HataVNI

EGS.

Currently playing Inochi no Spare from Akabeisoft3. A game about designer babies which purpose it is to live as a remedy for their siblings to counter a serious illness called "Oumonbyou" The setting reminds me a LOT of the movie "Blueprint" which I read around middleschool so it felt really intriguing to me Blueprint: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0321473/ Inochi no Spare https://vndb.org/v19513

Amazing article! I'm super disingeniously impressed by your work and effort! (´・ω・｀)

It's decent, but I'm like in the second chapter lul

I finished Kara no Shoujo yesterday - still have to get some of the bad ends, but it was probably one of the best VNs I played so far. And that KnS 2 is even better...well that excites me infinitely. Currently/today I am planning to play through the Demo of Softhouse Charas new Koikuma Game (悪魔聖女) and later this one https://vndb.org/v21768

All hail Zakamutt!

I'm playing Natsu no Kusari atm and I'm planning to play Maggot Baits. But I think the scariest VN I can think of is either Death Mark or XX of the dead

You can use google translate. It works near perfectly. Just a little wonky with the typography~

Had to edit some lines on request of Bango. This fucked the formatting, really sorry. But the text has the same content. Edit: This looks like absolute shit, Discord and its plain text/rich text is really shit for the fuwa editor. Sorry.

https://vndb.org/t11053

Good morning to you fellow enthusiasts, I'm Hata-tan and I am the admin of Visual-novel.info, a German website and community about visual novels from visual novel enthusiasts for visual novel enthusiasts and I have written a review about the newest release of Sol Press "Newton and the Apple Tree". Instead of going to translate my whole review for you guys I'm really urging you to read it with google translate, as bad as that may sound - English to German is really good. It lowers the text maybe down to some typographical errors and wonky sentence structure, but believe me it's acceptable and nowhere to standards of your diary+ You can access my review here: https://visual-novel.info/newton-and-the-apple-tree-newton-to-ringo-no-ki-review/ In course of this review and also during the review period I got kind of closer to the translator of the game which presented a fairly zealous image to me and showed me that translators with passion are still among us. It is actually his first TL he worked on and so far there's barely any complaints about them if next to none. Really congratz to Bango for a successful release and the popularity in the international Steam-Lists represent that. Nonetheless, let's begin with the interview. 「Interestingly enough Bango personally agreed to this interview and answered quite a lot of answers for me and towards the reader of the game. I'll paraphrase them for you and hope that you support Bango for future releases and follow him on social media and check out his other project: Strongest Gamer: Let's Play in Another World. 1. Even though the used jargon in the game is scientifically versed you don't use completely alien words which you even have to look up as a native speaker. How do you word the terms so even an ESL can understand them without any problems? Was it hard for you to understand the specific jargon or did you have to research a lot? If not, what were difficulties you had to overcome? Bango: I studied thermodynamics and electricity when I was at school, so it wasn't that difficult for me to deal with the themes of the game. The bigger problem would have been the wordplay and the puns. It's not easy to explain concepts taking into consideration I had to put myself in the mindset of people that don't know what gravitation is and explain it that way, 2. Towards the general translation: Many games have the problems that the Japanese is too descriptive also you had to shorten a few sentences I assume? How often did you rephrase whole sections and why? We received the All-Ages Version and I'm still having shade towards Sol Press because of it. I want to know how you liked the AA version. Bango: Maybe during the sex scenes I had to spice things up a bit to make the reader "happy". Japanese porn goes into silly detail when talking about porn sometimes. And about the All-Ages version you received... I'd rather not think too hard about it. 3. If you look at the translation in retrospect, what could you have done better? Bango: Maybe the beginning, Newton was my first project after all, so I was pretty green at first. I started Strongest Gamer around the moment Emmy's route starts. There are a few parts I would rephrase is I did them again today, but guess all writers of any kind feel that way about their work. 4. While translating, did you learn many new things? Bango: I learned not to be too stiff with line and scrap repetition whenever it's not necessary in English. Simple is best to make things read natural. (Hata's assumption: Japanese love the concept of over-descriptive text ever since literature began and its most noticeable in contemporary literature, also the self-recognition and confirmation of many things which completely contrasts with the more on-point writing style in the west.) 5. Do you think it is important to have played the whole game before translating? Or do you think you should translate from start to finish in one go and recheck several times? I personally think that an official release cannot avoid the fact you should know the game in and out flawlessly. Bango: Yes, it's extremely useful to play the game first all the way. It's easier to plan ahead if you know what's coming up. There's a lot of foreshadowing in the early chapters of Newrin which are kinda hard to notice the first time around. Although most translators don't have the luxury to play their games in advance. 6. How does it feel continuing when you already know whats going on? Does it get boring because of it? Bango: On no, the feeling of transmitting lines into another language with the same soul is very moving no matter the situation. It's better to work that way. 7. How do you create such a natural vibe with your phrases? Do you read them out yourself and analyze what sounds like functional English? Bango: Yes, I try listening to stuff all day and read a lot, you get a feel of what's natural that way. 8. Two more detailed questions and then we're done: What did you learn mechanically when translating NewRin? New grammatical structure, certain kotowaza (proverbs) which you had to research and find English equivalents? Which resources did you use, physical dictionaries, online-dictionaries, J -> J Encyclopedia and other things. In addition to that which was your translated lines ratio per day? (Lines/Day) average amount =? Bango: Dictionaries of all kind are quite useful and if we are talking about translated lines I guess its 8000/10000 characters a day which translates to around 500 lines a day. Color me surprised, some translators do even more (Hata's note: I'm thinking here of Steiner, AruNaru or Aroduc...). When I started my goal were 250 line per session but beyond the beginning struggles, I quickly exceeded that. 9. Incredible, do you think that TLing H-Scenes is rather boring? Do they tire you out? Bango: Not at all. I translated doujins for a whole year before starting my work on Newrin, sex doesn't scare me. you gotta strive to make lines hot in sex scenes. 10. Closing Question: Do you have any comment for the readers or the players of the game. You can also give a tip to our wannabe-translators. Bango: If a dumbo like me can translate, anyone cans. I hope everyone enjoys the game as much as I did. And most importantly, don't play without the patch Patch: https://pantypress.com/ 」 Thanks for this thorough interview, but the last and most interesting question hasn't been answered yet: Why do you use Kunrei-Shiki for Syujis name? Bango: It's something I can't comment on, really sorry. Buy NewRin here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/721010/Newton_and_the_Apple_Tree/ The team that worked on NewRin: https://twitter.com/ZeHaffen/status/1030219925623918593

