing/localization is several levels above what you used to see in the same era as Chrono Trigger (one aspect of that era that I am glad is gone is the weirdly inconsistent translations).  The basic plot is classic jrpg, with endless excuses for taking the long route to get to the final destination, lol.  The ending is... a bit of a letdown, from my point of view.  I honestly don't see why they chose the classic 'dialog-free' ending type that used to be common in SNES era jrpgs, even if they were going for nostalgia, hahah.
Overall, this is a first-rate effort, for what amounts to a mid-budget VN directed at retro-gamers.  It goes for the emotions, it ignores the intellect, and it breaks the fourth wall at times (you'll see what I mean if you go to a certain place once you get the airship).  In other words, it is a classic 'save the world' style jrpg, and for those who like the older console-style jrpgs, it is pure crack, though it does leave you wanting more (I'm probably going to yank Xenogears out and play it again sometime soon, lol).

For better or worse, the VN localization industry in America and other Western nations is expanding rapidly, primarily due to the efforts of aggressive localization companies such as Mangagamer and Sekai Project, but also due to the increased interest on the part of at least some Japanese VN companies in making a few extra bucks through localization. 
I say 'for better or worse' because the increase in localizations has actually begun to outline what some of the biggest problems with VNs are, for those living in the West.  What I've put down below is basic guidance... not all of which I follow myself, but which is mostly common sense (which a surprising number of new Fuwans seem to be ignorant of).
 
Ethical/Legal problems
1. Piracy- To be blunt, prosecuting consumers of pirated games is a waste of time, and most companies are quite well aware of this.  So, most of the fallout for this kind of thing is going to keep hitting the websites and individuals who promote the distribution end of things.  A few examples will most likely be made of outspoken pirate consumers (the idiots, in other words), but the problem here is almost entirely ethical for most.  Tell me, do you think it is right not to pay for content if you happen to have the money needed to pay for it?
2. Lolicon content- Seriously guys?  When I saw that Maitetsu was getting a localization, even though it was an all-ages one, alarm bells went off in my head.  Someone is inevitably going to put up an h-patch for the game, and that is going to cause a huge amount of controversy later on that could be a huge blow to the industry, in the short run.  Loli content is one of the two nuclear bombs of Japanese eroge, and it is the one that honestly bothers me the most personally (not so much morally, as in a pragmatic sense).
3. Rapegames- I'm going to be blunt... considering the degree to which Western culture has come to consider rape a mortal sin, do you really think games focused around rape and extreme sexual situations (ie the entire Maggot Baits game) are safe for the industry to localize, if you consider their potential to backfire?  There is no conceivable way that these games could be considered anything other than obscene by any reasonable critic (not a community one, in other words), and in the long run, games like these have an enormous potential to castrate the localization industry.
4. School-based games- Sadly, the excuse that 'all the heroines are over eighteen' is only going to take you so far in some countries... to be blunt, a judge is unlikely to listen to that kind of protestation if, for whatever insane reason, you end up dragged into court.
Common sense issues
1. I don't think anyone has any business telling us we can't import Japanese games, including VNs.  However, as a matter of common sense, you should probably avoid importing anything with a lot of content linked to the numbers 2 and 3 in the section above.  I don't mean to piss on your bonfire, but if you are going to buy something with that kind of material, at least have the sense to use digital download purchases and/or don't display the packages for that type of eroge where casual visitors can see them.
2. Figurines and other side-junk- Within reason, there is no reason why a fan of a particular bit of otaku media shouldn't order figurines, statuettes, oppai mousepads, etc to decorate their room or gaming space.  However, keep it within reason... I've seen otaku friends of mine go insane and overpurchase, even going into debt, over buying swag.  If you aren't rich, have the sense to focus on the main material first, then expand at a reasonable pace into the swag.  To an extent, the same can be said of the games themselves, considering the costs of the actual purchases plus import costs.
3.  Anonymity is your best friend.  Don't pull stupid crap like linking your Facebook profile to your dlsite or getchu account... for that matter, don't link them to your Fuwanovel account, if you are a fan of 'deep' eroge content.  Leaving that kind of data around for casual skimmers to find is just plain stupid.
4.  If you are a fantranslator, number 3 applies emphatically unless you are about to go 'legit' by handing your translation to a localization company.
5.  During scandal times (like when the media is making a big deal over an eroge-related issue such as during the infamous Rapelay incident) have the sense to take cover and avoid conversing on rapegames and lolige publicly. 
6.  Know the difference between being open about your libido and being excessive *remembers Steve*
 
A final comment
Needless to say, almost all the issues above revolve around controversial sexual content.  Part of that is that many people, both inside and outside the VN fanbase, have trouble marking the difference between fiction and reality when it comes to otaku media (an insanity that I can understand but am long past).  As a legal argument, it (as in the argument that figments of an artist's or writer's imagination, as opposed to real women, cannot be considered underaged and cannot be considered victims in any way, form, or fashion) actually has a lot of merit... but that doesn't mean that they'll rule in your favor, in the end, lol.  The West is prudish, to the extreme.  There is no telling when religious interests will slip a noose around our necks, and general moralists are just as bad.  I'm not perfect about taking my own advice.  I'm a VN junkie, and I really don't have any morals when it comes to my search for good VN stories.  I might be disgusted by some content, but that won't prevent me from experiencing the story, lol.  However, a lot of the people around me seem to be utterly unaware of the risks of being an eroge reader... and I felt I had to put this out there, for the 'public' good, even though I'm certain I've already pissed off the anti-censorship and pro-piracy parts of the community, lol. 

