Nandemonai

It died with Light.

One of the big reasons more Japanese VN companies are looking for an 'in' in the US market is because the moege/charage market over in Japan is saturated and generally in decline.  One reason we are seeing declining Steam sales is because most people tend to go for the uncensored versions that they don't allow, so they hit up the company stores instead of Steam.  The other reason is that the market here isn't growing as fast as the number of new VNs being released.  It isn't like the average income of a western VN-gamer has suddenly increased to match the output, after all.

The relatively small market for Japanese VNs in the West is doing fine.  The larger market in Japan seems to be tightening, likely due to shifting demographics, oversaturation, and lack of innovation.

Oh, that's easy.  Those projects aren't "basically finished", and Sekai has terrible project management skills.
People will put up with fan patches that are glitchy, require people to install locale support for a language they don't even speak just to run the game, and has a kind of crappy presentation cause the 'patch' is made by hacking the executable so there's lots of little engine issues.  People will not put up with that kind of thing from a legit company.  The customer base will be like 'what the fuck, dumbasses?' and the licensors may be offended at how poorly their products have been treated.  A crappy release like Leyline or Hoshizora does more than just make Sekai look inept.  It also tarnishes the reputation of the licensor by association.  They aren't likely to be fans of that.
Sekai seems to repeatedly suffer from issues that ... to put it charitably... speak to a lack of experience managing IT projects.  The sort of trouble Sekai is having is what happens when you have incompetent management.  Incompetent rank-and-file employees produce one kind of bad result.  Incompetent management produces bad results that are often far worse, and larger scale.
Take Leyline for example.
1) Sekai should have known there were untranslated lines in the product.  Why didn't they? Because they fell victim to one of the classic blunders: they made a small change after testing was finished.  I.e. they shipped an untested build.
2) They should have known better than to ship a game where, if they ever patched the game's script, the engine would delete saves and make people start over.  This is a technical limitation they absolutely should have known about.  They don't seem to have considered the high likelihood that this engine limitation would vastly complicate their lives.
3) The first two items combine very poorly.  Releasing a build that is untested has been known to be playing with fire for a long time.  It drastically increases the odds that you're going to have some kind of problem.  Hell, this is so well known that in some places I've worked, doing that is grounds for termination. And when you know that, if you do have a problem, it'll be an enormous clusterfuffle to fix it, then you either fix the engine before releasing it, or you be extra super careful to make sure it's perfect before it goes out, so you won't ever have to update it.
Here, they decided it would be too much work and delay the project too long to try and rework the engine.  (Not without reason; look at how long the delay was once they had no choice but to do it anyway.)  That's ... not exactly 'fine', but sometimes you have to go with the least bad option among your bad choices.  But then they did something that increased the odds that something would be wrong with the scripts.  Something that's widely known to be a terrible idea.
Or take Hoshizora or Chrono Clock.
Both of these games shipped with localization issues severe enough they decided to redo it.  Well, how did that happen?  How did this not get caught much earlier in the process?  It would have been a lot cheaper and quicker to catch these issues after (say) 5% of the game text was done.

Plot twist: Protagonist is actually blind

He created the setting from scratch and is generally seen as defining the style of the early harem charage genre.  His influence can be seen anywhere where you see a kind and proactive protagonist surrounded by a bevy of bishoujos who have a good (or at least, well-explained) reason for falling in love with the protagonist. 
Honestly, Spiral was something of a disappointment to me... it failed to accomplish anything and the heroines were all human, which was weird, since what is the point of a multi-racial setting if you don't have a good mix? 
tbh, whether the game is something to look forward to or not will depend on the choice of writer.  If it is the same writer as Spiral (the DC III pathetic third-rate moege writer Takeuchi) then I won't want anything to do with it, as he managed to completely fail to give life to the setting, while having plenty of opportunity and elements of the setting to do so.   The Shuffle FD's and expansions were generally decent, but part of that is because Agobarrier was there to consult with on how to fit the new stories into the existing setting.  Now that he's gone, I honestly can't bring myself to be optimistic after Navel's abominable choice of staff for Spiral.

This is the one to read inbetween two longer titles, as it takes only about 120 hours to finish.

Planetarian

Oldie, but a goodie: Nocturnal Illusion still has one of the best soundtracks, period.  VN, games in general, TV and movies, everything,..

Oldie, but a goodie: Nocturnal Illusion still has one of the best soundtracks, period.  VN, games in general, TV and movies, everything,..

