Decay

Oh, stop being a baby. MG has been releasing a shitload of other stuff lately. Don't throw a tantrum just because they're throwing fans of other stuff a bone this con.

To be honest, it's a little hard to get excited by new Rance announcements when MangaGamer still has two other Rance games in their backlog waiting to be released. And we all expected these announcements to happen at some point anyway. For people wondering about 01/02/03, those games are fairly short and we probably won't see X for at least two more years, maybe even more. I wouldn't be surprised if the remakes get translated and released before X, even though X was announced first. I really hope MangaGamer at least releases 03 first. I think 6 is the start of a new story arc and works on its own, but it comes bundled with 5D and that one is very short and introduces a few of the characters in 6, so you may as well start with 5D.

I'm a bit biased since I was the dracu riot editor, but I dispute the notion that only sophisticated prose needs to be written well. I find it really important for comedy as well, and Dracu-Riot is a comedy game first and foremost. The leaked patch read halfway decently on the surface, but the moment you stopped and thought about almost any exchange of dialogue in the game, you'd find a ton of little inconsistencies that break the flow. The patch actually contained thousands of unfixed mistranslations on the micro scale. So while you could accurately glean the bigger picture from the translation, most of the dialogue felt a little off. The comedy that relied on absurd situations all still worked, but most of the banter lacked impact and wasn't as entertaining as it could've been. My team and I fixed all of those little errors, and I think the game is a lot more entertaining as a result (though of course I would, lol). That, in addition to us trying to make the prose more natural in general as well as a (light-handed) attempt at making the different character personalities more distinct meant that over 70% of the lines were changed from that patch, so the changes probably aren't as minor as you're thinking. Though I perfectly understand why someone wouldn't want to read the whole VN again if they already read the fan tl version.

The game's writer mentioned it in an almost off-hand comment on his twitter a few years ago, but there's been complete silence on it since then. This is the first time it's been properly announced.

Well, at least Hard Work (an EVN) was announced a while ago. The showing this year was just an update/demo announcement? And Mischievous Sensation is another third party EVN. They also announced that I Walk Among Zombies ep1 is releasing... right now, actually! https://denpasoft.com/products/i-walk-among-zombies

Literal h-scene translations can be a problem too. I might just die if I have to read about a cock "clawing away at her inner walls" one more time. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if "beat that pussy up" was a literal translation too, based on how so many literal translations end up sounding more like snuff than sex. I support creative translations in h-scenes, as long as the translator or editor actually understands what is and isn't erotic for english readers. Here's an especially poignant line from Insem's Dracu-Riot translation. Warning: not mind safe. Maybe this is hot for someone like @Dergonu, but not me.

JAST didn't buy the fan translation for sweet pool, and I'm pretty sure they're not buying the fan translations for these, either.

To explain exactly what makes totono special would be a huge spoiler. Which means it's the type of school life VN where major spoilers are possible. There's a lot more to it than it first seems. I wouldn't say it's much like Subahibi. If you want to compare it to another VN, I'd say Doki Doki Literature Club is a poor man's version of totono.

That's Flowers Summer, and it's available at AX already and is coming out everywhere else in 11 days.

No real news. They handed out the demo, then moved on without saying anything about the actual status of the translation. Panel video here btw: https://www.pscp.tv/w/1BRKjeOQApBxw It's sideways, so watch it on your phone or rotate your monitor.

Ask about Sumaga while you're at it. I'm curious if that's in the same boat.

There was actually django news at the panel! It's canceled. No, really. They said that unless Nitro+ ever releases a windows 10 version (not a guarantee), it's never happening.

Okay, I'm glad you moved the goalposts to a point that we at least somewhat agree on (that the game shouldn't have been released in this state).

The point is, we have absolutely no way of knowing one way or another. In the absence of any evidence or even any hint or indication that they knew beforehand, it's absurd to act like they definitely did. You can have your suspicions, but don't act like it's a fact.

This presumes that they knew about the problem prior to release. If they did, they would've seen this shitstorm coming and wouldn't have intentionally walked into it. Speculating that they knew beforehand gets us nowhere. At that point you're just finding reasons to be mad for the sake of being mad.

They already did admit the issue and state that they're seeking a solution, though? I dunno what kind of point you're even trying to make here.

Okay, sorry, they just announced Togainu no Chi, Lamento, and Dramatical Murder. None of the fandiscs, smaller titles yet.