Knonyuu Fantasy 2if is a remake of the original Kyonyuu Fantasy 2, with an apparently expanded narrative.  Having played the Digitalized Novel version of the original Kyonyuu Fantasy, which I loved, I found Kyonyuu Fantasy 2if to be very… familiar.

To be blunt, everything in this VN is exactly like the first few chapters of that estimable game, with the easygoing, unambitious protagonist gaining political power and rising to the top over the course of the game… while having sex constantly with a rather large cast of heroines with massive breasts.

Now, at first glance, this series seems to be a bunch of nukige… and that impression isn’t entirely wrong.  There is a lot of sex in all the VNs in this series.  However, the writing, storytelling, and world-building in these games really is impressive… so impressive that I have been reduced to exasperation each time I played one of these games.

How could I not be exasperated?  Most of the time, a writer of this level of quality would be working on major-name low-ero VNs, not something that verges on being a complete nukige.  Yes, there are exceptions, such as the writer of Erect… but they are just that… exceptions. 

Kyonyuu Fantasy 2if is based a century and a half before the original game, in Hillsland (the country visited as part of one of the Gaidens), where the king is dying of a curse and is looking to choose his successor from amongst the skilled youth of his kingdom.  Predictably for a protagonist of the Kyonyuu Fantasy series, he doesn’t start as one of those candidates… rather, he gets sent away to serve as a captain of the guard of a small castle on the edges of the kingdom. 

Generally speaking, this follows an eerily identical path to Lute’s rise to power in the original, probably because that particular plot was so well-loved by the fans of the original.  That said, the protagonist is an administrator rather than a knight, and that shows in the true path, where he climbs the ranks (after his unusual start) of the bureaucratic hierarchy rather quickly.  This VN is slightly longer than the whole Digitalized Novel version of the original and its gaiden stories, and it also has numerous endings besides the true one.

Overall, this VN will be instantly loved by anyone who loved Kyonyuu Fantasy.  If there is a disadvantage to this VN, it is that it doesn’t have as much of an extended story as the original ended up with. 

The Kyonyuu Fantasy series is easily one of the weirdest series I’ve ever encountered.  On one side, you have what is clearly nukige levels of sexual content, with some of the most absurd h-scenes I’ve ever encountered, taking male breast-obsessions to new levels.  On the other side, you have startlingly detailed settings and interesting stories with protagonists who only seem weak on the surface.

Kyonyuu Fantasy 3 is no exception to my experiences with the series.  When I started it, I was returned mentally to my first experience with the series, in the form of the massive omnibus edition of the original and its side and after-stories, the Digitalized Novel version.  I’m going to be blunt, this series’ protagonists are universally the same type of person… loving, wide-hearted, and extreme nymphomaniacs with a breast obsession.  The one in this one is the god of paizuri (if you don’t know what this is, ask one of the h-addicts around here), Yuranis. 

The era is something like twelve to fourteen hundred years before the original, when an alternate Rome (where Caesar was never assassinated) ruled much of the Western world.  The protagonist gets thrust into the human world, and he makes his way with the usual casual competence and lack of tension that is pretty much inbred into the series.

I should say that this Rome shares all of the Empire's many flaws and virtues, from systematic slavery and the difficulty of obtaining the status of citizen, to the formal and orderly lawmaking and engineering that defined the Empire at its best. 
I’ll be honest, I absolutely love the way they put together the settings in these games… there is enough detail to satisfy people like me, and the tons of erotic content makes me rofl, since it is so… random most of the time.  I’m serious and I’m laughing… and I honestly just can sit back and enjoy games in this series without taking them overly seriously.  It is pretty rare for me to just sit back and enjoy something with this much h-content, but the Kyonyuu Fantasy series is a definite rare exception.

The endings other than the true one are actually pretty detailed, and I was mostly satisfied with them… though it is pretty blatant that they intend to put out yet another series of fandiscs for this one later on, lol.

Seinarukana is an ambitious visual novel / SRPG hybrid that should appeal to fans of anime-style JRPGs like Ar tonelico and Agarest War.
In-Depth Review: Seinarukana + Info Hub
Review highlights:
Pros:
Classic JRPG storyline mixing comedy and high fantasy Streamlined battle system with decent depth and no grind Good value even at full price New game + adds replayability  Choose the heroine Nozomu ends up with All major characters except protagonist fully-voiced in Japanese, some good BGMs
Cons:
The game is less impressive in 2016 than it was in 2007 Like many JRPGs, the characters and writing lack maturity Stereotypical harem protagonist The gameplay doesn't have the depth, especially in customization, of some mainstream JRPGs Route branches aren't sufficiently different to justify a second playthrough Combat becomes monotonous after a while, especially on subsequent playthroughs

My blog posts so far have mostly been about how to edit. That holds true for most every other VN editing blog I've ever seen as well. But I'm a really big believer in approaching any significant task from a "Why, What, How" perspective. So now, let's try to answer those first two questions.
Even "What Is Editing" would be starting in too far (it made for a better title, so sue me). Let's start with this: why do translation projects, or even original fiction projects like novels, have editors?
 
