Infernoplex

The game that must not be named--nor the events that led to the fabled Lolipocalypse--must never be spoken of in the Halls of Fuwa.  So hath the Fuwa zealots decreed.

I'm pretty sure I predicted this whole thing happening at some point back in 2016. This is what happens when you become overly reliant on a platform that was already inconsistent with its 18+ content rules to begin with. Sure, it did improve the number of releases and grew the VN medium to heights that nobody predicted, but this was always gonna come back and bite the medium in the ass. If Valve actually become serious about this sort of thing, then I can see a few things happening.
A lot of JP VN companies will no longer have an incentive to localize their titles if Steam wipes out VNs from its catalog. Quite a few companies only got into the West because of the promise of Steam sales, like Frontwing. Quite a few localization companies will be forced to localize more VNs that sell well as they find that the lack of Steam sales will cripple some of their financial gains. Aka, Mangagamer will possibly go back to 2012 Mangagamer. With less JP companies becoming involved in the West, fan TLs will slowly start to come back into the spotlight. Have fun with mediocre TLs. The only benefit I see from Steam doing this is that Moenovel can't half-ass their censored releases anymore, at least in terms of h-content.
Either way, it'll be interesting to see where the scene goes from here. Let's see how these localization companies adapt to these new changes. 

inb4 Frontwing just leaves the western market entirely instead of developing an 18+ distribution platform
If Valve goes back and retroactively "re-rates" games, a lot of VNs could potentially be on the chopping block.  This sucks quite a bit for companies that haven't fully invested in their own distribution platform.  Guess it's just another lesson about relying on Steam to distribute VNs.

Hopefully this will finally lead to more companies selling adult titles off steam, like MG, instead of using steam + those silly patches as their only distribution platform. 

Quality discussion requires a topic worth discussing.  Allow me to assist: the developers of Huniepop and other VN devs on Steam have just been served a notice from Valve that their games will be removed in 2 weeks.  Is this the beginning of the end for VNs in the West, or the end of the beginning?  Ready, set, go!

Yes, it is. The staff ostensibly don't have time to either participate in things themselves or allow new things to happen / people to do something, from what I've gathered. I'd comment on moderation, but we're not allowed to. Quality discussion, as you may have seen, is quite rare, and we are limited to 5000 recommendation or CoC meme threads. This place is the last vestige of Fuwanovel, with only enough strength to barely put its ugly, sacrilegious visage above the surface to take gasping, ragged breaths before it is finally put out of its misery and sinks to the abyss.
On the bright side, however, it is full of quality people from a variety of backgrounds. There is still a chance that among them stands a hero that will arrive and pull this sinking relic from the water and deliver it to salvation...

I will take that as a White Album 2 and Sakura no Mori confirmed

Hello again. Today, I have the 7th week of progress updates.
Here are the updates!
Translation:
Prologue - 100% (1791/1791)
Edit
Prologue - 42% (748/1791)
The translation for the prologue is finally finished. That's one huge leap towards the upcoming prologue patch. The team is aiming for it to be released in a couple of months, but that's just a rough estimate. I hope you're all excited by those prospects.
We are always looking for more help in any positions that still need filling. Please PM me if you're interested in filling one of these positions.
That's all the progress I have for this week. We are approaching ever closer to that prologue patch. Get hyped, and I'll see you all next week.

What's wrong with that? It's merely an abbreviation, like how I call my pals from Germany Germs.
There's nothing wrong with MTL. Learning Japanese is a time-consuming, arduous task with minuscule payoff and little to no professional or vocational benefits. Not everybody wants to invest so great a portion of their life into learning a language solely for the consumption of visual novels.
There's also nothing wrong with that. As long as nobody attempts to disseminate their MTL or pass it off as a translation project, there is no issue whatsoever. Please take your Japanese fetishism and elitism elsewhere, Kiriririri.

He did a very, very good job at editing it (very thorough).  The reason machine translations became such a huge stigma later on was because of later abortive efforts by others, including the aforementioned incidents with Edelweiss, where the machine translations were basically presented without any grammatical fixes at all.  Of course, what he did was a full TLC/edit, but the fact is he based it off a machine translation. 
I played it, and while - from a purely translation point of view - it has issues, as reading material, it is mostly just fine.  He ran extensive fixes for internal consistency, and he made a serious effort to make it readable in general.  A lot of the reason why it was so successful was because Kamidori, in general, is not one of the harder Eushully games linguistically (I wouldn't want to see him make the same effort with IMZ, for instance).  There is little attempt at the kind of large-scale world-building you see in IMZ or the later games by Eushully, and the story itself is relatively straightforward and is not a 'heroic epic' like the IM games, so the narration is more simplistic.
Understand, the reason most translators bash attempts at machine translation (other than elitism) is because the people who are using them don't have the Japanese or the English skills necessary to know when the output they are getting is wrong and/or needs modification.  That wasn't the case with the Kamidori fantranslation...  and at the time, nobody really cared it was based off of MTL.  After all, it was a readable VN at a time when the localization industry was basically JAST and the nascent MG.

