Narcosis

Bethly

After many...many...many hours of reading I finally finished one route which I think is enough since one route in this VN feels like finishing a long VN on itself, also picking a different girl feels incorrect at this point, like I'm cheating someone... (forgive me Bethly ) 
Giniro is a pure love story, slice of life with some very mild drama(almost non existent), most of it consist on developing the bonds between the main character and his group of friends(only females)  and later on the girl you chose from that group.
This VN shows you that each one of the girls has a great potential inside of them but they wont be able to use it on their own, they are like rough diamonds, with the help of the main character will "unleash" they full potential(it sounds like an action vn xD), is not like they will turn out to be unhappy or anything like that but each one of them wont fully accomplish their respective dreams or reach their full potential on their own.
This might be a little spoilerish but Yuzuki wont become a great chef, Mizuka wont reach the first place in the figure skating thing she does, Bethly wont become a famous illustrator, Hinata wont even be able to realize what her true dream is in the first place, finally Momiji won't become a great actress. 
Another thing to point out is that while all the girls hang around the main character they actually dont love him in secret or anything, in fact it's a long process for each one of them, the only exception to this is your non blood related sister, which is kind of sad since she starts tearing up every time she realizes that she wont be able to be with the person she loves.
The first part, which is the common route is really long and from there you go into the heroine route which is again really long. It's so freaking long that the vn itself thinks that you are an idiot without memory and re-introduces you the characters like 3 times at some different points... 

There are 5 heroines to chose from:

*Yuzuki, your non-blood related sister, she is really shy and probably the "loli" of the group but she works very hard and even though I admit I hate the imouto heroine type this one didn't feel that bad.

*Mizuha, your childhood friend, again the VN surprisingly didn't go for the cliche thing of the "childhood promise" or anything like that (well, it did but it was pretty subtle and it was also resolved very early in the game without forcing you to pick her just out of pity) she is some kind of figure skating star, to be fair I found her to be the most boring character, specially because I have 0 interest in what she does, so meh.

*Hinata, the best friend of your sister, she is amazing and really charming, has this quirk way of speaking and expressing herself, most of the users on the internet hate her and her voice acting for some reason, she loves everything about girl stuff (like clothing, hair, how a girl should act etc etc) very sharp and lively, a true energetic type of character.

*Momiji, she goes to the same class as the MC and thus they become friends, she loves acting and has a very normal character overall, still I found her to be one of the most interesting character... I almost do her route but at the last moment I went for...

*Bethly, she is probably the character that most of us will chose because she is the foreign girl, she is from Canada and at first she doesn't speak any Japanese so it's kinda of funny to see how she struggles in every situation (the vn doesn't really do a good job portraying this...just a decent job.) She likes to draw, has a really calm personally and a great sense of morality, she is also very stubborn, finally she is the girl I picked.

*Finally the MC (Yukito or whatever name you used for him, I recommend to leave his default name), he is for my taste.... a bit too perfect, he is a perfect student, friend, son, boyfriend, husband, father..you name something and he is perfect in that, not because he does everything in a perfect way but because he doesn't have a glimpse of malice or egoism in him, which is hard to believe.
He has a very strong sense of duty and morality and wants to help anyone that needs it, very proactive, he is not naive and doesn't behave like a retard in front of the opposite sex... he is... yep perfect, which was a bit of a let down for me.. because him being that way takes away many opportunities from the novel thus the drama in the VN it's almost non existent or very predictable.There is a reason why he is like that but still I didn't like it.

The pace in this vn is slow, really slow, for example you won't kiss the heroine until much much later on into the story(let's not even talk about having sex xD), if you don't enjoy slice of life then you will hate this vn because that's pretty much what it is.
It's hard to compare anything with this or find some equivalents but the closest thing that I can think of is nagisa's route in Clannad (if you take out the funny parts with sunohara and pretty much everything else) and all the heavy drama.
It does have some funny parts here and there (most of them are generated either from Hinata or an school teacher that you find later on and occasionally from the MC's biological mother.)
I chose Bethly and later on I regret it, I really wanted to pick momiji or hinata but at that point it was too late...
Bethly's route was ok, but her inability to speak Japanese was what it kinda ruined it for me, I came to hate the words うれ fucking しい and おいしいい, you will hear those words probably more than 500 times in the novel (or more and no I'm not joking), yes, it's tasty and yes you are happy "I got it" I really do but just stooooooooooooooooooooooooop, this again is something that makes sense in the context of what it's going on but it just pissed me off really bad.

On the other side, it's really interesting to see how the characters grow(mentally and physically too) and how your relation with the main heroine gets stronger by the passage of time, it reminded me a lot of my own experience with my ex lol so in that sense it's pretty realistic and also maybe boring for some readers.

Now I will force myself to finish momiji's route even though I'm not very sure if I will be able to do so 
What I liked it:

The music.
Very rich characters development.
Amazing art.
Some really good and interesting characters that I won't be able to enjoy xD at least not right now.
Amazing voice acting.

What I didn't like:

A bit slow.
Too long for its own good.
The main character.

What I hated:
Repetition, specially of some words.
Not enough strong drama.
One awkward and very unfitting scene in the story.
How difficult is it to read?
Really easy, you can read this as as your first vn without any doubt, I wouldn't recommend Hinata's route for someone new because of the way she talks (not hard at all but still be careful)
I rate this vn:  Snowman out of 納得.
EDIT: a little spoiler part to actually point out what was really boring, unfitting and what was actually pretty good.
 
Hinata
Since I don't want to create another topic about hinata's route I will keep adding info here, 
So Hinata's route has a really different dynamic and it has a lot more of comedy than bethly's, the combination between hina and yuzuki is amazing. I won't say that bethly's route was bad but so far hinata's is overall way more enjoyable.

First, let me say that this was the very first non-violent VN I played after jumping into Japanese-language (untranslated) VNs.  I should also say that it was the one that taught me that even a VN of this type (what I later came to call a charage) could have a truly solid story.  This VN is the reason I'm frequently willing to give charage the benefit of the doubt, and it is also the reason why I became somewhat obsessed with ojousama heroines.  Mifuyu is still one of the better ojousama heroines I've seen, both setting-wise and as a character. 
My second playthrough of this game gave me an even greater appreciation for what makes it stand out... and made me once again dust off my hopes that one day LoS will stop making kusoge (three kusoge in five years is a bit much).
There are points of this VN that I found irritating both now and the first time I played it.  Those points haven't really changed, though.  The biggest one is that the story is set up so that the bulk of the events don't change, until after the prologue>3 common story arcs are over.  While this can be called a common route... the fact is that the order in which they occur is altered by which heroine you chose, but you still have to go through the same events (with a mixture of unread and read text) three times after your first, with only minor changes.  This is a mild irritation but still an irritation.
The upside is that the common route itself is actually fairly well-written, so that you can get a good idea of what each of the heroines is like in the common story arcs, so you don't feel left behind when things move on to the heroine arc (which is relatively short compared to the main story arcs).   A lot of the reason for the way this game is done is that the canon/true heroine of the game is Masshiro... and her path is emphasized more strongly (and is longer) compared to the others (I really recommend that you play Masshiro's last or Masshiro's only... one or the other).  
The protagonist, Yuuri, is the only child of the priest of the Yachimata Shrine and a direct descendant of Masshiro's 'progenitor's' former master/ally (the full extent of the relationship isn't revealed, save for on Kikurami no Hime's side).  He is a fairly normal young man (yes, that was already the staple of what I came to call charage by then) with a passion for fixing bikes and a fondness for the shrine he grew up in.  Despite his problems with Ameri, he is actually fairly perceptive, with an intuitive grasp of concepts that some people have to seriously think to get at.  Nonetheless, he is ultimately just a 'normal' guy who happened to get involved with this mess.
One thing I think a lot of people who read this will be... amused by is the h-scenes.  To be blunt, all the things that can go wrong with a person's first experience with sex can and do go wrong in this VN.  The 'girl has an orgasm the first time' trope that has defined most h-scenes since the beginning of the current decade isn't present in this VN, and that actually has an effect on the heroines' stories at times.  I say it is laugh-worthy because I spent most of my first ten VNs laughing rather than fapping to h-scenes... I literally spewed soda on my monitor during one of the h-scenes in Jingai Makyou, lol. 
On the other side of things from Masshiro is Ameri... which is in a lot of ways the opposite of Masshiro.  To be honest, having Ameri as a heroine kind of pushes things.  Tsundere osananajimi have never been one of my drugs of choice, and Ameri is one of the worst of those.  She makes a great side-character and semi-antagonist, but as a heroine...?  Her path is also the most... pessimistic of the paths, at least in part because Ameri was also the heroine that had the most difficulty with the Tayutai as a species of being in the first place. 
Yumina's path is... pleasant.  I like Yumina as a character, as she grows throughout the story when you pick her.  In the later part of the game when you choose her, she has matured immensely, and her ending is one of those ones that just makes you want to smile in pleasure at the characters' happiness and that of those around them.  If you like heroine paths that end up warm and normally happy, this is a good path for you. 
Mafuyu is in a lot of ways the ideal modern woman (if you ignore her setting).  She is intelligent, capable, wise within the limits of the society she was born into and lives in, and is capable of accepting other people's advice (to some extent) without automatically assuming she is always right... once she trusts them.  Other than Masshiro, her path is the strongest in this VN, and I honestly think her personality is the most interesting.  She has become something of an archetype for a lot of similar characters over the years, but her view on Japanese society was the cause of one of my first post-VN epiphanies that broke part of my weaboo armor.  That said, she isn't perfect... while she is willing to give those she trusts the benefit of the doubt, she can have a tendency to dismiss the opinions of those she doesn't yet trust outright, at times.  Her best quality at times like those is her ability to admit when she was wrong.
Mashiro is... Mashiro.  She is the enfleshed reincarnation of Kikurami, who sealed herself away along with the other Tayutai some five hundred years before the beginning of the story.  She has a lot of old-fashioned thought patterns, and a somewhat one-track mind when it comes to the things she believes are necessary.  She desires the coexistence of humans and Tayutai above all other things, and her affection for Yuuri is an odd mix of her own personal love, memories of Yachimata Kageharu inherited from Kikurami, and her need for him as an ally to deal with the other escaped Tayutai leaders (in other words, she is complicated).  Some people have trouble with her as a heroine because she is more than a little pushy and is sometimes inconsiderate of others' circumstances... not to mention that her idea of basic training resembles that of a drill sergeant from hell at first, lol.  For all her courteous nature, she is kind of scary when she snaps, though.
Mashiro's heroine path is my favorite non-tragic immortal heroine path in a charage.  I say this because a lot of immortal heroine paths tend to have... weak endings.  Moege immortal heroines in particular tend to 'lose their immortality' somewhere along the way, which is irritating since I don't see a reason why they should give it up, lol.  A lot of that comes from the Japanese unspoken taboo against exceeding by too much or falling too far below society's norms.  Exceptional individuals tend to end up isolated and the less-capable looked down on as human trash, when societal impulses are left to their own devices over there, lol.  Anyway, I am immensely fond of how they wrap up this path, and I wish all other immortal heroine paths would at least take it as an example of the ideal. 
Overall, this is a VN that exemplifies what is best in the fantasy charage sub-genre, breathing life into a set of characters that have remained in my heart strongly, even to this day.   I can honestly say that I enjoyed replaying this VN almost as much as I enjoyed playing it the first time, which is rare in my case with a charage.  If there is a downside to having used this VN as my starting point for charage, it is that so few manage to reach the same level, lol.
PS: The joke story that opens from the main screen when you finish the entire game is hilarious.  The second story that pops up on the bottom is Kikurami's past, and it is a fairly sad story, with a linguistic level that will probably stump most newbies. 
Edit: Adding It's happy Days fandisc
Tayutama It's happy Days
It's Happy Days is the fandisc to Tayutama, providing a side-story and extended after story for Mashiro.
The side-stories
The side-stories cover time spent at an onsen ryokan (hot springs inn) where various events occur and you watch a few h-scenes.  For those who wanted to know what it was like for Yuuri immediately after the ending (as opposed to five hundred years later) with Mashiro or Mafuyu, it is a nice treat. 
The extended After-story
The extended after-story is just that... an extension of Mashiro's ending that fills in gaps in the conversation and gives you an idea of what happened between the end and the epilogue of the original game through conversation. 
 

