Jump to content

SpecterZ

Members
  • Posts

    214
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Reputation Activity

  1. Like
    SpecterZ reacted to Clephas for a blog entry, My opinion: Pitfalls of a Fantranslator   
    This is a simple post putting forth my views on what the largest pitfalls are for a fantranslator, both in the immediate sense and the long-term.
    Immediate
    1. Making promises: Anyone who starts a translation is bound to do something stupid... such as setting a deadline or predicting how long it will take them to do something.  Even experienced translation groups trip and fall into this particular trap.  Nothing good comes of making promises, primarily because rl exists.
    2.  Agreeing to translate/edit/proofread something you aren't interested in: This links to motivation.  To be blunt, no fantl will be able to finish work on a VN if they don't enjoy the original or at least prefer the genre it is in.  Fantls are a labor of love not a workplace with a set salary and a boss telling you to get back to work or he'll dock your pay.  Passion about the subject matter is necessary to get anywhere on a fantl project.
    3.  Taking on a job you aren't qualified for: This mostly applies to beginner fantls... to be blunt, don't take on something you can't read easily.  If you can't read and fully comprehend the text of the VN you've agreed to translate, don't even make the attempt.
    4.  Machine translations: Don't work.
    5.  Looking up your name/reputation/etc: Some people get addicted to looking for positive reactions to their work.  Unfortunately, this also means that they stumble across the negative responses and can damage their confidence in ways that can destroy a project. 
    Long-term
    1. The choice to announce  a project or not: Many who translate VNs use community comments to help them build motivation.  However, choosing to involve the community in your project is a two-sided sword... it cuts both ways.  Negative comments, people asking you when it will come out, and complaints about the translation of any partial you put out can obliterate your motivation and cripple the project.
    2.  Internal group chemistry and mechanics:  No matter how you look at it, the translator is the origin and star of any given project.  Without the translator it goes nowhere... but translators can't be the ones going around motivating the group to keep working.  It's inefficient and emotionally draining for the person in question, and it is the number one cause of project failure I've seen related to group chemistry, when the translator finally falls apart.  An editor's role only seems minor to a translator.  It is actually a job that can be equally frustrating to that of the raw translation, and a decent translator's secondary job often becomes tlcing and explaining his own work to the editor.  Thus, my advice to any fantranslator is find an editor you can talk to and get along with, or you'll regret it later.  My advice to editors is: Be patient.  Many translators really don't like going back over their own work, so just keep an eye out for potential signs that they are at their limit. 
    3.  Burn-out: This can potentially happen to any fantl position.  It is also related to all the things above, since it is a state where all motivation is lost and the individual in question basically just drops out of the project.  Apathy toward the project and ignoring group members are fairly common signs of this.  Whether it is permanent or not depends on the individual, but it can take years to recover mentally and emotionally once you've reached this stage *speaking from personal experience*
     
  2. Like
    SpecterZ reacted to Aizen-Sama for a blog entry, Dear Translation Requesters   
    Disclaimer: At the end of this post I get pretty salty, so be aware of that. This post endorses MY and MY OPINION ONLY. The numbers about the costs of a translation team were researched before putting them here.
    Hello guys. Aizen-Sama here with another spicy rant. Although I haven’t been around the forums as long as other users who have spent their time here several years (I have spent around 7 months more or less at the present time being) I have seen that there’s a huge problem that I’ve mostly seen here, in Fuwanovel, more than any other site that congregates VN fans. In fact, I think that this doesn’t happen anywhere but here, but again, what do I know? I don’t really visit Reddit nor 4chan that much, let alone interact there.

    Anyways, what I want to address is a problem that has been going on since the beginning stages of this site, and that problem is the Translation Requests, or what I like to call “e-beggars” (yes, I know this term has been invented already).

    First and foremost, the majority of people that make these Translation Request posts are usually new users and I’m fully aware of that. But this has been blowing up lately. I know that 4 posts in the last month and a half doesn’t sound like that much, but the proposals are getting so ridiculous that it’s hard to believe sometimes if the guys asking these things are for real or if they’re straight out trolling.