The goal of editing is to help the author achieve their goals.
An author brings a whole lot of goals to the table: a story, characters with personalities and motivations, a setting, overarching motifs, style, ... probably a lot of other stuff I forgot. Anyway, you get the idea; there's a lot there which they're just trying to get out on paper (or bits, or whatever) and then into your brain.
An editor doesn't bring any of that stuff. An editor instead strives to understand all of these things the author wants to communicate, finds the points where they can be better achieved, and refines the text to better achieve the author's goals. Although there's obviously some overlap, there are quite different skill sets involved in the raw writing and the editing, and thus the two roles are often fulfilled by two people.
How about for a translated VN, rather than for, say, writing a novel? The story is roughly the same, actually. Although the translator has essentially the same goals as the editor in this case, the skill sets required are quite different, and thus differentiating the two roles is not uncommon and frequently beneficial to the project, for the same reasons as it is with original writing and editing.
I'll also add that an original writer is usually considered "too close" to the original text to make a good editor. Even a writer who is also a great editor will benefit from having someone else edit their manuscript. I haven't heard the same thing said of translators, though, so that might not be relevant to this special case. But the skill set differentiation point still stands in the case of translation.
Assuming you're satisfied with that explanation for Why, let's move on to What.
Professional manuscript editing typically distinguishes four kinds of editing: developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and proofreading. Those are ordered based on both the scope of changes they make, and also the chronological order in which you should do them: developmental editing is very macroscopic and happens first, while proofreading is very microscopic and happens last. Let's drill into each:
 
Developmental Editing
Developmental editing is, first, the act of identifying all of those authorial goals I mentioned, and second the act of cutting, rearranging, and adding large chunks (think: add this whole new scene, cut that whole character) in order to advance the author's goals.
Obviously, that second half isn't applicable to VN translation. You're not going to cut whole scenes or change how characters behave. Those decisions have already long since been made by the original writers, hopefully with the help of an editor of their own ;).
But the first half is essential, and is quite a bit harder in VN translation, since you generally can't actually talk to the writer. Read it all, understand the authorial goals, and build a strong, consistent interpretation of the plot, the characters, the motifs, the setting, the tone, everything you can think of. If you don't form an interpretation while translating/editing, you're liable to thwart the author's goals as part of your translation, and as a result accidentally obscure or entirely lose key points of the original intent. Of course, you'll occasionally make mistakes in your interpretation, resulting in mistakes in translation. But if you don't even form an interpretation, the result will actually be worse: you'll still make mistakes in the translation, and the resulting translation will certainly be internally inconsistent, but you won't notice those internal inconsistencies because you have no guiding interpretation. If you form a consistent interpretation and let it guide your translation, when the text goes against your interpretation, the resulting inconsistency means you'll notice it, correct your interpretation, and then go back and modify your translation to fit the corrected interpretation.
 
Line Editing
Line editing is about assessing and fixing the flow of a scene and the flow of a line. It's about logic, language, word choice, rhythm, the mechanics of a sentence, and the sound of human speech. It is not concerned with grammatical errors, punctuation, and spelling, but more with higher-level ideas like tone, emotion, and atmosphere. A line editor worries whether a sentence ought to be punchy or loquacious, not whether it has all the commas in all the right places.
"Logic" probably seemed a bit out of place there, so let me give an example for that one in particular, since it's essential. For example, unless you're editing the VN equivalent of a Beckett play (and if you are, please point me to that VN, because I'm interested), one dialog line should generally be a logical response to the previous one. A canny line editor will ensure the logical flow from event to event, line to line, and even scene to scene, ensuring consistency of the narration.
This is also where all that authorial intent mentioned above comes into play: an editor in this capacity should also be ensuring consistency of a line with those overarching goals. A good line editor will help ensure that characterization is consistent, for instance, or that a motif is not buried inappropriately. An editor, in their avatar as the keeper of consistency, is crucial to achieving those authorial goals.
The prose side of line editing is also key simply because stilted speech, unnatural utterances, redundant repetition, awkward alliteration, and their ilk all kick you out of the immersion. Your brain wants to keep reading something when it flows well. And nothing hits softer than shitty prose.
Line editing is the meat of VN editing. It's what most existing VN editing blogs are about, not coincidentally. If you're an editor for a VN, line editing is what you should be thinking about constantly.
In addition to recommending other VN editing blogs, notably Darbury's blog (mostly about line editing, though all the punctuation ones are more about copy editing) and Moogy's now-ancient blog post (basically all about line editing), I'll also suggest you go read up on line editing in a general setting. A quick search for "what is line editing" will lead you to mountains of useful links. As a random example, this is one such useful link, and it's hilarious, well-written, and edifying: http://www.thereviewreview.net/publishing-tips/short-course-line-editing. There is a veritable sea of such articles on the internet. Read them.
 