*weeps hopelessly, his face a mess with tears and other fluids*
Inochi no Spare is an utsuge, produced by Akabeisoft3, the conglomerate company made from all of Akabeisoft2's subsidiaries except Akatsuki Works.  I'll be blunt, I didn't know what to think going into this.  It was blatantly an utsuge, right from the beginning... and one that is merciless in its descriptions of the characters' suffering.
The disease in question is called Oumon Disease (fictional), which manifests initially as cherry flower petal-shaped marks spreading outward across the patient's skin from over the heart and later as horrible pain attacks that are so terrible that they cause the patients to harm themselves in order to distract from the greater pain.  No element of this disease is spared from the reader's point of view, and it can get pretty graphic, both in narration and in appearance.  For those who can't stand watching others' suffering, this VN is probably going to be too much for you.
The protagonist and heroine's suffering, joy, love, fear, loneliness, and despair are all portrayed in an intimate fashion that gradually grasps your heart, building up from the initial point, where you don't know precisely what is going on.  For better or worse, I have to advise that you avoid reading spoilers on this VN, as the pace of revelation is as important as the content itself.
The writing of this game is excellent... and ruthlessly true to the characters and scenario.  The characters aren't perfect.  They are as deeply flawed as any human being can be.  Meguri isn't a saint, nor is Ria a pure-hearted martyr. 
The protagonist of the story, Shizumine Ryuuji, is a young man whose expression rarely shifts, living for all practical purposes alone in a home that once held his parents and an elder brother.  One thing that struck me as I read this story was that, for all his weaknesses, Ryuuji is a frighteningly strong-willed person, when given reason to be.  His role in this VN is as important... or even moreso than the sisters' roles. 
This is a 'soft' utsuge, meaning that the ending is extremely bittersweet but not devoid of salvation, and there is joy along the way, not lost entirely in the despair and suffering.  For those who like 'soft' utsuge, this will be pure crack... and it reminds me of some of the best moments of Konakana, which is still the best utsuge I've ever read.
Overall, this is a kamige... and it is rare for an utsuge to manage to reach that level.  Most utsuge slip up somewhere along the way, but this one is presented perfectly for fulfilling its purpose.  I cried out loud for the ending, vicariously experiencing the loss without needing to think myself into it, which was amazing in and of itself.  That's not to say it is entirely without flaws.  It is a bit slow to get going, at least in part because you aren't given all the pieces of the puzzle initially, but I can still honestly call it a kamige, because even those elements that felt like flaws at first added to the experience later on.

Another update.
Firstly, we decided to get a filler editor for ocdc, who has been really busy with his real life, and that editor is Einstein9029 like you can see from the Staff page. Anyways, there hasn't been any major editing progress, but a little bit and we have reached the halfway point of editing, which is great news. QC's been going at a steady pace too, pretty much parallel to editing.
Secondly, we've begun proofreading. Now if you're wondering about the leap of progress in a single week, proofreading is just a final check and cleanup, and thus doesn't take as much as QC'ing or nearly as much as editing, so fear not.
Next, I more or less have finished up the look of the website, and that pesky front page slider really did give me a headache, but it was worth it. There still is some things I want to do with the design of the website, but those can wait for a better day.
Finally, you probably saw me tweeting about the new "announcement" I made. Sure enough, there's something big coming up early October, and that specific date happens to be my birthday too. Well, I can't give that many hints as of now, but I can tell some things if you want answers, just don't expect too much at this point out of me. You can check it out in here.
That is all, progress time:

Until next week

First, I'm going to say right out that this VN feels very familiar to me, as someone who dropped Hoshi Ori Yume Mirai.  I dropped that game for a number of reasons... but the biggest one was that I was extremely tired of slice-of-life and romance at the time.  Since Hoshi Ori (and indeed all games by Tone Works) is a pure slice-of-life/romance VN (not charage) it just was a bad time for me to hit on it.  As I studied my feelings about my experiences with the path I'd played, I went ahead and rated it based on that, and I'm going to tell yall some of my impressions of Tone Works' games. 
Tone Works, unlike most slice-of-life companies, doesn't utilize any sort of heavy-handed moe.  As a result, it definitely isn't a moege company, as most slice-of-life companies are.  This is only the first - and least important- distinction.  The most important distinction is the detail in which this company portrays the blooming, growth, and maturity of the relationship between the lovers.  The creation of the relationship, its growth into deep love, and its mellowing and deepening into maturity in adulthood are all portrayed in this company's VNs in incredible detail...  That is why their heroine paths are generally ten hour affairs (seriously) and actually much longer than the common route.
This VN is no exception that way.  The common route covers the first half of the central cast's middle school experience together... and that in itself covers about six hours of reading.  However, from there it extends through the end of middle school, throughout high school, college, and into the characters' mid-twenties, touching upon various experiences in each era, as the characters grow and mature.
To be honest, this kind of VN will probably overwhelm most people who read it with the sheer overload of information you get.  By the time I'd finished Bethly's path, I'd been playing for eleven hours, just covering the growth of their relationship and path to marriage.  As such, I can't really make a good comparison to give you reference points for how to understand the experience of a VN like this.  In my experience, neither novels nor VNs actually cover this kind of gentle, almost real-feeling relationship growth.   That is probably the reason why I had trouble with Hoshi Ori. For better or worse, the story goes so deep into the characters that it really feels like a betrayal when you pick another heroine, to the point where I actually feel like I'm cheating on Bethly for starting a new path.  I didn't even realize I was becoming this emotionally invested in her, lol.  It isn't quite the same as the epiphany I had when I first watched a love-comedy anime (Ai Yori Aoshi), but it is the first major epiphany I've had in some time, when it comes to fiction. 
While I always complain about the incomplete nature of Vn endings, I am definitely getting the feeling that I should have been careful what I wished for, lol.
PS: Incidentally, I rofled hard at the scene from the pic below.
http://s21.photobucket.com/user/Rihochan/media/Bethly zombie.png.html
 
 

It’s here.
I’ve always felt that the WordPress site felt a little lacking, so now Euphemic Translation has moved to a new domain with a brand-spanking new, shiny design. I spent many hours getting everything nicely together without anything suddenly exploding, and I’d say I’ve done a good enough job with it. More or less everything’s been imported and greatly updated, including the theme. Tell me what you think of it.
As you probably could already guess, the old site is going to be abandoned, to put it bluntly. If this site goes under, I’ll of course revert back to the old site, but I don’t see that happening.
Anyways, onwards to the actual update.
We almost got 50% on editing with 48 percent, and whole 10% more on QC. Things are going smoothly, and they don’t seem to be slowing down, but nothing special has happened this week aside from the new website.
Progress:

See ya next week, on this new address.
http://euphemictl.vntls.com/2016/08/26/update-32-new-domain-new-website/

I'm going to hell for this.

