Decay

I have a feeling you're misunderstanding both visual novels as a medium and Telltale's style of adventure games. School Days is an exception. I could point out that in School Days, the end states are not binary like you suggest and actually branch even more, but that's besides the point. That game exists on an extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to branching stories (and itself doesn't actually quality as a VN, truthfully). The vast majority of VNs have limited branching, especially modern VNs. In the modern VN, you make a series of choices that maybe change a few lines of text for each one, and through those choices it determines which "route" you end up on, which themselves are linear stories. Older VNs like Clannad have far more choices, but still ultimately have a route system where the game simply tells a series of linear stories to you. VNs that are like School Days are exceptionally rare. Telltale's adventure games, meanwhile, aren't really supposed to have substantially different endings/routes. That's not really the point of those games. Maybe six years ago there was some confusion as to what kind of games these were meant to be, but there shouldn't be any now. When I first played it in 2012, I found Telltale's TWD brilliant. The thing it did was that it told a single specific story with a single outcome whose progression was heavily influenced by the player. Its story beats were custom-delivered for every player based on their actions, which enhanced the emotional impact without compromising the authored experience. By contrast, I find that David Cage's games overreach and end up with incredibly sloppy narratives as a result. Too bad Telltale peaked with TWD season 1. The minds behind that game left the company soon after its completion, and telltale's been chasing after that success ever since. Anyway, for VN recommendations, check out our recommendations forum. Perhaps you can find a thread there suited to your own tastes, or you could make a new one. I'm guessing you're probably not going to want to jump straight into moe romance hell. If you enjoyed Steins;Gate, then I'll recommend Chaos;Child to you, another game set in the same world. Or for something structured more like the kind of typical PC VNs that are popular around here, and something much more action-oriented, Dies irae.

It's the person who translated the last few Sonohana games for MG.

To be honest, I'm still pretty skeptical that Kotonoha Amrilato will turn out okay. I usually don't fall for the "impossible to translate kamige" meme but the very nature of this game makes it extremely hard to translate. It's not just about overcoming a language barrier, but it's very specifically about approaching and learning Esperanto from the perspective of a Japanese speaker, and the similarities and differences between the two languages. There will be a lot of rewriting involved. Like, a whole lot. I feel like it's the kind of work that only means anything when read in the language it was originally written in, and that any "proper" translation for it would just be a completely different thing. It's a rather confusing choice of license for MG when you consider that.

Well, it's unknown when exactly they licensed this new one. But the fact that they announced it means that whatever issues they ran into with ChuableSoft's bankruptcy have been cleared up, yeah.

Erm, to be clear here, VonKlaus did not mean someone helped them go bankrupt, VonKlaus is suggesting that someone helped them recover from bankruptcy (basically, that someone saved them). He is also guessing that maybe it was MangaGamer who helped them. I don't know if this is true. It's possible that Chuable is still bankrupt. Just because MG is publishing more of their games doesn't necessarily mean that Chuable has been saved. People should also understand that a bankrupt company doesn't just suddenly cease to exist. Chuable's situation seemed very complicated and it clearly put MG in a similarly complicated position, otherwise they would've published SukiSuki ages ago. The way MangaGamer tends to license things is by paying little money up-front but paying out royalties to the license holders. If the license holder happened to change hands, MG would have to establish relations with the new license holder, and the new license holder oftentimes has the right to cancel the contract, meaning you have to renegotiate everything. That's if the license changed hands. It's also possible that Chuable was meant to do a large amount of the technical work and suddenly couldn't. We probably won't ever find out unless MG or Chuable ever goes into detail over what happened, which they probably won't. It would be an interesting read if they did, though.

Does your personal experience come from another creative field like localization? At the end of the day, it is a creative process and the way people grow in it is fundamentally different from the way people grow in less creative fields. Office workers tend to grow faster over time, while artists, writers, translators, etc, tend to become better. To a certain point, at least. There are apexes to be reached in any individual's growth.

The way it reads, it's either edited machine translation (edited by someone who only somewhat knows english) or manually translated by people who are about as bad. It's not particularly relevant, though. What's important is how ridiculously awful this translation is.

Experience can absolutely make you better, though. Proof: me. It all depends on the attitude you approach your work/hobby with. In fact, many translators I've talked to have said that they've become slower with experience, not faster. Inexperienced translators tend to work quickly, going with very direct and literal translations, and basically just translating word-by-word without thinking deeply about it. More experienced translators will tend to read into nuance, will consider context more, and will spend more time finding ways to eloquently write what is being expressed. Obviously there are outliers. Some translators will never change their translation style with experience. But that's not everyone. The same goes for editors. When I first started Dracu-Riot, I was really sloppy. I improved rapidly as I worked though and ended up having to redo a lot of my early work. I was brand new to editing back then which accounts for the rapid pace of improvement, but I don't think I'm going to stop improving ever.

The real answer is that the translator translates faster than anyone else at the company can keep up with. Arunaru is a beast.

