Nandemonai

Well, that was fast.
 

To be honest... I was gravely disappointed in how this game was handled at every stage after the Kickstarter.  When I was given a chance to beta test the game, I dropped it inside the first chapter, having discovered that a whopping 85% of the lines were either outright wrong or so grammatically messed up that it was obvious someone had just put them through google translate and pasted them in. 
To be blunt, they could have easily had this translated by any of a number of talented translators in the community for less than they apparently paid, but instead they left it to amateurs?  That was just idiotic. 
Also, as an answer to those who still question whether the base material was any good, the answer is, yes, it was.  The protagonist was always a bit of a non-starter as a character in that type of game, but the rest of the story was good enough that I felt satisfied.  If there was one thing that kept driving me crazy, besides the protagonist's unwillingness to embrace any part of his nature, it was that idiotic obsession with girls wetting themselves the writers apparently had.

I actually sent them a message at their 'contact us' page and pointed them to the thread you posted.  We'll see what (if anything) they say.

Oh.  Well, in that case ... Are we there yet?
How about now? But I wanna play the game noooooow

Don't underestimate my ability to forget about posting updates.
But yeah, with multiple people working on various scripts it'd be a bother to calculate the overall progress, so I'll only give the very rough estimate - I don't think we have reached 1/3 yet. That's mainly because of the monstrously long common route that requires the most work.

And thus, today marks the day I sold my soul for a cupcake.

Actually, I was convinced they had.  But reading this announcement closely, I don't think that's right anymore.  Here's what they actually said.  They gave it a "Winter 2017" window.  Except because "Winter 2017" runs from 12/21/2017 to 3/20/2018, realistically, they're releasing sometime in the first quarter of 2018.  (I very much doubt they'll be shipping the game out over Christmas, after all.)

Let's see.  You want a strong cast of likeable characters?  And genre doesn't matter? In no particular order, there is Chrono Clock, Kindred Spirits, Steins;Gate (and the sequel S;G 0), Persona 3-4, Demonbane, Koihime Musou, Littlewitch Romanesque, Tokyo Babel, Princess Evangile (Konomi and Ruriko by themselves ought to work out well, some of the others are kind of bland), Chou Dengeki Stryker, and A Kiss For The Petals New Gen.
Oh, and if you like RPGs, then you should also check out Recettear and the Trails series (Trails in the Sky / Trails of Cold Steel - 1st 3, and 1st game of 3rd arc, are on Steam).

Steins;Gate is pretty much exactly what you said you wanted: great characters that you'll really get to know over the course of the game.
H-scenes are a thing, though.  Of the VNs that I listed, Steins;Gate is all-ages (I mean, it's on Playstation).  Tokyo Babel is also all-ages.  All the others, except 3, are h-games, but also have a non-H version available.
Koihime Musou is a huge game, so even though H is a pretty small part of it overall, there's still a lot of it.  Kindred Spirits is so tame that it could be put on Steam 100% as-is with no censorship, but it's technically adult.  And Demonbane is really low on H as well.  Those are the 3 I mentioned that don't have a non-H version.  I have no idea if that matters to you or not.

Let's see.  You want a strong cast of likeable characters?  And genre doesn't matter? In no particular order, there is Chrono Clock, Kindred Spirits, Steins;Gate (and the sequel S;G 0), Persona 3-4, Demonbane, Koihime Musou, Littlewitch Romanesque, Tokyo Babel, Princess Evangile (Konomi and Ruriko by themselves ought to work out well, some of the others are kind of bland), Chou Dengeki Stryker, and A Kiss For The Petals New Gen.
Oh, and if you like RPGs, then you should also check out Recettear and the Trails series (Trails in the Sky / Trails of Cold Steel - 1st 3, and 1st game of 3rd arc, are on Steam).

