yumi

This is a condensed version of the full article which can be found on my Main Blog Here.
 
She Was Always Right Beside Me
 
A story always has its heroes and heroines, defining characters who shapes the narrative and break out of the normal to change the world around them. These are the people who the player remembers long after they have put the game down and are the focus of a developer's time and effort. But what about the supporting cast? The men and women who stand bellow our protagonists and who sit closer to the normal and mundane, individuals who would normally stand in the background of a scene. Visual novels have found a place for them within their structure in the form of the Sub-Heroine Route. This curious phenomenon is the topic of this article and it has a surprising degree of complexity and variety to its form. From its implementation to its effects within the narrative, there is a fair amount to cover. And perhaps along the way you might see the value and place of including a Sub-Heroine Route in your own work.
 

 
In The Shadow Of Importance – Defining The Sub-Heroine
 
The category of Sub-Heroine is one which is somewhat vague by its nature. It has been used to refer to a variety of characters, such as those who have major routes but are not focus of the overarching narrative or those are not the clear favourite of the writers. However, the set of characters which this article poses as the real Sub-Heroines are those minor characters or important supporting character who would not under normal circumstances have a route of their own due to their nature as secondary characters. They tend to either reflect the more normal aspects of the protagonist’s life or they are some type of plot device required by the story and in most cases these are the people the developers tend to want the player to not fixate on. So having entire, albeit shorter, routes dedicated to them is a strange choice under normal circumstances. Their routes tend to take two forms, shorter unlockable routes and offshoots of an existing route, and it is these which we will be examining.
 
Perhaps the common manifestation of the Sub-Heroine Route is in the form of shorter unlockable routes in which the protagonist chooses said heroine over the main cast. These are generally the home of Sub-Heroines who are minor characters which would normally occupy supporting roles and have little influence on the overall narrative. This type of Sub-Heroine Route is treated as a form of unlockable reward for the player to incentivise them to keep playing and potentially uncover more hidden content. In terms of structure, they focus around a single point of conflict, often romantic, and spend their entire play time exploring it without any diversions or interactions which are not absolutely necessary. Sometimes they are even paired up together with another Sub-Heroine Routes if their content is similar enough in order to save on space. A prime example of this practice can be seen in Senren Banka with the coupled routes of Koharu and Roka who share an initial build up before splitting off into their own self contained sections. Their shared path is disguised as a competition between the two heroines to see who will get to be with the protagonist, Masaomi, and gives them a change to shine through various character interactions before they enter their isolated routes. It also allows them to serve as a sort of antidote to the grander narrative plots of the main heroine’s routes by offering a glimpse into the mundane lives of the rest of the cast.
 

 
A less common type of Sub-Heroine Route is one which exists as an offshoot of a major route. In these the narrative will shift off the original main heroine and moves onto the Sub-Heroine while maintaining the same thematic and tonal aspects. The Sub-Heroines often found here are those which under normal circumstances would serve as plot devices or form part of the world building and the routes they off shoot from are generally the ones they have an important role to play in. This results in an expansion of the player’s understand of this character and their role in the story. It is less prevalent than the separate route type due to the effort required to set it up and there being no call for such a route in many less narratively complex visual novels. An interesting example of can be seen in Hoshizora no Memoria with Mare’s route which is an offshoot of the final route of the game. Here the player gets to see the mysterious Mare behave in more human fashion as opposed to the aloof manner she has been throughout the game and serves to tie her character up. Mare is a constant presence in the narrative but never shifts out of a supportive role, acting as a means of moving the narrative forward both within a route and in an overarching sense. There is a definite argument that Mare’s route is not a particularly good Sub-Heroine route due to it being short in duration and lacking in substance, but it is nonetheless a good example of how this type can be presented and placed inside a visual novel.
 
 

 
Why Writing Sub-Heroine Routes Is Hard
 
There are relatively few Sub-Heroine routes in visual novels compared to total number of titles which just include a spread of standard routes. This drought has come about for a variety of reasons with the most prominent being that the compact nature of a Sub-Heroine routes requires a certain set of narrative skills. Writing a long main heroine route is very different from a short form narrative with a single focus. As has been expressed earlier, this is a problem which many Sub-Heroine routes suffer from and there have been various attempts to mitigate it such as the aforementioned partial merge of two routes in order to give the developers more space to work with. However, these are just band-aids and demonstrate the writers are much more comfortable creating a longer story than managing the swifter pace of a short route. Knowing how to keep events to their necessary space while at the same time not making the whole route not feel rushed is an off-putting challenge for many and so they simply choose to avoid the problem entirely.
 