Slight correction: Most games have a few sample pics on their official sites.  What is illegal is ripping the entire CG set and posting it online for any reason, or downloading the entire CG set to keep if you don't own the game.
Posting a few screenshots (even if they're not of the same CG that the developer posts to their site) is much murkier.  if your screenshots are attached to a review, that's probably fine.  Browsing a complete rip someone else illegally uploaded, in order to see if you want to buy the game, is murkier but probably also fine.
Edit: If you were wondering 'what about what VNDB is doing' (by posting sample pictures for many games) - That is probably legal.  They are a database, and it's beneficial for a database to be holding a few pictures of the game to give people a feel for what the game's CG looks like, mugshots of the characters in the 'characters' view, and a screenshot of the cover art.
At least in the US, they are almost certainly covered by Fair Use.  There is no way VNDB got permission from every game company whose software they host pictures of.  For one, many of these companies no longer exist.  But because VNDB is not directly competing with, or undermining the market for, the VN companies, what they're doing would likely be found to be legal.

I think it's fucking hilarious that they are legit charging you extra for this, as if it's some kind of DLC. They were clearly working off the PS3 port assets, and the Akari route is a part of that build. The fact that they took it out just to sell it as "DLC" is really money hungry and scummy, tbh.
Their translation quality is all over the place, but at least there's no porn for them to censor in this particular route, so I guess it's a safer buy than everything else Moenovel does. Still wouldn't recommend supporting them though, as scummy companies like these don't deserve your money.

My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

Straight after the release of Trinoline, Mangagamer announces the release date for The Most Forbidden Love in the World, AKA Damekoi 
Was not expecting that, I heard good things about this VN so pretty excited about the release 

I'd rather call it circumstantial.
Besides, true, ImoPara is very popular but even if we believe that imopara would still be in top 5 on its fourth year, having two imopara games on 3-rd and 10-th or 7-th and 8-th places is surely more profitable and beneficial to MG than having a single ImoPara game on the, say, 5-th or 4-th place. Also, as you can see, ImoPara 2 was announced in the beginning of 2016 so its announcement not only didn't hurt ImoPara's sales but likely boosted them helping it to move up in the rankings for that year. ImoPara is not even a kind of series that should be hurt by the upcoming sequels to begin with...
Not to mention, that ImoPara 2 was announced exactly one and a half years after the first.

- If the knowledge I got off Shark Tank was right, the "I just need this small percentage of people to purchase the product" kind of thought most of the time brings nothing but disaster to a business.
- Most Japanese VN (aside from (nukige) titles from small companies/circles) have merchandises, not just stuff from Yuzusoft. And obvious enough, not all of them sold well. Not if the game itself was not even doing well in the first place.
- Calling a 8800 yen game (or 10k plus with limited edition) a "free to play with paid content" is just ridiculous. 
- Having the game available in more than 2/3 languages only works if the game already did well in English/Chinese. If it flopped even in those 2 biggest foreign markets, then what's there to hope for in other smaller one?
- Having a horrible translation, even if it's not Google style, might work quite some time ago when there were just a very few official translation. But it will certainly kill off a large amount of potential customers for your next titles, bonus a huge negative in your reputation. A very fine example: MoeNovel.
- Life would be so easy if companies could just easily pump out unique stuff like that. I assure you, every company out there want to create a masterpiece, something that no one has never read before. Whether or not they have the ability, time or finance to do that, is a different matter.
- Neptunia is not even VN so I don't know why you put that here.

Can you please not write about stuff you have no idea about

I'm pretty sure no one missed it. No one even said it's incomprehensible, it's just... Dumb and unconvincing. A good setup drowned in ridiculous, overly convoluted sci-fi dribble and over-the-top plot twists. I understand people loving this game for its atmosphere and the psychological parts, but I find the overarching mystery plot absolutely indefensible. It doesn't make the game awful IMO, but doesn't deserve to be treated seriously.

None of the characters, including the MC, want to be there.  As for the H, I found every scene in the game utterly repellent.  Even the theoretically more vanilla scenes.  I didn't read any of them.  As for the story, it's interesting - it certainly kept me interested in finishing it.
But after I was done, I ultimately found it unsatisfying.  The story is at war with itself.  The latter half makes the most interesting aspect of the first part into an ice cream koan - undermining it and making what was interesting about it basically irrelevant.  The true ending makes very little sense.  The explanation behind the first part doesn't make any sense, either.  One character's personality and actions make sense only if you stop considering them a 'character' with believable motivations and recognize that they're a walking plot device.
Considering how highly this title was praised by those who like the dark side (Nargrakhan, etc), the fact that I wasn't overly impressed with it has convinced me to be far more selective screening dark side titles.  I'm just giving Maggot Baits a hard pass, for instance.  Nope.  Nuh-huh. Not happening.

None of the characters, including the MC, want to be there.  As for the H, I found every scene in the game utterly repellent.  Even the theoretically more vanilla scenes.  I didn't read any of them.  As for the story, it's interesting - it certainly kept me interested in finishing it.
But after I was done, I ultimately found it unsatisfying.  The story is at war with itself.  The latter half makes the most interesting aspect of the first part into an ice cream koan - undermining it and making what was interesting about it basically irrelevant.  The true ending makes very little sense.  The explanation behind the first part doesn't make any sense, either.  One character's personality and actions make sense only if you stop considering them a 'character' with believable motivations and recognize that they're a walking plot device.
Considering how highly this title was praised by those who like the dark side (Nargrakhan, etc), the fact that I wasn't overly impressed with it has convinced me to be far more selective screening dark side titles.  I'm just giving Maggot Baits a hard pass, for instance.  Nope.  Nuh-huh. Not happening.