    Let’s take this post as a quick example. You’re scrolling through the forums and see this post, and then the thought comes to mind “Another typical Request Post. Sigh. Let’s see what this guy’s asking for…” and then you see this:

    These posts show nothing more than ignorance and arrogance, as well as no interest towards these groups they are begging to translate something for them. Do these people even understand what it takes to translate a medium length VN? A medium length, around the 35-40k line mark in my opinion, could easily take a year. And the guy in this post begged for 5 medium and long length VN’s to be translated, one of them being >50 hours long.

    But don’t be mistaken, the worst part about that post wasn’t the amount of VN’s he was begging for nor their length. It was the last statement: “Thanks in advance”. Although it sounds stupid, that’s what triggered me the most. A shitty “thanks in advance” is not something that motivates people to do these things. People have to put themselves in a translators’ shoes sometimes. Not only him, but also the people who aren’t translating, but the ones who edit the text, proofread it, the image editors, the quality checkers, etc… Do they think that the task can be easily done if the guy in question knows Japanese? Not even close.

    The secret of a translation project.

    I know this is hard to believe for the e-beggars, but the translation of a game requires an enormous amount of time, and one year to finish the TRANSLATION, not editing, of a medium length VN is a very decent deadline. And I’m talking about a medium length game, not a long one. Majo Koi has around 47k lines. Supposing it had one sole translator and the translator in question did 100 lines a day, the game would be finished in around 470 days approximately, this taking into account he diligently does 100 lines a day, no skipping, no nothing. Let’s convert that into hours spent in total, since that tends to shock people more; 470 days doing 100 lines a day, if the translator is an experienced one, meaning that he has done this before or is a professional in the field, he could get rid of that task in about an hour. But an amateur translator, basically the bulk of the community in itself when it comes to fan translations, could take around 1,5 or 2 hours to do the exact same number of lines. That could mean than in total, just translating could take from 470 hours for the experienced translator, which means around 20 full days translating something, to 705-940 hours for the amateur translator, which is around 30-40 days translating nonstop. And this would be just translation, I’m purposely taking out the other processes such as editing and QC’ing. Do you e-beggars understand the amount of work is being put in these projects? This is why Translation Request posts should be completely banned off this site and instantly deleted. Then again, where would I put my insulting memes towards the op’s to gain likes for no reason?

    Let’s throw in another question now that we’re shifting towards that matter: Is fan-translating Visual Novels even worth it in the first place?

    Before I answer (although it’s probably known what I’m going to say, given my tone) let me address this: I by no means think that fan-translation is bad, in fact, it has been the reason why we’re getting official localizations now and I think that no amount of praise of thanks can equate the amount of work the translators of these projects did in order for this genre to be known better in the Western community.

    But, as sad as it sounds, fan translating at this moment is not worth it. Why? I’ll put in some of the reasons:

    -          Although some members of the vocal community throw in the occasional thanks once the patch is out that’s all the team who translated the game gets. Nothing more, nothing less. Some people might say that recognition counts as some sort of reward as well, but personally I don’t think that’s the case.
    -          No reviews of the translated VN’s are usually made (this is what in my opinion spreads the awareness of these games), only discussion threads are made, which is pretty sad in my opinion.
    -          I’m going to quote something that Clephas said in one of my posts, that sums up this next point:  “Another thing is that most people in the community will never even try to experience fantl from the other side of things... they don't realize how much time it eats up, that emptiness you feel when you realize you've used dozens of hours of your personal time only to put out a patch that people bash left and right for 'errors' and other shit.”
    -          The work put in to translate the game itself is not worth, meaning that the compensation that the translator/team worked for it is not even close enough to what they should be getting.
    Lastly, I want to address the problem that comes with donations, awareness of localization costs/translation costs, and ignorance.