Hey, another update.
First up, let's welcome our new QC, Nanon. He seems to know what he's doing, so that's nice. QC should be coming much more swimmingly.
Some nice progress was made this week, both in editing and in QC'ing, and progress overall is speeding up decently, which I'm overjoyed about.
Anyways, that's all that's happened this week, so onto progress:
Translation: 100%
Editing: 46,5%
QC: 25,5%
Proofreading: 0%
 
Farewell.

... it's been a while since my feelings on a VN have been as complex as my feelings for this one are.  I say 'feelings' because this VN has massive emotional impact... not as much as Hapymaher, but nonetheless a lot of emotional impact. 
To be blunt, Makoto is nothing like Hapymaher's protagonist, so if you were hoping for more of his 'consumed by sorrow and despair but still living my life' personality, sorry, no luck here.  Makoto is... a blank slate.  I don't say this in a bad way.  For better or worse, Makoto has lived his life in an isolated village where people literally don't talk any more than is absolutely necessary, lest they accidentally compel one another with their power, 'kotodama'.  Makoto has a fiance named Mana (and no, not that kind of lukewarm, 'distant fiance' sort of thing you see in some VNs, since they actually get down to business), and a rather nice, slow life in that village... However, he yearns for the outside world, where people can talk to people without restrictions.
He escapes from the village and collapses from hunger in a small town four days later, where he is saved by the first of four heroines, Kokoro.  From there the story begins, as he makes the journey from an innocent 'kami' to a real human being with all the baggage that comes along with it. 
A lot of the most interesting parts of this game come from the fact that he naturally doesn't understand much about the outside world.  Makoto's innocent, unstained viewpoint, combined with his natural kindness and willingness to embrace new experiences, feel surprisingly refreshing.  Things other 'normal' protagonists would worry over don't even occur to him, and he is so laid back he makes the drugged hippies of US in the sixties seem tense.  While he does change as part of the story, his personal 'lens', through which he sees the world, remains remarkably clean throughout... not to mention the guy has absolutely no sense of sexual morality (in other words, his idea of sexual morality is 'don't use his power to compel people to have sex with him').

The first of the heroines, Kokoro, is a shojo manga addict who has fantasies about immoral relations with older brothers.  She is a natural at unconsciously grasping the hearts of others around her without trying, and she is pretty much the picture of a heroine who 'exists to be loved by everyone'.

The second heroine, Kyouko, is a miko that can see dead people (yes, I went there).  She has huge self-esteem problems and is more than a little weird... for one thing, her reaction to Makoto is one of the more unique heroine reactions to a protagonist I've encountered over the years... for another, she is abnormally self-derogatory in both action and word.

Mana... is the protagonist's fiance from the village.  She is pretty much apathetic about other people, unless they have the decency to provide her with food (from her point of view, people who give her food move up from 'stone in the road' to 'slightly adorable insect' in most cases).  She is a bit of an S, when it comes to Makoto, and Makoto is pretty much her reason for living.  Because of a careless use of kotodama by another member of the village, she is always cold and in her eyes, it is always snowing.

Hotaru... is the true heroine of this story.  Cheerful and active, not to mention highly intelligent and perceptive... she is actually a fairly attractive heroine from the start.  However, she has less initial impact than Mana or Kokoro, for reasons that are fairly apparent.  Since that is by design, I actually am not complaining about this, though.
Now, to get to the downside of this game... it uses the G-senjou 'ladder' story structure, wherein the story progresses arcs where you choose to either pursue the heroine associated with that arc to an ending or move on with the main story.  I can say that the path endings for the non-true heroines were actually pretty good, but having played the true path, they are comparatively low-impact.  A lot of this is the fact that the major events of their 'paths' are in the arcs they branched off from, so little is added by their endings save for more sex and some minor tying up of loose ends. 
To get back to the main game... the true path is the impact I was talking about.  The main arcs were all emotional, so I guess you can say that the other heroines' 'paths' were also emotional, but, as I mentioned above, there is a definite sense that very little was added by choosing one of the other heroines.  Hotaru's path is easily the most powerful 'arc'.  In fact, it is so emotional and powerful that there are two ends for it.  The first one (which you are required to watch first) is... sad, to say the least.  It isn't a bad ending, but it is a sad one.  I know I cried.  For the second ending... well, let's just say it is a good one and leave it at that.
Overall, my viewpoint on this game is... just as mixed as I said above.  My conclusions on the G-Senjou story structure are unchanged in the least.  I still believe that all VNs that use that story structure should be changed to kinetic novels, just so I don't have to deal with heroine endings that are neglected by the creators of the stories themselves.  While all stories with true heroines inevitably put a much larger emphasis on the true heroine, the way this story structure trivializes the other heroines is really irritating, especially when they are good heroines, like these were.  However, if you take the arcs, characters, and the true endings separate from that source of irritation, it is a great VN.  It just happens to use the single worst VN story structure in existence.  Indeed, that story structure and the inevitable realities it brings along with it are the only thing that kept me from naming this as a kamige. 
PS: I will erase any and all comments that spoil anything in the last arc.  I say this because this is the type of VN that can only be enjoyed to the fullest once, not the type that merely changes flavor with each playthrough, like Devils Devil Concept.  Anyone who spoils this VN should have their skin sliced open, drawn back, then have salt rubbed into the exposed flesh. 
... *Clephas drools and goes off to make BBQ*

What an eventful week this was.
First up, some progress on both the editing and QC was made. Now, it isn't the most, but progress is always progress, and I'm happy about it. We'll try to make some amount of progress every week.
Second up, I had my hands full polishing some things and making our very own Discord server, now open for public. So, if you have some questions, want to chat with the staff, or just bitch me about how much of a fuckboy I am, go on ahead.
Now without further ado, here's the link to the server.
You can also get the link from the main page, in Recruitment, and in Contact Us.
Progress thus far:
Translation: 100%
Editing: 33,9%
QC: 20,1%
Proofreading: 0%
 
Until next week.

Tell me, how does this image make you feel?

This was the first thing I ever saw when hearing about Planetarian. I still vividly remember that moment, and how it made me feel. It made me feel like the world was at its literal and figurative end, civilization just a memory. A cold, empty, dangerous world. And somehow, at the peak of it all, this being, standing there. at once a tangible remnant of that civilization, stuck in a warm, cozy world of her own, and at the same time something much older, much wiser than that civilization. No work of fiction has ever drawn me in as strongly as this. Then, I read it.
TL;DR Planetarian is the best VN
The fact that this is a written article about why I don't care about writing should tell you that it's not going to be very well-written, just keep that in mind.
I was inspired to write this by this video by Digibro. I suggest you watch it (up to about 12:13), but to summarize, he says that most media critics value writing above all else, and treat aesthetic elements as secondary. He then claims that, since nearly all critics are also writers, that is not surprising, and then goes on to explain how aesthetic elements can indeed tell a story that no words will ever be able to.
And this made me realize: I simply don't care about writing and prose. I'm not saying that I can't appreciate it, or that I've never enjoyed purely written media, but when it comes to all the works of fiction that I truly love, aesthetic has always been the primary reason for that love.
To me, writing in a VN is just string. It's there to hold the story together (and doing it well is certainly important), but all of the emotion has to be conveyed through the visuals and music. Nearly all VN critics are writers, and therefore not likely to fully acknowledge the value of art and sound direction. Art, in this community, is seen as something that should be pretty (BiMan) and music as something that should sound good (Little Busters) and almost nothing more. Frankly, I think that's bullshit. Neither art nor sound should just be there to make everything feel right, or to 'fit the mood'. They should be there to create a mood of their own, tell a story of their own.
Now, let's look at Planetarian, and how I believe it still works well without a script. May contain vague rambling

This is a panning shot of a pre-apocalyptic street. I'm a big fan of imagery like this. There's something beautifully immersive about the lighting. Personally, whenever I feel stressed, there's nothing I like to do more than walk outside on a rainy evening, breathing deeply, letting my mind clear. It's a wonderful world. Shame it all had to end.
Now let's add music to it, shall we?
Just listen to this while looking at the next one.

To me, this is like a massive, fluffy bed of nostalgia. while Yumemi is talking about absolutely nothing, I am somehow right there, in that dusty old planetarium, and she is just sitting there, calmly. An artifact from a bygone age, something that could not be repaired or even maintained by anyone alive right now. When I read Planetarian, these scenes make it feel like Yumemi was part of some strange ritual, somehow kept in a perfect equilibrium all that time, despite everything that has happened, and the protagonist has brutally interrupted that ritual.
Now listen to this.

