Gibberish

Since I don't have anything set up to get pretty images, we're gonna have to make do with title screen images and links for this month.  Next month will be shinier, promise!
Here are all of the FuwaReviews for the month of October, 2015.  Pretty solid month, overall.  Some solid 8/10 titles that you should definitely look into, and some stuff that's more "If you like this genre, then maybe you'll like this."  I'd like to offer a huge thank you to our Community Submissions this month - Zakamutt, OriginalRen, and InvictusCobra.
Review Count for October: 12

fault -milestone two- side:above (by Ryechu) - October 2 - Rating 8/10
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A Kiss For the Petals - Remembering How We Met (by Zakamutt) - October 6 - Rating 8/10
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Cocoro@Function! (by OriginalRen) - October 7 - Rating 8/10
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Black Closet (by Palas) - October 10 - Rating 8.6/10
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Over The Hills And Far Away (by solidbatman) - October 12 - Rating 7/10
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The "Jewel Stars" Series (Ruby Striker, Lapis Gunner, Amber Breaker) (by Ryechu) - October 12-14 - Ratings 4.5, 6, 5
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The Menagerie (by solidbatman) - October 18 - Rating 3/10
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Hoshizora no Memoria -Wish Upon A Shooting Star- (by OriginalRen) - October 19 - Rating 3/10
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The Royal Trap (by Palas) - October 24 - Rating 7.5/10
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Hanachirasu (by InvictusCobra) - October 26 - Rating 8.5/10
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Hello everybody!  Ryechu here~
I decided to go ahead and do a monthly recap of all the FuwaReviews released by our in-house team.  October's Recap will be up in the next day or so.
 I am interested in feedback in regard to how everybody would like to see this formatted.  Should I use images with the Pros/Cons and the score and make the image clickable (which is mostly just a bunch of image copy/pasting on Paint.net for me), or would you prefer just an image of the game cover/title screen (In other words, the "Featured Image") with a link to the review without the spoilers?  Let me know below!
Anyway, I wanted to take a little time to talk about what we do, and who our members are (at time of writing).
What is the Goal of FuwaReviews?
Our goal is the same as the motto you see on the forums:  "Making Visual Novels Popular in the West." We do this by presenting honest, thoughtful reviews on all sorts of visual novels, from the latest and greatest OELVNs, to the latest fan-translation releases, to the major releases from Mangagamer/Sekai Project/JAST.  We want to be that one-stop shop for all things Visual Novels, and reviews are our way of doing that.  Translated, untranslated, we don't care.  If it fits the requirement of a Visual Novel, it's something that is on our list to review.

We using a scoring system when it comes to our reviews, and our scale is on a 1-10.  Some of our reviewers break that number down a bit further and translate their score from a 1-100 scale, so you may see a number like 7.8 or the like, but that's all the more specific we intend to get.  This is how the reviewer rated the game.  This number is based on their opinion, and their scores may very well differ from yours.  Are your tastes different from the reviewer's?  Quite possibly.  Are you going to read the review anyway if you're genuinely interested in the game and regardless of whether or not you've played it?  Quite possibly.  Will fans of certain franchises/fetishes/characters get incredibly angry and locate their nearest pitchforks if we don't give their favorite game a 10/10?  Quite possibly.  Here's my answer to that:  We are not going to please everybody.  Honest reviews will never please everybody - that is the unfortunate truth about this business.  For me, my review has the same score that I put on my VNDB profile, and if it doesn't follow the bandwagon average, then there will always be justification in my reviews.  Well, there's always going to be a justification for my score in my review, but you get the point.
Some of our reviews will tell you "If you like x or y, then you'll probably like this," but it's not required.  If I play a game filled to the brim with gore or the like, it'll be the first one I play.  I won't (and don't, to be perfectly honest) know other titles in the genre, and I can't provide suggestions, so I'm not going to.  Many reviewing sites don't do that, because there's a chance that mentioning other titles may detract from the publicity of the game we are reviewing, though that is an arguable statement from either side of the coin.  The information in the review should be more than enough to help you make a decision on whether or not you may be interested in the title being reviewed.
We have two styles of reviews:  Featured (which are full-length, 800+ words, multiple pictures, "complete" reviews), and Minute reviews (300-500 words, one-two images, "Overview" reviews).  Most nukige and short OELVN reviews will end up being Minute reviews, while basically everything else is Featured.  Virtually all of my nukige reviews are Minute reviews.
We know we're gong to get the same flak as every other reviewing site, and that's fine.  We appreciate any and all feedback about the site, even if we don't immediately acknowledge it.  That much I can assure you.
 