    I’ll cut to the chase; for the people that think that with donations alone you can “pay” a translator to do some kind of game, you’re WRONG. Let’s put an example of what could a medium VN translation cost: let’s suppose that the team consists of three persons, to translate a 1.5 million jp character VN (equating to a 45k line count approximately). The translator gets 1 cent per Japanese character, the editor gets 1 cent per English word and the QC gets a quarter of a cent for each English word. In total, the final price equates to 33k dollars JUST FOR THE TEAM TO TRANSLATE A SINGLE VN. And these prices are apparently pretty shitty for a translator, so yeah, there you go. Besides, why donating a random group of guys, who could easily run away with the money and machine translate the game, or not even translate the game at all, when you can just support the official localizers? Contrary to what some people think they are actually releasing more games than ever and the 18+ industry in the scene has never seen so many official releases ever.

    Summing up this 3 page-long essay of frustration:

    1.       Please for the love of god don’t e-beg or Request for translations. Just no, it triggers people off and it only shows how ignorant you are about what happens behind the scenes.
    2.       Fan Translating in this actual moment is NOT WORTH, only people who are very commited and have a strong resolution will be able to start one, and very few out of those will actually finish the project.
    3.       Donations are NOT a solution to encourage Fan Translation, it ruins the very concept of it and it’s also ILLEGAL. Don’t support an already illegal activity by paying it.
    4.       Before posting retarded shit on the forums please look for other posts similar to what you might want to post. Maybe looking at the responses could enlighten you and help the other users not waste their time by reading the same shit over and over again.
    5.       Before criticizing Translations and patches for “errors” and “typos” and being a little whining bitch how about you try to show interest on how much effort people put on the translation of these games behind the scenes? (This goes solely to the people that haven't experienced working on a fan translation and whine non-stop about "how bad the translation of this is" and blah blah blah.)
    Anyways, I think that’s all the rage out. For those of you who haven’t dozed off already have a nice day and all of that stuff.

    And if you smash that like button you will get your very own… DIES IRAE MACHINE TRANSLATED PATCH. Yes! This is not a scam at all, your own personal Dies Irae Machine Translated patch. If you leave a like you can choose between a Google, Bing, or a Skype translated patch. I’ve invested so many hours on them, it was totally worth though ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

  3. Like
    SpecterZ reacted to Aizen-Sama for a blog entry, A rant about the translation scene and the community revolving it.   
    Hello everyone, Aizen-Sama here. I’ve been only around this community and forums for around 6 months by now, and even though I may not be the most knowledgeable when it comes to VN’s in general, I think that I possess enough knowledge about the translation scene. That’s right, today I’m not writing a post about Luna Translations, but one about my opinion on the translation scene, translation groups, and the community revolving them.

