Nandemonai

Hello, Dracu Riot editor here (for the fan group — I do not work for SP). Things got pretty messy, and I've basically just been a spectator to it all, as frustrated as everyone else (or probably more so. God, do I ever want this translation to see the light of day). I can't tell you exactly what happened, nor can I tell you exactly what is going to happen, unfortunately. What I will say is that what stalled Dracu Riot is not tech work, nor is it translation/editing/QA. In fact, basically nothing has happened in the last year. The situation has changed somewhat recently, though it will still take a while before this means anything for potential readers, sadly. Let's just say I'm hopeful that we will hear more about Dracu Riot sometime this year, but I'll make no promises this will actually happen. I know that's not very encouraging. Make of this what you will, and set your expectations accordingly.
I haven't played the daito patch since the initial partial patch way back when, so I can't really say if it's better or worse than the leaked DR patch. But I will say that we corrected thousands of mistranslations in the DR patch between the leak and when we completed our work on it last year, as well as edited the rest of the routes. The mistranslations ranged from minor mistranslations that didn't correctly capture character tone or got a word or two wrong creating incongruities in conversations (many lines felt like non sequiturs), to severe errors that heavily impaired your understanding of action scenes, or on some occasions, entire plot points. A couple examples of this were the climactic moment of the Elina route (utterly butchered) and the initial confrontation with Giordano (his entrance was very confusing).

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.

If all you care about is product, and you have no scruples at all about where they come from, then the Internet is your oyster.  People who buy products from reputable sources--especially fans and hobbyists--tend to have certain expectations about quality and legitimacy.

Project is not dead.  The editor hasn't been around for awhile; some personal stuff came up he has to deal with.  I've been going through a list of questionable stuff he's been finding and > 85% of the items on it are translation errors
I'm consequently not sure what the actual completion percentage is.  It will come out when it comes out.  I first started working on this in 2011, if I remember correctly.  Definitely I want it over the finish line, but I also don't want to leave it full of errors.  Just because that was good enough for the original translators doesn't mean it's good enough for me

@Stormwolf
I did with A5 (Only Takae's route though). Horrible experience. You can only understand about 75% of all dialogues by my estimation, and out of those you have to guess what the dialogue text means more than half the time.
My time with MTR (more specially, Translation Aggregator + ITHVNR combo) is negative. A full Visual Novel experience is more than just understanding, or trying to / guessing, what the dialogue is trying to say. Spending most of your time trying to guess the text is frankly very tiring and while you may get a idea of what's happening, you can't get what the VN is trying to convey. Ultimately it's a very disjointed experience and  I would rather not read it at all as opposed MTL-ing it. The only positive thing I can think of is that it serves it's purpose very well when trying to experience a fap-ge
Actually I feel so strongly about it now that I would encourage anyone who has an notion to MTL VNs to give it a try. I believe most will come to the same conclusion as I did.

Rest assured, it's still being worked on. The project has transformed pretty radically and this thread is quite outdated, but it's not cancelled unless we say it's cancelled, and if that happens, we'll let you know right here.

You probably wouldn't recover anything.  If the project died because of creative troubles (i.e. 'I wrote myself into a corner, I can't fix it, the project's dead') but there was money left, it would likely have already been returned.  Like you said, it doesn't smell like a scam project either.  (If it was, there's a very slim chance some governmental entity intervenes and makes her disgorge whatever it can find, but unfortunately the amount's probably too low to interest any of those.)
So either the project is technically-not-dead but shuffling along so slowly it will likely never come out, or it ran out of money years ago and is dead.  It doesn't matter which it is, the instant anyone files suit (or threatens to) and she lawyers up, the lawyer will say 'This project's attached obligations onto you.  You can't reasonably fulfill those obligations, so you're insolvent.  Declare bankruptcy.'
See, a failed Kickstarter project is the kind of thing bankruptcy law is for.  Before it was invented, if you launched a project like this and it went belly-up, you either made everyone good or you went to jail 'until you did'.  But going to jail just meant you were even less able to pay people back, so you rotted there forever.  Naturally, people were very unlikely to launch such projects under the circumstances.  Bankruptcy is set up to protect people in the event something like this goes pear shaped on the theory we're all better off if people can take risks like this without completely ruining their lives if it goes badly.
TL;DR - If anyone sues, she declares bankruptcy and walks away.  Even if she doesn't, and you actually win, the reason the project died in the first place is there IS no money.  You can't squeeze blood out of a stone, and if you try it's your hands that come away bloody.  A court can issue a piece of paper saying she owes you money, but if she hasn't got it, well, you aren't going to get it out of her.

Guys, don't take this idiots serious. You know what don't ever take a translator serious or someone who knows to claim Japanese. I've been friends with a lot of people who can speak Japanese and even make a living of it, and yet they claim MTL is bad, blahblah. but it's all BS. Most people think I know a bit of Japanese and let me tell you, this will be my first time I ever confess this. I actually don't at all. I use MTL for everything and speak with a lot of those so called friends about VNs I've read and they respect my opinion about it and I can talk about most details and they haven't showed any doubt that I could actually read it. What an absolute morons. I even tl doujins and get praised for it. LUL can you imagine it. It only reads so well because most of my projects has an editor.