Who Are We?

Ryechu - I'm the PR guy for FuwaReviews.  I do most of the talking with companies to get review keys for the team, I run the nukige corner, and I handle Community submissions.  I'm also the author of this blog! Flutterz - He's our editor.  He's also a god.  You will bow down to him. Full-Time Reviewers
solidbatman - This guy was the one that started it all.  He's also my bae.  He handles a lot of newer, popular releases, and is often abused for his honesty. Palas - The OELVN god.  He normally snags all of the OELVN keys, and puts out excellent reviews for them. Tyrael - The fresh meat.  We just picked Tyrael up as a full-time reviewer.  Can't wait to see what he has in store! Part-Time Reviewers
Down - He had a soul once, then Batman ate it.  Down still hasn't recovered since that day. Exenorate - He's hiding most of the time, but he's still shiny. Community-Submitters (that I would pick up in a heartbeat)
OriginalRen - He needs to write more reviews.  Straight up.  C'mon Ren, you know you wanna~ Zakamutt - #blamezaka There are also other reviewers that I've spoken with, and they'll be mentioned once I get some reviews published by them!
 
I hope you enjoyed this little post, and I look forward to hearing some feedback about how you'd like to see our Monthly Wrapup posts!
 

How do you eat an entire whale? One bite at a time. Preferably with Cholula.
How do you edit/translate/whatever a visual novel? One line at a time. Preferably with bourbon.
Whether you’re a fan of the final product or not, one of the things that impresses me most about MDZ’s fan translation of Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort is that it got released, period. As in, if you were so inclined, you could download the installer right now, patch the original Japanese game, and go play the thing on your new-fangled Windows Pee-Cee. No demos, no one-route partial patches. The whole damned VN in English, finished on schedule and out there in the world.
The project didn’t stall. It didn’t wind up in no-updates-in-six-months-but-we-think-they’re-still-working-on-it hell. It didn’t climb into that white panel van with Little Busters EX, never to be heard from again. The nice man was lying to you, Little Busters EX — there were no cute little puppies in the back. What were you thinking?!
The KoiRizo team did nothing particularly special to make this happen. We just ate the whale one bite at a time.
The rhythm method
By his own account, MDZ worked very methodically on the project, spending an average of 30 minutes every day translating scripts into English. Not when he felt like it. Not when inspiration struck. Not when enough people harassed him with all-caps emails asking why the HELL hadn’t there been any progress updates on the KoiRizo tracker lately. He made it an expected part of his routine, like brushing his teeth or eating dinner. He scheduled regular translation sessions between classes or before heading out in the morning.
He did a little bit. Every. Single. Day.
There’s a word for that: consistency. That’s what gets things done in the real world, not 48-hour marathons every random.randint(1,6) weekends fueled by Red Bull, Hot Pockets, and intense self-loathing. Consistency keeps you from getting burned out. Consistency lets you make reasonable schedules and estimates, then stick to them. Consistency is like goddamned black magic.
Over the course of the project, MDZ had consistency in spades. If he can maintain that approach to life, I have a feeling he’ll be successful at whatever he puts his mind to after college.
When I came on board as an editor, I kept a somewhat similar schedule. I resolved to set aside my commuting time each workday for editing. And so for 40 minutes in the morning and 40 minutes in the evening, Monday through Friday, I’d park my butt in a train seat, break out my laptop, and just edit.
Weekdays were reserved for my family. If you’re married with kids, you know there is no such thing as free time on weekends. If you’re not married and don’t have kids, please tell me what the outside world is like. I hear they came out with a PlayStation 2? That’s gotta be pretty awesome.
Anyway, that’s what I ended up doing. Edit every single workday. For six months. Until it was done.
(Six months? That long to edit a medium-length visual novel? Yeah, that long. KoiRizo weighs in at 36,000+ lines. Over six months, that works out to about 1,400 lines a week, or 210 lines per hour. That’s an edited line every 17 seconds or so, with most of the lines needing substantial polishing/rewriting. I have no idea what pace other VN editors work at, but I felt like this was one I could maintain over the long haul. Call it the distance runner’s lope.)