Another noticeable barrier to the effective inclusion of a Sub-Heroine route is the fact that the emphasis they place on mundanity through these more minor characters is difficult to make engaging for the player. Our everyday lives are not filled with constant excitement and so a narrative focused around such ideas and themes may bore an audience which is expecting an escape from that life. There is also the issue of how it can rub up against a serious and supernaturally inclined story with the sudden shift into a slower paced route coming across as jarring and even as a betrayal of the experience the player signed up for. It is a delicate line to tread when designing a Sub-Heroine route and there are as many aspects to consider as there are in a main route even if the outcome differs. Balance has to be found between the heroine’s arc, their lower narrative stakes and their shorter length, and this is a struggle for many Sub-Heroine routes. As such their quality varies even more wildly then normal routes despite how relatively few of them there are and it is perhaps a sign of how flawed their core ideas are in practice.
 
For The Importance Of The Sub-Heroine Route
 
If Sub-Heroine routes are so hard to get right within their constraints and they focus on less important characters, why would anyone choose to use them at all? This is the inevitable question which comes from the issues shown above and a perfectly reasonable reaction to them. However, even in the face of these concerns the Sub-Heroine route offers some unique strengths which allow it act as an important narrative pillar for the main routes. The first of these, which has been alluded to before, is the contrast it provides. By supplying a point of reference for the player for what the more grounded elements of the world and characters are like, it gives the player a lens through which to appreciate the dramatic highs of the central plot. It makes clear that not everyone lives in the high powered drama and action which the main cast finds themselves in, there are normal people living their lives and doing their best to deal the changes brought by the protagonists. This sense of perspective is lacking in many visual novel and the Sub-Heroine route can give a space where the developers can insert the necessary fleshing out of their vision.
 

 
The other strength offered by the Sub-Heroine route is the opportunity it gives for humanising more minor or plot device characters and providing another angle to their interactions with the main cast. There is an inherent imbalance necessary in a standard linear narrative to allow for a proper pacing of events and arcs which visual novels have assumed to make certain they can keep the player engaged. However, it is only in breaking out of these conventions where the medium can truly show its uniqueness. The Sub-Heroine route plays into the non-linear nature of visual novels by allowing for the exploration of characters who would normally go ignored and in doing this expands the player understand and investment in the overall game. No longer are these character to be simple background noise, they are as alive as the main cast and in many ways more relatable due to the smaller scale of their problems and triumphs. In addition their optional nature ensures the player will never become bogged down by them and helps keep the Sub-Heroines from the possibility of overshadowing the main heroines.
 
Conclusion
 
If there is one thing which the existence of the Sub-Heroine Route demonstrates it is the flexibility and engaging nature of visual novels. Having the ability to examine the side characters of a story within a cohesive and thematic section of the game is a major advantage of the medium. While Sub-Heroine routes do have their issues in terms of being difficult to write for, due to their short length and focus on the more mundane, the ability to humanise these characters and provide much needed contrast greatly outweighs these problems. The debate as to whether a game should have one or not is a matter decided by the overall narrative need for these strengths and a defined enough secondary cast to utilise it with. Having a Sub-Heroine route can elevate a story in a surprisingly effective manner and should definitely be on your list of possible options when you create your own visual novel.
 

I've spent some time in the guts of some KrKrZ games. I've learned many things the hard way, including some things I could've just looked up in a manual if I wasn't such a reverse engineer by heart that I never thought to even look for a manual.
Anyway, some time back in what must've been a semi-hallucinatory fever state, I wrote two little guides to share some very basic stuff I know, in a structured manner.
Both of these guides are available on the pantsudev organization's Github, publically:
https://github.com/pantsudev/krkrz_ecosystem_guide
https://github.com/pantsudev/krkrz_textrenderguide
If you're getting started on hacking on a kirikiri game translation, maybe you'll want to take a look at these. Maybe not.
And more importantly, I'd appreciate any pull requests with corrections or additional information. I'm sure I've made numerous mistakes in these writeups.
---
On the other hand, some people appear from time to time in my DMs, asking for help with kirikiri, or even other engines.
I'm very sorry, but I do not have the time to do such personal tech assistance, and in many ways I can only share generalities, anyway - because every tool used by pantsudev was custom created by me, serves exactly one purpose for our exactly one project, isn't public and would not work in other situations.
However, I'm all for sharing knowledge! Let's just do it for everyone, not on a person-to-person basis, right?

