Pabloc

Witch edition? Pre-owned or brand new? In what condition? Because depending on those factors, the price can range from a few hundred yen to over 20000 (from a quick look at Amazon.jp, the most expensive version I found was 22.800￥ = almost 200$). Generally, I'd say ~80$ is a decent price for a brand new physical copy of a medium-long VN. In other words, all official English releases so far are actually cheap.

I usually don't care about male characters too much. They are... well, male after all. Notable exceptions include pretty much all Nitro+ VNs - those are pretty much filled with ultimately awesome guys. This includes Kurou, Dr West, Master Therion and Sandalphon from Demonbae (Sandalphon completely overshadowed Leica in her route), Akane and Igarasu from Hanachirasu, Taoluo Kong from Kikokugai, and of course my favorite (male) psychopath of all time - Fuminori. Honorable mention goes to Shiki, although Togainu no Chi sure as hell isn't a VN aimed at guys. There's also Hozuki from Sharin no Kuni - along with the protagonist they completely overshadowed the rest of the cast (which isn't an entirely good thing really...). Oh, and I can't believe nobody mentioned Kotomine (F/SN) yet. And well, there's this guy, too:

Oh, now that this is a separate thread, I guess I can go all-out. First things first:

I don't like digital copies, so I only buy stuff from DLSite when there are no alternatives, and only titles I have already read and really liked. I'm just too used to downloading stuff for free. I do buy physical copies, I like collecting stuff. I get most of those from Amazon.jp (using Goody-Japan as a proxy). Oh, there's also MangaGamer and JAST USA, I buy their stuff too. Again, only physical copies if possible.

Except that statistically, the majority of translated VNs are not nukiges, so that statement is simply objectively wrong. And while Zakamutt's statement is obviously a subjective opinion, it's far from being a hyperbole. I can count actually readable non-Japanese VNs on my fingers (I'm talking only about pure VNs, since I'm not playing dating sims). Of course, there are some exceptions and their quality seems to be slowly improving, but there's still some way to go. And while I agree that the quality of translations is often very questionable, the vast majority of those still have better writing than an average OELVN (plenty of those are on the level of a bad fanfic...). Plus, a huge problem with many Western VNs is that they try to be as Japanese as possible, which usually results in weeaboo garbage. Those that avoid forced (pseudo)Japanese settings, sometimes can be quite interesting. I wonder why there are so few adaptations of literary works/fairy tales/etc., those are generally the best OELVNs I have read so far.

Yeah, judging from VNDB screenshots, it may look awesome. But it isn't. It's so boring that probably everyone who tried to TL this fell into a coma in the process. No, seriously, it's mainly about the protagonist walking around the town with his childhood friend (plus 1-2 doggirls), talking about their past and boring stuff. At the same time, it seemed a bit harder to read than your average moege (though it was one of the earlier VNs that I have read in JP, so take this with a grain of salt). And doggirls are only involved in the bonus, omake H-scene (and that one is certainly nice), otherwise it's the protag x childhood friend (and those scenes are funny, but nothing else).

It has Oyari Ashito's artwork - that's all I need to know to throw my money at them.

The first patch technically works, but it uses pretty much raw MoeNovel translation, which is absolutely awful. You can read it if you don't mind nonsensical lines, out-of-context BS, killed jokes, occasional gibberish and such. But if you'd prefer an actually translated version, I'd recommend tossing KonoSora on the shelf for a year or so and waiting for the Retranslation patch.

@Cryofrzd I'm pretty sure most people here have the basic idea what VNR is. MT concerns are related to what OP said, specifically: "it'll cough up the eng text for you". The only Eng text VNR can cough up, is a machine translated gibberish (or a TL uploaded by someone, but well, let's not delve into that...). @Decay Don't be sorry. Even if it's really just a misunderstanding caused by poor English, not being able to properly express himself in this language to THAT extent kinda disqualifies him as a translator in and of itself anyway. @Otakuboy Could you make yourself a bit more clear? If you are planning to use "English text coughed up by VNR" in your translations in any way - just stop. This not only won't help anyone, but it will actually mess up serious projects. Enthusiasm is a very admirable thing, but when it isn't backed up by any skills, it can be quite harmful...

Err... Maybe somebody should tell him that random English text coughed up by machine translators often has little to do with the original script? "Reading" VNs like that is one thing, but attempting to join real translation projects... -.-'

Nice troll, but still... @Topic That's kinda hard to judge. Before I have learned Japanese, I simply couldn't fully evaluate translations, so titles I have read earlier automatically seem better because of that. But still, Insani's stuff is definitely high quality, especially True Remembrance (I didn't notice any particularly complicated English there either). Narcissu was well done too. Other than that, I think all TLWiki projects that I have read were also very solid.