Special topics in calamity physics
So why all this rambling about whales and consistency? Because I just got back from vacation a few days ago and I’ve been surprised at how long it’s taken me to get my head back into the various projects I’ve been working on (or even writing this blog). And then I got to wondering how often something small like that snowballs into a stalled or even failed project. A missed day turns into a skipped week turns into a skipped month turns into a dead translation.
Which then got me thinking about the coefficient of friction.
It’s basic physics, which I excelled at (failing repeatedly). In layman’s terms, it’s a ratio (μ) that gives you a sense how much force two surfaces exert on each other and, therefore, how much force you need to exert to get something moving from a dead stop. Wooden block on ice? Low coefficient of friction. Wooden block on shag carpet? High coefficient of friction ... and a senseless crime against tasteful décor. Once you overcome that initial friction, it takes comparatively little force to keep an object in motion.
I can easily imagine there’s a coefficient of friction between us and our work, some quantifiable level of resistance that needs be overcome before we get our asses in gear and be productive. And unlike the one in Physics 101, which is constant for any two materials, this one is different every single day. It depends on a bunch of different factors: how interested we are in our projects, how appreciated we feel, what other projects we’ve got going on at the same time, how much sleep we’ve gotten, what else is going on in our lives, whether or not the Mets are currently in the World Series, etc.
Let’s call it the coefficient of slackitude.
Once we get started on a project and make it part of our everyday routine, we can largely ignore this number. We’ve overcome the initial slackitude and, with moderate effort, can keep things rolling along fairly smoothly. But each time we let things coast to a stop, even for a few days, we’ve got to overcome the slackitude all over again. And since that value is variable, it might be much harder the second time around. In fact, it probably will be.
Eventually, we’ll fail to do so. And our project will die.
The takeaway
So other than the fact that I had no business being anywhere near a physics classroom, what can we take away from my incoherent ramblings? A couple things:
The easiest way to make sure your project gets finished is to stick to a regular schedule. Eat the whale a little at a time — every day if you can. Minimize the gaps. Avoid having to face off against that nasty coefficient of slackitude more than once. The easiest way to make sure your project gets started at all is to pick a time when that coefficient of slackitude is low — when you’re excited by the prospect, when you’re well-rested, when you have relatively few competing interests. When you can focus. Use that time to build your momentum, so when your interest wanes or real life intrudes — it always does and it always will — the project is so embedded in your routine that you can just ride it out. We need more finished translations in the world. So pull up a chair and eat your whale. Do it for your team. Do it for yourself. Do it for poor Little Busters EX, drugged and ball-gagged in a basement somewhere, forever wondering when it’ll finally get to see the puppies.

There’s no getting around it. If you’re looking to edit visual novels, at some point you’re going to have roll up your sleeves, put on the rubber gloves, and get elbow-deep in some H. The good news is that if you come prepared, practice your technique, and set some clear boundaries, it can be a pleasurable experience for both you and the reader.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t like pineapple on my pizza, and I don’t like H-scenes in my VNs. It’s not a prudish thing; it’s a narrative thing. They’re rarely well crafted — you can feel all the hallmarks of the B-team being brought in to write them — and they almost never add plot/characterization that couldn’t have been handled better some other way. (I’ll pause here so you can mention Amane’s route from Grisaia, an exception that helps prove the rule.) Let’s be honest: they’re shoehorned in to help sell product. It’s built into the economics of the eroge genre. And honestly, that’s fine. I try to be sanguine about it and think of H-scenes as banner ads or TV commercials. They’re profit centers that help support the content I’m actually interested in. (I suspect more than a few developers feel the same way.)

Long story short, H-scenes ain’t going anywhere. So how do we deal with them? Go in with a game plan.

[Warning, there will be some NSFW language from this point forward. Sorry! It’s all part of seeing how the sausage is made.]

1. Do your research
In raw translation, sex scenes from a Japanese visual novel tend to be far from erotic. More often than not, they read like an obsessively detailed transcript of a gynecological exam. That’s not because the Japanese writing team suddenly forgot they were supposed to be penning a passionate sex scene. It’s just that what’s erotic in one culture isn’t always as erotic in another. It’s your job (along with the translator) to help bridge that cultural divide and come up with something that feels faithful to the original, yet still sexy in English.

Your first stop? Research. Read some English-language erotica so you can get a better sense of what works and what doesn’t. Sites like literotica.com even have stories broken out into fairly specific categories, so if you know you’ll be editing BDSM, threesome, and footjob scripts, you’ll have no problem finding what you need. (If you have all three in a single scene, you still might be in luck.) There’s also a category called “First Time,” which is more broadly useful, given how fixated many VNs are on virgins.