Copy Editing
Copy editing is about the nuts and bolts of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It's not the same as proofreading, but it's getting close. The copy editor typically should select and enforce an appropriate style manual (AP, Chicago, MLA, take your pick). The copy editor is the person who gets mad when you write "I baked 7 blackbirds into that pie." instead of "I baked seven blackbirds into that pie.", and who calmly, patiently replaces all your misused hyphens in the middle of sentences with em-dashes.
You're unlikely to have a dedicated copy editor on a VN project; if you've got the "editor" role, you're probably it. I think this is along the lines of what most people think of already when they hear "editing" anyway, but really the line editing is the most important to the enjoyment of the text. Still, the picky people among us can get awfully uppity if you start putting in stuff like ellipses with four dots and inconsistent use of the Oxford comma (sidebar for the attentive: I'm for it, as you've already noticed). Copy editing is a particularly thankless job, since it's not like you can do an exceptional job of copy editing and really salvage a bad manuscript, but poor copy editing can certainly hurt an otherwise-good manuscript. So it's worth investing the time in doing it carefully.
One important recommendation for copy editing: take notes and build up a style document and glossary for your VN as you go. Are honorifics being used? What about name order? If you're going to romanize some words, is your romanization consistent? Do you 1) always write "senpai", 2) always write "sempai", or 3) mix and match? I don't care if it's 1 or 2, but it better not be 3. Write conventions like this in a shared document and make sure everybody knows about the conventions and the document.
 
Proofreading
Proofreading is the final stage of this pipeline. The role includes checking for grammatical errors, spelling errors, punctuation errors, typos, and perhaps some more exotic things like incorrect English dialect. It's straightforward and mechanical. Like copy editing, it is essentially thankless. It is, nonetheless, important. While you're making big sweeping edits doing all the stuff above, you're going to create tons of errors at this level. They need to be fixed. Make sure you have someone (preferably not the "editor", because they're too close to the text) do a proofreading sweep. You can lump it into QC if you like, but make sure that whoever is assigned to do this is looking at it carefully. Check. Every. Single. Word. There are errors in there, I guarantee you, and they're embarrassing. Getting the number of errors down to near-zero before you release your translation is going to make both you and your audience happier.
 
 
In Summary
There's not one editor; there are four. In an ideal world, with original fiction, you'd actually have someone separate filling each role. For a translation you don't need a developmental editor, leaving you needing three editors. In the non-ideal world you live in, you've probably got at least two of those roles to yourself. Push for someone else to handle proofreading, at least (call it "QC" if you have to), and make sure said person has the necessary ability and attention to detail. If you're the "editor", then you're almost certainly doing both line editing and copy editing. When that happens, make sure you keep a balance amongst all the things you need to do: for instance, spend 10% of your effort trying to understand what the author is trying to achieve, 88% of your effort on line editing (it's the meat, after all), and 2% on copy editing the little details like punctuation, romanization, etc.
 
And If You Can Only Remember One Thing
Focus on line editing.

Translation errors in English releases often go undetected. Join me as I plunge down the rabbit hole to see how such errors affect the experience.
Seinarukana: A compilation of translation errors in the official English release

It's sad but true: we've finally come to the end of our tour of Japanese punctuation for VN editors. But before we bid adieu, there are a few more types we have yet to cover. None merit full blog posts, however, so I offer them up here in a bit of a punctuation grab bag. Reach in if you dare.
The placeholder:  〇
The 〇 is typically used to censor offensive language by replacing one of the characters in a word. It's the equivalent of writing "f*ck" or "sh-t" or in English. Everyone knows what's being said, but we can all pretend we didn't say it. Kumbaya, amirite? Cursing really isn't a thing in Japanese, of course, so these marks get used either for our naughtiest bits — think "cock" and "dick," or "pussy" and "cunt" — or certain other socially offensive terms. You might be surprised to see censoring in the middle of an H-scene that, in all other respects, has spared no detail or volume of liquid, but there you go. Just think of them as pixel mosaics for written text.
As for editing these bad boys, you should almost always just go with uncensored English. Fuck yeah. The one situation where you might want to consider doing otherwise is when a VN also bleeps these words in the VO. In that case, you'd also be justified in using the censored English equivalent with either *, -, or _ replacing vowels as needed. Pick only one wildcard and be consistent in its use.
Another use for these characters in Japanese is to mask portions of real-life names or places — e.g., Bu〇er King. This is done both out of a sense of propriety and to avoid the wrath of real-life lawyers. You'll conceivably see the names of celebrities, bands, games, movies, etc. all masked in this fashion. Thankfully, there's a long tradition of this in Western literature as well, most notably in the Victorian era — "I sent my butler out to the renowned psychic, Madame G—, to seek her advice on the matter." Our best course of action during editing is to mimic the Japanese, but do so in the English tradition, replacing the omitted portion with an em-dash — two if the excised text is particularly long.
Sometimes, rather than use 〇 for masking, a VN writer will choose to come up with soundalike parody names for the person, place, or thing being referenced. And so you'll end up with people talking about anime like Wagonball Z and Tailor Moon. If the VN chooses this option, then so should you. Do your best to come up with witty replacements in English.
More rarely, you'll see a double 〇〇 all by its lonesome. This just stands for "word goes here." It's a literal placeholder. If you encounter it in narration, you can usually replace it with a few underscores, like _________. If it appears in voiced dialogue, possible options include "blahblah," "yada yada," "blankity-blank," or whatever else you can think up.
Parentheses: ( )
In VNs, these typically indicate a line should be read as internal monologue, or in some cases, a stage whisper.
The meaning is clear in both languages, so best to keep these as they are. Unless, of course, your text engine is one of those rare snowflakes that can output English italics. In that case, use those.
Bedazzlers: ★☆♪♫❤❆❀✿❁
Okay, they're not actually called "bedazzlers," but it's a good a name as any. You know what I'm talking about, right? That big ol' box of typographical Lucky Charms that gets dumped right onto VN text to provide some wacky flavor to the proceedings. Hearts, stars, flowers, snowflakes, music notes, Zodiac signs, etc. 
Some common uses include:
- A music note at the end of a line to show it's being sung. ("Fly me to the moon♪")
- A heart somewhere in a line to indicate puppy love at its most disgusting. ("He's so dreeeamy❤")
- A name or term being bracketed by stars to show that it's extrasupervery OMGmagical. ("Aha! I've transformed into ☆Magical Girl Bertha☆")
- A tiny gun so we can commit suicide after enduring all the above.
These little pretties are self-explanatory enough that I tend to leave them as is. Japan's gotta Japan, right? But use your best judgement; if you feel like they're getting in the way of the of the English narrative, go ahead and prune them back — or omit them entirely.
Full stop.
Not the punctuation; the whole series of punctuation articles. We're done. If I think of any more oddball Japanese punctuation marks worth discussing, I'll add them to the end of this post. But otherwise: happy f〇cking editing!