I've spent some time in the guts of some KrKrZ games. I've learned many things the hard way, including some things I could've just looked up in a manual if I wasn't such a reverse engineer by heart that I never thought to even look for a manual.
Anyway, some time back in what must've been a semi-hallucinatory fever state, I wrote two little guides to share some very basic stuff I know, in a structured manner.
Both of these guides are available on the pantsudev organization's Github, publically:
https://github.com/pantsudev/krkrz_ecosystem_guide
https://github.com/pantsudev/krkrz_textrenderguide
If you're getting started on hacking on a kirikiri game translation, maybe you'll want to take a look at these. Maybe not.
And more importantly, I'd appreciate any pull requests with corrections or additional information. I'm sure I've made numerous mistakes in these writeups.
---
On the other hand, some people appear from time to time in my DMs, asking for help with kirikiri, or even other engines.
I'm very sorry, but I do not have the time to do such personal tech assistance, and in many ways I can only share generalities, anyway - because every tool used by pantsudev was custom created by me, serves exactly one purpose for our exactly one project, isn't public and would not work in other situations.
However, I'm all for sharing knowledge! Let's just do it for everyone, not on a person-to-person basis, right?

For any fan translators unfamiliar with the jargon:
source language/text = language/text being translated from
target language/text = language/text being translated into
While writing sufficiently well in your target language is important to ensure both that the finished product is a smooth read and that no errors occur because of you being misinterpreted by your editor or audience, it’s all for nothing if you didn’t interpret your source correctly in the first place.
Reading a source text without making errors can be surprisingly difficult even with a decent grasp of both your source and target language. Certainly most fan translators, and more professional translators than I’d like, are lacking in at least one of those two areas: personally, I am objectively significantly worse at Japanese than the average native Japanese high schooler¹.
There are more ways than one to avoid mistranslations, and often you can compensate for lacking in skill by being more cautious while reading the source text. Personally, I like to focus on two basic principles: always trying to detect possible gaps in your knowledge, and always considering whether your translation actually makes sense.
Does It Make Sense?
Bar things that are written specifically to evoke surrealism, writers usually try to avoid things that obviously make no sense. This is a pretty general principle and editors and proofreaders can both use it even if the translator does not, so it’s always a bit strange when I see some weird-ass obviously illogical mistranslation pop up. Theoretically QA/proofreading is extra powerful in this regard for games, as they will usually play the game as they work, so they can spot backgrounds or character movements contradicting the text too. For a subtle example of this, have something from a translation I love to hate on, Seabed:
Now when I saw this ingame it made no sense at all. Why would it be darker after you turned on the light? Part of this is probably just questionable doujinge graphical accuracy (and maybe needing the emphasize the light / mimicking how it would actually look as your eyes adjusted), but I would still make a note on this line were I QAing this². Now the Steam release of Seabed happens to let you switch to Japanese…
壁のスイッチを押して、ナツメ球だけをつける。
I flipped the switch on the wall, turning on just the nightlight (ナツメ球）.
Well, that makes a lot more sense. The second background was probably going for an adjustment effect where everything but the light looked darker, but it wasn’t showing a bright light. Well, that or background 1 was a sort of generic movie-darkness-but-not-really kind of deal. The point is, we have a solution to the puzzle.
If your translation is contradicted by other parts of the game, whether it be the situation the characters are in, the lines before it or after (painfully common), or something else, you should look at those line extra damn hard. Writers do sometimes make mistakes, but it’s probably you. If you know someone with higher Japanese ability that can help check your translation of the line, ask them (make sure to give sufficient context if at all possible. I can’t believe how many people seem constitutionally unable to do this, though the worst offenders are learners rather than translators). Until the line makes sense or you’re confident it’s not supposed to, I recommend leaving the line/section blank or at least leaving a strongly worded note to come back to it later.
Always Be Suspicious
When I was still a high school kid, a freelance literary translator did a presentation at our school³. One thing she said really stuck with me: the principle of always keeping a careful eye out for anything that might not mean what you think it means.
The example she used was of a translator that had managed to get toy shaped like a dog from a lady walking her toy poodle, a small poodle breed, in English — leading to a rather surreal mental image⁴. I suspect this line wasn’t very important, but that’s not always going to be the case, and this kind of mistake is always an embarrassment.