Read, read, and read some more. Pay attention to the verbs, the nouns, the pacing. Try to quickly form a model of what makes a sex scene successful, then look to carry those techniques over to your VN script.

2. Pack a box lunch
If you take nothing else away from this post, remember this: bring a big bag of dicks; you’ll need them. Better pack a few pussies while you’re at it.

By the time you’ve edited your third or fourth H-script, you’ll find you’ve run dry of good synonyms for the male and female genitalia. In KoiRizo, the raw script mostly used the word "thing" for the protag’s package, which ended up sounding childish and/or ambiguous in English. (I only kept it in a few instances where such a reaction might be appropriate — for example, when the route partner catches her very first glimpse of Lil’ Protag: “Is that your ... thing?”). The remainder of the original script was a mix of the clinical ("my mucous membrane”) and the hilarious (“my soiled meat stick”). As for ladyparts, the original script relied heavy on metaphor and indirect reference — lots of openings, entrances, gates, doors, depths, special places, overflowing pots of nectar, etc.

So what’s missing from the above? The common English erotica standbys: “dick” and “cock” for men, “pussy” for women. There’s a reason for that. KoiRizo complicated things by using the Japanese equivalents of these very sparingly, reserving them mainly for shock effect in dialogue — “e.g., OMG, she just said ‘cock!’ Things must be getting real.” Moreover, when these words were finally hauled out, the devs bleeped the VO and censored the text string (e.g., “p*ssy”). That meant it was very obvious when those words were being used and when they weren’t.

All of which presented quite a challenge to the team: if we were to preserve those “shocking” character moments, we couldn’t use the most common English terms 99% of the time. And so, I fell back on a shortlist of alternate references: pole, rod, erection, hard-on, manhood, etc. By the time I was done editing, however, this list felt far too limited; those words were overused pencils worn down to their nubs.

This is one of those areas where, in hindsight, I feel like I could have done a better job with KoiRizo. The takeaway: If I ever tackle a VN this H-heavy again — doubtful — I’ll come packing a much longer list of euphemisms.



3. Bring a raincoat
Compared to its English counterpart, Japanese erotica seems downright obsessed with fluids: saliva, vaginal secretions, semen, urine — you name it. The look, the sound, the feel, the taste, the smell, the volume. You’ll be describing a lot of liquids in a lot of ways, so get ready to break out the thesaurus. And an umbrella.

4. Embrace the improbable
Let’s admit it: VN sex is over-the-top ridiculous. In a matter of seconds, sheepish virgins turn into seasoned pornstars, cramming 20 orgasms and 40 positions into a quickie broom closet hookup. (Oh so much cramming.) This is the nature of the genre, so don’t fight it; embrace it. Trying to force realism onto a typical H-scene would be like trying to force realism onto a Dragon Ball Z fight: everyone still looks constipated, but no one’s having any fun. If you’re that desperate to edit sadly mundane sex scenes, wait for the VN version of Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs to come out. Till then, work with what you have.

I remember a tiny dustup a while back when another TL team supposedly wrote lubricant into an H-scene because they felt the acts described would be difficult or painful without it. It’s a minor thing, but if the original writer left the lube out, I’m inclined to do so too. These portions of the script are wish fulfillment at their best/worst, so just leave them be.

Except ...

5. Reject the impossible
... Except when the improbable becomes the impossible. More often than not, this is either the result of a mistranslation or an error by the original writers. (As an example of the latter, KoiRizo was haunted by an entity we dubbed “phantom Riho.” A couple of times, the devs would forget they were writing another girl’s scene and use Riho’s name for a line or two instead. We fixed this in our version, but still ...)

Anyway, as editor, it’s your job to keep an eye out for the impossible. Is the protag’s penis simultaneously in someone’s vagina, anus, mouth, and ear? Did the heroine’s hymen suddenly regenerate? (Starfish Girl is mah waifu!) Did a corded vibrator suddenly become a battery-operated one? Ask to have the TL double-checked and, if that still doesn’t resolve the issue, use your best judgement to fix the error while causing minimal disruption to the surrounding lines.

6. Set your limits
This is important. Know what you’re comfortable with going into a project and make those boundaries abundantly clear. Some VNs can venture into very unpleasant territory — rape, abuse, gore, catgirls, etc. — and it’s best to ask yourself up front if you could, in good conscience, commit to editing that sort of content. Set your limits early on, then make sure your team’s fully aware of them.

