
Nandemonai
Members-
Posts
840 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
3
Nandemonai last won the day on April 28 2020
Nandemonai had the most liked content!
Recent Profile Visitors
The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.
Nandemonai's Achievements

Fuwa Elite (7/11)
432
Reputation
-
Frontwing made an update on their Kickstarters and open projects.
Nandemonai replied to HataVNI's topic in Visual Novel Talk
SubaHibi is out. The one that's not out is Sharin no Kuni. Full engine replacement, last word was 'hopefully no more than 6 months'... last December. Oof. And yes, I'm a backer, and I'm not particularly happy about the delays, either. I'm sure it's just as thankless for Frontwing. They've almost certainly lost money overall. Never mind Kickstarter's cut and taxes, they've had to spend huge amounts of time (i.e. money) on an interminable slog that has to be way over budget. And the best they can possibly hope to accomplish is leaving a bitter taste in everyone's mouth. -
sanahtlig reacted to a post in a topic: Steam has banned Chaos;Head NoAH from their store, unbans the game after successful community-driven campaigning
-
Phalk reacted to a post in a topic: Nocturnal Illusion Renewal Translation Project
-
novurdim reacted to a post in a topic: Steam has banned Chaos;Head NoAH from their store, unbans the game after successful community-driven campaigning
-
HataVNI started following Nandemonai
-
HataVNI reacted to a post in a topic: Steam has banned Chaos;Head NoAH from their store, unbans the game after successful community-driven campaigning
-
No, they're not consistent. If they were, they wouldn't have let Persona 4 onto Steam; it ambiguously implies MC-kun has sex with his girlfriend(s) if you max her (their) S-links. And they would have updated their "we will allow anything that isn't trolling or illegal" statement to clarify what else they will ban for, since clearly that is not true. Instead, they have attempted to reap the benefits of appealing to the no-censorship absolutist crowd by claiming anything goes, when it's not actually true. They have Standards & Practices (just like every other publisher in existence), they're just lying about it. They'd get flak. First, for merely openly saying they have S&P, the anti-censorship crowd would get all up in arms. Second, the particular standards they have chosen are pretty hilariously inept to boot. They would bar a video game adaptation of Romeo and Juliet or the Bible, in a society where American Pie makes a quarter billion dollars. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They've refused a handful of Western developed games too, like that Pickup Artist "game". Their public "statements" attempting to "justify" their actions, in light of them pretty obviously doing something they made a commitment not to do, are nonsense. They want the benefits of censoring things that might hurt their image, and the benefits of taking an absolutist no-censorship stance. So they have chosen to be dishonest.
-
Nocturnal Illusion Renewal Translation Project
Nandemonai replied to Nandemonai's topic in Translation Projects
Slowly. I've been avoiding posting an update mainly because it's mostly not good news, but I doubt it's likely to change at this point. Darklord Rooke has disappeared. The last I heard from him was before Covid and he was more or less disengaged from VNs except for this project (which he seems to have disconnected from sometime after that point). Looking back at the work I did, I did the best I could using the (limited) tools available at the time, but it's not something I'd want to release. So I've started retranslating the game from scratch (in between retranslating / editing SKM from scratch and, you know, life). I'm in the middle of chapter three. So even if DR were to pop up again, what he'd done would be of questionable usefulness anyhow. So I'm just going to fly solo. I'll finish the (re-)retranslation myself, then edit my own work. The good news is the tools programmer for SKM has given me a preliminary editor I can use to proceed with redoing the TL while he builds a toolchain. -
Nandemonai reacted to a post in a topic: A demonstration of how machine translators have evolved in recent months [Sugoi Japanese translator + DeepL]
-
Nandemonai reacted to a post in a topic: Noratoto - 18+ Restoration Project
-
Nandemonai reacted to a post in a topic: What is the appeal of ecchi comedy where the MC gets brutalized?
-
Nandemonai reacted to a post in a topic: Noratoto - 18+ Restoration Project
-
Nandemonai reacted to a post in a topic: Senmomo: A Billowing Bladestorm, A Persica Princess Translation Project
-
NekoNyan might want to rethink their PR strategy (inasmuch as a cash-poor company like a VN translation outfit can afford such a thing as a PR strategy). Someone who's interested in DracuRiot didn't know that they'd announced the cause of the delay four months ago. That's kind of the whole point of PR: to make sure interested people, and folks who might be interested, know what's going on and remember / look forward to the release.
-
KazumaNekko started following Nandemonai
-
Nandemonai started following [project] Sakura no Kisetsu Ren'py remake project
-
Nandemonai reacted to a post in a topic: [project] Sakura no Kisetsu Ren'py remake project
-
Nandemonai reacted to a post in a topic: Pure x Connect Translation [Prologue and UI patch released]
-
Nandemonai reacted to a post in a topic: Pure x Connect Translation [Prologue and UI patch released]
-
Nandemonai reacted to a post in a topic: Noratoto - 18+ Restoration Project
-
Vldislav reacted to a post in a topic: VN with strong females
-
Steins;Gate. Demonbane. Tokyo Babel. Shadows of Pygmalion.
-
Nandemonai reacted to a post in a topic: Nitro+ Translation Projects?
-
Zalor reacted to a post in a topic: Basically, how better are translator groups at choosing which VN to translate?