In the projection scenes, you are the audience and Yumemi will be your guide for the evening. This is where she really shines. This is exactly what she was made for, what all that (now pointless) chatter was intended for. All she wants is to show you and the protagonist the most beautiful thing she knows, and personally, I was just as moved by the whole thing as the Junker was, and was basically crying sweating from my eyes throughout both parts of the projection.
I think I'll stop here. I'm obviously not claiming writing isn't important, it clearly is, I'm just trying to illustrate (pun intended) that visuals and sound can tell (parts of) a good story all by themselves.
Be sure to look out for any ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ  you can find, will you?

Yes, I went ahead and played this, having pre-ordered it on Steam. I've been pumping about three hours a day into it since it came out and my final level for my main party was 47 (which seems to be low, but that is apparently because people go for the 'beat the boss without weakening him first' trophy, pfft).  This is a game designed to bring nostalgia to the minds of those who are fans of the SNES and PS1 eras, and in that sense, it definitely succeeds.  It utilizes a battle system copied from one of the most famous kamige jrpgs of all time, Chrono Trigger... with a number of additions, both big and small.  The world map is also reminiscent of that estimable game... but the resemblance pretty much stops there, save for a few other superficial elements.
First, I'll give you a basic rundown on the story concept.  Endir, a mercenary swordsman, is sent to a certain island to assassinate a young girl, and it is there that he finds out that she is destined to die in any case, giving her life for the sake of the world, to appease the monsters.  It really is, from the very beginning, a story of compassion, driven almost entirely by Setsuna herself, with Endir as a sounding board, more than anything else (your choices as Endir are fairly irrelevant). 
It is easy to love Setsuna.  She is kind-hearted and genuinely compassionate, as one would have to expect of someone who is going willingly to their death to save the world.  As a character, she has, of course, been 'done before', but that isn't as problematic as you might think, considering how the entire VN is meant to stab you with nostalgia about as subtly as driving a nail into someone's forehead, lol.
The world map's design style is identical to Chrono Trigger's (albeit with modern graphics), and many of the skills are drawn straight from that game, name and all... though there are about five times as many skills total.  All skills, save for a few found in chests and a few defaults, are obtained by selling items gotten from monsters to the Magic Associations, which gives you their 'Spritnite' if you sold them enough of the right item.  There is no need for more than one of the 'command' type spritnite, as each character's techniques and magic are unique to them, so don't waste your 'budget' of sold items by getting more than one of any of them, lol.  Support spritnite are another thing entirely... these give various effects, ranging from stat boosts to healing you when you kill enemies, and using them strategically can make the game immensely easier. 
Most monster drops need you to meet certain conditions for them to be dropped, ranging from killing enemies with a specific element, killing them with damage close to their exact hp, or overkilling them (there are other conditions, but those are listed in the monster encyclopedia, so there is no need for me to go into detail here).  This can be a bit of a pain when it comes to items from bosses, but you can re-fight bosses in certain dungeons opened up in the late game, so don't worry too much about it, lol.
One of the positives of this game is that there are multiple characters capable of healing... to be specific, both Setsuna and Endir can serve as healers, as well as damage dealers.  Not being bound to keep any one character in your party just to survive can be immensely helpful... especially when their attack element is useless against the local enemies, hahaha.
The atmosphere of this game is not just shaped by the setting... but also by the music and the world itself.  Piano music dominates this game, giving it a somewhat 'realer' feeling than a lot of the half-synthesized music that is common in mid to low budget jrpgs.  However, while the tunes are just fine for activating your emotions, they tend to blend into one another after a while.  The world... is defined by snow.  Literally.  Blizzards, your feet leaving a path through snow drifts, monsters rolling balls of snow both before and during battle... this game is based in winter, and it doesn't even try to be anything other than a world in winter, hahaha.  Both aspects can leave you numb after a while... but the game is short enough that it isn't that noticeable if you play it in digestible bites of a few hours at a time.
Story-wise... I'd say that the writing/localization is several levels above what you used to see in the same era as Chrono Trigger (one aspect of that era that I am glad is gone is the weirdly inconsistent translations).  The basic plot is classic jrpg, with endless excuses for taking the long route to get to the final destination, lol.  The ending is... a bit of a letdown, from my point of view.  I honestly don't see why they chose the classic 'dialog-free' ending type that used to be common in SNES era jrpgs, even if they were going for nostalgia, hahah.
Overall, this is a first-rate effort, for what amounts to a mid-budget VN directed at retro-gamers.  It goes for the emotions, it ignores the intellect, and it breaks the fourth wall at times (you'll see what I mean if you go to a certain place once you get the airship).  In other words, it is a classic 'save the world' style jrpg, and for those who like the older console-style jrpgs, it is pure crack, though it does leave you wanting more (I'm probably going to yank Xenogears out and play it again sometime soon, lol).

My blog posts so far have mostly been about how to edit. That holds true for most every other VN editing blog I've ever seen as well. But I'm a really big believer in approaching any significant task from a "Why, What, How" perspective. So now, let's try to answer those first two questions.
Even "What Is Editing" would be starting in too far (it made for a better title, so sue me). Let's start with this: why do translation projects, or even original fiction projects like novels, have editors?
 
The goal of editing is to help the author achieve their goals.
An author brings a whole lot of goals to the table: a story, characters with personalities and motivations, a setting, overarching motifs, style, ... probably a lot of other stuff I forgot. Anyway, you get the idea; there's a lot there which they're just trying to get out on paper (or bits, or whatever) and then into your brain.
An editor doesn't bring any of that stuff. An editor instead strives to understand all of these things the author wants to communicate, finds the points where they can be better achieved, and refines the text to better achieve the author's goals. Although there's obviously some overlap, there are quite different skill sets involved in the raw writing and the editing, and thus the two roles are often fulfilled by two people.
How about for a translated VN, rather than for, say, writing a novel? The story is roughly the same, actually. Although the translator has essentially the same goals as the editor in this case, the skill sets required are quite different, and thus differentiating the two roles is not uncommon and frequently beneficial to the project, for the same reasons as it is with original writing and editing.
I'll also add that an original writer is usually considered "too close" to the original text to make a good editor. Even a writer who is also a great editor will benefit from having someone else edit their manuscript. I haven't heard the same thing said of translators, though, so that might not be relevant to this special case. But the skill set differentiation point still stands in the case of translation.
Assuming you're satisfied with that explanation for Why, let's move on to What.
Professional manuscript editing typically distinguishes four kinds of editing: developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and proofreading. Those are ordered based on both the scope of changes they make, and also the chronological order in which you should do them: developmental editing is very macroscopic and happens first, while proofreading is very microscopic and happens last. Let's drill into each:
 
Developmental Editing
Developmental editing is, first, the act of identifying all of those authorial goals I mentioned, and second the act of cutting, rearranging, and adding large chunks (think: add this whole new scene, cut that whole character) in order to advance the author's goals.
Obviously, that second half isn't applicable to VN translation. You're not going to cut whole scenes or change how characters behave. Those decisions have already long since been made by the original writers, hopefully with the help of an editor of their own ;).
But the first half is essential, and is quite a bit harder in VN translation, since you generally can't actually talk to the writer. Read it all, understand the authorial goals, and build a strong, consistent interpretation of the plot, the characters, the motifs, the setting, the tone, everything you can think of. If you don't form an interpretation while translating/editing, you're liable to thwart the author's goals as part of your translation, and as a result accidentally obscure or entirely lose key points of the original intent. Of course, you'll occasionally make mistakes in your interpretation, resulting in mistakes in translation. But if you don't even form an interpretation, the result will actually be worse: you'll still make mistakes in the translation, and the resulting translation will certainly be internally inconsistent, but you won't notice those internal inconsistencies because you have no guiding interpretation. If you form a consistent interpretation and let it guide your translation, when the text goes against your interpretation, the resulting inconsistency means you'll notice it, correct your interpretation, and then go back and modify your translation to fit the corrected interpretation.
 
Line Editing
Line editing is about assessing and fixing the flow of a scene and the flow of a line. It's about logic, language, word choice, rhythm, the mechanics of a sentence, and the sound of human speech. It is not concerned with grammatical errors, punctuation, and spelling, but more with higher-level ideas like tone, emotion, and atmosphere. A line editor worries whether a sentence ought to be punchy or loquacious, not whether it has all the commas in all the right places.
"Logic" probably seemed a bit out of place there, so let me give an example for that one in particular, since it's essential. For example, unless you're editing the VN equivalent of a Beckett play (and if you are, please point me to that VN, because I'm interested), one dialog line should generally be a logical response to the previous one. A canny line editor will ensure the logical flow from event to event, line to line, and even scene to scene, ensuring consistency of the narration.
This is also where all that authorial intent mentioned above comes into play: an editor in this capacity should also be ensuring consistency of a line with those overarching goals. A good line editor will help ensure that characterization is consistent, for instance, or that a motif is not buried inappropriately. An editor, in their avatar as the keeper of consistency, is crucial to achieving those authorial goals.
The prose side of line editing is also key simply because stilted speech, unnatural utterances, redundant repetition, awkward alliteration, and their ilk all kick you out of the immersion. Your brain wants to keep reading something when it flows well. And nothing hits softer than shitty prose.
Line editing is the meat of VN editing. It's what most existing VN editing blogs are about, not coincidentally. If you're an editor for a VN, line editing is what you should be thinking about constantly.
In addition to recommending other VN editing blogs, notably Darbury's blog (mostly about line editing, though all the punctuation ones are more about copy editing) and Moogy's now-ancient blog post (basically all about line editing), I'll also suggest you go read up on line editing in a general setting. A quick search for "what is line editing" will lead you to mountains of useful links. As a random example, this is one such useful link, and it's hilarious, well-written, and edifying: http://www.thereviewreview.net/publishing-tips/short-course-line-editing. There is a veritable sea of such articles on the internet. Read them.
 