One key skill to avoid that embarrassment is to grow an intuitive sense of what you don’t actually know — if you’ve hung out in some environments, you might actually already have gotten a slice of this with your English, or another language you know well. For example, did you know that strictly speaking bombastic is only to be used for things that are flashy but have little substance? I myself find myself googling words I only sort of know sometimes (…usually after unwisely pressing the enter key in some chat. At least I edit myself quick!). It doesn’t always go well. Ask me about the time I subtly misused reticent sometime… or don’t, actually. A soul can only take so much.
Either way, that same nagging feeling — that maybe you don’t actually know this — can be a valuable ally to maintain the proper level of suspicion when translating. You’re looking for when the structure isn’t quite like what you’ve seen before, or when you’re thinking you can figure out the meaning of something from its parts — look up とてもじゃないが for a real mindfuck of a phrase. And as above, you’re also looking for things that don’t make sense.
Always be suspicious of things that don’t make sense
Showing the interlinked nature of all your guards against mistranslation, the earlier example with the nightlight might also have been prevented by being suspicious. If it was a translation-side error, going deeper than a cursory google images search might have helped get it right — looking at the page, you’d think to yourself: do I really know this is just a normal lightbulb? Looking at ナツメ fruits they look kind of red, too. I’d better look further…
More examples
I was going to review Seabed for Fuwanovel, which is part of the reason why I took a lot of screens going through it. It fell through because I simply could not complete it: my examination had turned me hypercritical and practically every line bothered me — mostly for clumsy flow rather than translation oddities, though there were more of those too. But hey, I got some pictures for this post for all the trouble. Anyway, have another example:
Okay, so this doesn’t make sense. How are you seeing things in pitch black darkness? Let’s look at the Japanese:
すんなりと入国を済ませて空港を出ると見通しの悪い夜ではあったが、コンクリの壁の落書きや広めの道路、湿った空気で異国だと直ぐに分かる。
見通しの悪い isn’t pitch black, it’s just the dark of the night making it hard to see. Now it makes sense that you can see the graffiti again, nice. It’s possible this was some kind of botched adaptation due to the background being solid black, but I don’t buy it.
For my last example, lets use this line from 新説魔法少女 (Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo), an SRPG/VN hybrid with an ensemble cast of Japanese students, mostly in middle school. Moka is a first-year high school student who used to be in the swimming club last year. Before she graduated she was in the same club as Nagato, who is being discussed here due to her habit of not showing up for things (she still gets good results academically, and is also very strong athletically).
悪化してたか…… 試験だとか総体だとか 大事な時にサボる癖は治したほうがいいよ。
Huh, I guess it’s gotten worse… She should really fix her habit of skipping important events like tests and… 総体?
I was actually just reading this right now, and at first it didn’t make sense, or at least sounded extremely strained, with any of the definitions of 総体 in edict⁵. So I checked kenkyuusha (shin waei daijiten) and a J-J dictionary and they still had nothing illuminating. Now I was starting to think it could be some of my more unlikely interpretations. I checked out そうたい without the kanji to see if it might be using the wrong kanji; 相対 seemed more plausible in the sentence, but I was still not feeling it; my Japanese ability was telling me it wouldn’t look like that grammatically and the interpretation felt strained. My intuition told me that 総体 would be an event somewhat similar to a 試験, maybe sports related given who the speaker was. So I googled 総体 and the second result is a Japanese Wikipedia disambiguation page.
全国高等学校総合体育大会の略称の一つ。高校総体、インターハイ、インハイも同義。
An abbreviation of the Interscholastic Athletic Meet. Synonymous with [various katakana words on the theme of “inter-high”]. Well, that confirms my suspicions. It’s some kind of sporting event. This definiton actually specifically mentions high school events, but there’s nothing saying you can’t have them in middle school.
This interpretation makes sense; a swimming club member would want gifted other club members to be at their competitions. Even if I didn’t use that principle, suspicion could also have saved me and made me actually google the word. But Japanese knowledge also helped me: Japanese often shortens longer terms into a word using some of the term’s kanji; for example 自動販売機 becomes the probably more familiar 自販機, and I knew to suspect this. In the end, the more Japanese you know, the less errors you’ll catch with these methods… but remember, kids: a totally radical book once said that pride comes before a fall. It had a point⁶.
To tie this up, I think my soul has recovered from the baring some time ago, so let me tell you of another English-related fuckup: for the longest time I used to think “craven” was related to “craving”, and none of the times I’d read it had disabused me of this notion. I then saw it used in the Tokyo Babel translation in a way that was clearly incompatible with craving anything, so I looked it up… and was enlightened. It was a sad moment, because at the back of my mind I knew I’d misread it like 10 times by now. With that said, I kinda blame the English language for this one. That, and not having dictionary lookup just by hovering over the word. Man, the browser addons we have these days are pretty dang good...
Footnotes
