Ottes

It's time for Getchu Awards again, even though it's later than usual. The winner for Getchu Awards 2022 here is Hentai Prison, and I'll list top 20 below. Oh yes, as usual you can view the source from this link.
1. Hentai Prison - Qruppo

2. Jewelry Hearts Academia -We will wing wonder world- - Cabbage Soft

3. Hamidashi Creative Totsu - Madosoft

4. Ambitious Mission - Saga Planets
5. Same to Ikiru Nanokakan - Cube

6. Tsui no Stella - Key

7. Unless Terminalia - Whirlpool

-
8. Motto! Haramase! Honoo no Oppai Isekai Oppai Maid Gakuen! - Milk Factory
9. Criminal Border: 1st Offence - Purple Software

10. Houkago Cinderella 2 - Hooksoft

11. Futamata Ren'ai - ASa Project

12. Anetomo - Atelier Kaguya Bare & Bunny
13. Study Steady 2 - Marmalade

14. Ao no Kanats no Four Rhythm EXTRA 2 - sprite

The after story for Misaki.
15. RE:D Cherish - CRYSTALiA
16. Amanatsu - Azarashi Soft

17. Role player: Tororo Shimai no Nenmaku Portrait - Gurigucha LIVE! - AKABEiSOFT2
18. Yuunagi-sou no S-kyuu no Kanojo-tachi - Moonstone Cherry
19. Tomodachi Kara Koibito e - Azarashi Soft

20. Mahou Senshi FINAL IGNITION - Triangle
Of course as usual we have the awards for each categories, and here's the best VNs for each categories.
Best Scenario: Hentai Prison Best Game System: Role player: Tororo Shimai no Nenmaku Portrait - Gurigucha LIVE! Best Graphic: Unless Terminalia Best Soundtrack: Jewelry Hearts Academia -We will wing wonder world- Best Movie: Hentai Prison Best Character: Izumi Hiyori from Hamidashi Creative Totsu Best Erotic Contents: Motto! Haramase! Honoo no Oppai Isekai Oppai Maid Gakuen! Well it's interesting to note that both of high rated VNs for both RAW and the translated version are happen to be fandisc, moreso with Aokana EXTRA2 is conveniently available for both sides with it currently has the best average score for translated VN in 2022 on VNDB, although the one who vote for Getchu are apparently prefer Hamidashi Creative Totsu (I still lament on how Sekai decide to release the main game in Chinese language first despite that it make sense from business perspective). Anyway once again I'll try to comment more on this later, but if anything else at least we'll going to have two VNs from top 20 being translated, with another VN is Tsui no Stella that Key already announced the localization of it.

And it's still going! Wouldja look at that. Huh. Crazy.
Just a mandatory "signs of life" post over here.
I'm legitimately sorry for the few peeps here and there who have tried to join the Discord server in the last months, but haven't been accepted in from the lobby.
That's because the shitfuck of a bot ("Yui") that we used on the server robloxed itself one day without warning, and since I didn't find anything I liked to replace it, it fell on me to give out the "Citizen" roles by hand. And I often wasn't on time before a disappointed newcomer left the server.
If that was you, dear reader, please join again. The server isn't dead nor do I hate you, I promise.
What else is up? We're 56% done, but also we work and in particular iterate soooo much faster than we did in the first two years of the project that you shouldn't extrapolate one way or the other from that number.
Also, we might be in a little bit of a pinch. It seems that we really might need another translator now, because for the time being I appear to be alone.
Seriously, if you're a competent translator, I don't care if you come in to one-shot some hentai scene without context or join for the long story haul, we just kinda need more hands on deck in the TL sector. Also most of what is left is pretty much straight up hentai anyway. And there's a lot of variety in that, I'll tell you that much. You'll even get to pick and choose. As long as you're good. Call now.
We might also soon take on a few fresh test readers. Not looking for TLC anymore because real TLC is a unicorn, and non-native TLC is just like, your opinion, man. Plus literally nobody does TLC anyway, not even paid work, so the whole point is moot.
Anyway DM me on Discord (yumi#0163) if you wanna talk about whatever. I don't have a good track record on replying to Fuwa DMs; sorry about that.