    Let us establish how this community and market actually exist in the first place. Piracy and fan translating, they are both mutually exclusive to each other and they are the foundations of what we consider as the “western visual novel community”.
    After some years where piracy slowly started to decrease and official releases started to be a thing I can safely assume that there are three types of people now, one who will support every single game localization and buy the Visual Novels instead of pirating them, one who will pirate everything and anything, or one that will mix between these two because either there is no other access to the game in Japanese to apply the English patch (in other words, you can’t buy the game legally because the Japanese market is already a very difficult place to access with Western VPN’s, mostly because Japanese publishers block them to not let people outside Japan buy these games online, which is usually the only way to get them in the first place) or the individual simply doesn’t support some releases or companies that release VN’s in particular (I’ll set people that want to buy legally a game with a fan-translated patch but can’t do it, so they have to pirate the VN even if they don’t want to as an example).
    This last example leads to another concerning issue, the relationship between translation groups and the community itself. It’s partly human nature; when a group establishes itself and releases a patch (no matter whether it’s full or partial) we automatically create what is called a “power level” between these two types of people, the users that translate and work on translating games in one way or another (editing, QC’ing, etc…) and the users that simply play the releases made by the first ones.
    This so called “power level” is what should be avoided at all costs, sometimes the community must remember that the people that belong to translation groups (whether they are official or not) are part of the community as well, and have their own stances and way of doing things.
    Those “power levels” are automatically made, and they are the primary reason of this community’s fragmentation into several “sub-communities”, which is a problem mainly for the translation groups. What I’m trying to say here is that what is constantly happening right now is that what this “power division” has made is to categorize groups by number of patches released (the more they have released the more praised they are) and that has ultimately lead to two things; groups distancing themselves from the community, which is a very bad thing for both of the parties involved, and groups distancing from each other.
    What I mean by this last statement is that there is no communication between teams, which leads to what is happening in the actual society that we live in: the individualization of people (Tl-teams in this case). But regarding that aspect, some groups have managed to find a solution to this matter. Let’s put @Arcadeotic's (Euphemic Translation) and @oystein's (Elevator TL) groups for example; both of them have found a way to make the community feel closer to their groups thanks to their “Public Discord Server Policy” (that’s how I call it) and both of them are in the TL Leaders Discord Server (basically a group to try to unite translation teams more, an initiative from Arcadeotic and I). That group has opened my eyes in many aspects regarding team stances towards piracy as well as opinions about the community and it's relation with the Tl teams. This group has also helped me in getting to know people that otherwise I would have never met even if we were active members of this forum and interacted with each other sometimes, like for example Dergonu, Oystein, Kardororororo, and many more.
    What I’m ultimately trying to say is that banding together is a rare thing for groups now, and this is the first step to create a community feel again, something that, in my opinion, is being lost little by little and needs to be stopped.
    I’ll mention another issue that many people find itchy, and that is the topic of “the sense of entitlement of a loud minority”.
    I’d like to make myself very clear about this; I know that there is a silent positive majority, and that compared to the amount of people that complain about things about projects and English patches this majority vastly overcomes the “minority”, but the matter of fact is that this “loud minority” is what gives people that are new to the community a bad impression about it from the start.
    I’ll set two examples to demonstrate the last point I mentioned: firstly, I’d like to address the Koiken Otome Project, one that took approximately three years to finish. It’s a topic full of controversy, firstly because people firstly speculated that Flying Pantsu was going to “definitely sell out to the localization companies” and they made a ruckus about it.

    First of all, what if they really “sold out” to one of them? That is, in my opinion, a good thing (primarily because I belong to the “buy everything” type of guy instead of pirating unless it can’t be avoided and tend to support official releases), but mostly because, the fact of the matter is that they spent working on an English patch of a game that contains more than 40K lines three years, and the entire effort is theirs, that means that even if they decided to not release the patch for whatever reason, I would have been totally in favor. Why? Because it’s THEIR work and THEY did it, not the people that feel entitled to have the English patch.
    Same goes with the problem that revolved around the time of release. Again, I’ll repeat, the matter of fact is that they could’ve released that patch whenever they wanted because since THEY did the patch, they decide when to release it, simple.

    The second example I’ll highlight in this post talks about Shinku Translations and the controversy that revolved around the SakuSaku patch. If you don’t know what happened regarding this project I’ll quickly sum it up: Shinku Translations made a deal with Sekai Project to release the game officially, what ultimately made people who were waiting for a fan-patch very pissed. The comments on their website were mostly full of “sellouts” and “I already bought the game in Japanese, now I’ll have to buy it again, gg boys” and many more that blew my mind. That was the perfect demonstration of the entitlement that people slowly begin to have when a project is close to being finished.
     I’ll repeat myself once again, just like Koiken Otome and Flying Pantsu, it was THEIR work, so they had the right to make a deal with Sekai Project and do whatever they wanted to the patch. And, as Akerou explained in one of the comments, it could lead to more titles being localized, which, in my opinion, are good news!
     People have to start realizing that sooner or later, the entire scope if not most of the translation scope will shift towards official releases instead of fan-patches.
    As a last argument regarding this matter, I’ll mention a couple of YouTube comments that I found in the official OP video of SakuSaku published by Sekai Project’s YouTube channel, they basically said this:
    “That's a low punch SP. That's just low. The guy translating it is almost done. If you buy the translation from him and release it in the next 2 months I might forgive you. If you do it less than a month you are forgiven.”
    “Well just pirate the release when it comes out. This is one of the cases when piracy is completely justified.”
    These two comments are part of the “entitlement problem” that I’ve addressed before, and I hope they highlight what I’ve been trying to tackle (take into account that these comments are just the surface, just look at the ones in Shinku’s page and you’ll get a grasp of what this community broods sometimes).