What else did you expect? People to sympathize with your laziness and lack of respect for the original text by forcibly butchering it through Google Translate? Get real.

Do you know what Majikoi is? Comedy
Do you know what is the WORST thing to machine translate? Comedy

My problem is I've reached a point where I actually kind of have too much swag.  I don't just go for swag the way I used to, both because I'm running out of space, and because of going in for things like The Last Guardian special edition (got bored, put it down halfway through) or the Persona 5 special edition (game's TL issues and struggles to nail the landing soured me on it) or the Ni no Kuni special edition (it's... not Ghibli Movie: The RPG).
So what I want to do is play the game and then buy swag.  Chrono Clock, for instance.  I decided I wanted one of those wallscrolls.  Turns out I could only get one via one of the Japanese stores that will ship overseas.  Wallscroll itself was relatively cheap, shipping was an arm and a leg.  When I backed the Kickstarter I could have gone for a wallscroll and probably paid a similar amount.  But I hadn't played the game yet.  (I did go in for the drama CD because I figured it wouldn't be sold seperately.)
So for Irotoridori, I bought some wallscrolls and keychains because hey, they're nice wallscrolls and keychains.  Spend a couple hundred bucks, get the complete set.  But I'm taking a chance.  I could always play the game and decide "I hate the main character" or "the game expects me to overlook the fact character X is malevolently psychopathic because the writers seem to think it's funny" or even for no reason I could articulate other than the Eight Deadly Words "I don't care what happens to these people".
I don't expect this, but I have been disappointed in similar ways before by things I was looking forward to, and I'm sure I will be again.
Consequently I'm in a bit of a weird spot.
Spend the money now, and maybe throw it down the drain.  Or don't, and then be kicking myself over loving the game and wanting the cool swag, but not being able to get it.  Because I can't decide I want the swag after playing the game.

And that, my friend, is not even a guarantee anymore, you are basically proving our point with your own words. Noone can guarantee a huge trilogy (unless kickstarted) when the first entry can bomb so hard that it won't be feasible anymore. That just doesn't make any sense. Sol Press is doing exactly the same thing as Neko would right now so your discontent is a bit misguided.

Well, that's how it is, this is not a cheap business, if you want to cover a serious part of your expenses through a KS and not just raise awareness around the game a bit, then 85k is a very fair number for a VN-translation KS. Pretty sure even this number doesn't cover everything. Probably not even close. And it's a number that many predecessors have already achieved so you can't exactly call it unreal.
And yes, Iroseka definitely had the potential to gather enough funds in other hands, it has a big enough buzz to be considered relatively well-known: a famous developer, an already localised Hoshimemo which is kind of popular, Astral Air also had an active fan translation that many people followed and they all definitely know about Iroseka etc. Iroseka is not that unknown of a title and we've had games with literally zero exposure in the west like Libra and NewRin gather 183k and 88k respectively, for a quick example. Or do you really think A Clockwork Ley-line or ChronoClock were more famous than Iroseka from the get-go?
Maybe it's the tiers, maybe lack of advertising, maybe a bad time to launch, maybe the whole "trilogy through stretch goals" thing, maybe all of the above. But something definitely went very wrong. I was sure it would end up with 90-100k and then we'll worry about getting the sequels and stuff. Instead we got an unexpected flop. A first serious flop since, I don't know, the initial Sharin KS, and that one could be easily explained since they took every major misstep they could. Which they then fixed and gathered 188k during the second KS attempt.
I'm almost shocked Iroseka fared so badly, hard to believe that only something like Kickstarter fatigue is to blame here, a lot of mistakes should have been made for something like Iroseka to gather only around 60k.

It actually is.

Fuwanovel circa 2022

 
(try this)

We need skill with Japanese more than we need skill with English right now; the original translation's got its rough spots.

Indeed, the translation is now at 100%.  But please, don't anyone get hopes up.  That's a very misleading figure.  The translated material is not in a very satisfying state.  Editing is required.
And the editing percentage is highly misleading also.  The material that has been edited is not up to par.  Sometime in May, I realized this and decided to start over; now I'm playing with the game open, listening to all the dialog.  This is actually the reason that status updates have stopped: editing is not back to where it was originally yet, but the stats no longer reflect this.  (It has also been much slower going, since real life got inconvenient for me.  Such is always the way.)

i mean let's be honest here. vn writers and readers generally aren't that experienced in sexual matters and they kinda just get their knowledge from other fiction. i for one cringe at the frequency of painful hymen breaking at every first time, dudes who can ejaculate multiple times easily, girls who cum easily without clitoral stimulation, and the ikea descriptions laced with copypasted dialogue/screaming of tortured young women. i guess it can also lead to some humor if i'm in the right mindset.