Project leader Keimaru posted some additional info on Twitter:
He realizes that the concept of an all-ages Venus Blood is a bit absurd. He's been surprised by the swell of very forward-thinking user feedback. The current plan is to launch the Prefundia in mid-May, but due to user feedback that may be delayed. He's willing to hire additional translation, editing, and debug staff if the Kickstarter does well enough. There's only so much that Ninetail can do at its own discretion, and therefore this is all subject to approval. There's also a comment about "colorful tofu" which I can only assume is a euphemism for porn.
Also, I appear to have gotten assasinzassasin in trouble for disclosing too much by tweeting about the discussion here and elsewhere.  I do however think that there's been valuable feedback that'll allow them to adjust their plans before they're widely disseminated and the die is already cast, so to speak.

How on earth would taking corruption scenes out of a game about sexual corruption be in any way satisfactory to the primary audience?  That's literally the main selling point.  It's a core gameplay mechanic and has entire story arcs devoted to it (optional, but incentivized by gameplay mechanics).  The gameplay is great but you can't just excise a major theme and claim it "wasn't important".

There are some partial scripts leftover from the project. MDZ finished one of the routes and I think common route is also TLed, so there's that.
Sarcasm on or off?
Edit 1:
Oh, I didn't know about this one actually. I knew about Cocoro project that was started by Dr. Kleiner back in the day, but this one seems to be by someone else? I managed to dig out from the wayback machine this: https://wayback.archive.org/web/20141018211613/http://gokurousama.wordpress.com/
I don't know who this is, but whoever it was, the project is surely 100% dead. @StrategyMasterz
Edit 2:
Forget what I said, I didn't know about this blog before. Dr. Kleiner = Gokorousama. For a moment, I was confused whether there were two separate projects for Cocoro at the same time.

No sarcasm at all brah

Hello again. Today, I have the fourth week of progress updates. There has been some good progress over the past week, but first of all, please welcome @Arcadeotic to the position of QC.
Now for the updates.
Translation:
Prologue - 68% (1224/1791)
TLC
Prologue - 39% (707/1791)
Edit
Prologue - 21% (385/1791)
We are still looking for a dedicated TLC as the other translator is only doing it for the prologue. If you think you are capable enough for the position, please PM me.
That's all I have for this week. The prologue patch we are planning is inching ever closer now, so look forward to that. See you guys next update. 

Looks cute. Good luck.

Ah, I see. Yeah, that might be it.

Hello again. Today, I have the third week of progress updates. Editing has finally started for the project, so that's pretty nice
Translation:
Prologue - 46% (829/1791)
TLC
Prologue - 27% (486/1791)
Edit
Prologue - 16% (279/1791)
We are still looking for a dedicated TLC as the other translator is only doing it for the prologue. Also, we are looking for people to fill in the QC position as well. If you think you are capable enough for either of these positions, please PM me.
Also, everybody can view live progress on this project from this website. I'll put it in the original post as well.
https://cookie4.com/projects/haruuru/progress/
That's all for this week. I'll see you next week with some more progress.

Err, we are not translating the whole VN, just the H-scenes xD Sorry, just had to correct you there

Hello again. Today, I have the second week of progress updates. Not as much progress as last week unfortunately, but Ittaku was pretty busy and any progress is good progress in the end.
Translation:
Prologue - 36% (636/1791)
TLC
Prologue - 27% (486/1791)
Again, we are still looking for a dedicated TLC as the other translator is only doing it for the prologue. If you think you are capable enough, please PM me.
That's all for this week. I'll see you next week with some more progress.

Good luck with the project. 

A Sky Full of Stars - +18 Restoration
 
 

 
1. VN Info
2. Synopsis
3. VN OP
4. Project Introduction
5. Staff
6. Recruitment
7. Progress
8. Asking for Feedback
Edit (14.06.2021):
The project is dropped for the foreseeable future.

It's not really "in the future", since I already started working on something. It's a cute little RPG that's simply perfect for fans of lighthearted, vanilla stories where totally nothing bad happens to main characters.
No, of course it isn't. Playing it will result in severe emotional trauma. You have been warned. ^^
That aside, we are considering moving our main info/updates/feedback place somewhere else. Due to Fuwa anti-piracy rules this thread's usefulness is quite limited, since we can't ask for any files that we would need for further compatibility testing and the like. I'm not sure about discussing how to mess around with that Chinese DLC either. Actually, it's highly questionable if the patch itself should be even posted here to begin with... >_>
Anyway, don't be surprised if this thread gets abandoned/locked in the near future. I'll post links to a new place (Reddit?) in the OP if that happens.

I'll say what I already said elsewhere about this matter - they were just lazy to remove those files from the archives (I seriously doubt they can butcher so many VNs in such a short time frame). With any luck, Moenovel will soon bankrupt.