7. Have a sense of humor
At the end of the day, VNs are entertainment. Unless you’re editing Saya no Uta 2: Vom Harder, it’s probably okay to approach your H-scripts with a subtle sense of play. A decent chunk of your audience will either be fast-forwarding through these scenes outright, or paying far more attention to the visuals than the script.

So think of these times as exhibition games in your script editing schedule. They’re opportunities to spread your wings a little bit, try a few stylistic experiments — maybe even slip in a sly joke or two. And even if everything doesn’t quite work, we’ll still respect you in the morning.

As any translator can probably tell you, Japanese jokes are a huge pain to capture in English. There are unfamiliar memes, cultural references, wordplay, riffs on kanji characters — none of which are particularly easy to convey to Western audiences. If you get lucky, a few nips and tucks in editing are all you need to make one of these unwieldy beasts work in English. If you get unlucky, however, you end up having to grab the rib spreader and do some major linguistic surgery.
Sometimes the patients pull through. Sometimes they die on the operating table. These are their stories.
Joke 1: Pearls before swine
In this scene from KoiRizo, Soutarou has just finished giving one of the girls a bit of helpful advice passed down to him by his grandfather. The raw translation is below:
Soutarou: “... That's the motto that they followed back then, I think. Well you know, according to my grandfather.”
Riho: “Your grandfather's ball bag?”
Soutarou: “A-Although I think that he got it from my grandmother...”
Riho: “Ha ...?!”
Soutarou: “...”
Riho: “I just said a really strange thing ―!”
Get it? Get it? No, of course you don’t. KoiRizo was intended as a literal translation, and read literally, this makes zero sense. At this point in my editing, the only choice I had was to go back to the original script, break out the Japanese > English dictionaries, and see if I could figure out what the hell was going on here.
As near as I could figure, Riho meant to use the word “chiebukuro” — literally, “sack of wisdom.” She intended to say something about Soutarou’s pop-pop being a pretty smart guy, chock full of good advice. Instead, she uses “tamafukuro” — literally, “ball sack.” You can understand Soutarou’s confusion when Riho starts talking about his grandfather’s wrinkly old nuts. Nice guy that he is, however, Souatrou tries to give her a graceful out, suggesting it was actually his grandmother who provided the advice. Riho realizes her error and is appropriately mortified.
Great. We’ve puzzled it out ... but at this point, the joke still doesn’t work in translation. “Sack of wisdom” isn’t a common English phrase, so the reader won’t catch the intended meaning behind Riho’s mistake. It just sounds like a plain old non sequitur right now. So our next task is to change her line to something that (1) works as a Freudian slip, (2) comes out of the blue, and (3) is sexually shocking enough to catch Soutarou off guard.
The version I eventually settled on ran something like this:
Soutarou: “... That was the common advice back then, I think. Well, you know, according to my grandfather.”
Riho: “Your grandfather must have really liked giving you pearl necklaces, huh?”
Soutarou: “A-Actually, it might have been my grandmother who liked giving out pearls of wisdom ...”
Riho: “Ha ...?!”
Soutarou: “...”
Riho: “I can’t believe I just said that ―!”
Here, we’ve keep the same basic structure, but rather than “sack of wisdom,” Riho tries (and fails) to say “pearls of wisdom,” a much more common English idiom. And now, rather than Grandpa’s gnarly ballsack, we have the even more shocking image of the old guy giving his grandson pearl necklaces on a regular basis. Soutarou still gets to save the day by pivoting to his grandmother, and then the rest of the joke plays out pretty much as originally written.
Does it work? I hope so, but one could just as easily argue that I broke it. It’s a different gag; there’s no doubting that. But at the end of the day, I’d rather have a joke that works and maintains the original’s spirit than one that’s accurate to a fault.