I'm back for another update, this time to announce that all the in-game images (and at least a portion of the UI) have now been completed. The vast majority of the images were pretty simple in terms of typesetting and editing, although there were a certain amount (around 25-30 or so) that required extensive editing, but I'm very pleased with the end result. Even the more challenging ones were fun to go through, if not a bit tedious at times, but there was nothing too difficult, at least.
On the video side of things, all the lyrics for the 7 songs have now been translated (a shout out goes to Shinyyyjoke#1112 from the Moekko Company discord for providing the lyrics for 2 of the songs that I couldn't find anywhere online), and that was the last thing I had left to do before moving on to the text editing phase.
Speaking of which, that's what I'll be doing now for a while. There was a certain amount of self-editing I was conducting on my translation as I went through the script just as a general side-effect of the translation process itself, but there still requires a fair amount of editing the script now that the entire thing is translated. I'm not really sure how long this process is going to take, but I'm not going to rush it by any means. Preliminarily, it might take me anywhere from 2 to 3 months, but I really don't know. As I've commented on previously, this game is wordier than the previous project, Imaimo, not only in terms of its sheer length, but the lines themselves and the overall writing style lends itself to be more verbose than what I encountered in general when I had worked on Imaimo last year. As such, I can already anticipate the editing phase for this game to take longer, but how much longer exactly I probably won't know until I'm around 50% through the script.
So thank you for your support, and your patience in this long process. I want to put out the best quality patch I can, and 90% of that has to do with the script, so that's why the editing and QC phases are so important to ensuring the quality of the overall product and experience when playing the game. So until the next update.
PS: The game is once again 50% off on DMM until March 7. Now would be a great time to buy the game in anticipation of the patch, if you are able to do so.

Hey sorry for the late reply. I fixed it by creating a new folder "sav" in the "One ~Kagayaku Kisetsu e~" folder, and that worked for me.

Now the update many of you have been eagerly awaiting: the translation is now 100% complete with the completion of Otoha's arc. The translation took just under 6 months to complete from August 10 to January 28, a period of 171 days. To put this in perspective, that's around 400 lines per day on average. I say around, because a certain amount of the 73,547 lines were repeated across various arcs, and in two instances, there were scenario files that had identical content (one shared between Hayami's and Hinata's arcs, and another shared between Hinata's and Otoha's arcs). In addition to this, large sections of other scenario files were duplicates of lines already translated, and although I don't have an exact number, it's at least 3,000 lines, but it's probably closer to 4,000 or perhaps upwards of 5,000 lines.
But let's just say we can estimate that about 70,000 lines of the game were not duplicated elsewhere. That would bring the average number of lines translated per day to about 410. On average, I usually could translate about 80-100 lines per hour, meaning that it would come out to be around 4-5 hours per day as an average. Obviously, some days I did more when I had more time, and some days I did less when I had less time, but I'm giving the average to give you an idea of just how many hours it took to translate this game over the past 6 months. I translated at least some of the content nearly every single day during that time, mainly because I was eager to get the patch complete and out as soon as humanly possible. That said, it will still take a long time before the patch is released, although if all goes well, I still assume it will be out sometime later this year, but I won't know an exact time frame until at least the editing phase begins, which probably won't be for several weeks.
In the meantime, work on the game's images will now be the main focus. This process is being shared between me and nReus, same as with Imaimo previously. There are around 110 UI images (not counting some duplicate CG thumbnails) and roughly 335 other game images, almost all of which deal with the SD images that pop up throughout the story. Many of those 335 images are themselves duplicates, or at least are otherwise minor variations on each other, meaning the exact number of unique images is much less than that. Plus, most of the images require relatively little image editing, so I don't really anticipate this process taking that long, although could still stretch into several weeks or more, at least for my part. As it is, I won't be starting on the editing phase of the text until the images are finished, and this process will give me some time to take a break from the script for a little while.
But with the translation now complete, the project can now finally move forward with the rest of the work. I'm looking forward to getting the patch complete, and I hope you're also looking forward to finally playing H2O after all these years, this being the 17th year since its initial release back in 2006 (although the Complete Story Edition didn't actually come out until 2009, so it's been 14 years since that release). So thanks for the support the project has received thus far and I'll see you at the next update.