¹ The JLPT N1, well known for not being particularly indicative of ability but seen as a decent anchoring point nevertheless, is apparently supposed to be easily passable to any student that has finished Japanese high school. I originally wrote most of this essay in ~2017, when I didn’t think I would pass it — I now think I have a decent chance, with pass/fail mostly down to listening ability (not very relevant for text translation) and if a lot of media-obscure grammar points I don’t know happen to show up. I’m still much worse than a Japanese high schooler, though — you’ll have to believe me on this one.
² It’s hard to know where exactly this went wrong, and it’s possible only QA could have saved it from what could be both a reasonable editing decision or a translation oversight. Maybe the translator used google images and saw the bulbs looked more or less like normal bulbs and just went with that; ナツメ球 is in edict, but edict is unreliable and a professional translator might understandably avoid it (I wouldn’t – it has better coverage on a lot of random more contemporary/obscure stuff, though I if I were truly high effort I would probably get access to more updated online daijirin/shinwaei dictionaries).
³ Among other language pairs she was a JP->SE translator I believe, but I can’t remember if she did it firsthand or second. I also remember the title of one book she worked on, Shine, a localized title she didn’t pick or particularly like and which seems to be entirely impossible for me to find anywhere. I also don’t know if she was entirely a literary tl, it’s not like those get paid a lot, though I guess probably more than VN translators (let it be known that the muffled crying of our industry professionals can be heard in the background of this sentence).
⁴ It’s possible she was actually just holding it or something and I’m misremembering, but this way the example has more of the dimensions I want to discuss in this post.
⁵ At the time, Translation Aggregator with JParser and mecab was my first-line lookup choice. These days I have to look things up infrequently enough that a browser addon that has shinmeikai and shin eiwa daijiten 5th ed EPWING dictionary lookup in addition to JMdict (basically fancy non-boomer edict) serves my needs better. Those did not help me here, though.
⁶ In keeping with the principles of this post, I ended up checking out the origin of the proverb. The passage used to read “a totally radical guy once said…,” since I was assuming it had been directly said by Jesus (also, it was funnier that way). At least it really was from the Bible! Though the fall implied is supposed to be “calamitous”, apparently, so maybe we’re using it a bit lightly here. Then again, a bad enough mistranslation really could cause a disaster… though if you’re translating the nuke launch protocol, I really hope to whatever deity will still give me the time of day that you actually know what you’re doing. The rest of you, feel free to muddle along doing your best like us other mortals.
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Let’s not mince words here. The ellipsis is a blight upon English translations of visual novels. It must be uprooted and killed with fire.
Before the slaughter begins, however, let’s review some basics. As the name suggests, the ellipsis represents an elision — that is to say, omitted content. It functions as the “yadda yadda” of the English language. It is the “Step 2: ???” before the all-important “Step 3: Profit!” A writer deploys those three little dots to indicate either the intentional removal of something that once was there, or the pointed absence of something that should have been there.
That’s it. That’s what the ellipsis is supposed to do. You wouldn’t know this, however, by reading nearly any English translation of a Japanese visual novel. Ellipses are scattered across the text like so many rhinestones on the sweatshirt of a Midwestern mom. They’re at the beginning of sentences, the ends, stuck randomly in the middle — sometimes even chained end to end like a writhing Human Centipede of punctuation, each little dot in the chain crying, “Kill me now!” into the anus of the next.
It’s an absolute abattoir in there.
This particular road to hell is paved with good intentions, however. You see, all those ellipses are also present in the original Japanese and, in an attempt at faithful translation, the TL teams have left them all sitting there for you to enjoy. The original writer had a reason for putting them in, the reasoning goes, and it’s our job to offer the purest translation of his/her vision possible.
This, of course, is bollocks. Punctuation operates differently in different languages. Japanese ellipses are used much more liberally than their Western forbearers, particularly in popular culture (e.g., manga. light novels, etc.) Want to indicate a pause? Ellipsis. Silence? Ellipsis. Passage of time? Ellipsis. Need to fill some empty space? Ellipsis. Is it Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday? Ellipsis, ellipsis, ellipsis. When ported over to English, most of these usages look less like carefully crafted sentences and more like a transcript of a particularly drunken Snapchat session.
Put simply, what works in one language doesn’t always work in another. When I’m translating a Line of Text from German, for Example, I don’t capitalize all the Nouns because that’s how it was in the Original. I normalize it for English. The same needs to be done in any VN translation.
My current rule of thumb while editing — I’ll bold it for you in red here — is as follows: Remove/replace all ellipses in a line of Japanese text unless doing so irreparably breaks the sentence or significantly changes its meaning.
Luckily for us, English has a toolbox full of punctuation to get the job done. Commas, semicolons, periods, dashes — they’re all your friends. So let’s discuss some common situations in VNs and how we might handle them.