Last time I talked about trade-offs in editing and high-level motifs; macro-scale stuff. This time, I want to talk about a micro-scale topic: how to make an individual line better. As before, I'll be demonstrating this with examples drawn from recent editing experience. Before writing this post, I went around looking for other people talking about similar things, and I found this reference: http://kristensguide.com/Writing/powerful_sentences.asp. Frankly, it's great; probably better than what I have, especially in terms of breadth of topics. Give it a read and get your editing learning on. For this post, I'm going to deep dive into one single topic mentioned there, though, for which I've been saving up examples: putting the first and last words of your sentence to good use.
The first and last words of a sentence are powerful. They're memorable. Forgetting the middle of a sentence is natural, so put a word at the end of a sentence when you really, really want that one word to be remembered.
Okay, so what did you get from that last paragraph. I hope it was "first", "powerful", "memorable", "forgetting", and "remembered", because that's the point of this blog post.
Anyway, let's look at some examples from my recent edits to Majo Koi Nikki, some to the prologue patch we're about to release, and some later. I'll point out other things that I changed as well and why, but this one point is going to be the running theme.
 
Original:
  Looking in the mirror, she pondered for a second and answered with a shy smile on her face.
Potential problems:
- "on her face" is extraneous
- that extraneous phrase is squatting on valuable real estate at the end of the sentence.
Mine:
  Looking in the mirror, she pondered for a second, and then she answered with a shy smile.
Changes:
- drop "on her face" (for both reasons above - it's less verbose, and now I get "smile" as the last word in the sentence, which is great)
- the comma after "she ponders for a second" is intended to give the reader that same mental pause as "she" has, to better set up the last part
- "then she" somehow pushes you out of that mental pause and into the most important part: that shy smile, lingering at the end of the sentence.
 
Original:
  Tokeizaka-san irritatedly flips through the book, but her hand stops suddenly.
Potential problems:
- With the benefit of spell-check, "irritatedly" => irritably
- "suddenly" is often overused
I actually really like the original; if you left it alone, aside from the spell-check correction, I wouldn't fault you for it. The verbs are great, "irritably" is a good use of a modifier, and the sentence communicates multiple events very concisely. But there's always room for improvement.
Mine:
  Irritated, Tokeizaka-san flips through the book, until her hand suddenly stops.
Changes:
- Drop "suddenly." "Stops" is strong enough to carry that feeling of suddenness on its own, so "suddenly" is only making things weaker. I've also noticed a tendency for raw JP translations to overuse "suddenly", which makes me especially biased to remove it. It's the typical problem of overuse: if everything is happening suddenly, it might as well all be happening normally.
- Move those good words, "irritably" and "stops" to the memorable points of the sentence. "Stops" we got for free, "irritably" requires a small bit of juggling. Unfortunately, Tokeizaka-san's family name is a bit unwieldy at best; better to bury it in the middle of the sentence and let the nice, emotive words take pride of place.
- Swapping "but" for "until" made for a clearer plot to the sentence, I thought.
 
Original:
- The colorful beauty article are displayed neatly.
Potential problems:
- Engrish
- Passive voice
- Not flashy enough
Mine:
- Iridescent beauty products dot the shelves, arranged with flawless precision.

On that last potential problem: normally my style is pretty spare. My typical goal is to drop adjectives and adverbs, and make verbs and nouns stronger to carry the weight of description, without going overboard on vocabulary. More often than not, I'm trying to make long sentences shorter and punchier.
I didn't do that here.
For context on why, it would help for you to hear the ridiculously high-brow BGM accompanying this scene and see the gorgeous background art. So, here:
Background:


BGM:
 
Equally important for context, you need to know about the surrounding narration: basically, the narrator is currently marveling at just how amazing this beauty parlor is.
One of the benefits of generally being spare with your adjectives and adverbs is that they then work a lot better when you actually do pull them out. A good mental model is that you have a budget: don't spend your nice words if you don't need to. Only pull them out when you're going for the razzle dazzle. The analogy breaks down fast, but basically, if you're constantly using flowery language and overdecorating the ordinary scenes, nobody's going to be impressed when something extraordinary happens, just like the overuse of "suddenly" I mentioned earlier. Since this actually is an extraordinary moment for our narrator, I'm spending a few nice words now.
And again, I want to call attention to the first and last words of the sentence. Those are strong places in a sentence (or, especially in the case of a VN, a line). Previously there were pretty weak words there ("The colorful" and "neatly"); now we've got "iridescent" and "precision". Good words in good places.
 