Copy Editing
Copy editing is about the nuts and bolts of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It's not the same as proofreading, but it's getting close. The copy editor typically should select and enforce an appropriate style manual (AP, Chicago, MLA, take your pick). The copy editor is the person who gets mad when you write "I baked 7 blackbirds into that pie." instead of "I baked seven blackbirds into that pie.", and who calmly, patiently replaces all your misused hyphens in the middle of sentences with em-dashes.
You're unlikely to have a dedicated copy editor on a VN project; if you've got the "editor" role, you're probably it. I think this is along the lines of what most people think of already when they hear "editing" anyway, but really the line editing is the most important to the enjoyment of the text. Still, the picky people among us can get awfully uppity if you start putting in stuff like ellipses with four dots and inconsistent use of the Oxford comma (sidebar for the attentive: I'm for it, as you've already noticed). Copy editing is a particularly thankless job, since it's not like you can do an exceptional job of copy editing and really salvage a bad manuscript, but poor copy editing can certainly hurt an otherwise-good manuscript. So it's worth investing the time in doing it carefully.
One important recommendation for copy editing: take notes and build up a style document and glossary for your VN as you go. Are honorifics being used? What about name order? If you're going to romanize some words, is your romanization consistent? Do you 1) always write "senpai", 2) always write "sempai", or 3) mix and match? I don't care if it's 1 or 2, but it better not be 3. Write conventions like this in a shared document and make sure everybody knows about the conventions and the document.
 
Proofreading
Proofreading is the final stage of this pipeline. The role includes checking for grammatical errors, spelling errors, punctuation errors, typos, and perhaps some more exotic things like incorrect English dialect. It's straightforward and mechanical. Like copy editing, it is essentially thankless. It is, nonetheless, important. While you're making big sweeping edits doing all the stuff above, you're going to create tons of errors at this level. They need to be fixed. Make sure you have someone (preferably not the "editor", because they're too close to the text) do a proofreading sweep. You can lump it into QC if you like, but make sure that whoever is assigned to do this is looking at it carefully. Check. Every. Single. Word. There are errors in there, I guarantee you, and they're embarrassing. Getting the number of errors down to near-zero before you release your translation is going to make both you and your audience happier.
 
 
In Summary
There's not one editor; there are four. In an ideal world, with original fiction, you'd actually have someone separate filling each role. For a translation you don't need a developmental editor, leaving you needing three editors. In the non-ideal world you live in, you've probably got at least two of those roles to yourself. Push for someone else to handle proofreading, at least (call it "QC" if you have to), and make sure said person has the necessary ability and attention to detail. If you're the "editor", then you're almost certainly doing both line editing and copy editing. When that happens, make sure you keep a balance amongst all the things you need to do: for instance, spend 10% of your effort trying to understand what the author is trying to achieve, 88% of your effort on line editing (it's the meat, after all), and 2% on copy editing the little details like punctuation, romanization, etc.
 
And If You Can Only Remember One Thing
Focus on line editing.

Well, as most of you know by now, I completely obliterated all the links concerning BiMan1's prologue patch. This was because of two reasons:
Because it was terrible in every possible way to put it frankly. In order to make room for this post. The prologue patch was bad, really bad. The sentences were akward, spacing was weird, translations at some points didn't even make sense, etc, etc. That's why I've been fixing the first quarter of the script; retranslating, modifying and editing the script along with perfecting the engine this starting and last week. Doing UTF-8, some hex editing, final image editing and resource editing.
It was quite rough, but I finally got everything according to my wishes, and the price for my naivety has been paid back. Anyways! I present to you my hard work and labor:
Prologue Patch 2.0
Probably another 10~ hours down to drain, but it was worth it. The new and improved prologue patch (or well, partial patch at this point, but whatever)!
Features:
- Completely polished and finished engine, fully translated by me. Includes all buttons, menus, extras and other minor things.
- Music track names are translated, although I didn't intend on ever translating them.
- Translates the dialogue all the way to the end of the first H-scene.
- The two internal menus:
Are translated to these:
Things to note:
- The dialogue text is not in its final version that it will be in the final release, so keep that in mind. The patch, however, shouldn't have any typos.
- The amount of text ranslated in this improved patch is quite a bit more, because I wanted something more grand and of course, to make up to you for the travesty that was the original prologue patch.
- The text after the first H-scene will continue as Japanese, unlike the gibberish it was in the original patch. Sorry about that.
- All of the previous prologue patch download links are now going to be replaced with this version's link.
Download Link:
https://mega.nz/#!C8FDiagC!xeW7-MPcjsZWm5ebycEnEXJ66y-Ld7H6ojTa0yYF4b0
Install instructions:
Download the patch from the link above and open the .zip file. Drag & drop the new .exe into -呪われし伝説の少女-1, and data8.pack into -呪われし伝説の少女-1/GameData.  Launch the game through the new .exe file and have fun.

Sometimes, something lands on your plate that makes no sense. If you're lucky, it may be a single line that makes no sense as it is written, but you can figure it out and fix it from context. If you're unlucky, it might be a whole passage that doesn't fit together quite right, or something that just doesn't hang together to present a consistent plot. As the editor, it's your responsibility to turn that line or passage into something that makes sense. Sometimes you can manage it yourself with enough brainpower. Sometimes you should ask the original translator, another editor, another translator, or a TLC to help, if you simply cannot hit on an obviously-correct, logical interpretation. Ultimately, though, you are responsible for seeing it through. You have to land that joke. Nobody else is going to do it for you.
I present to you the following independent, unimportant passage from the raw To Heart 2 translation. This is one of the night scenes, which are mostly short throwaway gags featuring the protagonist, at home alone, being silly. Full context for this scene: the protagonist can't sleep and has picked a 'difficult book' off his shelf to try to put himself to sleep.

Wat
What all needs to be done here:
The joke doesn't make sense (at least, it doesn't to me; you might be smarter than I am and able to get it immediately). There's some Engrish to be cleaned up (That "What what...?" line, especially, which sounds like it's straight from an old hip-hop song, not the utterance of a donkan harem protagonist about to read a book on special relativity), and there's ample opportunity to make the phrasing more natural. Once the nature of the joke is understood, it turns out its timing can probably be improved as well. It actually took me a couple of rewrites before I finally grasped the nature of the joke, and then I was able to both clean up the language and land it properly. It's frankly still not all that funny, but hey, a not-that-funny joke is still better than nonsense.
Okay, much more readable, and I think you can actually understand the joke when reading it (you can, right? please tell me you can.). Aside from making it understandable:
I deferred the idiotic non sequitur to the last line of the text-within-the-text, since it's the setup for the punchline on the last line and I wanted to get them closer together, since any time between these two is time people will spend being confused. Being a geek, I also decided to add a little more to the special relativity explanation to try to make it more clear, mostly so that it didn't look like the idiocy was endemic to the text, but rather was isolated to that final statement. For that last part, I ended up shuffling some text around, but it's not voiced text so this is really no big deal. You'll probably want to shuffle around whole lines, rarely, so be prepared to do that, for reasons like this one. Lastly, and most importantly, I tried to make the whole book-inside-the-VN passage flow as though it were a single logical explanation (you know; like a scientific-minded book normally would deliver). This is crucial for making the non sequitur at the end more jarring, and thus making the joke work (to the extent that it does). That last one is really the key, and it's applicable to more than just jokes or short passages like this. It's easy to get hung up on fixing individual lines and then miss the big picture. Lines are connected to make scenes. Scenes are connected to make the VN. Each level of that chain needs to fit together to make sense, and as the editor, you're on the line for that.
As I'm writing this blog post, I realize there's at least one error in the "final" text I delivered up above: inconsistent capitalization of Theory of Relativity. Possibly more problems as well that I'm not seeing, and certainly there's room for improvement. Well, hopefully QA caught that grammar problem.
I wasn't delighted with the result, but nonetheless, this was a good time to move on. This joke isn't going to be winning Olympic gold with such a shaky landing, but at least it does land instead of flying off on its own somewhere, leaving us behind and horribly confused. That's good enough for this filler scene. Everything can always be made better, and you can spend an eternity making something a little bit better all the time, but then nobody will ever actually see your work. You need to realize when to step back from something and say "It's good enough; ship it."
Bottom line, if you're playing To Heart 2 and you get to a scene where the protagonist is picking a book to put him to sleep, take the science trivia book instead. That joke was funnier to begin with.

