Frost51

Why don't you contact the publishers? I'm quite sure some of the smallers ones would be eager to work for some short game translations. Even bigger ones like JAST might be interested on that. Just don't expect them to contact you spontenously, usually people who want stuff like that have to go after a contract and stuff

The heroine isn't exactly the one looking for revenge, but you have heroines who assist the protagonists in their revenge in both of these cases. But they are most likely releases that can interest you and they are short games. The first option is Gen Urobuchi's Kikokugai. While I think the story is quite flawed and the ending displeased me to death (probably establishing itself as the worst VN ending I have ever seen to be honest), the overall plot progression, worldbuilding, characters, style and worldbuilding did please me a lot. If you don't mind some imperfections, I can guarantee this is one of early Nitroplus' most memorable works. Especially because Zizz Studio went insane on the soundtrack, really good stuff. Second one, well, Full Metal Daemon Muramasa famed author Narahara Ittetsu wrote this short VN called Hanachirasu that is not only a pretty good story of this nature, but also has a lot of creative ideas that would later return in his magnum opus. This one is a lot more polished even if I still have some complaints on the way they deal with h-scenes. However, the story is pretty good and I would totally see a script like this being adapted into a cult classic swordfighting movie if you give it to the right people. Both of them are Nitroplus, and thinking on it... This company have a pretty good story that literally fits your description to its core; where all of the routes are basically heroines trying to get some sort of revenge on someone and the protagonist gets dragged into their personal stories. And yes, there are rival heroines in some manner. It's Full Metal Daemon Muramasa itself, highly regarded as one of the best VNs of all time. If you haven't read this one yet, you are losing one of the best stories you'll ever witness in this medium. Believe me, it deserves all the fame it has. And it has been recently translated in case you don't know Japanese. Go for it. It's long as fuck, but it's worth it.

Thank you a lot for this thread. I have been interested on OLEVNs for a while and the only one (outside of the popular ones) that I went for and pleased me a lot was SOUNDLESS (https://vndb.org/v21745). I also enjoyed Katawa Shoujo, Doki DokI Literature Club (c'mon it's pretty cool for a short free game) and Everlasting Summer. And I'm not counting games like Milk Inside a Bag of Milk exactly VNs, but I feel narrative heavy games like these are really great in the west. I just feel we still have a bit to evolve in terms of bishoujo games. I don't feel a lot of OLEVNs are able to play with the bishoujo game structure as well as the likes of Subarashiki Hibi or Muv-Luv for instance. Maybe because Doki Doki Literature Club and its influence kinda gave the west some bias on what a bishoujo game is and some artificial need of subverting its structure. I think most eroge writers in Japan are usually seasoned players, so they understand the structure deeply — thus they can effectively subvert it in clever manners. Or just use it cleverly in general, without actually having to subvert anything. Still, feels like we are getting more quality releases at a steady pace. I hope this niche keeps growing.

Nice to hear a bit on how the VN community works in Portugal. I hear that europeans usually know more than one language — which makes sense given your physical proximity to a lot of different countries. As far as I know, you don't really have the need of a second language in Brazil or the US; given the fact that their territories are pretty big and most people have little to no contact with other frontiers. Also glad to know I'm not the only one who has some worries on the state of Portuguese translations. Maybe because I'm a fluent English speaker for years, and because I have also helped in Persona 3 FES' Portuguese translation in the past, I'm quite aware that most projects don't have the care they deserve. Nowadays I am learning Japanese, and I hope I can do some justice on certain translations if I keep this hacking/translating hobby in the future. I highly recommend you to try learning Japanese too. Translating from an English TL does create some noise, and the linguistic structure of English is a lot different from Japanese. I think the fact our native language is Portuguese kinda boosts our Japanese learning capabilities since we have similar sounds and our linguistic structure is not as alien to Japanese as English is. If you need any any help, I highly recommend this guide: https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/ Currently focusing on the N4 exam. Also hoping to get N3 by the end of next year. I'll keep immersing, studying and praying lol

They are just being inconsistent and biased. They just look at VNs and ban them because they are VNs, at least if they bear some resemblance to bishoujo games. Hope GOG keeps growing in terms of market share. The guys who are paid to curate this should research more on Japanese culture instead of just swinging the banhammer at games like Chaos;Head. For fuck's sake.

This game doesn't even have h-scenes, what the fuck? Don't worry, Valve will approve an orgy DLC for Cyberpunk 2077 while we can't have a regular VN that doesn't even have any kind of explicit scene. This is just cultural prejudice.