The trailing ellipsis
You’ll see lots of these littering the ends of sentences and lines, mostly to little effect. More often than not, they indicate a thought closing on anything other than a 100% full and decisive stop. Since they don’t hold the place of omitted text, we can almost always replace these ellipses with periods.
There are a handful of situations, however, where keeping a trailing ellipsis makes sense. These include:
The Pregnant Pause: 
When something’s strongly implied at the end of a sentence/line, but left unsaid for dramatic effect.
The ellipsis fills the place of the implied content, so it gets to stay. (Fun bonus fact: pauses are the only things that can get pregnant in VNs.)
The “And So On”:
When a statement is implied to continue for an unspecified length beyond the end of the sentence/line.
The ellipsis here indicates there may have been a few more beers after Michelob, but the writer has decided to spare us and jump straight to Bob’s objection. Had this been more interruptive in nature, with Bob cutting Joe off immediately after “Michelob,” the ellipses would have replaced with an em-dash (—).
The Trail-Off: 
Similar to the “And So On,” but with the character choosing to let a statement taper off into nothingness, rather than the author.
The opening ellipsis
You’ll see these slightly less often, but they’re by no means infrequent. Typically, they indicate some slight hesitation at the beginning of a line of dialogue. But again, the nuance ends up being so slight and the impact so watered down through overuse that you’re almost always better off removing these ungainly beasts. An exception can be made for:
The Reverse Pregnant Pause: 
Just like the original Pregnant Pause, but it appears at the beginning of a sentence. Often holds the place of something a character doesn’t want to say.
Rather than just pausing in passing, Joe is actively not admitting he thinks Joe is a jackass. That makes this line a strong candidate for an ellipsis.
The mid-sentence ellipsis
So, so many of these. You’ll close your eyes at night and they’ll haunt you. They’re almost always meant to indicate a slight pause in speech or thought, but trying to the read the resulting text is an exercise in frustration. There are... just so... many unnecessary... gaps. (Full disclosure: When writing scripts for TV, I’ll use ellipses like this a lot. But that’s for a very specific purpose: helping to communicate the particular rhythm of a line to the actor(s). I always avoid this in audience-facing text.)
In almost all cases, unless there’s a marked pivot in thought, a comma will suffice.
If the ellipsis is holding together two complete yet interwoven thoughts, a semicolon will do nicely.
If the ellipsis is holding together two complete and independent thoughts, a period should be used.
If ellipses are used to indicate an interruptive thought, one that breaks the main flow of the sentence, em-dashes can be used.
Again, there are a couple situations where these mid-sentence ellipses can remain:
The Ta-Da:
When a pause is used for obvious dramatic effect, the ellipsis should be kept.
The Shatner:
When halting or stilted speech is intended for dramatic/comedic effect, ellipses may be retained.