    Last but not least, I’d like to address Fuwanovel as a platform for translation projects and my opinion about it as a Leader of a translation group (in this case, Luna Translations).
    Don’t get me wrong when I say that. I love Fuwanovel as a site. It’s one of the principal, if not the main responsible for the appearance of a community that revolves around Visual Novels in general. I love this site, and I appreciate the people that back this site paying monthly (I hope I can do it as well when I get the chance) and the mods for doing their jobs correctly and every other person that supports this site. But, I’d like to tackle the issue of trying to host translation projects in a forum-based website.
     I’d like to point out that the system created in Fuwa worked very VERY well at the beginning stages of the creation of this community. Basically, the “Fan Translator Skills” thread and the “Translation Projects” thread were probably very useful and effective back when the community was niche and not a lot of projects and teams crowded the scene (I’m not directing this towards the “Fan TL Discussion” thread, by the way).
    But, as a leader of a translation team (and I’m sure that many people will agree with me on this) I just think that Fuwa’s way of hosting projects is not as effective as it was probably two or three years ago.
    What I’m trying to say here is that, just like VNDB exists, a platform that focuses solely on helping teams and individuals to work on projects will certainly appear at some point, or at least needs to appear at some point. Summing up, Fuwanovel as a forum focused on the discussion of Visual Novels and the fan translation scene is a very good and positive website, and it’s totally needed for the community to keep growing, but! Fuwanovel (the forums) used as a platform to support projects and teams may have been very effective in the past but not anymore, since now the scope is very broad and more complex compared to when all of this started.
    Finally, to close this rant, I’d like to say that if I had to sum up things probably the most important issue would be that the community is losing the sense of being together, and groups, as well as individuals, are distancing themselves from each other, which is something that has to be avoided at all costs. I’ll personally try to do whatever I can about this matter and little by little this problem will hopefully be solved in the future, because together we can do great things.
    Let’s try to make the translation world great again, as Trump as it sounds.
     
     
     
  4. Like
    SpecterZ reacted to Clephas for a blog entry, Senren Banka   
    Before I go into this VN, I should probably bring up a few facts I’ve noticed about Yuzusoft VNs in general.   First, while most Yuzusoft VNs have a central story that is vital to the heroine paths as well as the common route, the degree to which that central plot effects the heroine paths varies pretty wildly.  In some cases – such as with Nicola in Dracu-riot – the effects of the main plot are almost nonexistent, and in others – such as Miu’s from the same VN – the effects are dramatic and integral to the progression of the heroine’s own story.  Another aspect is consistency… or rather, the degree to which heroine paths are consistent with one another.  Generally speaking, Yuzusoft games don’t strive for absolute consistency.  One reason is because most charage writers (and Yuzusoft writers are mostly charage writers) are not nearly as good at managing the numerous ‘threads’ of their stories as a chuunige writer has to be.  To be blunt, Yuzusoft games tend to eliminate the need for consistency as much as possible, limiting ‘contact points’ between the heroine routes wherever they can.  Unfortunately, there are always minor details that slip through the net, so you can’t really expect perfect consistency in any charage. 
    Another aspect of Yuzusoft VNs is that they still utilize the concept of ‘heroine salvation’.  The idea that a heroine needs to be ‘saved’ by the protagonist on some level used to be integral to virtually all VNs that tried to charge the emotions of the reader, but it fell out of use over time as the emphasis shifted from story to characterization in most cases.  Yuzusoft is somewhat ‘old-fashioned’ this way, as they focus strongly both on the actual ‘stories’ of the heroine paths as well as the characterization aspects.  As a result, for those of us who get emotionally invested in the characters, the inability to ‘save’ the heroines you didn’t choose is always a bit… troubling, lol. 
    I know that sounds weird coming from a self-proclaimed pragmatist like me, but that is one of the few areas in which VNs are still mostly games, rather than just reading material.  The act of ‘choosing’ a heroine inevitably invests you just a little bit emotionally in the heroines, barring a kusoge experience, lol.
    Yet another thing to keep in mind about Yuzusoft games is that the company, even after all these years, is still experimenting with the ratio of ichaicha (lovey-dovey flirtation in the girlfriend/boyfriend part, such as dating, visiting one another’s houses, h-scenes, etc) to the actual story and character development.  Most of their games tend to have long (in terms of text) dating/lovey-dovey/sex periods, which can be unbelievably annoying in a VN with a good story, lol. 
    Last of all, Yuzusoft games tend to have longer heroine routes on average than most moe-VNs.  I’d say by about one and a half to two times, depending on the other developer.
    Now, having gotten that over with, enjoy my comments on this VN, as I plan to go into more detail than usual.
    PS: I don’t intend to bother with the two sub-heroines, Ruka and Koharu.
    Common Route
     