JAST announcements: Flowers Summer and Trample on Schatten BOTH releasing on July 16th, with early copies available at AX. Togainu no Chi, Lamento, and Dramatical Murder announced for JAST Blue, their BL brand. Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi. announced. This game is really popular. Sweet Pool is coming soon, and not just "jast time soon." Work on Flowers Autumn has started (though JAST already announced their intent to translate the entire series a few years ago)

Correct. None of the h-scenes are in the main story in the Japanese version. They're all intended to only be accessible via menu. Kinda like how Chrono Clock or eden* were. The Fakku version has all of those scenes. Mountains out of molehills, imo. A handful of altered or missing ecchi CGs and a dozen lines without voices is not the end of the world. The translation accuracy is a bigger concern, but I dunno if I trust Fakku comments on that. This whole ordeal seems way over-dramatic for how small the issue really is. Like, should it have been released in this state? No, and I do hope it gets fixed soon. But is it really bad enough to start a witch hunt for responsible parties and demand refunds? Even Fakku's initial statement seemed outrageous to me. I get the feeling that they are just trying to win points with the anti-SP and anti-censorship crowds and are willing to stir up drama and throw SP under the bus to get these points.

This is probably true. The problem is easier for QA to miss than it first seems, really. I've never seen the QA for any company specifically check against the unaltered japanese version. They likely had no idea there was supposed to be anything different about the 18+ version.

Seems like your questions were largely addressed without me. Anyway, I'm the current theoretical leader of the reviews team, but I don't actually have much control of the reviews hub in general, and I'm not entirely sure of how it even works, to be completely honest. I probably have the ability to hook you up in theory, but I have no idea how. Hopefully Nayleen does. Sadly the reviews team itself is for all intents and purposes dead. I haven't had the time to watch over it like I should, and there are no more active contributors. I don't think anyone will be added to the team either until we either find a new team leader or I suddenly get a lot more time on my hands to properly manage things. I'm reluctant to add anyone else if I can't be around much to oversee things.

If you don't feel okay about having paid for the product you bought, just refund it. I really doubt they care either way.

There's not much you can do, but I wouldn't say that MoeNovel has been completely unresponsive to fan sentiment. Miagete Goran/A Sky Full of Stars may have the h-scenes removed but it is otherwise fairly unbutchered, with references to sex, sexual humor, etc still intact. This is contrary to If My Heart Had Wings, which utterly butchered the original game, changed large story elements, changed every reference of "boobs" to "eyes" ("I bet Aoi likes girls with big eyes"), etc. In A Sky Full of Stars, they also created replacement scenes for the h-scenes with new dialogue recorded and everything to make sure that no aspect of the story was missed. So, essentially, the only thing missing from it is the porn itself. I don't think this would've happened if there was zero backlash to IMHHW, so that backlash did work, to an extent. They seem pretty stubborn about 18+ patches, so that's likely never gonna happen. But I guess you never know.

Grammarly really wouldn't help much at all. A lot of King Exit's text is so horribly mangled that Grammarly wouldn't know what to do with it. And it takes someone halfway decent at English to look at the suggestions and decide which ones are worth implementing and which ones aren't. Grammarly will frequently want to change perfectly acceptable informal English dialogue, for example, so I can only imagine the dumb suggestions it would give for a mangled machine translation. In general, the only real use I've found for Grammarly in translation work (with proper translations) is for finding double and missing words. I would also argue that not all of the problems with SakuraGame's translations are grammar-related. There's a lot more to good English writing than proper grammar. Even if Grammarly could fix all of the grammar, it would still probably be a terrible translation not worth reading unless an actual decent editor came along and gave an extremely thorough editing pass. But you don't want to do that when the base translation is potentially inaccurate, and I really don't trust these translations to be accurate. Even if they get the broad strokes, they're missing so much of the smaller details, tone, and personality. So really, SakuraGame's translations need to be thrown in the trash and incinerated, never to be seen again. Trying to help them improve is a fool's errand.

Profit-wise they're making bank too. Even if they're making just a dollar off of every sale, they are routinely pulling in six-digit sale figures. Meanwhile, MangaGamer struggles greatly to reach even a tenth that, with many of their successful games only selling in the thousands. SakuraGame is most likely making way more money than any other localization company right now.