Another day, another deep dive into the esoterica of visual novel punctuation. Next on our chopping block: the wave dash ( 〜 ), which looks an awful lot like the Western tilde (~) but functions nothing like it. Our refrain here is a familiar one: the wave dash has no place in well-localized English VNs and should be removed or replaced wherever possible. No ifs, no ands, but one very small but.
How 〜  functions in Japanese
The wave dash has several fairly pedestrian functions in written Japanese, including separating ranges of values, which is handled by the en-dash (–) in English; denoting geographic origins; and separating title from subtitle, which is handled by the colon in English (e.g., Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo). These are all fairly boring, however, and if you’re an editor, your translator should already have converted such wave dashes to their Western equivalents.
Where things get interesting, and by “interesting” I mean “annoying,” is when we start looking at some more colloquial uses that pop up in translated VNs with alarming frequency.
The wave dash can be used to elongate and modulate a vowel sound, much like the long vowel mark (ー) in katakana. You’ll sometimes find 〜  applied to the end of a word, and it’s implied that this longer sound is audibly “brighter.” Terms like “uptalk,” “vibrato/tremolo,” “kawaii” and “girlish” get thrown around a lot. (Think of the stereotypically perky “Ohayooooo” morning greeting you often hear in VNs or anime.) It’s usually a deliberate choice by the character, done to sound cute, funny, etc.. The wave dash can also be added to the end of a sentence to suggest the entire line should be read with that same brighter inflection – a happy sing-song of sorts. Or sometimes, it can signify literal musicality, as in the line should actually be sung. “Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day〜 ” Less frequently, and usually in the context of digital communications, the wave dash can be used to suggest that a word or sentence should be read as being ironic/sarcastic. “Oh great. What a beautiful morning 〜 ” As you can see, there are a bunch of possible readings of any given wave dash, and the correct interpretation depends largely on textual and cultural context. Add in the fact that 〜 is non-standard English punctuation that your average non-otaku isn't familiar with (never mind its various nuances), and it seems like a no-brainer to dump it and convey the intended meaning in clean, clear English instead.
But no. For some fecking reason, VNs are littered with these fecking squigglers. They’re fecking everywhere, like that scene in The Lost Boys where one of the Coreys, I don’t know which goddamn one, starts eating a takeout container of lo mein but Kiefer Sutherland or some other vampire guy gets all vampirey and is like, “Nuh-uh, Corey” and that selfsame Corey suddenly looks down and his delicious noodles have turned into thousands of these wriggling, white maggots and he can’t vom fast enough.
It’s literally like that. Literally.
The answer? Get rid of them.
Do your readers a kindness and remove wave dashes wherever you encounter them. If your translator has done their job right, you’ll have all the context you need to turn those dashes into well-formed English that anyone can understand. That doesn’t always mean stretching out the last letters preceding the wave dash, mind you. That ways lies disasteeeeeer. All you need to do is ask yourself one simple question: How would it sound natural if a native English-speaker rephrased this line? That’s it!
Let’s look at some examples. The easiest is where the English usage matches the Japanese, such as stretching out a vowel. So imagine a character walks into a dark and spooky house, then calls out to see if anyone’s home.
What about cute inflections? Well, English is a rich language; there are plenty of ways to make a sentence sound perkier:
There’s no magic formula, and it's not rocket science. It's just sitting down and rewriting. And if you’re doing your job as an editor, you should pretty much be rewriting every single line anyway, so it’s no added hardship.
The one, small exception
If you remember, I mentioned digital communications a little earlier. This is the one place where I’d recommend you let a sleeping wave dash lie. Typographical oddities (such as emoticons) are part and parcel of the electronic vernacular, so it feels much more natural to let them stay in a text or an IM that’s being quoted verbatim. You want your reader to feel like they’re seeing exactly what the character has on their screen. Just make sure you’ve edited these lines so the English meaning will still be clear if the wave dashes were removed.
After all, there’s a world of difference between “Great advice, Darbury 〜 ” and “Great advice, Darbury 〜 ”

strikes again, so I'm reposting this, more or less for my self-gratification and to sate my inner perfectionist
Well, now that my part is mostly done, these posts are most likely getting much smaller.
I also got asked to join the revived Witch’s Garden TL project as a Proofreader/QC’er over at Luna Translations now that I’m free and personally, I really like the game, so I’m happy of being asked to do it. If you want, I’ll leave a link to their translation blog here and you can find them on the bottom of the front page too.
The editing’s progressing at a steady page and QC’s still perpetually frozen in place, but that isn’t a big deal at this point yet. I’ll also finish the image editing and minor tweaking soonish.
 
Translation: 100%
Editing: 22,9%
QC: 3,1%
Proofreading: 0% 
 

I’m on vacation, which as a dad, is usually more exhausting for me than not being on vacation. That means no rants about the evils of third-person direct address in VN translations this week — sorry! I just don’t have it in me.
Instead, I thought I’d give a long overdue plug to a project I helped out on last year: ff80c38’s 2x Ren’Py port of True Remembrance. And by “helped out on,” I mean ff80c38 did everything; I simply pitched in with a little Photoshopping and typesetting at the very end. This was a total passion project on his part, and it shows.
If you’re not familiar with it, True Remembrance is a short kinetic novel released by Shiba Satomi in 2003, then gussied up and re-released in 2006. (insani subsequently published a wonderful English-language translation of it two years later in 2008.) I’ve always had a soft spot for this VN, in part because it’s not afraid to be quiet and contemplative. It underplays its emotions rather than underlining them and, as a result, feels more like a found storybook than a modern trope fest. There’s a plot, of course — there are guns and spies and dystopian futures and unexpected twists — but to TR’s credit, it’s never about those. The visual novel’s gaze stays fixed on its characters, exploring their empty spaces and pondering how they might be filled, if ever.
True Remembrance is not a perfect VN, not by any means. The art is on the simpler side, which some might consider a plus, and the game’s writing often stumbles when it comes to comic relief — pretty much any scene in the café, for instance. Still, its measured tone is a rare find, and for that, I treasure it.
The original freeware release of True Remembrance only ran on Windows; this Ren’Py port adds Mac and Linux to the roster. It also supports higher resolutions, hence the 2X identifier. And let me just say that, across the board, ff80c38 approached this port with utmost respect for the source material. Not a letter of the script was changed, and great care was taken in resizing (or in some cases, recreating) graphics for the new resolutions.
Finally, I can’t stress to you enough that this version is entirely unofficial, released late last year in hopes it might help a few more people find True Remembrance. So listen: if you’re not running Mac or Linux and/or don’t really care about higher-res assets, I urge you to pick up the original English release at insani’s site instead. It’ll do ya good. But if that's not feasible, for whatever reason, please think of ff80c38’s project as another snowy back alley into Shiba Satomi’s world.
Download: Windows / macOS / Linux
Postscript: Why-oh-why isn’t Mimei of the Transmission Tower, the author’s other VN, translated yet? Seriously. I know insani was considering working on it at one point, but that was years ago. This has long been one of my white whales, and I’d love to be able to read it in English before the world ends sometime in late November.

NSFW?
 
I'll say it straight out... in my mind, Draculius is one of the top two vampire VNs in existence... with the other one being Vermilion by Light.  Meromero Cute was a company that had a tendency toward making... eccentric works.  Mahou Shoujo no Taisetsu na koto is particularly memorable for the cross-dressing protagonist who spends a ridiculous amount of time being reverse-raped in a magical girl costume...  It used the fact that nobody expects mahou shoujo stories and settings to be consistent to go a bit crazy...
Draculius is a bit different... the protagonist, Jun, is the kind of guy who would be a hero in an otome game.  While he isn't voiced (a mistake in my mind, but one that is common) his narration and lines have so much personality that you never see him as a 'standard' protagonist.  There are precisely two paths in this VN... a 'joke' path where Jun doesn't make the full transition to a vampire during the story (focused on Rian and Zeno), and a true path, where Jun confronts the people hiding behind the curtains in the course of building his vampiric harem of a trigger-happy tsundere vampire-hunting nun, an ancient vampire who was once his father's vassal and lover, a vampire 'ojousama' whom everyone takes joy in teasing, and a loyal werewolf maid who makes  a hobby out of tricking her mistress into making a fool of herself.
The action in this VN is actually a bit above the standard for chuunige of the era, though it doesn't match works by Light.  At times there are battles of wits, and there is enough comedy to make a lot of modern charage seem boring.  To this day, I've never met a loli in a VN that matches Belche for characterization (yes, I include stuff by Favorite).  The multitude of roles she takes on and the layers to her personality and viewpoint on life make her one of the few 'ancient heroines' who doesn't seem in the least bit fake. 
One of the things that is most important in a vampire story of any type is the perspective... to be blunt, a vampire setting where the vampires don't drink blood or are fundamentally harmless is... boring, to say the least.  Vampires in Draculius are nothing of the sort... in particular 'Seconds', vampires made from humans, can only turn humans into zombie-like Roams (and can potentially do so just by biting someone), so vampirism is actually a legitimate threat.  Firsts, like the protagonist and Rian (also called Shiso, like the True Ancestors in the Tsukihime world), don't have any of the vulnerabilities of their servant vampires... and they can make vampires that are sane.  However, most Firsts perspectives are... warped, to say the least.  There is nothing worse than a justified sense of superiority to make people insanely arrogant, lol.
The actual story of this tilts back and forth between the more absurd slice-of-life and the more serious parts, but this is one of those rare VNs that manages the balance nearly perfectly.  People die, the protagonist kills, and the enemy is ruthless (as is Belche, lol).  However, the slice of life in this VN tends to serve as a bright and amusing contrast to the darker elements, keeping it from becoming a purely serious VN. 
Overall, replaying this VN has confirmed to me something that I had more or less guessed over the last few years... they don't make ones like this one anymore, lol.
Edit: The pic is Belche just after she became a vampire.
Edit2: ... for those who wonder, the h-scenes in this VN... are pretty unique.  Most of them switch between Jun's and the girls' perspectives...