    The beginning of the VN is somewhat fantastical, and with a little effort, they could have easily turned this into a light chuunige (I’m actually wondering why they didn’t, considering how suited many members of the cast are for that type of VN).  One of the most fortunate aspects of this game is the fact that very little time is spent dwelling on school life… in fact, it is probably the least relevant portion of the game, outside of the character setting of ‘gakusei’.  In my experience, the more reliant a VN is on school life for character development and story progression, the less likely it is to be interesting from beginning to end.
    The basic story is that the protagonist, having drawn the sword from the stone (lol) by breaking it off at the hilt (viva, self-repairing holy weapons!  Haha), ends up engaged to and living with the himemiko, one Tomotake Yoshino.  He’s also together with a bodiless loli who presents herself as the guardian of the sword calling him her master, and a ninja who does all the cooking and cleaning around the shrine. Apparently, in order to cleanse the taint left by an ancient curse on Yoshino’s family and prevent disaster, he has to help them fight dog-monsters in the mountains around the town, so that their taint doesn’t build up enough to cause natural disasters and other tragedies.  The common route is consumed by the quest to free the Tomotake bloodline from the ancient curse and the characters’ travails in the process.
    For better or worse, the central story of the VN is nearly completely resolved in the common route, leaving the heroine routes for those heroines’ personal issues.  This does mean that the tie-in to the central background story in the heroine routes is weaker than in some of Yuzusoft’s other games, such as Dracu-riot.  However, the common route itself is actually one of the better ones I’ve seen from this company, and I enjoyed the process immensely.  The downside is that the transition feels a bit awkward, sadly.
    Murasame
     
    Murasame is the overseer of the holy sword Murasamemaru, and Senren Banka’s resident loli.  In a lot of ways, she embodies the archetype of the ‘outsider/exile from life as we know it’ heroine archetype that has popped up occasionally in VNs like this one.  Favorite, in particular, is a company that loves this heroine archetype, utilizing it for the true heroine of every one of their games, and a disproportionate number of the heroines of this archetype are lolis (somewhere around two-thirds, starting with Ilyasviel from FSN).  This is probably because a childlike heroine who suffers from that kind of isolation is more likely to strike at our hearts.  She started out as a common village girl, and when a sacrifice was needed to become the guardian of the sword, she gave up her humanity to stay with the blade (this isn’t really a spoiler, since they tell you this early on and it is in the character profile, lol). 
    Murasame comes across as your typical ‘loli who hates being treated like a child’ most of the time, but her speech and manner in more serious scenes shows at least some of her experience… and her path rakes her over the hot coals of her own personal darkness and insecurity.  Hers is a path that is all about salvation through love, and it is one that can’t help but resonate with romantics in general.  I should know… I cried several times in the course of this path.
    I honestly felt that this path represents Yuzusoft at its best, and for this path alone I would have been willing to play the game… and I’m not even a lolicon. 
    Mako
     