-
Localization companies have a lot of constraints. The business requires co-operation with the Japanese side of things. No game can be released without the consent and involvement of the rights holders. The Japanese IP holder can't just sign on the dotted line and take easy royalty money. They have to do work. Legal work, chasing down VA contract clearance. Graphics work, uncensoring the artwork and finding original assets. Programming work, updating the game engine to handle incompatibilities with Western OS default settings and the fact that Western languages use characters that, in Japanese, nobody ever uses so you're free to use things like apostrophes and commas as game scripting commands. Witness Kara no Shoujo and Koihime initially releasing with no VA because they couldn't afford to pay the VA fees. Witness a certain game I know of not ever getting an editing pass to fix issues, even though company staff privately admitted to me they wanted to - because the Japanese side didn't want to give the localizer their script compiler, and didn't want to be bothered because they'd already provided one fix and seemed to feel 'why jerk us around fixing one thing at a time'? Witness Pulltop, releasing Princess Waltz under Jast USA (great game by the way) then deciding to start MoeNovel. Or Jast USA getting Steins;Gate but not being the ones to release it on Steam, or anything else by them. Navel pulled out of a partnership with MangaGamer to release Shuffle! on Steam all by themselves. The licensors have a lot of pull, and they absolutely will use it. And the truth is, VNs sell a truly pitiful number of copies in English. Koihime had no VA because they didn't think the game could sell two thousand copies. It eventually did, after close to two years. After they decided to cheat a bit and include the size of their hard copy print run in the 2K (assuming it would eventually sell through) because they didn't want to do a hard copy release of it with no voice. Things are somewhat better if your game can get on Steam, but after Steam opened the floodgates suddenly there's lots of games on Steam and so few nowadays get the eye-popping sales figures IMHHW or Nekopara did once upon a time. So even though sales are declining slowly but steadily in Japan, as mobile inexorably cannibalizes everything else people used to spend money on, they're still - even far removed from what they used to be at the peak, like they are nowadays - still far higher than they are in English. This makes it a tough sell for most companies.
-
Nocturnal Illusion Renewal Translation Project
Nandemonai replied to Nandemonai's topic in Translation Projects
Heh. Back in the day it was the Peach Princess forum (since after Jast folded, they reorganized under that name for a few years). -
I started translating VNs having read 0 in Japanese. (My first project is Nocturnal Illusion, whose official loc was so bad I still did a better job.) My editor found dozens of questionable-looking lines that, upon going back and rechecking, were pretty amateurish and awful errors. (I mean, I am an amateur.) On my next VN - SKM - I've noticed a big improvement from when I started versus now. Like anything you'll get better with practice. I often spend significant lengths of time struggling to figure out a mere several lines of fairly complicated Japanese. Sometimes it's 'what does this mean?' and Googling idioms I don't recognize and whatnot, and sometimes it's 'I know what it means, how do I express this thought in English in a coherent way that reads well?'. Expect it to take a lot longer than you thought it would (even if you were already thinking it would take a long time).
-
Chronopolis reacted to a post in a topic: New guy interested in translating
-
Fan projects, by their very nature, do not ask permission. They simply do what they want. If you want to join a specific fan translation project, you should talk to the people running it. Getting their attention might be hard; a place like this is a good place to try to get in touch. If you have a specific game you want translated badly enough to do it yourself, and it doesn't have a project already, this is also a good place to come looking for a group to start one. But you don't need anyone's permission to post here. There is no licensing board of amateur translators you need to worry about either. Just do it. There is one catch. (There's always a catch.) If you want to start a new project to translate game X, but no one else wants to work on it, you'll have a problem - in that you need a programmer who can create tools to extract and re-insert the scripts. If you aren't that programmer, you'll have a hard time getting started. It is, in fact, possible to have a would-be project fail because you can't find anyone. The project forum is full of abandoned and incomplete projects, most of which floundered for exactly that reason. Fan TL projects have three key skills: Tech, to get the scripts out of, and back into, the game. Translation, to produce intelligible scripts. Editing, to make those scripts fun to read. You have one of those key skills. You should be good.
-
Nocturnal Illusion Renewal Translation Project
Nandemonai replied to Nandemonai's topic in Translation Projects
Project is definitely not dead. I have no other news at this time. -
adamstan reacted to a post in a topic: How much worse the experience is with VN reader compared to a normal translation?
-
Paying a language tutor to tell you what you did/didn't get right might be a worthwhile endeavor. Using MTL is not. If you already know enough Japanese to tell 'oh I should clean this up to be more standard so the MTL can figure it out' or 'this looks like an idiom, lemme google.jp this and see' then you will be more accurate than the MTL, making it mostly useless for that purpose.
-
completed Noble Works Translation Project (COMPLETE Patch Released!)
Nandemonai replied to Keisuke's topic in Released
Yes, I'm necro'ing a 4 year old thread. Fear my dark magic! So I thought I'd fool around with the script tools. I did get them half working - the readme is wrong (it says "Copy scenepatch.sdb to the "patch" folder and run make_patch.bat" - you actually also need to copy scene.sbd). But the resulting patch leaves most of the names in Japanese. That's no good. Is anyone from this project still around to take a look? (I mean, probably not, but...) -
There are way too few visual novels with actual gameplay
Nandemonai replied to Plk_Lesiak's topic in Visual Novel Talk
That was the number I got when I googled the going rate in general. I know the rate for VNs was much lower, but wasn't sure how much I could share. I mean, just because I'm not under NDA doesn't mean people on the grapevine I've been talking to aren't. Then I remember this: This confirms the 1-1.5 cents per character figure.