One last thing to mention. I wrote each of these up in the middle of editing, and then later edited that up into a blog post. I made changes to the edited line itself in the process of writing all this stuff up, which made it better. In fact, I even noticed a problem while writing up this blog post and further refined the line. You'll never know what it was (probably). The point being, simply spending time reflecting on an edit, and especially writing down your observations and motivations for certain choices, will help you do better work. You don't have to be this thorough all the time (I certainly am not), but every time you do an exercise like that, you'll learn from it, and then you can write up your own blog post and teach me something.
 

Another day, another deep dive into the esoterica of visual novel punctuation. Next on our chopping block: the wave dash ( 〜 ), which looks an awful lot like the Western tilde (~) but functions nothing like it. Our refrain here is a familiar one: the wave dash has no place in well-localized English VNs and should be removed or replaced wherever possible. No ifs, no ands, but one very small but.
How 〜  functions in Japanese
The wave dash has several fairly pedestrian functions in written Japanese, including separating ranges of values, which is handled by the en-dash (–) in English; denoting geographic origins; and separating title from subtitle, which is handled by the colon in English (e.g., Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo). These are all fairly boring, however, and if you’re an editor, your translator should already have converted such wave dashes to their Western equivalents.
Where things get interesting, and by “interesting” I mean “annoying,” is when we start looking at some more colloquial uses that pop up in translated VNs with alarming frequency.
The wave dash can be used to elongate and modulate a vowel sound, much like the long vowel mark (ー) in katakana. You’ll sometimes find 〜  applied to the end of a word, and it’s implied that this longer sound is audibly “brighter.” Terms like “uptalk,” “vibrato/tremolo,” “kawaii” and “girlish” get thrown around a lot. (Think of the stereotypically perky “Ohayooooo” morning greeting you often hear in VNs or anime.) It’s usually a deliberate choice by the character, done to sound cute, funny, etc.. The wave dash can also be added to the end of a sentence to suggest the entire line should be read with that same brighter inflection – a happy sing-song of sorts. Or sometimes, it can signify literal musicality, as in the line should actually be sung. “Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day〜 ” Less frequently, and usually in the context of digital communications, the wave dash can be used to suggest that a word or sentence should be read as being ironic/sarcastic. “Oh great. What a beautiful morning 〜 ” As you can see, there are a bunch of possible readings of any given wave dash, and the correct interpretation depends largely on textual and cultural context. Add in the fact that 〜 is non-standard English punctuation that your average non-otaku isn't familiar with (never mind its various nuances), and it seems like a no-brainer to dump it and convey the intended meaning in clean, clear English instead.
But no. For some fecking reason, VNs are littered with these fecking squigglers. They’re fecking everywhere, like that scene in The Lost Boys where one of the Coreys, I don’t know which goddamn one, starts eating a takeout container of lo mein but Kiefer Sutherland or some other vampire guy gets all vampirey and is like, “Nuh-uh, Corey” and that selfsame Corey suddenly looks down and his delicious noodles have turned into thousands of these wriggling, white maggots and he can’t vom fast enough.
It’s literally like that. Literally.
The answer? Get rid of them.
Do your readers a kindness and remove wave dashes wherever you encounter them. If your translator has done their job right, you’ll have all the context you need to turn those dashes into well-formed English that anyone can understand. That doesn’t always mean stretching out the last letters preceding the wave dash, mind you. That ways lies disasteeeeeer. All you need to do is ask yourself one simple question: How would it sound natural if a native English-speaker rephrased this line? That’s it!
Let’s look at some examples. The easiest is where the English usage matches the Japanese, such as stretching out a vowel. So imagine a character walks into a dark and spooky house, then calls out to see if anyone’s home.
What about cute inflections? Well, English is a rich language; there are plenty of ways to make a sentence sound perkier:
There’s no magic formula, and it's not rocket science. It's just sitting down and rewriting. And if you’re doing your job as an editor, you should pretty much be rewriting every single line anyway, so it’s no added hardship.
The one, small exception
If you remember, I mentioned digital communications a little earlier. This is the one place where I’d recommend you let a sleeping wave dash lie. Typographical oddities (such as emoticons) are part and parcel of the electronic vernacular, so it feels much more natural to let them stay in a text or an IM that’s being quoted verbatim. You want your reader to feel like they’re seeing exactly what the character has on their screen. Just make sure you’ve edited these lines so the English meaning will still be clear if the wave dashes were removed.
After all, there’s a world of difference between “Great advice, Darbury 〜 ” and “Great advice, Darbury 〜 ”

