Infernoplex

Hi

I resuscitated a twitter profile I'd never used and am posting my progress on there now since this thread is only updated every few weeks.
 

If we go this route, I think it's only proper to have an "Another VN got MTL'd by SakuraGame" thread as well. True, this could be served by Translation Salt, but translation salt tends to be people complaining about inconsequential things like honorifics half the time, and the SakuraGame topics have a kind of special flavor to them, much like umami. I think we lose something by not having a separate thread for tls bad enough to be MTL.
Actually, this got me thinking. Now one of the supposed benefits of discussion is being exposed to outside views that temper your own viewpoint, so let's throw that out altogether and divide people along clear lines instead. We could have two factions of people, either for or against weeby translations. Call them GOAL (Good Online Advocates of Liberaltl) and BAKA (Ban Abominable Kooky Americanizations). Naturally this will cause a spectrum crunch as people rush to adopt one position or the other, losing all nuance in the process and leading to a cycle of hatred and misunderstanding, which is what we all want, right?
I'm thinking we add a set of badges to show membership, with choosing a side obligatory for participation in any translation discussion thread. This way, you can instantly see if your interlocutor is a wrong-thinking degenerate and deserves not be interacted with, rather than actually reading their post, which will save valuable time to not use to read visual novels. I also suggest doing something similar for the censorship/no censorship axis, and maybe a few other fault lines like BL, EVNs, Otome games, and the narrative value of porn in visual novels. I fear adding a loli axis may cause actual deaths in real life, so I cautiously recommend not pursuing this otherwise fairly obvious axis of contention. All new discussion threads will naturally have to be tagged under one of these axes; if one genuinely cannot be placed on a predetermined axis, the moderators will watch the thread like hawks for derailment onto one of the well-tread tracks of argumentation and tag it after that.
Naturally we need enforcement of membership in the two groups. Someone might try a false flag operation, or muddy the waters in some kind of rebellion against glorious one-dimensional clarity. As such, we should establish a council for each party that may eject particularly egregious members (they may choose to either join the opposing party or bear a "null badge". Rest assured that all party members that wish to remain in good standing will ignore all posts made by a Null, or else.) I strongly recommend that I be given a judging position in GOAL, and for the intellectual luminaries @littleshogun and @Stormwolf to be given positions in BAKA. As Fuwanovel proves, leaders are totally best when absent, so I nominate Tay as the unofficial leader of both groups. I give no particular recommendations as to who will prove to be the unofficial leaders due to the power vaccuum; let the social dynamics sort themselves out, guillotine blades fall, &c.
All in all I think I've got a great proposition here. Does anyone agree?

It's that time of the year again. Time to reflect on everything you made of good and bad in the year. But who cares about getting chained down by your past forever huh? So let's skip that part and look forward to the future! To what we can (and can't do) to make Fuwanovel great... again? Did we ever were great? Debatable.
So anyways, let's all collect suggestions of changes we want to see here in the coming year. If you're feeling a bit uninspired, I suggest to vote for one of the wonderful suggestions I make below. Because I thought long and hard (aka 3 minutes, rough estimation) in the well being of our beloved dysfunctional community.
Create a pinned "Translation Salt" thread under Visual Novel Talk, because lately every single release gets this; Rename Walkthrough section to "SeniorBlitz's Secret Dungeon"; Rename Translation Projects to "Fan Translations Burial Ground" because lately they're mostly dropped anyway; Create a board "Introduce Yourself and Never Speak Again" under Introduce Yourself because yep; Rename Community Coordination and Feedback to "Tay and Co. Burial Ground" (I'm sorry Tay, we love you); Create a pinned "Looking for Hentai Animation or Visual Novel (Powered by Monta93TM)" thread under Anime/Manga Recommendation; Rename Leaderboard to...... anything tbh no one will notice kek kthxbye

Let's face reality.. People don't honor their commitments these days and its only going to get worse.. True, not all commitments lead to riches, that doesn't mean you don't have to honor them as a matter of principle.. After all.. Can you expect others to do the same if you don't ? You deserve only the world you create.
IF you want to really read this novel, learn japanese.. Sure it sounds impossible, but trust me you have all the time in the world or at least the rest of your life however long that is, so get to it chop chop ! Don't rely on people for something you can permanently solve yourself..

@Infernoplex is right. Fureraba is miles apart from Loverable. I helped the group, and I can vouch the game sucks.

I didn't read Fureraba by the way xD I am basing this on "popular opinion", so I could be wrong. What I did read, though, is Lover Able, and I can vouch that it's a decent at best moege.

I......
 
I'm not dead. But Christmas is almost here. Let's focus on that instead! Celebrate the holidays, be with family and friends, cheer and welcome the New Year btw this visual novel takes place in 1988 and Christmas Day was on a Sunday truly befitting a day when blue sparkles became a thing in the Typeverse hahahahahahahaha
 
I'm sorry this keeps happening everybody

Don't worry, we can always leave this project to our children if we die of old age before completion

While they might have left some general refrences in the TL, I glanced at the script thanks to @Infernoplex and saw some fairly big changes in scenes leading up to/ coming after H-scenes which removed refrences to sex. (It also has a fair share of translation errors.) ASFOS was absolutely a major step in the right direction TL wise, but still lacked in quality compared to other professional TLs. (The TL errors should really not be there, for instance.) Adding some extra content to the places where H was removed is basically the norm in console/ all-ages versions, so it's a shame they aren't sticking with that approach.