Joke 2: Deflowering the girls
Here’s a joke I know I broke during editing. Smashed it to the ground and danced on the pieces. In my defense, it was looking at me funny.
In the raw translation of this scene, resort manager Nagisa has just asked the staff to gather in their swimsuits for a big announcement:
Nagisa: “I have a reason for calling you all here like this today.”
Nagisa: “I'd like everyone to become the 'detergent' of the facilities.”
Sango: “Detergent? Us?”
Nagisa: “Oh, sorry. By detergent, I was referring more to advertising material.... In other words, I need you guys to photograph for an advertisement.”
Again, another joke that makes no sense when read literally. And the only TL note I had to go on said, “This translation won't work in English.” Agreed. So I hauled out the J>E dictionary again, but had much less luck this time. At best, I came away with a wisp of a shred of a guess. My hunch was that Nagisa was using one very specific meaning of the word “senzai”— the foremost part of a garden, the loveliest flowers intended to set the stage and entice visitors in deeper — and Sango interpreted it as another more common meaning of “senzai” — namely, detergent. Nagisa clarifies her meaning, everyone has a chuckle, and the scene continues.
I wasn’t sure if I was right — I’m an editor, not a translator — but lacking any better options, I decided to go with it. And I promptly flailed about like a clown being drowned in a bathtub. Right off the bat, I knew there weren’t any good English sound-alikes that would work here. So instead, I wrote about a dozen variations on garden and flower puns, but none of them managed to weave plausible misunderstanding with Nagisa’s actual meaning. Worse yet, they just weren’t funny.
Next, I tried a few bawdier versions, but quickly abandoned those as well. This scene is going to get more risqué in a minute, but throwing in a sex joke right now would be tipping our hand too soon. (In one draft, I had Nagisa say she wants the girls to be the hook that lures visitors to the island. Sango replies, “What?! You want us to hook for you?” — i.e., she thought her boss wanted to pimp them out as resort hookers.)
Having hit brick wall after brick wall, I decided to strip the joke down to its essence. What’s the basic structure here? Nagisa says she wants to use the girls to help sell the resort. Sango suffers a comic misunderstanding. Nagisa corrects her. The end. So that’s what I wrote:
Nagisa: “There’s a reason why I’ve called everyone here like this today.”
Nagisa: “I've decided to sell you.”
Sango: “Sell us? Is that even legal?”
Nagisa: “Oh, sorry. By ‘sell,’ I meant using you to help advertise the resort ... In layman’s terms, I need you guys to model for some publicity photos.”
We lose the poeticism of the original — that image of the girls as flowers drawing visitors in — but in exchange, we get something that actually works as wordplay in English while still delivering the necessary plot info (Nagisa’s marketing brainstorm). It’s still not a particularly hilarious gag, but then again, neither was the original.
In both examples, I ended up completely rewriting large chunks of each joke. And while I'm not entirely satisfied — I wish I could have kept more of the original language — I'm okay with the result. Editing is a balancing act. You want to remain as faithful to the original text as possible while maintaining the audience’s immersion in the work. If the reader suddenly comes across a joke that clearly doesn’t parse in English, that immersion is broken. They stop. They scroll back and re-read it a few times, trying to make sense of it. They wonder if they’re missing something, or if the TL team just messed it up. BAM. They’re now completely out of the world of the visual novel. The magic is broken.
Because magic is only magic until you notice the strings. Or that dead clown in the bathtub.

There is a secret language spoken in the darkest corners of the visual novel world, a cant so ancient and intricate that none know its origins. To be initiated in its ways, one must drink from the Dread Chalice and be reborn in fire. Only then will the caul be drawn from your eyes.
You shall know onomatopoeia. And you shall know fear.
Sploosh 101: What is onomatopoeia?
Before we jump in with both feet — *splash!* — let’s do a quick primer on terminology. An onomatopoeia is a word that imitates, resembles, or suggests the source of the sound it describes — i.e, it sounds like what it is. Like clink, yip, kaboom, swish, meow, oink. (That’s the verbatim transcript of my bachelor party, in case anyone’s wondering.) This is different from a word that describes a sound or action, but doesn’t actually imitate it — e.g., sneeze vs. achoo, punch vs. kapow, close vs. slam. The latter are onomatopoeia; the former, I call ononotopoeia.
For the sake of brevity, let’s refer to these O and not-O.
The Japanese language is rich in O. There’s a sound effect for everything. There’s probably a sound effect for there being a sound effect for everything. (If there isn’t, I’d like to propose one now: darubu.) There are even sound effects for things that don’t actually make sound — e.g., “jii” for staring. While it’s woven into the fabric of the modern Japanese language, O is especially prevalent in manga and, to a somewhat lesser extent, anime. Since visual novels draw heavily from these two worlds, they too feature lots and lots of these words.
English is relatively impoverished in O by comparison, and therein lies the challenge for VN translators and editors. Do you leave these essentially untranslatable sound effects as they are? Or do you try to translate them, losing some of their immediacy and, for lack of a better word, oomph?

