twdarkeh

I encourage everyone to buy a legitimate copy of the games if you can. Our patches should still work with them, I think.

Are you offering to pick stuff up for people? Or what?

Well, to be fair, fair market value is pretty subjective. Fair market value is wherever the meeting point between what the people selling are willing to take and the people buying are willing to spend. So work that was intended to be done for free anyway would logically have a lower value that work someone was paid for from the start. That said, the value of fan translations is more complex than simple time invested. Many fan translation projects build up fairly loyal fanbases, and some of those fanbases get quite big. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I heard Sekai Project brought in the fan translator for grisaia no kajitsu, that's what motivated me to buy it; because I already knew the quality would be high and trusted the translator. Each game itself also has a fan base, that can be appealed to or not based on other factors. If you license a game that has a fan translation, DMCA every fan-TL patch of it, and then don't do anything with it for 2 years, that fan base is likely to be somewhat miffed, and probably not likely to give you money. If you get it out quickly, more people are probably going to buy it. So buying an existing TL can greatly reduce the time from license to release. And since you start getting return on investment faster, you have less of your capital tied up for less time overall. Again, look at Sekai Project with Clannad. They raised money for it, with the fan-TLs heavily promoting the official project, and they got it out in a reasonable time frame. I don't know how their sales or doing or what their margin on it is, but I imagine they made a pretty hefty sum on it. On the topic as a whole, I don't much care one way or the other. Fan translations aren't going anywhere; there are just too many VNs for the three major publishers to work with, even if they hired every fan translator in sight. There are also Japanese companies that are never going to license their stuff to the west for whatever reason. But at the same time, I feel that if publishers are buying up big name fan-TL projects, that'll drive TLs to the more well known VNs in hopes of getting bought out, and away from the lesser known games that fewer people are willing to work on already. So it's a somewhat mixed bag.

I'm confused as to what that is.

There are only 3, and one of them is an After.

It occurs to me that some of you probably don't actually read the blog, so I'll post it here if you want to discuss it: The way A-1 and A-2s files are structured, such as the script and image names, as well as things such as the eventtype text, heavily suggest Minatosoft is planning to release all the games as a single version at some point. I wouldn't say I'm 100% sure of it, but they've certainly put quite a bit of effort in to a file system that will let them do that.

Well, have some more news then.

One of them is simply the names in the tooltips for the event mode. Three names that are redundant, so not a whole lot of motivation, but also maybe worth doing. Dunno. The text in the () literally says "Benkei". It's somewhat pointless, but it's still japanese text.

Well, A-1's UI is basically done. There are some minor things we're thinking about doing but probably won't, so other than that, woo.

For those of you who don't actually follow the blog religiously as you should, posted an update.

It seems they're releasing A-5 one file at a time.

Hey, where did you get the calendar? I'd like to buy it myself if possible.

I'd like them as well.

The reason A is so compelling is there is no single story-line. It's basically just a collection of single-route VNs, since you directly choose the route you want without any guesswork regarding vague conversation choices. The routes still have some variance within them, but you know that you're not going to end up in the wrong girl's route. This is something that set Maji Koi apart; while not necessarily unique, it is rare enough to be compelling. The problem with S was that it took the base routes from the first game, robbed them of the mixture of comedic and serious story, and made them essentially short sex-based bullshit. The Margit, Kokoro, and Iyo routes started well, but finished poorly and also lacked any real depth, failing to add anything to any of the characters. Only Monshiro and Tsubame were proper routes(and Koyuki, but for spoiler reasons, I won't discuss the myriad of issues there), and two routes that, in my opinion, could only charitably be called passable can't carry the weight of the rest of the game's failure. This was especially a shame, since from a format, feature, and ease of translation standpoint, S was vastly superior. It had everything going for it, other than the story, which is why, again in my opinion, the game was largely a failure. A preserves those things that made S great from a technical standpoint, and adds back in the story based content, returns to proper character development, and actually put a bit of effort in to the writing. Even the H-scenes are better written than large swaths of the story from the 5 original girls in S. It's one reason I wanted to keep going, and I think it's why the team stuck together. As bad as S was, as annoying as it got, A reminded us why we liked the series in the first place(Koyuki's route played a role in this, as it was story based, but again, due to spoilers, I won't go into depth on this). This is obviously just my opinion, so feel free to disregard it, but I think that A is enough. Are there girls/routes in general I'd have liked to see? Sure. I liked the friend arcs from the first game; Moro's route was excellent, and Capt's was just hilarious. I'd have liked to see something similar for Gen and Kuma. As well as a proper route for Kokoro. However, the game has run it's course, and if it can end strong with what we have in A, then I'd rather it stay like that than to descend back into what S was.

As amusing as this would be, I think we'd get crucified for ruining someones best girl. So as long as it's Chris, I don't mind.

To be frank, I doubt the uncensor for S will get done anytime soon, if ever. And no, we don't really plan on doing one for A, unless someone wants to volunteer.

Is alright. I like A. Helps us forget S was a thing.

I believe the writer has said he's done with the series, but someone else would need to dig up the quote and translate it, since I'm going off a poor machine translation of a post on their website when I was looking for something else.

Sorry, I don't really check this thread very often anymore. Please see the website(sift through the comments, we never did make a proper post for it); or PM me or Kardomol about a manual patch.

In my view, discussing whether or not the VN is good is still about the VN. As long as you're not being rude about it or insulting those who do like it, it's a valid discussion topic.

Based on the total size of the scripts compared to the H-scene scripts(of which there are relatively few), A is much more story focused.

Well, wairu did common, kokoro, margit, tsubame, monshiro, iyo, and kosugi; all we did was QC them, and even that was somewhat annoying. I was specifically referring to the ones we did from scratch.

While I can't speak for the others, S almost made me quit wanting to work on maji koi at all, because everything but Koyuki was trash.

It's fine. It's marginally related to the game, and it's not like we post updates here anyway. All updates are posted on the website linked in the project thread. In retrospect, I should probably also update the project thread, but am so lazy.

As some may have noticed, both this and the project thread have been renamed to reflect that we're going to keep working on the series. How far we'll go depends on the others, but work on A-2 is beginning, while A-1 has hit some bumps that we'll work out eventually.