BLACK SHEEP TOWN
It's unvoiced, but I don't really care too much for that. The story seems to have a somewhat similar atmosphere to Rose Guns Days with main characters being mafia related. There are people with mutations divided into different types: Type A - Psychic powers which comes with physical deformation and Type B - physical augmentation with degrading minds. There are 7 great holes in the world with the setting being in a city built near one of them. This reads more like a traditional novel written for literature than entertainment.
 
Chris Tsue or however you spell his name is a rather interesting character.
 
They show things from the perspective of many different characters, but there are cases where the same scenes does not have the same dialogues. I'm not sure if that's intentional or just a writing miss. An example is when the former detective talked to the doctor and the doctor reacted to his talk about Chris Tsue's dying, but from the doctor's perspective he heard about him dying from rumours coming from a nurse.
The writing is engaging and nihilistic. It feels very realistic, if not a bit dry and he does not sugarcoat anything. Majority of it is about finding your own meaning in life.

Todokanai Translations Presents
White Album 2 Mini-After Story

https://vndb.org/v16493
Description
Howdy 
The patch will include translations for White Album 2 Mini-After Story.
Mini-After Story features the following:
-After Story for Kazusa True End
-After Story for Kazusa Normal End
-After Story for Setsuna True End
-A whole host of digital novels, translated by www.wa2analysis.com
-A whole host of audio dramas depicting events that take place during and after base game story.
Audio dramas will not be translated in-game due to engine limitations. Instead, we have opted to recreate the audio dramas in the form of hand-crafted videos using in-game assets and .srt format subtitles. Here's how it will look.

 
Todokanai Translation Team
Project Lead Frogstat
Translators Frogstat
Editors Krizs, Gauche Suede
Programmers Avuxo, Jonathansdf
Typesetter Observer of Time
Graphics Frogstat
Video editing for audio dramas Frogstat
Playtesters Epika07
 
Download
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVHRJMckgvbNVdD3Xm6BfCoejD4Rc0wE/view?usp=sharing

H2O √ after and another Complete Story Edition

Release
Download the patch (Google drive, Mediafire) (ver. 1.01, dated September 8, 2023)
Description
In H2O -Footprints in the Sand-, Hirose Takuma is a blind middle school student, though the cause for his blindness is undetermined. After his mother died unexpectedly, it left a deep emotional scar on him, causing him to become lonely and reserved. Due to this, Takuma moves from the city out into a rural area to live with his uncle and Takuma is enrolled into a new middle school. There, he meets several new girls, including the firm and obstinate Kohinata Hayami, the kind and obliging Kagura Hinata, and the cheerful and mysterious Otoha.
In √ after and another, there are new after stories for two of the heroines from H2O (Hayami and Hinata), plus new routes for Yui and Hamaji/Yukiji, the latter of which also unlocks Maki's route.
A version merging both games into one was later released, H2O √ after and another Complete story Edition.
H2O VNDB: https://vndb.org/v473
√ after and another VNDB: https://vndb.org/v561
Where to purchase
The game can be purchased legally from DMM (https://dlsoft.dmm.co.jp/detail/mnphs_0007/), but a Japanese proxy/VPN may be necessary to purchase it. That is where I obtained my copy. It goes on sale quite often, although it's pretty cheap even at full price, considering its age.
Project