I equate our current position in time in the VN development world to that period in anime propagation when fansubs started having a massive decline and official localisations started rising in number quite abruptly. Not long after that we had official localisations for the bulk of the anime being produced and even simulcasts of the material. This to me was when we had succeeded in our fandom for creating a market where there wasn't one before through the efforts of fansubs to show there was a niche market and the businesses came to fill it. Fansubs have persisted after that stage but to me they're redundant and they became the raison d'etre instead of filling a missing niche which would inspire markets to create official localisations. They've become more about e-penis. We used to go to great pains to point out that our translation was free and that should an official localisation come out we stopped all distribution of our subs and encouraged people to buy that instead. VNs probably will never get to the popularity in the west that anime has seen due to a whole swag of reasons that has been discussed to death in other threads but nonetheless we are now finally getting what we wanted in the VN world with lots more localisations but some are continuing to fan translate things that are already being, or have been localised, because "we can do it better". As far as I'm concerned the fan translation scene for VNs has succeeded since we are now seeing a plethora of new translations appearing (compared to the JAST days @Clephas mentioned.)  Unlike anime though, there will be thousands times more VNs available than those being translated so I can't see the worth for fansubs going away any time soon for more fringe works (leave the stuff that's obviously going to be translated to the official groups.) I'd never partake in a fan retranslation of an official localisation for so many many reasons...

MangaGamer's words on the matter are far more eloquent than mine.  Here is the Wayback archive of an answer on their ask.fm account (which was deleted with no explanation a year or two ago):
 

I'll just leave this here
 

Never mind being sued.  You never deliberately release something you don't have rights for, if you ever want to do business with any licensor ever again.  NuTech found this out the hard way.
And that's the difference.  Fans can do whatever they want because there are no consequences to them personally.  They don't need to worry about their reputation with the rights holders, because they're already ignoring what the rights holders want.  They don't need to worry about being sued, because it's a waste of a lot of time and money (that the rightsholders don't have) and generates huge amounts of ill will.  They don't need to worry about their company (which in the case of J-List has been around for more than 20 years) being destroyed, because they haven't got one.  Fan translators ignore all the rules and do whatever they want.
The same rules apply to them, in theory.  Fan translations are illegal.  But all the penalties for breaking those rules are toothless, when it comes to dealing with people like fan translators.  There's no way to punish them.  So they have nothing to lose.  A real company will have its business destroyed if it ignores the rules.  Fan translators have no such problem.
So that's why the fan translation has all this extra stuff in it.  Because the people who made it didn't give a crap about what the rightsholders wanted and just did whatever they wanted.  And if that makes the fan patch look more attractive than the legit release, and that in turn causes sales to suffer?  Then maybe the lesson Jast USA takes away is 'maybe next time don't license the game with an already-released fan patch'.

Again, main issue here is Licensing. Sometimes it's just impossible to get all the rights necessary to have this accomplished. And if you can't get the rights you are liable to be sued. Do remember that these official companies are profiting of these releases and as such the original companies that put in work are able to sue if proper steps are not taken. 
Fans on the other hand don't have this handicap and can literally, LITERALLY, do whatever the fuck they want. I could, theoretically, add in Linkin Park music as the OST or add in functionality to the game that wasn't there before. And not only do I need not get the rights to either the company who made the game, I don't even need to bother with music licensing.
And in regards to ALL of this, if you are going to sit there and go "well I'm not going to spend money because there is a free, better, version out there" then do just that. I personally have bought many visual novels and never opened them purely because I played the fan translated releases when they came out but I do in fact want to support the developers. Just like games I used to pirate long ago I all have in either a digital or physical paid copy. If content is so important to you, get the fan translated edition, play the fan translated edition. But if you want to support the sales of a game you enjoy, go purchase it, regardless of which version you play.
Add to this is a person didn't even know of everything you are talking about they would still purchase the game, play it, and that's that. It's not like the company is going "Hey everyone buying this product, look there is a fan version out there that has a shitload more content then the one we put out...just saying."
If the customer doesn't know, the customer won't care. So you might give a crap because you know, but many others who actually buy the game might not know this and therefore don't care.