Her english just isn't on par to be a good writer. If you want you can exchange some words with her on discord shes there under the handle @Yukari But if you can get over her negative side and her downplaying her own capabilities and convince her to improve herself instead of hiring people who handle the hard work for her (art in G&G) , then she might create better games. But you would need to go out of your way to do that and I think you used up enough of your time with these games. The problem is they actually sell on steam. I can give you the benefit that she actually read what you've written so you might have had an impact or made her self-reflect. Maybe...

Thanks for the analysis of our fellow former no-neets member "Yukari". She's not exactly good at creating visual novels, but its the prime example of how easy people are to deceive with nice looks and shallow concepts which just involve random encounters with bland heroines and flat porn scenes. I have actually considered to look into Games and Girls if its like on sale for one or two dollars and I have a coin too much, but after your thorough analysis that likely has more substance to it than the game itself, i might avoid it from as far as I can. Also the G&G Design looks like it deceives people into buying a Neptunia-artstyle-esque game. Thanks for going out of your way, and likely many others, to play these abominations of OELVNs from a german developer that sadly represents partially the creations of our country... YumeCreations, more like NightmareCreations. We know Yukari privately, so our judgement is probably already known to them. Unfortunately theres a quite lot of people buying her stuff, so she can actually meet ends with the revenue from these "titles". What a shame.

Yeah. We are both admins of visual-novel.info

I might have a little ahead of you here because people keep telling me inside stuff but rest assured that kicking their marketing staff made them resign vital key members that need to backup all these projects they assimilated. They might only have kicked the marketing staff but theres other people who left them including contractors like Ebihimes. Sekai is kind of on their last leg now and while they might not die out, they have a big problem now and have to rehire. Also the seperations makes them save if you calculate correctly at least 200000 bucks a year (8 employees at ~22000$/year). They could have some excess money for big project now but the last thing you want is dovac managing the twitter account. Just no. Also, they have done very cool stuff in the last few days. Including giving us a meaningless block on twitter and likely backing their own kickstarters. w https://twitter.com/BishoujoNEWS/status/1029765179767185409

I was reading Newton and the Apple Tree for the longest time. Now Hanachirasu, Utawarerumono, Chaos;Child and Nekopara Extra (which I am TLing to german) For japanese novels: Just finished Minikui Mojika no Ko a few days ago, then Erewhon, Tyr is telling me to read Natsu no Kusari so I will do that and probably Trample on Schatten for Review reasons.