The English localization project is being conducted by Studio Frisay, fresh off the completed Imasugu Onii-chan ni Imouto datte Iitai! project. As before I (Tooko) will be doing all of the translating and editing of the script, along with probably most of the image editing, and any engine work that needs to be done (of which is very little).
Studio Frisay discord server
Progress
Programming: The game is built on the BGI/Ethornell engine, as with Imaimo before it, so I'm already familiar with how the engine works and have all the resources necessary to apply any hacks and build the completed patch once everything is done. In fact, there's a lot less work this time around on that front because the structure is a lot simpler, being a NVL game instead of an ADV game.
Translation: The translation officially commenced on August 10, 2022 and was completed on January 28, 2023, although progress was initially very slow because of the ongoing work for the Imaimo patch at the time. However, I already translated a decent amount of the script (20%) by the time I announced the project a couple months later in October. The game has 73,547 lines across 167 scenario files split up between the common route and six character routes:
Common: 6953 / 6953: 100%
Hayami: 20620 / 20620: 100%
Hinata: 14112 / 14112: 100%
Yui: 13151 / 13151: 100%
Hamaji: 4973 / 4973: 100%
Maki: 5437 / 5437: 100%
Otoha: 8301 / 8301: 100%
Total: 73547 / 73547: 100%
Images and videos: Aside from minor tweaks, all of the in-game images in need of editing are now completed. Editing of images is shared between me and nReus, who will also be typesetting lyrics onto the 9 OP/ED videos. The images include about 110 for the UI, and about 335 for the rest of the game, although most of those are minor variations on each other, so the actual number of unique images is much less.
Editing: The editing of the game's text officially commenced on February 10, 2023, and it was completed on July 10, 2023.
QC: The quality check phase involves going through a normal playthrough to check for any problems with the patch files and their rendering. This should took about two months, completing in early September. The patch is scheduled for release on September 8, 21:00 UTC.
Progress link on Google Sheets

And here it is.
 

BLACK SHEEP TOWN
Generational change, huh. That's a pretty interesting topic in itself. The old passes away or retires and passes their hopes and dreams to their children. It's a reality that one cannot get away from as a mortal, and pretty much becomes the raison d'être of the older generations.
It's interesting how they show how different humans choose to live based on nature vs nurture. Those born as mutants tend to be more influenced by nature, while the more normal people are more influenced by nurture. But I think the point is that those two things both greatly influence a person's life. Ryou just wants to live a normal life as a student, but his circumstances around him won't permit it and turned him into a cold ruthless leader of a mafia.
All the characters are interesting as fuck. Tachigawa Ryouma, the doctor decided to stop living smartly and live as he pleases after getting involved with Chris Tsue. Chris Tsue is so fucking badass: 「おれが思うに、人間の命そのものには何の価値もない。命の価値というものは、その人間がどう考え、どう行動したかによってはじめて生まれる。……つまり作り出すものなんだ。」- "I think that there's no intrinsic value in people's life. A life's value is created from how people think and act...meaning we have to create it ourselves." 「人間は所詮土くれだ。誇りをなくし、心を濁らせれば糞と変われねえのさ 。」- "Humans are in the end the same as dirt. Those who lose their dignity, and have their minds tainted are no different from shit." Humans who live like cattle have no value. In real life, this refers to people who sell their dignity for money. They then use that money to buy safety for a stable empty life.
I think that his logic jump is too big here, but it's still an interesting thing to think about. I think it all depends on the personal goal of the person involved. For example, someone might join the sex industry to earn some money to pay for education, and then quit after a year. Is having that option truly bad? Systematically, it probably is as it can make poor people over-reliant on it. But for the individual involved, it's not necessarily bad. I guess I have similar ideas to Ryaochimin, which is money is just a tool.
There's lots of great quotes in this game. Saiki:
The main theme here seems to essentially be: life is meaningless, so you should at least live freely and make your own choices on how to live your life so that you can die satisfied no matter the result. The other part is that humans are no different from beasts. They can be extremely cruel, or be extremely nice depending on their mood and the situation. 「優しさと残酷さは似ているんだろうか？」- "Do kindness and cruelty resemble each other?" It's pretty much a 善悪相殺 situation.
Setoguchi seems more negative about life compared to Sca-ji. Well I do agree with him to a certain extent. Life is indeed pointless: your parents were horny and made you, end of story, what other meaning is there? But that shouldn't really stop you from pursuing happiness and valuing life. I've read a couple of reviews mention that it's Setoguchi's best work so far. It's hard to confirm that from my end as this is the first time I'm reading his work, but I will say that this is definitely a great game worth reading.