Next up in our parade of visual novel punctuation: the interrobang. That’s right, I said the interrobang. Can you believe it?!   Huh?! What the hell's an interrobang?! "Interrobang" is the term we'll borrow to describe that little dogpile of punctuation, usually represented as ?! or !?, that sits at the end of nearly every question in a visual novel. It's meant to convey incredulity, combining elements of both a question and an exclamation. And, since the typical VN's stock-in-trade is exaggerated emotion, you'll end up seeing it a lot. Because why have your characters simply ask a question when they can GODDAMN SCREAM IT at Samuel L. Jackson levels.   I mentioned we're borrowing the term. The actual interrobang (‽, a ? combined with a !) is a bizarro punctuation mark crowdsourced by an ad agency back in 1962, along with the term “interrobang” itself. (If Wikipedia is to be believed, other suggested names included “QuizDing," “exclamaquest," and “exclarotive.”) It fell out of fashion after the 1960s, though, so you'll rarely see it in the wild. Still, it lurks in the Unicode of a few fonts here and there, lingering on like some creepy conjoined twins left chained to a steam pipe in the dark basement of the English language.   In the meantime, we'll appropriate it here to describe its unpacked counterparts, !? and ?!.   So is it “!?” or the other way around?! Now that we know what our faux interrobang does, our next concern is how it should be edited. Do we (!?) shoot first and ask questions later or (?!) vice versa? There’s little agreement among language mavens as to which is correct, and most VN scripts I’ve seen switch between the two on a whim — sometimes in the very same line. Thus, it falls to the editor and/or translator to impose some order on the situation.   The simple answer: Pick one and stick with it; I don't really care which. Consistency is our primary concern here. The standard emoji character set uses !?, so you'd be entirely justified in rolling with that. Some argue that !? is also more typographically appealing, and I'd tend to agree. However...   The advanced answer: My own preference is to switch between the two on a case-by-case basis, with ?! winning out 95% of the time. That's because I tend to think in terms of nested levels of punctuation, rather than a monolithic model. Which is to say, the sentence   should be read structurally as:
with the ! modifying a base question and turning it into an exclamation. Since that’s what the interrobang typically does, I end up using ?! in almost all instances. But there are exceptions. Imagine some friends who find out they've won a contest to meet David Hasselhoff. Mid-celebration, it occurs to them they didn't actually enter, so there's no way they should have won.
Here, a base exclamatory statement is being modified into a question: (We did it!)? so !? would be the more appropriate choice. This kind of usage requires an editor or translator to make lots of judgement calls, however. If you don’t feel comfortable getting that deep into the contextual weeds, there’s absolutely no shame in going the simple route and using one option across the board.
What about interrogangbangs?!?!? Last but not least, we have the situation where a character goes into full freakout mode and says things like:   In these cases, make sure the first piece of punctuation aligns with the intent of original sentence — is it an exclamation or a question? — then keep the rest of the punctuation exactly as it appears. Or, if you’re opting for the simple method, don’t change a thing. Just stick with the punctuation as provided and keep on walking. It’s what The Hoff would want.

After some great discussion regarding v1 of this working definition, I brought it back to the shop for some tweaks and tinkering. The results are posted below as v2 of the definition. And I'm sure I'll repeat this cycle many, many more times.
So, without further ado...
A 5-point test for visual novels
1. It must be read/played on an electronic device that outputs to a screen.
Fairly self-explanatory. Computers, game consoles, handhelds, phones — hell, even a smart watch would qualify. A printed VN would be considered a graphic novel (or a choose-your-own-adventure book). An audio file of a VN would be an audiobook.
2. It must convey an authored narrative.
By narrative, we mean an organized account of true or fictional events, actions, thoughts, etc. In other words, the visual novel has to tell a “story.” The entirety of the Detroit phone book displayed in Ren’py is not a VN, even if it’s accompanied by a whole chorus line of catgirls.
By authored, we mean the narrative must be an act of transformative intent by its author. A VN cannot rely upon sandboxes, emergent gameplay, or similar mechanisms to generate its narrative arc (though they may be used to flavor it). Such experiences, while highly interesting, result in something other than a visual novel.
To put Rule 2 in more narratological terms: both the story and discourse of a VN must be deliberate acts.
3. It must use art & copy as the near-exclusive means for conveying that narrative.
Art: A visual novel must have visuals. Crazy talk, right? It doesn’t matter if those visuals are 1-bit pixel art, hand illustration, 3D renders, photography, or video. Ideally, these images will also be germane to the narrative.
Copy: At the heart of any VN is the act of reading — eyes looking at words and turning them into meaning. A VN should be structured around this. If significant portions of the story are delivered as voice-over/video without text, then title isn’t a visual novel. If the text can be turned off — e.g., captions, subtitles, etc. — then the title isn’t a visual novel.
4. Uninterrupted reading must comprise the near-entirety of one’s experience with the title.
For the purposes of our discussion, let’s assume a continuum that looks roughly like:
non-reading gameplay (0%) >>>> reading as gameplay (100%)
Past the 98% mark or so, we can usefully consider a title to be a straight-up  “visual novel.” From 50%-97%, we can usefully consider that title to be a VN-hybrid (a cross between a VN and another genre of game, such as an SRPG). Below that point, we don’t consider it to be a visual novel at all, but we can still discuss its VN-like elements (or lack thereof).
5. It must possess a defined “page” structure that’s generated in real time and is, to some extent, controllable by the reader.
Page structure: Unlike a novel seen in a word processor's window, a VN intentionally constrains what we may read and/or see at any given time. A VN-creator is almost like a film director in this respect, breaking a larger narrative into individual shots — in our case, screens or “pages” — for dramatic effect. Such narrative chunking is one trait that helps us distinguish visual novels from things like web novels or e-books. There are different conventions for such page display — ADV, NVL, diegetic, etc. — and each contains its own assumptions about how a story will be displayed. 
Real-time generation: Feel free to fight me on this, but a pre-rendered PDF is not a visual novel. A “Let’s Play” of a visual novel is not, itself, a visual novel. While it seems an arbitrary distinction to make, I’ll make it nonetheless. A VN must use a real-time engine of some sort to assemble art + copy for display.
Controllability: In most cases, this is achieved by turning to the next “page” of the VN with a click, tap, or button press, but any user input could suffice — speech or motion controls, for instance. If the option is available (e.g., via an “auto-play” setting) the reader may choose to waive this ability. But why have this requirement at all? (If you remember, I intentionally chose to omit it in v1 of my definition.) It's here now because, at their core, VNs are both literature and video games. Can you have a novel without mechanical interaction? Sure; I argued as much in v1. But can you have a video game that allows for no interaction or control? Not really; it'd be a machima at best, indistinguishable from a video. And yes, I know Mountain exists, and there's still some small level of control there, if not meaningful interaction.