Aside from the "sighed" thing there's nothing wrong with that line. But even then, it's fairly obvious to see that it's a pun on side. As for why, I don't know, but it probably has something to do with the original pun being with "soba".
The fourth one they just switched "I'm pitching to you" to "You're up to bat". Simple change, and this is done all the time in professional translations. 
As for the last one, I'm not sure what about it is "nonsense". The "side effect of intense aggression" is obviously referring to the からくるもの and not the サカリ part itself. If you look up to the SD image, you see the word testosterone. Testosterone is related to both sex drive and aggression. As for the sentence fragment issue, VNs are full of sentence fragments. The wording of the line here makes it pretty obvious that it continues off of a previous line so I'm not sure where the confusion lies.  

?
The definition of  'good enough' is that it is... good enough.  So while I appreciate time and effort spent going above and beyond to do excellent work, 'good enough' is perfectly acceptable.  That's what it means.
Where it gets weird is that 'good enough' changes over time.  Standards change.  Work that was 'good enough' for video game translations in the late 90's / early 2000's will generally not pass today's minimum standards.  Mostly, it doesn't qualify as 'good enough' anymore.  Companies have raised the bar over time to bring the average up enough that people demand better.
And that is the real threat here:  The VN scene still does bad enough business that SakuraGame's business model - 'burn the forest down and profit off the ashes' - probably provides a comparable profit to doing things right.  Some number of companies will look at the foreign 'market', see it an order of magnitude smaller than the Japanese market (even though Japan has shrunk so much since the heyday 10 years ago or so), and not care enough to pay attention and just sign with SakuraGame because they offered more money or it's easier.
Just like normal video games moved the bar up, but there's NISA and Tecmo Koei trying to drag it back down - the real threat is lowering the bar, so 'good enough' starts including bad work.

?
The definition of  'good enough' is that it is... good enough.  So while I appreciate time and effort spent going above and beyond to do excellent work, 'good enough' is perfectly acceptable.  That's what it means.
Where it gets weird is that 'good enough' changes over time.  Standards change.  Work that was 'good enough' for video game translations in the late 90's / early 2000's will generally not pass today's minimum standards.  Mostly, it doesn't qualify as 'good enough' anymore.  Companies have raised the bar over time to bring the average up enough that people demand better.
And that is the real threat here:  The VN scene still does bad enough business that SakuraGame's business model - 'burn the forest down and profit off the ashes' - probably provides a comparable profit to doing things right.  Some number of companies will look at the foreign 'market', see it an order of magnitude smaller than the Japanese market (even though Japan has shrunk so much since the heyday 10 years ago or so), and not care enough to pay attention and just sign with SakuraGame because they offered more money or it's easier.
Just like normal video games moved the bar up, but there's NISA and Tecmo Koei trying to drag it back down - the real threat is lowering the bar, so 'good enough' starts including bad work.

?
The definition of  'good enough' is that it is... good enough.  So while I appreciate time and effort spent going above and beyond to do excellent work, 'good enough' is perfectly acceptable.  That's what it means.
Where it gets weird is that 'good enough' changes over time.  Standards change.  Work that was 'good enough' for video game translations in the late 90's / early 2000's will generally not pass today's minimum standards.  Mostly, it doesn't qualify as 'good enough' anymore.  Companies have raised the bar over time to bring the average up enough that people demand better.
And that is the real threat here:  The VN scene still does bad enough business that SakuraGame's business model - 'burn the forest down and profit off the ashes' - probably provides a comparable profit to doing things right.  Some number of companies will look at the foreign 'market', see it an order of magnitude smaller than the Japanese market (even though Japan has shrunk so much since the heyday 10 years ago or so), and not care enough to pay attention and just sign with SakuraGame because they offered more money or it's easier.
Just like normal video games moved the bar up, but there's NISA and Tecmo Koei trying to drag it back down - the real threat is lowering the bar, so 'good enough' starts including bad work.

Some of these are definitely more cliched than others.  Some might be a bit more cliched than you would like, but I thought they're all fairly well developed:
Ever 17.  Root Double.  Fruit of Grisaia.  I imagine Dies Irae probable qualifies (but I haven't gotten past the prologue).  I expect that I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream is pretty good (but I haven't played it yet).  Littlewitch Romanesque.  Eien no Aselia.  Demonbane.  Gahkthun.  Steins;Gate.  Dengeki Stryker.  Tokyo Babel.  Shadows of Pygmalion.  Utawarerumono.  999/VLR.  And finally (yes I'm serious) Funbag Fantasy.

And with that, my promised commitment to this project is over. As I listen to the last movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony and watch the ring dissolve in the fire of mount doom, I bid this project farewell and godspeed.

Nobody's mentioned Funbag Fantasy yet?  Huh.  Tick Tack has Ai, but it won't make any sense without playing part of Shuffle! first (and that game's got ... availability issues).
As for nukige:  Nympho Sensei Ryoko and I assume Sweet Home probably does too.  There's also a bunch of really old, probably not worth bothering with G-Collections titles that have a MILF.  Come See Me Tonight, Kango Shicyauzo, and Do You Like Horny Bunny come to mind.  Amorous Prof. Cherry is essentially all this.