1. There's no way to translate anything with Atlas v14 - it doesn't work. [/obligatory machine translation jab] 2. Choices sometimes are hooked separately from the main text. I don't know how Chiitrans/AGTH work, but it should have an option to switch the string of hooked text that it displays. Sometimes those are unhookable (for example when pictures are used for choice buttons), but that's very rare. If that's the case, see below. 3. Titles, buttons, menus, settings and other such stuff most of the time are in the form of picture files - you can't hook the text from those in any way. The only way to translate them is doing it manually (that is, reading without any helpful programs, looking-up unknown kanji in a dictionary etc.). Hints: menus often use Engrish words written in katakana (せーブ/ロード - save/load etc.) - learning basic syllabary will help a lot.

I'm a bit of a completionist, so I read all good, normal, bad endings, get all CGs, and read all branches. When I know that some bad endings are short and meaningless ("You didn't get any girls, the end."), I sometimes skip those.

I may like hardcore, dark and wicked stuff, but my favorite nukiges are 3rd and 5th installments of the SonoHana series (Mai x Reo ones). ^^ I like those because of cuteness, Yuri, fluffy story and hot H-scnenes (even though theoretically they should be far too softcore for my liking). The fact those VNs would kinda work as romantic-comedies even without sex-scenes is definitely one of the reasons why I like them. Though if I also included non-nukige titles with high sexual content, Princess Sacrifice would win. For me, story is a vital part of H-oriented titles. Without decent characterization and setting, sex-scenes loose a lot of impact (and crappy storyline can ruin them completely). Vanilla scenes are pretty much worthless if you don't care about the characters, but more hardcore, darker content is even more vulnerable to retarded plots. I think I already mentioned it somewhere, but when the girl turns into a mindless sex-slave 10s into the rape scene (which is very common), it completely defeats the purpose of rape. NTR is also pointless when main characters are absolutely unlikeable idiots (which is very common as well, especially when it comes to protagonists). That's why good nukiges are quite rare (and almost nonexistent among translated stuff, except for SonoHana series of course).

This of course. Up to around 2005 there were almost no fantranslations to speak of really (I don't think there's a single one that was released before 2000).

Well, you can do this with right filters: http://vndb.org/r?q=;fil=lang-en.olang-ja.type-complete;o=a;s=released It shows all releases of each title as separate entries though.

Dark sexual content? I've seen it all. Well, I liked gore and grimdark stuff long before I even discovered anime (not to mention VNs), so getting into dark H was just a natural course of action in my case. I wasn't exactly sensitive to begin with, so I don't think threading into the weird Japanese H territory had all that much influence on me. However, I don't like dark H solely for fetish reasons. I like those themes mainly because they are simply interesting. Only when the story is written well enough though, even in nukiges. For me, dark sexual themes must be accompanied by serious drama (or a solid black comedy, like http://vndb.org/v10636 for example - but that's rarely done well). When rape/NTR/guro/whatever are used in a pure fetishistic way and the story is just a dumb excuse for sex, it doesn't work. That's applicable to all kinds of sexual content really - without at least somewhat decent characterization, setting and story, I almost always find it simply boring (with very few exceptions). Needless to say, I fully support the existence of such content. The weirder and the more disturbing the better. ^^

Did you mean Atlas (machine translator)? If yes, then forget about it, you will only waste your time. Those programs simply don't work, you can't translate anything like that. As for hacking, AGTH and ITH are just text hookers - they can only copy the displayed text, nothing else. For translation, you will need special tools that will extract and insert the text from/into the script files. Which program will be necessary varies depending on VN's engine. Some engines already have tools (check TLWiki), some engines don't. If you don't know what to do, it will be easier and faster to find a dedicated hacker to deal with that for you. But again, don't even think of using machine translators.

I usually prefer to save the main heroine and/or the girl I predict will be my favorite for the last playthrough. But, I don't pay too much attention to that and sometimes change the order on a whim. If the VN has a recommended route order of some kind, I stick to that though. It's almost always the best for the story.

If I had to choose one of the common moege archetypes, I'd say the sarcastic-intelligent is the least boring. But usually, when I see that a VN has a male high school student protagonist without any exceptional traits, I automatically loose a large chunk of interest in such title. What I like are adult/child protagonists, overpowered ones, villains, psychopaths, guys already in relationship. etc., basically, anyone who isn't the dull, generic Mr Average. Oh, and all female protagonists outside of otome games by default. I like girls' pov. ^^

No, I'm pretty sure that's just OMA's wishful thinking. Think of it as a running joke of sorts.

Bleeping "obscene" words and references are two different things. When it comes to the first issue, it's my pure speculation, but it may have something to do with seiyuus. Maybe some of them don't want to speak such words unless those will get bleeped later? Other than that, it also might be writer's preference (as in such cases, text also has "〇" instead of one or two characters) - then voices would be bleeped to match the text. I'm almost certain there are no laws regulating that and it's completely up to the creators. As for bleeping out references to real people, titles of other works and such, I think it's only partially to avoid potential lawsuit, and mainly just their rule of thumb. Very blunt stuff à la South Park simply isn't their style. Also, explicitly mentioning people/other works without their/their author's permission can be considered rude, and being rude is a big no in Japan.