Kenshin_sama

I thought about trying to explain the reasons... but they tend to vary from person to person.  Some enjoy it because it makes them feel like they are better/more able than others, others purely like adding new vocabulary and grammar usage to their repertoire, and yet others just enjoy the magic of what can be done with languages if you are creative enough.  To be blunt, I'm more of the last one at this point... early on, it was more a bit of reason one and two though.  Nowadays, I've  just gotten to the point where an interesting set of lines is enough to make me feel happy, which I know sounds weird.
To be blunt, Japanese is a much, much more flexible language than English... at least American English, anyway.  The Japanese language never quite abandoned indirectness, which is seen as dishonest by many English speakers.  It is also one of the prime reasons why it is so difficult to translate Japanese to English and why I can still find new things to learn by replaying games like this over and over.  Americans habitually avoid indirect language outside of trained creative writing and politics, and anyone seen using it is seen as smarmy or dishonest (unless you agree with them, of course, lol).  
Implied subjects, layered meanings, colloquialisms, etc etc... I can always find something new if I look hard enough in games like this.

You know, if it weren't for you, I might not even consider reading EVNs. I still haven't, but I will eventually! I've got Highway Blossoms sitting in my library!
And yeah, mate, enjoy your break. Maybe in the meantime you could try watching something like Bofuri? That might help to alleviate some of your stress.

In terms of books I sampled (read the first ten chapters at least) the number balloons to 300 or so... the seventy I'm talking about are the ones I was finding the most interesting.  Here is a list of the ones I enjoyed the most (even if some were trashy).
The Chaos Seeds (think an isekai/other world story with a protagonist who constantly swings back and forth between enlightened self-interest, pragmatism, and lust for power/stat geeking).
The Stork Tower (extremely interesting dystopian future with a genius street rat who makes powerful enemies in the virtual and real worlds)
Light Online (protagonist starts out as an out-of-luck NEET who is about to be turned into a virtual slave and then manages to rise high by playing a VRMMO in an unusual style).
The Ten Realms - Protagonists are an amputee mercenary named Erik and his comrade and best friend Rugrat.  They end up in the Ten Realms, two soldiers in a land of magic, and they quickly realize the only way to be themselves is to gain power and challenge themselves.  Sort of a blend of Wuxia cultivation, military fantasy, and craft obsessive nation-building with two foul-mouthed soldiers with hidden depths leading the way.
The Dark Elf Chronicles- In a future where a 'zombie particle' has contaminated most of the lifeforms on Earth, a few survivors try to live long enough to find a way to copy themselves into an online game while also stabilizing said game so it won't be a pure hellworld when they do so.  Tons of ups and downs in this story.
The Shadow Sun series- In this one, a mysterious System essentially unleashes massive numbers of super-powered monsters to cull humanity in preparation for aliens bidding on the land and resources.  Very much a survival apocalypse story for the first three books.  
The Silver Fox & the Western Hero - Pure Wuxia with hardcore cultivation and horrid levels of racial prejudice... and a young former American plopped down in the middle who has a stat sheet in his head.  The protagonist seems fairly normal, until he isn't.  He is intelligent to the point of being brilliant, and absolutely devoted to the path he chooses.  However, he is also capable of rising above his own desires at key points.  Honestly, I can't wait until the next one comes out.
Battleborne-  First in a new series about a soldier who dies with his unit and gets reincarnated as a combination of several races by a Valkyrie as reward for his life of war and bravery.
All Trades- A former conman goes into a virtual reality game to earn the money to give back to the family that supported him after his term in prison.  He really has turned a new leaf, but he quickly finds himself riding the figurative tiger by the tail as he tries to do right by those around him while also earning enough money to pay off his loan shark.

Conjueror gave it a bad review, so no thank you. 

Thanks! You too!
Oh and I hope the apps work out for you. Best of luck to ya.

Nice.
Maybe i will give it a try to

Oh nice! Kinda wish it had a physical release so I could read it before bed, but I am happy it has a translation at all. I still have a lot of fond memories of Kokoro Connect, and I'm excited to finally be able to enjoy its source material.
Oh and I think you accidentally wrote Inaba when you most definitely meant Iori. No big deal; it happens to the best of us.