The empty line ellipsis
You’ll see a lot of these. Holdovers from manga and light novels, they are explicit indicators of silence, being at a loss for words, holding one’s tongue, etc.
In English prose, these silences would normally be held with narration — e.g., “Baconator just sat there, dripping ketchup.” You’d never see a sentence such as: ‘Harry Potter said, “...” and continued looking out the window.’ That’s because, unlike most VNs, traditional novels don’t have the crutch of character sprites and name cards appearing alongside dialogue. Due to such VN conventions, along with the technical limitations of translation — it’s frequently impossible to replace character dialogue with unvoiced narration — you should almost always leave these ellipses in place. Based on your best judgement, you can also choose to leave such variants as the questioning silence ("...?") and the excited/alarmed silence ("...!").
It should be noted that such empty line ellipses can also be used outside of dialogue. Often, these will just indicate time passing. There’s also a long tradition in Japanese art of the “pillow” — a held moment of contemplative emptiness. It’s the bit of formal textual throat-clearing at the start of a poem. It’s the 10-second cutaway to a babbling brook that connects two scenes in a movie. In a VN, this pillow can evidence itself as a single line of narration, empty save for an ellipsis. There’s no good English alternative for this, so it should be kept wherever you encounter it.
Extra credit: The multi-line ellipsis
I saved this one for last, because it’s a bit of a special case. Against all my better instincts, it involves adding ellipses in places where the original text has none. It’s painful but it’s for a good cause.
Sometimes, when editing or translating a VN, you’ll run across sentences that spill over onto two or more lines.
Unlike in poetry, which uses line breaks to very deliberate effect, these multi-line monsters are almost always the result of the VN writer just running out of highway and choosing to keep on driving. Whenever possible, you should attempt to restructure such sentences so they don’t break across lines. Often, splitting an overly long sentence into two smaller ones will do the trick. If it resists your best efforts, however, maintain the break and indicate it with ellipses — one at the end of the first line, the other at the beginning of the second.
How many dots? ALL THE DOTS!
Another peculiarity of ellipses in Japanese VNs is that they don’t always have three dots. Depending on context and the arbitrary whims of the writer, you’ll typically see anywhere from two to six dots at a time. I’ve even seen 27 in a row once. I think it was a sex scene. Or a fight scene. Maybe both.
Don’t let this worry you. If you’ve been following my advice, you’ve already purged most of the ellipses from the text. Of those that remain, almost all can be reduced down to familiar three-dot English ellipses. But as always, there’s at least one exception.
Content-bearing pauses: In most cases, it’s of little concern to us whether an ellipsis consists of three, four, five, or even six dots. They’re all slight variations on the standard pause, but since English punctuation doesn’t make any such distinction, neither will we. An exception comes when the length of a pause not only adds flavor, but provides content. Consider the case of an ever-lengthening silence:
The lengthening of the line suggests the passing of increasing amounts of time; the scene isn’t the same without it. Or consider an explosive outburst after a deafening silence:
If you opt to stretch out an ellipsis like this, only do so in increments of three. If you’re musically inclined, think of three dots as a quarter note, six dots as a half note, etc., each one holding the silence just a bit longer than the last. Following the rule of threes keeps the text visually streamlined and helps if you ever need to convert a bunch of soft ellipses ( “...”) to hard ellipses (“…”) late in the translation process.
A quick note about spacing
I opt to keep things simple. If an ellipsis is at the start of a sentence or line, put one space between it and the first word. If it’s anywhere else, use no space before the ellipsis and one space after. If it’s a string of ellipses, it should be an uninterrupted series of dots with no spaces in between.
There are also differing schools of thought as to whether an ellipsis at the end of a sentence should also be followed by a period, resulting in four dots total. Again, I opt for simplicity here and advise three dots in all cases.
The mark of the beast
It’s easy to tell professional translations from fan projects, it’s said; just count the number of dots. While not always true – plenty of slapdash commercial releases exist in the wild — there’s definitely something to this. More often than not, fewer ellipses are a sign that someone has taken the time to not just translate a text word for word, but thoughtfully localize it.
Seriously, just dump the dots, folks. Your readers will thank you for it.