MangaGamer's words on the matter are far more eloquent than mine.  Here is the Wayback archive of an answer on their ask.fm account (which was deleted with no explanation a year or two ago):
 

Funbag is like Berserk.  They both belong to a genre that typically has a strong draw other than plot.   Things in Berserk's ultraviolent genre include truly awful stuff like Apocalypse Zero.  And in the nukige realm we have games where the "plot" is something like "All these monster girls are into the main character because... umm... His semen contains hyper-concentrated magical energy!"
Most entries in those genres don't bother, because they know a strong plot and characters aren't the reason people buy these.  So they'll still do well even with terrible writing.  But Funbag and Berserk do.  I have played non-H RPGs with worse characters and worldbuilding than Funbag Fantasy.  And yes, I'm serious.  Yes, there's gobs and gobs of h-scenes, but the plot actually is written well enough to justify why they're there.
To answer your other question (harem versus routes): It's not an either-or.   The game basically does both.  There are individual character routes, which focus on a single character and are romantic.   The harem stuff comes basically as an epilogue to the true route (which is canon and is what the sequels are based off of).  And it even makes sense in-story!

Assuming what I've heard about it being a Kancolle reference is correct, no, she's not.  She's being a weeaboo.  The random engrish in her original dialog is supposed to emphasize that she's a dork who's bilingual in Japanese and English.
If that's the case, then what Sekai did is probably the only real way to translate this into English.  No, American and British English don't diverge enough for that to work.  I went and found some footage of the Japanese version for DD on YouTube, just to see if maybe they did that thing with furigana and translated the English words.  They did not.  She just throws in random English and the Japanese player is expected to follow along without help.  In fact I hear that Japanese players found DD just as annoying as it seems Western players do.
First, this tells me the differences between American and British English won't work.  It's not incomprehensible enough to be a faithful recreation of the original.
Second, it tells me that the translation actually worked.  People are getting pissed off that they can't understand DD in the English version?  That's great, it means the translator took one of the problematic aspects of the original game and faithfully recreated the experience for an English speaking audience.
Which is nice: For a change, we have a translation that works so well people are getting annoyed at the game. Except that the issue was present in the original, instead of having been added by inept localization.  Imagine how NIS America would have "localized" DD.  The quirk would simply be entirely gone from her dialogue.  People might notice because they'd hear her JP VA using tons of English, but that would be it.  It would have just been lost in translation.

Assuming what I've heard about it being a Kancolle reference is correct, no, she's not.  She's being a weeaboo.  The random engrish in her original dialog is supposed to emphasize that she's a dork who's bilingual in Japanese and English.
If that's the case, then what Sekai did is probably the only real way to translate this into English.  No, American and British English don't diverge enough for that to work.  I went and found some footage of the Japanese version for DD on YouTube, just to see if maybe they did that thing with furigana and translated the English words.  They did not.  She just throws in random English and the Japanese player is expected to follow along without help.  In fact I hear that Japanese players found DD just as annoying as it seems Western players do.
First, this tells me the differences between American and British English won't work.  It's not incomprehensible enough to be a faithful recreation of the original.
Second, it tells me that the translation actually worked.  People are getting pissed off that they can't understand DD in the English version?  That's great, it means the translator took one of the problematic aspects of the original game and faithfully recreated the experience for an English speaking audience.
Which is nice: For a change, we have a translation that works so well people are getting annoyed at the game. Except that the issue was present in the original, instead of having been added by inept localization.  Imagine how NIS America would have "localized" DD.  The quirk would simply be entirely gone from her dialogue.  People might notice because they'd hear her JP VA using tons of English, but that would be it.  It would have just been lost in translation.

...see here is the thing, DD didn't speak random English to emphasize her british heritage. She was copying a kancolle character with a habit of throwing engrish into her speech (it's alluded to in a fairly early scene). DD can speak perfectly proper Japanese. She's actually meant to be annoying. Like weebs are. So making her throw in weebisms kind of makes sense?