Making Visual Novels popular is a goal that goes way further beyond the thing you guys are trying to consciously achieve. Most people consider what we think Visual Novels are as Animegames and Porngames, but the genre has so much potential being way more than that if we think about what the genre is. Nowadays people don't read that many books anymore, because everything has to be quick-quick entertainment. In that regard visual novels could provide a new way to tell stories, but it just did not reach this hemisphere yet and this is obvious because the people make VNs without having a real team try to abuse the visual novel genre as a way to get access to the gaming industry. That is also a reason why people try to convert their half-assed fanfictions into visual novels and then make actually sellable games out of them. But what if we make it possible that capable book authors find the genre and think it is revolutionizing? They could produce amazing stories and have the funds to actually found big western based publishers/development studios because they can hire capable people. If we are actually attempting to make VNs popular over here we have to get away from the selfish goal to bring only japanese gems over here. We have to create our own amazing stories, with western-based writing and settings. The art can still attempt to be moe and japanese, but the settings should not try to simulate a japanese one. I'm sick of western studios attempting to create foreign settings they don't understand, because they only gloss over the source material and attempt to rehash what they know from anime, storytelling takes A LOT of research and I'm surprised how japanese manage to use western philosophy in their works better than western developers do.. What I am trying to say. Try to promote the genre in itself and improve on creating new things instead of rehashing japanese ones and localizing games. We have so many capable people over here in the west, but we don't use their potential which is unfortunate. I'm not telling that we should completely cease localizing japanese titles but we should be less selfish.

I'm currently playing HapyMaher and Planetarian in its german version. You'll notice they tled it three times though. Just did it to judge a german translation as a german person. Else I'm trying to finish Evenicle but chapter 5 leaves me in a slump... Also I'm really disappointed by the lack of depth in the combat system and the difficulty curve. It doesn't get harder at all, very casual game. Evenicle Review on Friday on our Website btw, stay tuned!

I'm so amazingly hyped. Our website got a review key for this and I am so stoked to play this. I expect a chuuni-fest for a chuunilover like me. The NTR-Tag doesn't make me feel right, but I already read a bunch of NTR Stories this morning so I am prepared for the worst! The plotline sounds a little flat, but I am sure the fighting and action will make up for it! Trample on Schatten!

We started pushing out daily posts on our website. Please check them out. Theres a lot of work put into them like my 4.000 word Subarashiki Hibi review (｡ŏ﹏ŏ) Also Tyrs Loveletter review is worth reading too! We breached 330 people now. Before I posted it were near 300. Thanks for all the new people!

Really. I'm very interested why you think this game was any good? The choice system was atrocious and forces you to use a guide, the characters are neglectable and not built up towards the start, maybe near the end? The Transitions didn't make sense, Federico was a very weird character to make a protagonist out of. Alan was just a pointless brute and the Miharu/Rinka Romance was absolutely pointless, didn't even make sense as Miharu was super unlikeable and even Rinka said shes unlikeable. Fatal Twelve had a good premise but it was not good by any standards and thats not even because its allages, but just because its underdeveloped and aieouKompany doesn't know how to make choice systems without artificially making them hard or trial and error (see Shizuku no Oto) If you want to read a review of the game then check this. You might need to google Translate it though. https://visual-novel.info/review-fatal-twelve/ Ontopic: KEY will be at animagic with a panel this year in germany. I'm gonna go and ask them for some potential info and what they think about the western market depending on who is around.

As bad as it may sound, but try to get the Animeman on board. Hes a grown, adult man speaks Japanese, can promote obscure japanese titles and he has talked about visual novels and how they didn't reach the west as a medium yet in the past. I think he can actually grow the interest of the medium widely if he makes a video to promote you guys. Let's say a fuwanovel written script he models a big introductory video after. On the other hand, we are also trying to establish visual novels in germany and made a website and a connective community you can visit and have fun in. Our site and our dream is just a little instance of the overall vision we western visual novel enthusiasts all want to create. A visual novel Reich.

They most definitely won the AX, but because the others actually didn't step up to par. Denpasoft was quite ok, but my actual winner is Aksys. Why them? Actually a very good Horror-Title. That wasn't really to be expected. "Shiin" is really a title I would want a PSVITA for.

The translation isn't actually messed up just because 2-3 Lines are half translated. The game is translated very literally and thats fitting because it is a sole Infodump throughout. I really enjoy this personally though as the voiceline length matches the text. I think thats beautiful. Also they don't leave a away honorifics because frequent honorific switching is common and indicates that the characters get closer to each other. Apply the patch and buy the game I'd say. Maybe wait for a sale though if you are really unsure about it. The cuties lure you in Especially Hibiki

Personally I'm through with the common route now and I really liked it from a visual standpoint. The game is namely an infodump about trains and that is something that doesn't appeal to everyone. Me neither actually, but getting to know things and widening your horizons is interesting. Maybe the game leads to me finding a cool train 3dpd girl that wants to talk about my "drain cock" (reference to the game) one day (*´∀｀*)