Man, Nitroplus truly loves their Revenge stories huh? Muramasa, Hanachirasu, Kikokugai... they all fall into the particular niche of high stakes revenge plot with twisted but moral motivations and I'm extremely excited for it. We know nothing more besides the teaser image and this video:
The spoken lines say:
人を斬る (Cutting down Humans)
残酷な運命 (Wretched Fate)
抗うために (in order to defy)
Final Text:
運命を斬れ (Cut down fate!)
 
 

Yuuna and Miyabi routes playthrough proofreads complete. No more outstanding bugs are obvious. I've committed quite a few proofread typo fixes, and alas there will probably be quite a few that still make it to the final, but overall it's pretty solid now. Tonoko's route was proofread in the lead up to this so it doesn't need proofreading. A quick play-test shows it works fine to the end.
That leaves only doing a playthrough proofread of Shino's route, and I can then finalise the patch for release. That should hopefully be done within a week, barring finding any new bugs.

Yeah the thread title here is definitely rhymed all right. Anyway the tweet in regard of it below.
Initially Steam did list it as October release, although right now it already change into Q4 2022, so it mean that at the latest we'll get the VN in December's end. That aside, as we know this is Laplacian VN which we know was released Aojashin back on February with one tiny fault that caused one tiny controversy that still enough to annoy me here (At least it won't happen with Mirai Radio here), so if possible I prefer to less talk about it for now. Anyway it's good that we finally have the long wait for it is finally almost over, especially if one already waited for it ever since Sol Press announced it (When they still have enough spirit before realized that they didn't allocate enough money to pay taxes).

The Aniplex Online Fest 2022 was celebrated today and they held a near 6 hours long event for it. The event got a ton of interesting moments, industry personalities speaking, voice actors performing among other things that make the otaku's heart flutter greatly. In Fuwanovel's context however, the most relevant section were the six minutes featuring new trailers and announcements during the Aniplex EXE section. 
Hirahira Hihiru | vndb
Atri: My Dear Moments Anime Adaption confirmed
The entire event was dubbed into English by interpreters who sometimes struggled with certain proper nouns and Japanese net slang, but there was also a certainly machine translated captions subtrack which you should rather ignore because it just outputted nonsense most of the time.
If you have 6 hours of free time, there are a lot more things to enjoy.
 

Programming bugs now all attended to, just doing a playthrough now to see if there are any more outstanding issues.

Yuuna's route passed the playthrough with a few edits. I zipped through Tonoko's route since I recently proofread it but that seems fine too.
Still have Miyabi and Shino's route to play through.

All the data is in but dealing with display and behavioural bugs showing up now that everything's reinserted.

If you have followed the TGS2022 and did not get overwhelmed, then you are probably made of steel and you have capacities that I would be proud of. There have been more than 470 companies present and most big publishers and AAA companies announces a ton of amazing things. This definitely overwhelms our website's field of interest, so we told @Hiromi to go research a little into the relevant part for us. And hey, the amount of shown (not exclusively announced there) new visual novel projects is still overseeable. Without further ado, let's begin!
 