None of the characters, including the MC, want to be there.  As for the H, I found every scene in the game utterly repellent.  Even the theoretically more vanilla scenes.  I didn't read any of them.  As for the story, it's interesting - it certainly kept me interested in finishing it.
But after I was done, I ultimately found it unsatisfying.  The story is at war with itself.  The latter half makes the most interesting aspect of the first part into an ice cream koan - undermining it and making what was interesting about it basically irrelevant.  The true ending makes very little sense.  The explanation behind the first part doesn't make any sense, either.  One character's personality and actions make sense only if you stop considering them a 'character' with believable motivations and recognize that they're a walking plot device.
Considering how highly this title was praised by those who like the dark side (Nargrakhan, etc), the fact that I wasn't overly impressed with it has convinced me to be far more selective screening dark side titles.  I'm just giving Maggot Baits a hard pass, for instance.  Nope.  Nuh-huh. Not happening.

This sounds more like what a high level autistic 4chan literalist would criticize. My conservative count left out anything that could plausibly be a liberal adaptation (including the bell line, which would be a probable style mismatch rather than a pure information mismatch; also leaving out adverbs or minor-ish parts like turning on your heel before leaving rather than just leaving) and anything I couldn't be sure of due to context. But okay, let's say we go to even higher lengths to extend the greatest possible charity. Maybe we're at 5 errors that unambiguously distort the original line in the sample now. this is about 1/6 of 29 errors, and we'll also take heart-boi's lower sum of 5000. 5000 / 6 = 833 + 1/3. Do you like the idea of reading something with 833 unambiguous translation errors? At that level, it's not unlikely that some of them will hit lines that actually matter and distort the story.
For enjoyment purposes the patch doesn't look too bad and it seems to have funny lines at times, so it's quite possible it will be on some dimensions a better tl than many other fan translations around. I'm not sure if the average accuracy is even higher than what's on display here, either. However, it would be very unwise to make any claims about the original text of the VN from the translation, above and beyond the usual caution to be exercised in that kind of situation.

I did a conservative review of the lines and I would say 13 of the 29 (also there's a pair of lines that's repeated for some reason and random filler stuff y u do this) are certain mistranslations, with quite a lot of dubious ones, v. questionable style decisions, etc. We can probably estimate that at least 17 lines are wrong. While this is not quite as high as kokomeme's numbers, you're still looking at thousands of errors in total.

This image has a mixture of straight-up errors and just poor TL choices that aren't technically wrong but are pretty bad in context. I tried to stick to posting lines that the majority of people would think "That's bad" upon seeing. There were a decent number of lines that I considered bad, but not did not include because I could see some people arguing that it was just a liberal translation or something. So really, this image is me being fairly generous.

The smoking gun of this image is that this is all in the first 20 minutes of the game. Specifically, I watched two Japanese "lets play" Daitoshokan videos, each 10 minutes long on autoplay. Reading normally, it would take maybe five minutes to get to this point. There's this many errors that early into the game, and it hasn't even started yet. This is the tip of the shit iceberg. Five minutes into a like 30 hours long game. There's 29 errors compiled in this image, 1800 minutes of game divided by 5 is 360 chunks this long, this number of errors times 360 is 10,440 errors. At this rate, the game will have 10,440 errors in total. Nearly every other line has some issue, and every third or so has a straight up TL error. If we're being generous and fiddle with the math such that it takes 10 minutes to get to this point, we can lower it down to about 5,000 errors. But like I said, that's being generous. Ouch. 

Unfortunately, this is what happens when someone with a weak grasp of Japanese translates something. They have to guess a lot, and they rarely fully understand the point of a conversation, so they make mistakes. Constantly. Daitoshokan is that in a nutshell.
 

CREDITS: QUOF

Update 1 (12:45 AM EST)
Technical issues have caused a hiccup in tonight's upgrade process. Going to ping Nay and we'll try again later today. For now, the forums and front site will be put back online.
 
Original Message:
Forums Going Offline at 12:00 (Midnight) EST
In approximately 1.5 hours (at the time this goes live), the forums will be going offline for an unknown amount of time so that I can perform an outrageous amount of updates and fixes. I will announce when the forums are back online on our Twitter account (link). Please panic, and may the VN gods have mercy on our souls.
(Aside: after the forums are updated -- or irreparably broken -- I will also be working on the front site. Once that's done, if I have any energy and strength left in my body, I will try and make a post updating the community about recent events which have caused my absence, and briefly touch on ways we can move forward.)
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