It's finally done.
I finally managed to 100% translated Bishoujo Mangekyou in its entirety. Actually it happened quite early, 20th, if I recall correctly. It took me 5 monsths and 7 days to translate the whole scrip according to my calculations.
It's ben awfully rewarding and I appreciate you all sticking with me along this project, my team and I will do our best to make sure the end product is of high quality.
I'll say this now, this won't be my last transaltion project, but it sure will be my last 'double-translation', so all the following projects will be translated purely from the original script and some double-script translations.
Anyhoo, now that the translation's done, I am now largely free, so I can return back to what I did before starting this project. The patch release date is still TBA, but it could be done in a few months' time.
Progress:
Translation: 100%
Editing: 20,3%
QC: 3,1%
Proofreading: 0%
 

Next up in our parade of visual novel punctuation: the interrobang. That’s right, I said the interrobang. Can you believe it?!   Huh?! What the hell's an interrobang?! "Interrobang" is the term we'll borrow to describe that little dogpile of punctuation, usually represented as ?! or !?, that sits at the end of nearly every question in a visual novel. It's meant to convey incredulity, combining elements of both a question and an exclamation. And, since the typical VN's stock-in-trade is exaggerated emotion, you'll end up seeing it a lot. Because why have your characters simply ask a question when they can GODDAMN SCREAM IT at Samuel L. Jackson levels.   I mentioned we're borrowing the term. The actual interrobang (‽, a ? combined with a !) is a bizarro punctuation mark crowdsourced by an ad agency back in 1962, along with the term “interrobang” itself. (If Wikipedia is to be believed, other suggested names included “QuizDing," “exclamaquest," and “exclarotive.”) It fell out of fashion after the 1960s, though, so you'll rarely see it in the wild. Still, it lurks in the Unicode of a few fonts here and there, lingering on like some creepy conjoined twins left chained to a steam pipe in the dark basement of the English language.   In the meantime, we'll appropriate it here to describe its unpacked counterparts, !? and ?!.   So is it “!?” or the other way around?! Now that we know what our faux interrobang does, our next concern is how it should be edited. Do we (!?) shoot first and ask questions later or (?!) vice versa? There’s little agreement among language mavens as to which is correct, and most VN scripts I’ve seen switch between the two on a whim — sometimes in the very same line. Thus, it falls to the editor and/or translator to impose some order on the situation.   The simple answer: Pick one and stick with it; I don't really care which. Consistency is our primary concern here. The standard emoji character set uses !?, so you'd be entirely justified in rolling with that. Some argue that !? is also more typographically appealing, and I'd tend to agree. However...   The advanced answer: My own preference is to switch between the two on a case-by-case basis, with ?! winning out 95% of the time. That's because I tend to think in terms of nested levels of punctuation, rather than a monolithic model. Which is to say, the sentence   should be read structurally as:
with the ! modifying a base question and turning it into an exclamation. Since that’s what the interrobang typically does, I end up using ?! in almost all instances. But there are exceptions. Imagine some friends who find out they've won a contest to meet David Hasselhoff. Mid-celebration, it occurs to them they didn't actually enter, so there's no way they should have won.
Here, a base exclamatory statement is being modified into a question: (We did it!)? so !? would be the more appropriate choice. This kind of usage requires an editor or translator to make lots of judgement calls, however. If you don’t feel comfortable getting that deep into the contextual weeds, there’s absolutely no shame in going the simple route and using one option across the board.
What about interrogangbangs?!?!? Last but not least, we have the situation where a character goes into full freakout mode and says things like:   In these cases, make sure the first piece of punctuation aligns with the intent of original sentence — is it an exclamation or a question? — then keep the rest of the punctuation exactly as it appears. Or, if you’re opting for the simple method, don’t change a thing. Just stick with the punctuation as provided and keep on walking. It’s what The Hoff would want.

Aah, I'm tired.
It has been three days since the last update, but I'ver already surprassed and perhaps even doubled the amount I translated, thus I'm completely exhausted. I see sex lines where-ever I go and to put it frankly, it's not fun. Well, at least now I'll have six whole days to recharge until I finish this.
That's right, I'm aiming for my translation to be finished next week. I won't laze around like I usually do, forget about translating for a few days, notice you an upcoming update and then proceed to translate for two days. No, I will finish this next week. And the best part of the whole novel is at hand, so my motivation has reached its maximum potential.
As for other things, the editing got a nice bump but QC is still frozen solid. Nothing can be done about it, sorry about that.
Look forward to the end next week.
Progress:
Translation: 7/8 script files finished, 8th script file 81% completed (~97%)
Editing: 18%
QC: 3,1%
Proofreading: 0%
 
Let's finish this, next week.

Now... I know you've heard me bash charage/moege before.  That isn't the purpose here, though.  I've played plenty of VNs of the type over the years, and a decent number of them have actually managed to make it pretty high on my list of recommendations, despite the genres' flaws.  I've also mentioned before that VN quality has fallen drastically in the past two years... and I still think that, despite a few seriously stand-out works this year in general and this month in particular.
The reason why I'm focusing on charage/moege right now is because I just played one great one, one average-quality one, and now I'm playing a mediocre (but pretty-looking) one.  Having seen, just in the last few weeks, the variance in the genre in detail... I've had it thrust in my face that my conclusions, which were previously just instinctive (thus I thought it was at least in part because I was tired of the genre/s in general) and thus had the possibility of not being entirely justified, were not entirely off the mark. 
To be specific, I'm somewhat bemused at the degree to which people have been pushing/hyping the one I'm playing right now, considering how pathetic this writer is at using the tools available to him. 
It isn't the first time where I've encountered a mediocre VN with great visuals that gets pushed by the Western community (mostly by people who haven't played it but voted on it anyway... or ones who just extracted the CGs or used a save file to read the h-scenes) like crazy.  However, it is the most egregious example of this particular social pattern I've seen recently. 
Now, leaving aside my outrage at completely unjustified hype and recommendations...  I have to ask, why is this VN, which probably never would have made it to production three years ago, is still somewhat better than the baseline of what I've experienced in the last two years?
Thinking about it, the answer came to me startlingly quickly... it is because it satisfies people's nether-regions and their desire for idealized slice-of-life with a few quirks without actually having a personality.  The very reason I hate it is the reason it has caught the interest of some in our community, and I find myself smiling wryly as I realize that most of the people who play it are only interested in fapping to archetypical moe-heroines. 
Understand, I actually don't have any objections to non-extreme fap material or moe fap material.  I don't have problems with others' sexuality in general (as long as they don't inflict it on me or create victims along the way).  However, I do have to wonder why these same people don't hit up one of the dozens of moe-nukige that get released every year instead, lol. 
Obliterating all twists and scent of personality from a VN story is reemerging as a habit in VN makers, after a very very brief hiatus, and it is coming back even worse than before.  On the bright side, it makes the gems stand out more... but it also means that I have to listen to people fawning over mindless drivel that isn't even good by genre standards.
I actually should have seen the signs long ago... considering Sougeki no Jaeger (Propeller's last VN) and the sudden reappearance of the previously endangered beast known as the 'pure moege' in the last two years (though only a few of them, thank god).  The problem now, as it was thirteen years ago, is that the market is saturated with VNs in general and charage/moege in particular.  Because of this - the Japanese being the most conservative businessmen on the planet - the various VN companies have started to 'go back to basics', trying again the sort of tactics that succeeded before.  The fact that the average otaku ero-gamer in Japan is perfectly willing to shell out $120 for a crappy game that happens to have a cute (and preferably half-nude) dakimakura attached actually makes this trend worse, as it is creating an artificial (and very temporary) inflation of a stagnant market (and not for the first, second, or even third time).  It is almost like the real estate market here in 2007... everybody knew the bottom was going to fall out eventually, but people kept putting their bets on making a few more bucks before it did.
Worse, even if the market does collapse, it is unlikely to result in better VNs, lol.