So, I've done some research. English sources seem to focus on AAA titles like CoD and Tekken. And when they do bring up anime style games, these are mostly RPG and action games.
I googled "TGS 22 ノベルゲーム" and was rewarded with some discoveries:
Indies
 1) Binary Syndrome https://store.steampowered.com/app/2003300/_/ PC-98 style ADV. The game system reminds me of titles you find on Asenheim (Ring Out, Scoop titles, etc.) (so obscure it is not even on VNDB LOL)
2) Coffee Talk Ep. 2 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1663220/Coffee_Talk_Episode_2_Hibiscus__Butterfly/ Pixel art OELVN. VA-11 Hall-A, but as a barista. Not newly announced, but not released yet. Slated for 2023.
3) Ihanashi no Majo https://store.steampowered.com/app/1950570/_/ "Kinetic Novel" with around 10 hr length. Cute art. A boy moves to an island in Okinawa and meets a tanned girl from overseas. (JP/CH only Download release in October!)
4) Trolley Problem Inc. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1582680/Trolley_Problem_Inc/ Text adventure with narrative choices. Philosophical themes and dark humor. (Not on VNDB, most likely doesn't qualify? Out for a while now, still interesting. Even got a video by xqc)
5) Chigau!!!+ https://studio-thursday.work/chigau+/#/ Orthodox Bishoujo-ge... But with meta elements like DDLC: Some heroines remember what happens in their own route, even when you're in another girl's route.
These are some of the indie VN titles which were represented on the TGS in the section Indie Games Selection. https://tgs.nikkeibp.co.jp/tgs/2022/jp/contents/indie81.html I think I've caught all the VNs from these 77 titles. That's barely 6% of the total.
Big announcements
6.) Aoishiro & Akai Ito After like 20 years, there is a remaster bundling Akai Ito & Aoishiro in one for Switch & PC. We have already seen this announcement in another thread and the VNTS, but it might be worth announcing it here too. It contains Mystery-Folklore setting with gay girls. Also it supports English language!
7. Seabed Audio Novel Collection Speaking of gay girls, @PhleBuster(Fruitbat Factory) was also at TGS2022 and they announce that they will be releasing the Seabed Audio Novel Collection. It has been translated by Steiner, so it will be more quality. The original game is a Conjueror work, rip him
Here's everything. While only the last two are proper announcements and the other games earlier were just showcased in that event, I still believe just for Aoishiro & Akai Ito this year's TGS was worth it. Maybe it is also worth it to keep paying attention to such events in the following years..?

Missed anything? Please comment!

JAST announced today that they will release a fully remastered version of Heart de Roommate from Angle Smile at the end of September 2022!
Content in the remaster:
The remastered version will be free of charge for owners of Heart de Roommate on JAST.
PreOrder here to get a 15% launch discount.
 
(sorry for the styling, I'm on a phone. Will tidy it a bit up once I am on a computer)

All the reinsertion of text and graphics has gone well after sorting out any issues we discovered thanks to Blake's graphic editing and Porygon2's programming. Just dealing with a remaining niggling issue to do with the H memorial scenes not all working. Hopefully that won't take too long to fix.

Just in case that's what you mean, this game is not an all-ages re-relrease, but an originally all-ages VN.

Been playing for a while and still have yet to finish a single route, but I wanted to thank Tooko for the hard work that went into it.
Thus far it's a very enjoyable read, so GG and thank you!

I know that I should mention this as soon as the update in regard of After Stories is available, but I forgot about it until now. Anyway as of now we have both of the after stories for both of Kazusa's and Setsuna's true ending were already translated, and as for the last after story in that it's about the aftermath of Kazusa's normal ending was almost completed with the current progress was at 92% translated, so the wait shouldn't be too long if one also want to play the after stories of WA2 as well.

The team was just announce that it's their current project, and yes it's after CODA. That said though, the project for it was just started so it should be obvious that there's no release time estimation for Mini After Story here. It's quite short though from what I see, so at least the wait shouldn't be as long as original White Album 2 here.

All prooreading and graphic edits are in. Working on creating patch now, release soon.