Incynerate

Man, what a missed opportunity to get some help for your Miazora restoration project

In case anybody's curious, Sekai's response so far is this. It's not much obviously, but it'll be interesting to see how things unravel.

Late reply, but what leads you to believe the Kazato sisters route was cut? From what I remember, the below description was always there on the Steam page. (Unless it got removed and added back in sometime over the last few weeks) On a separate note, I haven't seen a lot of discussion about the translation quality of Flight Diary, does anybody know if MoeNovel did a decent job this time? I'm also curious to know how different MN's Flight Diary is from Cruise Sign's Flight Diary, but I know that's a much harder question to answer. If what we have is just a translated version of the all-ages version put out by the original developer (basically Cruise Sign), I can live with that. I just don't trust in MoeNovel's ability to rewrite story. It's a shame that there's no demo or *cough* unofficial demo that I could use to see if this release is worth my money. Though I suppose there is the Steam refund process. EDIT: Oh yeah, and it's cool to see we're finally getting Akari's route. I hope we get to see Ma-bou cry.

MangaGamer definitely deserves a lot of respect, especially considering Sol Press doesn't even sell their games on MangaGamer (no idea why). Anyway, I think it's a little unfair to claim that Sol Press did "very little marketing". According to them: Maybe they could have asked JAST or somebody more well-known to tweet about it earlier in the game, but I don't know if there's a lot of options beyond that. Now, could they have marketed it a little better? Probably. A working English title or at the very least, using something other than hiragana(?) in the game's logo probably could've helped the game's appeal to the more casual VN fans. A demo would have been nice, but I don't know what their licensing agreement with Favorite is to allow that.

Source

Speaking of, Nahoko's VA also did Nemu in Shining Song Starnova. Hearing Hikari and Nahoko talk in that scene before the title sequence was really bothering me; I was positive I had heard both actresses before but I couldn't quite place them lol I'm about 90 minutes in and it seems decent. The story isn't exactly drawing me in to the point where I can see myself losing vast swathes of my day to reading it, but it's adequate and still has plenty of time to win me over. The artwork is pretty fantastic, though. I think my only complaint is the sound levels on some of the voice acting. Hikari seems a bit louder relative to the other characters while Saiko seems quieter. But it's nothing major. It's a shame there's no volume sliders for each character, but I guess Sol Press is just working with what they were given.

Considering Valve had MoeNovel cut even more content that what was removed already, any excitement I may have had is diminished greatly... Oh well. Hopefully Hitotsuba will scratch that itch for me.

Yeah, it looks like very few people went for the higher-$ physical tiers. It seems like they either weren't priced very well or aren't things people were interested in getting. Somebody did pledge the $5k tier, but it sounds like that was somebody on /vn/ who probably wasn't serious. I think Doddler raised some good points on Twitter. Sol Press probably got a good number of the hardcore VN audience in the first couple days but doesn't have the reach to hit a wider audience, like JAST or Sekai has. Maybe an English title and logo would have helped with that wider appeal. If they try this again they might need to rethink the reward tiers and get a promotional partner.

Usually nothing, but sometimes baby carrots and hummus. Trying to keep things to 1500 calories a day...

Might be worth mentioning that for Newrin, Sol Press partnered with MiKandi Japan as a promotional partner. Granted, their Twitter follower counts look pretty close, but since MiKandi is based out of Japan, maybe they were able to bring in backers who were interested in physical goods. Not saying that's what got them all the way there, but it might have helped. In other news, they just posted another KS update listing the fund distribution. Kinda feel like that's something that should have been available on launch, but whatever. It's always interesting to see.

Maybe I'm being pessimistic but I'm not even confident they'll reach their initial goal. It's hard to imagine a KS pulling in more money in the latter half of its campaign than in the first half. Something drastic would have to change. I hope I'm wrong.

What do you mean by desperate? Sometimes I almost feel like there are too many titles getting picked up/released relative to the size of the western VN audience. I wonder if that pace is sustainable. If you're talking about whether or not the VNs getting localized are any good, that's another (more subjective) matter

A fan restoration project, that's admirable! If I may ask, I was thinking about picking up Kazoku Keikaku during one of JAST's sales - how rough is the English? The roughest official TL I've read and still liked is probably Kira*Kira. I wonder if it's better or worse than that...

I wonder if they'd do Kickstarters for the other two since it seems like they won't reach stretch goals. The problem with that is they're not likely to get more backers for a sequel than for the base game, and unless they're able to offer different physical products than before, they probably won't get too many people pledging high-dollar amounts. That's probably why they tried to push all three games into a single Kickstarter and hope the hype carried them all the way. Maybe a minori/Supipara type funding situation? But man, that could take forever. Well that certainly didn't stop you from speculating yourself.

At the end of the day, it's still an edited MTL, right?

Yeah, I also wonder if Favorite's fee was particularly high. It sounds like Nekonyan had been unsuccessfully pursuing Iroseka for quite some time. But if Sol Press was able to swoop in, maybe it was because they were willing to pay a higher licensing cost. Anybody know if VN devs also demand a % of localized sales? It doesn't look like Hoshimemo sold particularly well outside of its Kickstarter, so if the licensing fee was in fact higher than before, maybe it was because Favorite demanded more of their money upfront. But that's just more baseless speculation on my part.

There's a few fan-translated Swaneye VNs that have milf heroines: Hara Chuchu , Hara Kano , Maman Kyoushitsu . I've only played a little of Hara Kano but it looks like these are nukige-ish eroges with an emphasis on impregnation as well as incest for the applicable routes (each game includes the protagonist's mother and sister as heroine options)

I assume you're referring to the Grisaia Complete Box? In any case, Sol Press has done two Kickstarters and have delivered releases of both games, so I have no qualms about jumping on this KS. Granted, it sounds like they're still working on the physicals for those first two games, so that sucks. However, I don't care about physicals so that doesn't affect my decision. Oof, I hope it's not $200k. The most comparable KS is probably Hoshimemo and that only raised just under $90k. Pulling numbers out of my ass, I guess maybe $45k for the first game, another $45k for the sequel, then maybe $20k for the third?

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. I think it's still in localization companies' best interest to at least try to release on Steam. If it gets approved, great - they'll see a little bump in sales. If it gets rejected/banned, I'm pretty sure their submission fee gets refunded. The only thing they have to lose is whatever time they spent on the submission/appeals process.

Shame there's no launch day discount, but oh well. It's kind of funny that if you buy Chaos;Child via the Limited Edition bundle (includes the free OST) you can get it for 10% off, cheaper than if you just bought the game by itself.

(stealing this from someone else's post on Reddit) https://www.removeddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/a2otxh/jast_holds_the_rights_for_two_classic_games/

JAST is more convenient because they accept PayPal, but I do have a soft spot for MG because their support is always really helpful. MG's website is in desperate need for an overhaul, though. I guess if I absolutely had to pick one, it's probably JAST.

Yeah I'm glancing at their Twitter feed and their website, and I'm not seeing anything. Unless something maybe got mentioned on their Discord (do they have a Discord server?) I don't think they've yet made their decision known.

Steam likely banned My Erotic Summer because it's an H-game with a shota protagonist, not just because it's an anime-style game.

I dunno, but Winged Cloud released 3 VNs last year (god they really do churn those out) . Take your pic.