A couple blog posts back, I argued that the story exploration game Gone Home can be considered a visual novel. After some great discussion there, it seemed only logical to tackle the much bigger question: “What is a visual novel?
Which is why I’m not going to. That’s a spike-filled, snake-infested pit of a question if I ever saw one — and I already had spikes and snakes for breakfast. Instead, we’re going to attempt to answer a more nuanced question: “What are the minimum requirements something must meet in order to be usefully discussed as a visual novel?”
That’s a slightly different but way more useful angle. Just about anything can be used as a chair, but not everything is a “chair.” As a society, we’ve agreed on a certain set of characteristics that chairs share in common. This lets us discuss chairs with one another and be pretty sure we won't be given a pineapple to sit on.
We’ll do the same here. But for the sake of brevity, we’ll shorthand that question back down to “What’s a visual novel?” It’ll be our little secret.
The VNDB standard
The most obvious place to start looking for answers would be The Visual Novel Database (VNDB), home to info on more than 18,000 VNs. Here’s their answer, found in the VNDB FAQ:
As a working definition, this leaves a lot to be desired. There are an awful lot of cans, mays, typicals, and usuallys. Worse yet, you could easily dream up a VN that meets almost none of the assumptions laid out here — perhaps an extremely short text-based story in which the words run around the outside of a woodcut illustration. There’s absolutely no background music and the player answers no questions, which results in the same plot every time she plays.
A somewhat more satisfying answer can be found in VNDB’s list of requirements that titles must meet before being added to their database. For something to qualify as a visual novel:
Better, but still somewhat problematic. For one thing, it conflates the commonly accepted with the essential. What if someone wants to present a story in a manner other than ADV (text in box below image) or NVL (text overlaying image)? What if they thought of a more innovative configuration of text + art? Tough luck, Billy; go suck eggs in the corner. (They don't seem to strictly enforce this, by the way. Digital: A Love Story is on VNDB, even though it eschews both ADV and NVL for a diegetic presentation.) Moreover, these guidelines can’t seem to decide if no gameplay is allowed at all, as the first two sentences suggest, or if up to 1% simple gameplay is okay.
A title can also be added to the database if it’s a “visual novel/game” hybrid that meets the following requirements:
Again, problematic. The ADV/NVL issue is still there, of course, but now a new wrinkle’s been added: the privileging of narrative over dialogue. The assumption here is that a novel can’t consist entirely (or almost entirely) of dialogue, so a title that doesn’t “consistently” rely upon a formal narrator doesn’t qualify. In truth, there are any number of novels that take this form — The Awkward Age by Henry James, for one. Besides, if Key suddenly dropped a 50-hour all-dialogue school drama that looked and played exactly like Clannad, do you doubt for a second that we'd all consider it a VN? Or that FuwaReviews would give it one star?
But I don’t blame VNDB. They’re not looking to define the visual novel. They’re just trying to set up some semi-reasonable guidelines to help streamline their submission process. Without this, every staffer there would probably be eating gun-barrel sandwiches for lunch.

Fine. Let’s build something better.
I’ve sketched out the beginnings of a more general-purpose test for discussing something as a visual novel. I don’t consider this to be at all authoritative, and in fact, I invite you to critique it and build upon it in the comments below. It’s a starting point, nothing more.
A 7-point test for visual novels
1. It must be “read” on a digital device that outputs to a screen.
Fairly self-explanatory. Computers, consoles, handhelds, phones, e-readers — hell, even a smart watch would qualify. A printed VN would be considered a graphic novel (or a choose-your-own-adventure book). An audio file of a VN would be an audiobook.
2. It must convey a recognizable narrative.
Again, fairly self-explanatory. A VN must be a spoken or written account of connected events. In other words, it needs to tell a story, fictional or otherwise. The entirety of the Detroit phone book displayed in Ren’py is not a VN, even if it’s accompanied by a whole chorus line of catgirls.
3. It must use on-screen text as the primary avenue for conveying that narrative.
At the heart of any VN is the act of reading — eyes looking at words and turning them into meaning. If any significant portion of the story is delivered as voice-over or action without on-screen text, it isn’t a visual novel. Watching Game of Thrones on your laptop with subtitles doesn’t suddenly turn it into a VN.
4. It must have visuals paired with that narrative.
A visual novel must have visuals. Crazy talk, right? It doesn’t matter if those visuals are 8-bit pixel art, hand illustration, 3D renders, photography, or video. Ideally, these images would be germane to the narrative, but even that’s not technically necessary. Having unrelated images wouldn’t keep something from being a VN; it would just make it a *bad* VN.
5. It must be authored.
In other words, the story must be an act of creative intention by its author(s). A VN cannot rely upon sandboxes, emergent gameplay, or similar mechanisms to generate its narrative arc (though they may be used to flavor it). Such experiences, while highly interesting, result in something other than a novel.
6. Reading must comprise the majority of one’s experience with the title.
This one gets tricky, because it cuts deep to the heart of another unresolved question: “Is a visual novel a game?” For the purposes of this discussion, I’d suggest there’s a continuum that looks roughly like:
not a VN >> game w/ some VN qualities >> game/VN hybrid >> VN w/ some game qualities >> VN
Roughly past the halfway mark, we can usefully consider something to be a visual novel for terms of discussion. Below that, we can consider it a game but usefully discuss its VN-like elements (or lack thereof).
7. It must offer a deliberately framed reading experience.
This one’s a little tricky. Here’s the problem: a plain old Word doc containing a short story + embedded images could technically satisfy requirements #1 through #6, but we’d be hard-pressed to call that a visual novel. I’m still tweaking the language for #7, but the general idea is that just as a film director frames a shot, controlling what the audience can see and hear at any given moment, so too does the creator of a visual novel. This is unlike our hypothetical Word doc, in which you could widen the window to see more text than intended, skip around the story out of order, scroll the window so that you can read a passage without seeing its associated art, etc.
I briefly considered adding an eighth bullet point, but chose to leave it on the cutting room floor.
Why did this get dropped? Well, I imagined a traditional novel that was rigged to turn its pages at pre-defined intervals. You can’t speed it up, you can’t slow it down; all you have is an on/off switch. Would that lack of agency suddenly keep this particular book from being a novel? I couldn’t think of a good reason why it would, so I removed the requirement. But I'm open to good arguments for bringing it back.
Closing thoughts, for now
You might note that I’ve avoided any mention of things like: story genre, branching narratives, art style, country of origin, sexual content, sound/music, etc. That’s by design. These things help inform what type of VN a title is, not whether it can be discussed as one.
You might also note that my 7-point test would disqualify Gone Home from being considered a visual novel, invalidating my earlier argument. That’s also by design. Kill your darlings, amirite?

I've been playing video games more or less constantly for over twenty-five years. 
That's a very simple statement that holds a surprising amount of meaning, considering how much video games have changed since I first began playing them.
It began with the NES, for me... with Mario, Luigi, and the ducks.  I shot ducks out of the air, I jumped Mario across gaps and on top of turtles, without ever really understanding what was going on.  As a kid, this was fun, seriously.  Understand, this is the biggest point I am going to try to get across here... the difference between addiction and fun with video games.
I played rpgs, primarily jrpgs, throughout most of my first ten years as a gamer, starting with Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest), eventually reaching levels of true love with Final Fantasy II and III (IV and VI), Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Secret of Evermore, and Ogre Battle.  When the era of cd-gaming came, I played D&D dungeon-crawlers on a shitty dos computer setup, and I played every jrpg I could get my hands on, with a lot of shooters, strategy games, and sports games mixed in. 
Throughout all of that, I was still having fun.  Fun was my reason for continuing (I've always been a story-centric player, so I tended to stick with jrpgs, but I did play a lot of other stuff) and my reason for playing in the first place.
It was in the PS2 era that I first came to recognize the difference between taking pleasure in playing something and merely being addicted to it.  I picked up FFXI and started playing it on the PS2 (yes, it was possible to play it on the PS2), and for the first time, I knew addiction... for the first time, I poured hour after hour, day after day, into a game that I wasn't having any fun at.
I was constantly irritated, constantly driven to continue, whether for social reasons (friends I'd made in-game) or simply because I felt like I was 'almost there'. 
Then, one day, I suddenly looked up and realized... I was immensely depressed and not enjoying anything about the game.  The sense of having wasted my time... sent me into a funk that lasted the better part of a year.  I still played games, but the color seemed to leech out of the screen even as I played them.  I realized that I was seeing bits of FFXI in other games, and that was enough of a reason for me to actively hate them.
No game hit me this way more than FFXII... because FFXII's battle system is essentially that of FFXI with some tweaks.  Visually, it was a nightmare, and the weak story and characters only made it worse for me.
Ironically, it was the realization that I honestly didn't trust Squeenix to provide pleasurable games anymore that led me to start playing a lot of the weirder stuff out there... such as Eternal Darkness for the gamecube and the SMT series.  Ultimately, because I'd become very much aware of the difference between pleasure and addiction, I lost interest in games that I would once have jumped onto simply because they were jrpgs or done in a style I found interesting.  I started abusing Gamestop's used game 'seven-day return policy' to demo games, and I slowly but surely came to realize that I honestly and truly hate multiplayer games that aren't played in the same room. 
I am now an unabashed solo gamer, even outside of VNs.  I won't play most multiplayer games at all, and I hate games where the social element is as or more important than the actual gameplay or story.  Of course, if a game has an interesting concept, I'll try it... but if I feel that sensation I used to get from FFXI, I drop it immediately, cancelling all subscriptions and discarding all related materials without a second thought, even if I paid a good deal of money for them. 
To be blunt, life is too short to waste on playing something that is merely addictive (this coming from a VN junkie, I know).  That sensation of false social interaction you get from online gaming and the high you get from winning in competitive games is highly addictive... but are you having fun, really? I wonder, how many younger gamers actually know what it is like to enjoy a video game, rather than simply being addicted to one?  This is a question that seriously bothers me, as I saw my young cousin playing Call of Duty (whatever the latest one is) online, unsmiling, for two days straight while we were staying at their place a few months back.  He really, really wasn't enjoying himself.  He was angry, depressed, and frustrated, but I never saw even a hint of a smile when he won, only this vague expression of relief he probably thought was a smile.  Was that relief that his team-mates weren't treating him like a worthless noob or an incompetent, or was it simply because the match was over and he could relax?  I don't know, because I didn't ask.  I know from experience that the difference between addiction and fun is fine enough that most people don't even recognize it is there until they are forced to.
What are your experiences, gamers of Fuwa?