MangaGamer licensing another chuablesoft title when their current one is still in limbo strikes me as highly unlikely. Another Moonstone announcement seems very reasonable and there was that Sakura hint, but sometimes MG likes to throw in fakeouts, hints that seem obvious but actually mean something completely different. Still, it's probably what everyone's saying. One of the three announcements from current partners will probably be a nukige. Maybe another Ammolite title? Or another Atelier Sakura NTR game. Actually, maybe that's the real meaning of the Sakura hint.

Just off doing their own thing, with their friends or by themselves. Most people will check in at a community or two every now and again, but not actively participate. They get their news by browsing storefronts and maybe occasionally checking company twitters and such. People like these are actually the majority of the VN market (thousands of people buy every new release, with many of them being different each time, yet not anywhere near that many people are active or even lurk these communities), but are incredibly hard to get data on and predict.

The results show that a survey posted exclusively in weeb communities is mostly taken by weebs. Largely, yeah, though the degrees of weebness varies. I take umbrage with the survey giver stating that the target group are those "interested enough" in VNs to be part of a community, as if anyone not in a community lacks interest or isn't as big of a fan. There are a large number of dedicated VN fans who don't participate in any community (I know a few who were big enough fans of VNs to begin fan translating some without ever being a member of a community) as well as a number of members of the community who only casually read VNs. Basically, this survey was utterly meaningless from the start, but I'm sure we all knew that already.

The official patch has been released. It's probably not what most people want, but it seems the best we'll get officially: https://www.fakku.net/forums/games/maitetsu-fixes-and-updates Long story short, the version that was initially released was the version Lose intended to release, and is in fact the version of Maitetsu they'll be selling in Japan in an upcoming re-release. Fakku and Sekai Project both sat down with Lose and they came to a compromise. Some of the ecchi content like the upskirt will be restored, but none of the main story nudity will. Nipples will remain hidden. It seems rather absurd to me that they're unwilling to show boobs in the main story but are perfectly okay with including hardcore pornography featuring the same characters. I don't understand Lose's thinking here.

Yes, they funded and published Iwaihime. DMM seems somewhat willing to work with western publishers. But yeah, maybe they'll pull a frontwing and decide to do their own stuff themselves from now on, on top of licensing from other companies in Japan. Who knows. Witch Hunt worked with expressed permission from Ryukishi 07. I'm guessing they don't want to translate anything of his without permission, especially now that they've worked with MangaGamer on the official Umineko release. And R07 can't give permission for Iwaihime, indeed.

You already asked for almost the exact same thing a day ago. Please stop creating new threads just to ask for the same stuff over and over again. If you have further questions or requests, post in one of the threads you already made instead of making a new one.

Hobibox is a huge corporation that has been actively trying to release stuff internationally for a very long time. See their parent producer: https://vndb.org/p1665 Many of their imprints have games released by english-language VN publishers. They are also a subsidiary of DMM, a big online adult entertainment group. It's worth noting that there's some misinformation going around stating that this is being self-published by the original Japanese developers/publishers. This is not the case. The original developer was Cube, a subsidiary of Cuffs, which from what I can tell has no formal relationship with DMM/Hobibox. What appears to have happened is an actual licensing arrangement where DMM/Hobibox licensed the rights to a chinese and english release from Cuffs, just like how a western VN publisher like MangaGamer would. So essentially, it's still the same setup of a third-party company licensing, translating, and releasing a game in another language, except that Cuff turned down offers from proper English companies in order to work with a Japanese company that has no idea what they're doing. Fun stuff.

This translation definitely seems quite a bit worse than If My Heart Had Wings.

There have been a ton of lengthy, fully uncensored VNs released by MangaGamer.

The most likely scenario is that the project manager made a decision that wasn't properly communicated to PR. If that was even PR Sanahtlig talked to and not just some other person with the company who naturally wouldn't be fully aware of what's happening with projects they're not involved with.

Sorry for the late reply. You can get away with reading it in that order if you really wish, but it is not the ideal order. You will miss references to later rance games in the remakes. And also there will be a lot of waiting involved for the translations. Rance 5D and 6 represents what is basically a fresh start for the series. It still feels like you're jumping into a well-established fiction but they do a decent job at getting new players into the world of Rance and rely on almost none of the previous games' stories. Alicesoft made 01 and 03 in particular expecting a significant number of their players to have played 5-8 but not 1-4 since those are super old and dated. Basically, they expected their player base to be unfamiliar with the old games but still play each new game as it comes out, and wrote/designed them accordingly. (I'm not including 02 because that is largely the same as the original actually)

The chronology of the Rance series is actually kinda weird, in that Rance X leans on story elements that were inserted into the remakes of 1 and 3. And those remakes contain references to other Rance games. So the general recommended read order is the release order, with 1 through 4 being largely ignorable.

If you're talking about the west specifically, then I can actually see Evenicle becoming more popular here. At least until Rance X comes out. Japan, though? Definitely not. I wouldn't be shocked if Alicesoft makes a sequel some day but it's not about to become their new flagship franchise or anything.

Summer Pockets seems more on the scale of Air instead of Clannad or Little Busters. It seems to be a decently large VN, but not as huge as some of Key's other ones.

R-Right, of course I noticed that sentence. >.>

01 was a fully redone game with lots of new content and story stuff, was it not?