Across the great divide
The VN community seems to be fairly split on that question. In one camp, we have the purists. By and large, these are readers who are already comfortable with Japanese O through manga and anime. They consider it part and parcel of the VN experience. Learning and appreciating such terms is simply part of becoming an accomplished reader. It’d be like going to a fine dining restaurant and, instead of the chef presenting you with “the amuse-bouche,” he just came out and said, “Here’s this small appetizer thingy I made. Hope you like it.” The vocabulary is part of the experience.
In the other camp, we have the reformists. To them, leaving O untouched isn’t translation; it’s mere transliteration. It denies meaningful content to the uninitiated English reader — e.g., if you don’t know "munyu" means to grope someone, you’ll be clueless when the best girl hauls off and smacks the protagonist in the very next line. To extend the fine dining metaphor, it’d be like going to the same restaurant, being handed a menu that was all in French, and having the waitstaff snootily refuse to tell you what anything meant. Hope you like thymus glands, mon ami, because that’s what you just ordered.
When it came to KoiRizo, I was a reformist editor on a purist project. I joined the team after the translation had been completed and a lot of the big up-front decisions had already been made: Will this be a literal translation or liberal? (Literal.) Will we keep all the honorifics? (Yes.) Will we keep all the onomatopoeia? (Yes.) MDZ, the KoiRizo project lead, was very up-front about all this. And that was fine. The job of a VN editor is to facilitate and execute on the project lead’s vision. It’s great if you’re involved early enough to shape that vision, but it’s ultimately his/her show, not yours. (If you’re not okay with that, go start your own TL project.) So with that in mind, I did the best purist editing job I could.
But what if I had carte blanche in how I approached O? What would I do differently? As luck would have it, I’ve given that some thought.

Onomatopoeia in standard scripts
For the majority of scripts, it helps to separate O-words into two groups: content-light ad content-heavy. The content-light group tends to consist of interjections, exclamations, grunts, groans, laughs, etc. These are mostly self-explanatory terms, communicating very little other than the fact that they’re a familiar sound. Some examples include:
Ho E A Heh Uuu At most, I’ll clean these up to make them friendlier to Western eyes — “A! A sea cucumber!” becomes “Ah! A sea cucumber!” (In this case, it’d be too easy to mistake the “A” sound for a stammering repetition of the indefinite article “a.”) Otherwise, I’m happy to leave them be.
On the other side, we have the content-heavy O-words. These are either (1) terms that have a very specific meaning you’d never be able to guess at without prior knowledge, or (2) common sounds that are rendered much differently in English than Japanese. These are the words that, if you ignore them, will result in meaningful content being lost in translation. Some examples include:
Kakkun = the “sound” of hitting someone in the back of the knees. Based on a kids’ game. Su = the sound of something suddenly appearing (among other meanings) Gusu = the sound of a whimpering sob Hakushon = the sound of sneezing Chikutaku = the sound a clock makes Our first line of attack is to see if there’s any suitable English onomatopoeia we can swap in. It’s rare that it works out so neatly, but it does happen. So "hakushon" becomes “achoo,” "chikutaku" becomes “tick tock,” etc. If this doesn’t work, we fall back on another common approach: turning not-O English words into O by enclosing them in asterisks. So:
“Gusu. Why won’t you return any of my calls?"
becomes:
*whimper* “Why won’t you return any of my calls?”
As your final line of defense, you might consider abandoning O altogether, instead relying on some explanatory text to flesh out the intended meaning. So:
Su.
“Where do you think you’re going, jerk?”
becomes:
She appeared out of nowhere.
“Where do you think you’re going, jerk?”
I’d recommend turning to this as a last resort, however, since you can see a certain staccato elegance gets lost in translation.
As for where you can find out what all these untranslated O-words mean, there are all sorts of online resources to be had out there. I tend to use the Japanese > English SFX dictionary over at The JADED Network, but I’m sure there are plenty of others just as good.