    Mako… is the descendent of a ninja family that serves Yoshino’s family (Yoshino being the white-haired hime+miko heroine).  While she is deadly serious about her duty to protect and serve Yoshino, her personality is generally friendly, cheerful, and easygoing.  She is also more than a little… motherly in the sense that she loves to take care of people.  This tends to express itself in the common route through her devotion to never letting Yoshino or her father do anything around the house outside of their duties as a priest and miko at a Shinto shrine (and Yoshino’s duties as the sole descendent of her mother’s family line).
    To be honest, her path is significantly more boring than Murasame’s, in that her personal worries are ‘classic’ worries from the archetypical ‘raised to serve’ heroine who is suddenly free to do what she wants, along with the fantasy worries unique to her path.  It is still a good path, even touching at times.  However, since they fell back on what amounts to a ‘normal’ love story with a half-humorous twist, things were significantly less interesting from my point of view.
     That isn’t to say that it doesn’t have its high points… but most of those are toward the end or involve the fantasy elements.  I’m sure the people who adore the junai (pure romance) that is the staple of most VNs will lap it up like their favorite flavor of ice cream, but for someone like me who has been fed that stuff until he feels like a foie gras goose…
    Yoshino
     
    The structure of Yoshino’s path is something of an exception, looking at charage with a serious element in general.  Most of the time, the serious element is focused at the end of the path, with the ichaicha part making up the early parts of the path, during and immediately after the formation of the relationship.  In this case, the dramatic part happens immediately after the formation of the relationship… and the rest is essentially endless ichaicha and sex.  The path has impact, but I honestly thought that the latter part of the path dragged on.  However, the ending is pretty touching, and I was honestly happy for them afterwards.
    Overall
     
    Yes, I have no plans to play Rena’s path immediately.  To be honest, just two paths in this game takes up ten hours, and with the common route, this game could easily hit thirty hours if I played all the paths… and I don’t have the energy for dealing with an airhead heroine right now.
    Overall, this VN is one of the better Yuzusoft games I’ve played (considering that I’ve yet to encounter a Yuzusoft game that wasn’t at least worth consideration for a VN of the Month, this is a definite compliment).  It definitely beats out Sanoba Witch, both in terms of raw quality overall and in terms of the design of the setting in particular.  While the game itself doesn’t escape a lot of the clichés of the fantasy charage with story sub-genre, it carries them out well enough that I didn’t find that irritating.  The biggest downside of  the game is the downside to just about all of Yuzusoft’s games… the ichaicha is far too extended and there is usually a lot of runaround before they get to the point. 
    PS: By far, Murasame's path is the best... which probably means I should have played it last.  For better or worse, after seeing Murasame's path, it felt like a betrayal not to choose her over the others, simply because of her situation, lol.
  5. Like
    SpecterZ reacted to Darbury for a blog entry, Shameless Plug: Majo Koi Nikki (Trial) English TL release   
    Another quick project plug: Luna Translations just released their v1.0 English patch for the Majo Koi Nikki (a.k.a. Witch's Love Diary) demo. And guess what? You should totally go get it. I've been helping out with their proofreading, and I can tell you they've done a bang-up job so far.
    Best part? It's super easy to obtain. Qoobrand offers the trial, which covers the game's prologue, as a free download on their site. (You'll want to grab the first one, not Trial 2.) Just download it, patch it up, and Robert's your mother's brother. Just so you know, he gets a little grabby after two or three scotches.
    It should also be said that Qoobrand jammed a bunch of H-scenes into the early hours of MajoKoi. Consider that fair warning... or the clang of a dinner bell, if you're hungry for that sort of thing. Unlike a lot of VNs, however, those sections are there for a reason.* MajoKoi is set up as an intricate puzzle, and the oddly early placement of the H is all part of the larger mystery.
    So go on — pull up a chair, order yourself a Dragon Burger (medium rare), and settle in for a small taste of what Majo Koi Nikki has to offer.
    Trial download: http://qoo.amuse-c.jp/01_mazyokoi/download.html
    English patch download: https://lunatranslationstestsite.wordpress.com/downloads/
    * Not a good reason. But a better reason than most, at least.
×
×
  • Create New...