Good job, I really liked the definitions thing showed in your example. Did you create this deck or card?

I once saw a polyglot study guide (polyglot is usually defined as knowing at least 5 languages). Apparently they use many different study techniques, but they all have a few things in common:
study at least 30 minutes each day. have fun while studying. Make sure it will not feel like a chore you have to do even if you don't want to. don't study more than one language at a time. The part about studying every single day is important because the human brain has a place for foreign languages. You need to trigger it with the language of your choice daily. If you only trigger it occasionally, you won't get it into the mindset of the language in question. It's not the amount of time you spend, it's how you spend it. 30 minutes a day is way more beneficial for remembering what you study than a 5 hour study session every Sunday even if the daily study only sums up to 3.5 hours weekly.

Nice, doesn't hurt to have a new guide on JP every now and then. Even if you don't take in much of what you read it certainly is interesting to hear how other people learn a language.
I look forward to seeing how others got innate in the language. Personally hard learning grammar books/dictionary books/sheets haven't really done any wonders for me compared to the arguably more lazy route of just reading, watching JP shows, looking up stuff and taking down notes of things you don't understand until you "understand" the grammar / sentences (and look up the things you've forgotten every now and then).

Is that why you left it out of your title? Smart move, actually. I'd be much more likely to scroll past your blog entry if you did since I kinda lost interest in the main VN.

That's a fascinating way to think about it, I think you're right.
I'm hardly well versed in Chuuni but I was also curious as to its meaning at heart.
I think it's about greater purpose/meaning, ascending beyond the bounds of everyday thought and society, power to resist shackles and to be able to carve one's emotions upon the world.
It differs from power fantasy in that the focus in about escaping society and having purpose, as opposed to masterfully puppeteering the real world.

You're much better off just getting someone who knows what they're doing translating it in the first place. Translation checking is a luxury some localization projects have, but at least in fan translations, it's largely there to compensate for the fact that most of the people working in fan translations just aren't very good translators. 99% of the time, if they were passable at translating, they'd get out of fan translation and translate for a living.
If the translation is best described as garble, no editor can save it short of going to check every translated line and effectively redoing the work. I think what you're saying here is predicated on a mistaken assumption people often make when talking about localization: that there's some sort pidgin language between Japanese and English (let's call it Fantranslationese). Bizarrely, some people not only believe in the existence of Fantranslationese, but they have even convinced themselves that they prefer to read Fantranslationese over English. But make no mistake: Fantranslationese is not a language, and it does not communicate anything like what the original Japanese did and what a decent English translation would. Fantranslationese is a pale shadow of a language, and an editor can only do so much to fix a "translation" attempting to use it short of retranslating the work because the editor otherwise doesn't actually get an experience like reading the original. Relying on editors to inject flair into a Fantranslationese script means you lost all the flair that was in the original. You're certainly not there yet, but you're well on your way to writing fanfiction instead of a translation, if you go this route.
Editors should be polishing a translation, smoothing out rough edges and ensuring consistency. They absolutely should be fixing the translator's mistakes, always with the aid of the translator, because the editor sees the work differently and therefore is going to rarely find translation mistakes due to their different view. This is a given especially because of how ambiguous and context-dependent Japanese is.
I never want to work on any project with a translator who believes this.

If only the game were for a different audience.  That guy is one cute trap for sure.

For me, it's all about conditions. Even with the best anime I've ever watched, I usually won't retain information about them for very long. When I read or watch anything, I can only retain enough information to argue over it for a year. It takes somewhere between 8 to 10 years for me to forget something entirely. And see, that's the problem I had with re-reading Little Busters. Because the story is still so fresh in my memory from the 2013 anime adaption, I'm having some difficulty re-reading the whole thing from the beginning to get to the EX routes. I did want to learn the differences between the version I read way back and what I'm reading now, but I think I'll just take a pass.

That's so untrue though

Seriously, that is really petty of them to go to such lengths to cover up their lies. I'll be sure to spread this information around in hopes that this comes back to bite them. There's only so much I can tolerate before I start speaking out against something.