You can call it misinformation, but you can also call it adaptation. Some people have even mentioned making her speak french words instead, how would that not be misinformation according to your view?
If we assume a theory of wanting to have the same emotional effect on the reader, and the translation makes her annoying in a language-related way, I think chrono clock didn't pick that horrible of an approach fundamentally. While there are several theories of translation the idea of going for equivalent response is quite well known. Honestly the way I see it, the problem was mostly that the selected words to keep in Japanese were too obscure for weebs to know and, to a lesser extent, the british stuff was a bit too hard to understand sometimes.

See? This is why this whole thing's bollocks.
Technically correct as I may be -- the Japanese content wasn't necessarily written by the time LoveKami was translated to the West, and therefore Moenovel didn't rewrite anything, they simply worked with a Western exclusive that had less/different content -- this makes bugger all difference. We're still getting different content from Japan, regardless of the order in which they were made.
I am aware of the alterations in the script for Konosora, and acknowledged them. I was simply saying that there's no evidence of Moenovel butchering VNs any more -- they're only given stuff that already is. Essentially the same thing.
Even if I wanted to argue something or other, there's little point. As long as Pulltop doesn't want to bring 18+ content to the West, Moenovel won't. Even if I said "but Moenovel no longer rewrites content!" it'd make little difference if all Pulltop gave them to translate were already rewritten versions. If you want to discourage bad practices: not giving Western fans the same content as in Japan, then you are right to not support Moenovel, as their releases support these bad practices.
 

There is more to it than that.
Yes, censorship is annoying. But when your censorship involves actually re-writing the game to something entierly different from the RAW, then you are just destroying the original work.
I hate it when an eroge only gets an all-ages version and nothing more in the west, and personally choose not to support such titles. But hey, at least that kind of release pleases some people, as the rest of the game is untouched. But in Moenovel's case, they make things 1000x worse by actually re-writing the "all-ages" parts too, simply because it felt too steamy for their 12 year old french girls.
Don't give Moenovel your money guys, even if their TL quality has gone from machine TL level to acceptable. There is much more than a bad TL behind their works, and it's companies like them that are ruining the western VN scene.
If it wasn't for amazing people like Pabloc, western fans would never be able to enjoy the games that Moenovel has touched the way they were intended. (And don't count on people like Pabloc to show up every time Moenovel butchers something. It would be amazing if people were lining up to fix Moenovel's shit, but that is sadly not the case.)

Okay, everything that has been edited is now properly accounted for in the tools.  Here is the current project status (all of these are edited percentages):
Total edited: 5609/108888  (5.2%)
Shoku route: 2860/41882  (6.8%)
Gi route: 1390/38852 (3.6%)
Go route: 1358/25983 (5.2%)
Kan route: 1/2171  (basically 0%)
Over the course of my time on this project I transitioned, basically, from translating the remaining h-scenes into being a transleditor.  Nobody else was willing to do it, and the script needs some serious whipping into shape.  Also, I was much more haphazard in my editing before.  I would simply edit parts of files that clearly needed it as I happened to stumble across them.  This is reflected in the editing percentages, which are haphazard and show a lot of minor work mostly spread across the whole project, while a few files were very heavily edited.  For example, the majority of what is "edited" in Go happens to be the parts of Non's h-scenes that I translated (which mostly required only minor touching up).
Then the tools were ready.  And with the tools came nice stats.  With the stats, a good look at the state of the script.  I hadn't realized exactly how big the script was.  It's more than a hundred thousand lines! No, I'm not going anywhere.  Don't panic.  (And put this fish in your ear.  Trust me.)
But it does mean a change in approach.  As many of you probably know, the game is split into three routes (and one final bonus route, Kan), one for each of the three factions Shoku, Gi, and Go.  From now on, we are doing one route at a time.  First up is Shoku.  It's the longest, and it's the one our translator has decided to focus on finishing the h-scenes for.
This doesn't really mean much. The editing percentages for other routes just won't move for awhile.  No, it's not your imagination.  Yes, it's on purpose.

Not every VN is some masterfully written work guys. The vast majority of them are focused on the "how they got from point A to point there is a dick inside this girl now". Hate me all you want, I'll still enjoy what I like.