Seems like the editor is slacking xD

From the recently necro'd thread about Libra of the Vampire Princess:
Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
But other thing baffles me. There certainly ARE many Japanese people who are fluent at English - I refuse to believe otherwise. So why PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATION SERVICES don't hire them, and instead opt to produce unreadable gibberish? Do those tl companies (not game localization, but in general) pay their translators too little, and a person who is actually good at English just has many better job opportunities?
It would certainly be ironic in a pretty disturbing way, if only people who suck at English would be desperate enough to work as translators...

LOL Just for the record, I don't care about shitposting, as long as I FIND A TLCer!!!! I only hope the potential TLCer doesn't get discouraged by seeing the mess of this thread

You don't seem to care what anyone has to say TBH.

Can we discuss it here, or is it just announcement?
Anyway, I'll answer
Wanting to read untranslated VNs was one of my reasons for starting learning Japanese. The two titles that were the source of that are Konosora (it was back when I didn't know if and when retranslation patch will be ready) and Mashiroiro Symphony. Now they are joined by many others (like Clover Day's for example, and bunch of '90s PC98 titles, like Love Escalator or Kakyuusei).
As for the first question - I still don't have confidence to tackle those big ones, but recently I started with Hanahira to get my feet wet . It looks very approachable from the learner's point of view - the writing is very simple, and - since there is no narration - all lines are voiced, so it makes looking up unknown words easy even without hooking software.
As for the resources I'm using for learning - I started with JFZ online course. I also use Tae Kim's book, and currently mainly I'm learning kanji with WaniKani (and I'm about halfway through, at lvl 30). I'm also thinking about joining some actual class/course next year, to have some speaking pratice and some more structured learning schedule.
For now I feel pretty confident with basic grammar, but find my vocabulary and kanji knowledge considerably lacking, so reading bigger VNs would for now still mean looking up many words. But I hope, that maybe in a year or so I will be able to do it

Crescendo's pretty enjoyable, I found. But I never finished it because a couple of the routes bored me. Definitely underappreciated by modern audiences, imo. I get why, the art blows even by 2001 standards. Still worth giving a shot, though.

I'd say it depends on the actual timeframe.
For example, Spike Chunsoft, now, they don't have any qualms about localising just another version of Steins;Gate -ANY version, really, because it's a best seller.
But G-Collections is ANCIENT and they probably used what was available. It's just that the companies don't return to previous titles with improved versions, it seems like the West needs a constant flow of new localisations and people care more to have as many different games as possible, not return to old ones.
Another (discordant) example is Rewrite, which is officially arriving in 2 versions I think, and given that the majority of Key fans have already read it, either they buy it out of commitment, or it backfires gloriously (like Little Busters, mind you).
But of course, Rewrite and S;G are major games in a bountiful age for the community like 2018 is, not an old game like Crescendo.

Regarding Crescendo and Tsuki...
No, they didn't cut anything. G-Collections localized these 2 VNs slightly before their later editions came out. And as per usual in the western VN industry, we never, or very rarely at least, get these later editions updates for the original western localized VNs. So it wasn't "cut", but more like "never updated". Not strange considering VNs were selling even worse back in the day, so there was no incentive to update them at all.