Seriously, that is really petty of them to go to such lengths to cover up their lies. I'll be sure to spread this information around in hopes that this comes back to bite them. There's only so much I can tolerate before I start speaking out against something.

The VNTL community is lucky to have you as an editor. I was already interested in picking up Majo Nikki before I saw this post, but your edit work has added quite a bit to that. One of my many motivations for learning Japanese is the general lack of quality in translation, so your blog entry is rather refreshing.
Even though it'll be several years before I start it, I'm more interested in translating than I am in editing (I'm still only partway through the Japanese grammar guide), but I'll still try to keep these things in mind so that I don't have to rely that much on an editor.
Good luck on the rest of the project, pal!

With over 1000+ hours in SC1, 2000+ hours in SC2, and 500+ hours in osu, I think I know the flavours of addiction. I played Starcraft 1 and Starcraft 2 all the time for about a year and two years respectively, quitting mostly just before I went into Uni. Also was addicted to osu in streaks. Now I'm more sensitive to whether or not I'm actually enjoying the game, and I can put in perspective the gratification I'm getting from it.
Also, about MMorpg's, when I came back and tried MMOrpg's I was suprised at how weak the player to player interaction is by default. Couldn't stand it.
Glad you realized that. From someone who's gone through this... don't be too hard on yourself if it takes time to get off the game. It's still an activity that you are very used to. Especially for people who have used games as a diversion from real world tasks, important to recognize that failing in real world stuff (like trying to do X, and failing) isn't the end of the world, nor something to be afraid of, you just have to learn from it and try again. RL stuff relies on strategy and skill, and takes time to figure out, just like games.

That has given me a lot to think about.
Ever since I started playing WoW, I've very much developed the kind of addiction you described. Granted, I actually did enjoy the WotLK expansion, but I only played Cataclysm for the PvE rankings. It didn't help at all that I was at the top of performance charts and meters in my guild, other guilds, and sometimes even worldwide (that's when the real obsession begins). Since then, I've put myself through misery in games like Runescape and Osu for the sole purpose of gaining ranks and feeding my ego. Granted, I did enjoy doing quests in Runescape, but I've finished them all and I'm kinda dreading the thought of putting hundreds of hours into grinding xp for ranks. Osu is pretty fun to play on certain beatmaps, but it's a ton of work to get decent at it and it's easy to fall into bad habits that can kill the game for you. I've also put a lot more strain on my tapping hand than I should have. I loved playing Osu at first, but it's been a couple years now and it feels more like I'm in it for the fame than for the fun.
The one thing about playing games like these is that they make me feel like I'm actually good at something. I was raised in a low-income family, and because my parents were always away at work and I had too many responsibilities taking care of my siblings, doing chores, and never having a regular allowance to spend, I never had the chance to pick up a more productive hobby. A small handful of video games and basic cable were all I had for the longest time. As much as I loved playing enjoyable games that weren't competitive, I still felt like I was lacking something. With online games, I loved the idea of being acknowledged for my skills as a gamer because it gave me a certain sense of pride. Considering how average I am in everything else, this was refreshing in a way. Sadly, however, there are too many downsides to this. The biggest one is that even if I do feel accomplished, I'm still not happy. I get a brief moment of satisfaction whenever someone acknowledges my prowess, but it doesn't last long. Having to put time into something I don't like has made it more difficult for me to cope with depression. I can also get pretty anxious when I'm coming close to a major achievement that I could mess up on. Things like keeping my hardcore status (not dying) on Runescape during a tough boss fight or holding out for a full combo on Osu are pretty nerve-wracking. And because it takes up so much time, I have difficulty putting in the time I need to get my life together (losing weight, finding a job, preparing for college, etc), and that just drives me even further into depression. Pulling myself out of online games would free up a lot of my time, which I could spend doing things I actually enjoy.
Thanks for posting this. Reading your article and typing about my experience helped me realize how much of a hole I've dug myself into with online games. I don't know if it'll last long (it probably will), but right now I'm convinced that I shouldn't be playing these anymore.