A VN may also…
A VN may offer a non-linear/branching narrative… or it may not.
A VN may feature sound and music… or it may not.
A VN may feature a story and/or visuals rooted in the anime/manga tradition… or it may not.
A VN may be made by Japanese developers… or it may not.
A VN may feature erotic content… or it may not.
 
Extra credit
"This is stupid. I know a visual novel when I see one."
Well, what about the visual novel you haven’t yet seen?
"Can't a visual novel be just text and no images? Why are we privileging one form of content over another?"
You can create such a beast in a visual novel engine, sure — but it's not a visual novel. It's something like a visual novel, something I haven't yet seen an agreed-upon name for. I invite you to propose one here. Why do we make such a distinction? Genre lines are arbitrary, but we do have to draw them somewhere. Otherwise, anything could be considered a visual novel, which doesn't make for useful discussions. "This tree stump is telling me a visual story about its history, bro. And the tree is the author. And nature is its game engine. And I'm playing it right now." And Domino's stops delivering pizza to the dorm lounge at 2 a.m., so you better finish up wondering if we're all living in an exact simulation of the universe sometime soon. Bro.
"Can't a visual novel be just images and no text? Why are we privileging one form of content over another?"
See the above.
"But when you get right down to it, what’s a 'story' anyway? Or a 'narrative'? And is an 'author' even necessary? Or 'readers'?"
All good questions. They’ve been debated for hundreds of years, and they’ll continue to be debated for hundreds more. Suffice to say, we won’t solve them here. Go ask Stanley Fish or something.
That's right. Go Fish.

Last time, we discussed how the casual ellipsis should almost always be considered punctuation non grata in VN translations. Today, we set our sights on a new target: Japanese-style quotation marks. Handling these couldn’t be simpler: If you see any in your text, replace them with English-style quotation marks immediately. No exceptions. No special cases. No mercy.
A quick primer on Japanese quotation marks
If you’ve spent any time looking at Japanese texts, you’ve likely seen 「 and its friend 」. These little guys are known as kagikakko (“hook brackets”) and function almost exactly like opening (“) and closing (”) quotations marks would in English. No surprise there; kagikakko were invented during the 19th Century to aid in translating Western texts into Japanese. Why use these instead the genuine article? Because a Western quote (“) looks an awful lot like a dakuten (゛), a common Japanese diacritical mark; it turns “ta” (た) into “da” (だ), for instance. The potential for confusion was enormous, so new punctuation was introduced.
Less frequently seen are 『 and 』, known as nijūkagikakko (“double hook brackets”). These operate much like opening (‘) and closing (’) single quotation marks would in English — which is to say, for quoting things within quotes. (“You can’t just scream ‘FIRE!’ in a crowded theater,” he scolded.) In Japanese, they also moonlight as italics for things like book titles. Times are tough and they need the extra cash.
The rules (You can quote me on these.)
But all my friends are doing it!
So here’s the rub: I see Japanese quotation marks everywhere. Fan translations, professional translations — everywhere. Why? Buggered if I know. I can only imagine it’s affectation that, over time, has become habit. Maybe TL teams think it’s more authentic? Maybe they’re convinced it makes the English text look more Japanese-y? Maybe it’s chemtrails? I just don’t know.
Regardless of the reason, this is one seriously annoying trend that needs to be pushed off a seriously tall cliff. Starting now.
UPDATE #1: As pointed out in the comments, I'm assuming the rules of U.S. punctuation here. I also eat my soft-boiled eggs little end up, just as The Lord God Almighty intended. If you live in the U.K. or one of its offshoots, however, feel free to reverse the order I've given — i.e., single quotes as your primary tool, double quotes for nested quotes and italics.
And to be honest, if you look at how Japanese quotation marks are constructed, it seems pretty clear they're based off the British style. Point for the Queen. But ultimately, your editing decisions should be based on whether you're using U.S. or U.K. English for your translation in general.