This article and its author have recently caused an uproar in many discord communities, because the topic of this list seems to come up at any given moment. So, I'll try to provide some context regarding this list and be as civil as possible. My objective is not to be a bully but to give this article a fair analysis.
First of all, I must commend the quality of the writing. Whatever one might say about the content, it is without a shadow of doubt well-written.
The main issue is how the author's objectives are in conflict with each other. This is supposed to be an introductory article for beginners, members of the animanga community. However, the article is extremely lengthy, each entry worthy of being an article of its own. People have a short attention span and by the time most people are done with reading 2 or 3 entries, chances are they're already tired of reading it. If your objective is to convince, then keep it short. Or rather, cut the entry number. Perhaps a top 10 or even a top 5 would suffice.
Regarding the entries themselves and the main objective...they don't really match. Half of these titles are UNTRANSLATED, which is already going to turn away a big chunk of the community. Second, pretty much all of these titles are Long or Very Long. Trust me, hardly anyone would be willing to lay down 50 or more hours for a hobby they're not invested in yet. How about a few shorter titles, such as Narcissu or Planetarian (off the top of my mind). They are short, sweet, have no filler and leave a deep lasting impression. They also don't have Sexual Content.
You also excluded titles which are popularly known in the anime community, such as Clannad, Steins;Gate, Fate/Stay Night and Higurashi. People are more likely to find interest in reading the source material of something they already watched and liked.
And then, the exclusion of moege and gameplay eroge. Like it or not, moege are some of the best-selling games of the medium (second to doujin H-RPGs, I'd say). If the objective was to attract newcomers from a new community, there is absolutely no reason to exclude one of the most popular ""genre"" of visual novels. Gameplay eroge are the closest to videogames and might be just what newbies need to make the transition to full-fledged text-only visual novels.
I'm not going to comment on the entries themselves. After a certain point, they seem to be choosen sort of arbitrarily, merely there to fill the empty space. Honestly, anyone could've picked these titles, but that's not what's important.
If I had to comment on one of them, it would be YU-NO. YU-NO was one my favorite eroge for a period of time. It's also one of the highest rated titles of erogamescape. When you have half-truths and misinformation, others are going to believe it if it's this well-written. This is something that concerns me, as one could think of modern bloggers as the historians of old.
But to be honest, what bothers me the most is how this entry in particular is quite offensive to the medium as a whole. Not only does it ignore the hundreds of games that already existed in other platforms, such as PC-88, but it dismisses them as "cheap pornography". Just because you read two or three random nukige that JAST or whoever it was gave a bad translation 15 years ago, it doesn't make it true. Sadly, there are many great stories yet to be translated which most likely will remain so, due to engine issues and older art which isn't appealing to the modern gamer who plays everything in 4k 120FPS.
To be fair, this title is heavily overrated. The interactivity is incredibly infuriating - not only is it a verb-based game but you literally have to pixel hunt and randomly guess where you should go next. Not only that, but you can't save at will. Because of this, the player is forced to default to a walkthrough. Due to this and many other games with terrible choice systems forcing people to look for walkthroughs, we use walkthroughs even for games with good, carefully crafted systems. As for the content of the game itself, multiple route mystery wasn't anything new at the time. None of the routes really stand strong on their own, except perhaps the stepmother route, the concept of this route having been done better on other games at the time. The sci-fi aspect of the game only exists so that
- how cool is that? To finish this rant regarding YU-NO, let me tell you something interesting: one of the most important arcs, the whole emotional hook of the epilogue wasn't even written by Kanno himself. The current translation has different versions of the game mixed together, so you have the protagonist rejecting sex with a character in one line, and then deciding to go forward with it in the very next instant.
If I had to say anything else, it would be how you portray YU-NO as an important step forward for the eroge industry and explain its historical value, but you chose the cover from the remake.
 
The main issues, as pointed out by many others, is that this article is overly ambitious. You have only started reading VNs approximately a year ago and you have only read about 20 titles or less, yet decided to create a recommendation list of a higher number. You recommend titles that you haven't read and can't read (japanese). While there is some original content (SubaHibi and Danganronpa reviews), the description of the remaining entries is a mixture of opinions held by different people. If I wanted to read Conjueror's Sakura no Uta review or kastel's rants, I could do it, they already exist in other places. You could very well have started with a smaller project, publishing reviews of titles you have read with your one and only opinion.
I know I might have been quite harsh, but I'm honestly tired of this topic being brought up every couple hours, no matter where I hang out. That and I'm not sure if you're really interested in the advice of others or if this is just to show off, but so be it. I gave my two cents, and I hope to not have to comment on this further.
 
Good luck.

No Bee? What kinda cut rate production is this?

Howdy y'all, it's ya boi Arc back at it again with necroing projects thought to be dead long ago.
Have this: https://arcadeotic.wixsite.com/euphemictl/single-post/2018/11/04/OFFON
For those lazy enough to read it, here's some bulleting points:
The project's starting in early December due to school stuff (surpise!) The team has been changed, you can view it from the original post There will actually be quality passes this time, fantastic! We'll be using a format to work on this that ain't complete dogshit Still JP to ENG. That's all, have a good day and look forward to more porn from yours truly.
 

The most advanced neural network known to science is the human brain, and it can reconstruct images nearly instantly using the power of imagination.

i love how large parts of the VN fandom generally shits itself with rage any time a company comes in to legally release a a desired VN. 

Finding the .ybn decryption key is trivial: if you know the correct offset, it's right there in the file. No need to calculate or bruteforce anything.
Here's a zip with the scripts in an Excel file and a tool that'll put the translated text back into the .ybn files: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lbhwyrt7lio0zd0/Yome juu tools.zip?dl=0
The patched files get placed in the "patch" folder. Copy those to a new "ysbin" folder in the game and you're all set.
Some more remarks about the tool:
It handles word wrapping automatically by inserting line break instructions. You may need to adjust the "MonospaceCharactersPerLine" setting in tool\textpatch.exe.config to get this working correctly. If you're planning on working on this translation with multiple people, it's also possible to create a translation patch directly from a Google Docs spreadsheet rather than an Excel file. PM me for details on this.

I can't believe I'm doing this again. I feel like I have to finish off what I started, even if I'm not all that willing to.
As the title suggests, this is about the Walkure Romance translation that started in 2013 and was left to indefinite hiatus on 2015.

I suppose it's about time I crawl out of my hole and continue on to finish this off.
I may or may not be recruiting people for this project.
But when the time comes, I will ask around.
With that being said, please feel free to DM me about anything, preferably if its just asking about recruitment.

I'm officially back in the business, although I don't know how long am I gonna be working on this or keep this alive. Don't expect frequent updates either.

If there's a team already working on this, please let me know ASAP.