While checking the forums, I found this really interesting thread on the Spanish language VN community. While I'm sure a lot of the users are from English speaking countries, the world is quite big and a lot of the interaction people have with visual novels are out of international reaches. So, I decided to write a thread on th Brazilian VN community akin to Okarin's original post, which is available at the end of this one. I'm not that aware of its current state in Portugal, Cape Verde and other Portuguese speaking countries. If you want to add any info on it, please feel free to add your comment in this thread. The Need for FanTLs While English is definitely the "international" language in the west, the majority of our country's population isn't really that knowledgeble on foreign languages. Portuguese is known for its difficulty, and most natives really struggle with high level formal speech; to the point legal documents are almost written in a different language by itself; it would be rather utopic to believe the average Brazilian would have the resources to learn English in this context. Especially given the fact that inequailty and low quality education are two challenges that our country is still struggling against. Believe me, it's definitely hard to study a different language when you are overworked and not being able to get an appropriate income. According to the British Concil, literally only 1% of our population is English fluent. The already mentioned facts are some of the main reasons, but it should also be stated that English sounds are rather alien to the average Portuguese speaker. To most of us, they are really hard to figure out and replicate. Consequently, how would the community grow? The answer is simple: through fan translations. Back in the PlayStation 2 era, most games wouldn't get translations to our language, so a lot of the most avid players would eventually learn how to speak, listen and read English. These people would eventually focus on efforts that might date back to the early 2000s. Classics such as Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill have been translated to Portuguese and we have a rather big hacking scene, dominated by sites such as GameVicio. VN FanTLs in Brazil Curiously, VN translations in Brazil date back to the early 2000s! If you focus on the PC-98 niche, you'll find out that Divi-Dead and Immoral Study 1 - Reiko Shirakawa. While you had an emphasis on translating these games for the ecchi content, you already had a pretty solid setup, especially for those who wanted to research on the visual novel universe superficially. More communities and translation groups would pick up inside the VN sphere after the mainstream success of Katawa Shoujo. Shortly after this game's success, you'll find that a lot of the mainstream titles, such as Tsukihime, Saya no Uta and Planetarian were translated to Portuguese by groups such as ZeroForce Translations and Matsuri Fansubs. There is a pretty nice catalogue available if you enjoy short VNs, but there sure is a lack of long kamige. While you have a really well received translation of Rewrite (which was just recently translated to English), even classic games such as Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni are still unavailable in Portuguese (partially translated only). For each translated Tsukihime or Clannad patch, there are a lot of games which won't probably see a Portuguese version any time soon. One of the reasons is tied to how long these translation projects can go, and how small the niche is. The VN community is definitely growing in Brazil, but it can't be said that it is big crowd. TL Quality When you barely have any choice, it's hard to comment on quality. In a lot of the PT-BR translations, translating the text from English instead of the original Japanese script is almost a rule (and this is not exclusive to VNs). A lot of media in general is translated from a previous English TL instead of the proper, JP to PT-BR pipeline. I imagine how would picky JOPs feel about this lmao, but I think it isn't inherently a bad thing. While I'm sure anyone would pick a quality translation instead of one of those, availability sure is a thing; and I think people respect here anyone who spends their free time to get a given artpiece a bit more accessible. Except if it is offensively bad, but yeah. Still, there are some projects that do take pride of their quality. For instance, Umineko's Portuguese translation was officially approved by The Witch Hunt and translated directly from Japanese. Since it's still a growing niche, we will have to wait to find out more on it. Learning Japanese as a Portuguese Speaker Curiously enough, Japanese is not a language that's as notoriously hard to learn in here than it might be to the average American. Brazil had a pretty big Japanese immigration wave since the 1900s and finding a Japanese neighborhood isn't that hard. If you don't mind spending a bit more of money, it isn't hard to find imported manga — ranging from Leiji Matsumoto's works to modern releases like Chainsaw Man. The community is also really friendly, especially if they notice that you know some Japanese. I personally got gifted a magazine on the region's attractions fully in Japanese; just because I bought one of my mangas while talking in Japanese (it wasn't even on purpose, the owner just assumed since I was looking for a specific manga lol). Besides that, Portuguese's sounds are really similar to Japanese's, which makes the language really intuitive in terms of speaking. The only big barrier is (of course) reading and writing, so it's not rare to find Japanese descendents that know how to speak and listen the language fluently, but have a really hard time with kanji and kanas. However, there are plenty of Brazilians who know Japanese in the international VN community and I'm sure that, if you interact frequently within it, you probably know one or two. Communities Lately, the VN community has been growing a lot. I own a YouTube channel myself and I released a Full Metal Daemon Muramasa review some months ago. While I was one of the only ones made videos on VNs the first time in 2018 or something (Saya no Uta), you have plenty of options if you know Portuguese and want some quality content. Takumi Enferrujado made a Fata Morgana review that was pretty well done, Steendy has some content elaborating on eroge like Rance and YU-NO, and Ferovsky is still tackling the Muv-Luv Trilogy; and he is in the army, thus he is taking ages to complete the MLA video. YouTube has been the latest source of the growing interest, but there are also other older communities such as Sekai Visual Novels and Visual Novels Brazil. Plenty of friendly people too, with a some of these communities dating back to the early 2000s. Brazilians also seem to be less shocked by sexual content in videogames, unlike a lot of international readers that are really averse to h-scenes and such. Most of the readers consume English translations, but a lot of them also read in Spanish — the closest thing we have to a second language in Brazil — and of course, in Portuguese. Considering how unequal things are, there is some elitism and such; but this might be a problem the entire international VN community has so I digress. The World Isn't Limited to English This was a small effort at documenting a bit of this community's history and, if you feel there's something wrong or some info to add, feel free to. If you would like to talk a bit about how VN fans interact in your country, also feel free to add regardless of your nationality. I'm really interested on what you are able to say, especially if you are from a Portuguese speaking country that isn't Brazil. Cheers!