Onomatopoeia in H-scenes
Sex scenes are something of a special case. You’ll find there are large blocks of text that are nothing but wall-to-wall O. (I see what you did there, you sly dog you ...) Here are some sample lines from KoiRizo:
Sango: “Nafufu. Fumu, Juru, Zuzuzu."
Sango: "Rero, Chu, Chuu ..."
Sango: "Hamu, Chuu, Chuu ... Rero, Juupu, Zuzu."
Sango: "Jupo, Gupo, Zu."
Sango: "Juzuzuzuzu."
Sango: "Fumu? Fua ..."
During editing, I liked to call these sections “word salad.” They’re an unholy mishmash of content-heavy O, content-light O, and nonsensical fuck-grunts. It’s a tangled mess of syllables that can make even the bravest editor or translator turn tail and run. In my earlier post on editing H-scenes, one of the commenters — smile for the camera, Ittaku! — suggested it might just be better to replace these sections with ellipses and let the VO do all the heavy lifting. It’s a tempting thought. But despite all appearances, there’s content to be had there — content the Japanese reader would have understood, and which the English reader will miss out on ... unless you take action.
Let’s see what happens if we (somewhat liberally) run it through the techniques we’ve discussed so far.
Sango: "Ummph. Umm." *slurp* *sluuurp*
Sango: “Mmm.” *suuuck*
Sango: *nibble* *suck* “Mmmm ...” *bob* *sluuurp*
Sango: *sucksuck* *slurp*
Sango: *slurpslurpslurpsluuurp*
Sango: "Mmmph? Ahhh ..."
Okay, it ain’t poetry, but at least we’ve transformed our tossed salad it into something with actual meaning. Even without having read the rest of the scene, you can guess that Sango is vigorously polishing the protagonist’s knob. Or is trapped in a vat of ramen and eating her way to freedom. It can be improved upon, of course; all those asterisks start getting visually distracting, so if the VN engine supports it, italics might be a better choice here. But I’d argue it’s much better than what we started with.
Feeling more confident? Good. Go forth and sploosh.

Pop quiz, hotshot.
There’s an untranslated (i.e, romaji) word sitting there in the script you're editing, staring right up at you. It’s been left like that because the TL team figured people ought to know what it means. But will they really? And what are the ramifications if they don’t? You’re running out of time, and patch release day is breathing down your neck. What do you do?
WHAT DO YOU DO?
In the case of KoiRizo, I ended up relying on a journalistic standard commonly called “the first reference rule.” Here’s how it works.
Visual novels for all!
Let’s say you’re a journalist writing an article about efforts to improve educational standards in underdeveloped nations. At some point, you might find yourself needing to refer to The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, aka UNESCO. But if just you dropped the acronym “UNESCO” in there, most people wouldn’t know what the bloody hell you were talking about. And if you went with “The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization” every time, your prose would be about as ungainly as me at my prom. So a compromise gets struck: you explain the term on your first reference to it, then use the shorter form thereafter.
An example first reference:
“The director-general of The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), pledged to make visual novels part of the global curriculum by 2025.”
Or:
“The director-general of UNESCO, the UN agency focused on international education efforts, pledged to make visual novels part of the global curriculum by 2025.”
At this point, you’d be free to use “UNESCO” in any future references, since you’ve already explained the term. Everyone wins: the reader understands what you’re talking about, and you only have to use one word instead of eight.

Ojousamas for all!
The same holds true for visual novels. Let’s say an untranslated term like “ojousama” shows up in your script. if the reader has consumed a fair number of anime/manga/VNs, they might know this describes a young woman of certain means and refinement. It’s a common VN archetype, after all. But a relative newcomer to these genres would have no way of knowing that. They’d be lost if you just started dropping O-bombs out of the blue.
So the first thing to do is determine context. Is this a one-off reference? If so, you can probably just fully translate the line and be done with it. (“She takes a limo to school? She must be an ojousama” becomes, “She takes a limo to school? She must come from money.”)
In the case of KoiRizo, however, the word “ojousama” is used several dozen times. In fact, a character’s ojousama-ness becomes the focal point of an entire route. It would be a fool’s errand to try and excise it, particularly when there’s no one English word to replace it. So we apply the first reference rule.
The initial mention in the translated KoiRizo script reads:
“Because she's an ojousama, it'd be a given that she wouldn't worry about matters like money.”
It hints at the meaning, but doesn't quite go far enough. So applying our rule, we update it to:
“She's a proper young lady of means — an ojousama — so you'd expect her not to worry about things like money.”
We’ve now defined the word “ojousama” in context and set the stage for its future use. This will make the rest of the VN flow much more smoothly for both new readers and purists who prefer their tropey terms untranslated. If several hours go by without us using the word again, it’s common courtesy to provide a reminder of its definition, but otherwise we should be good to go.

All for gruel!
You can even apply the rule in reverse. Here, two characters are about to spend 50 or so lines talking about a certain home-cooked dish. Original translation below:
A: “Okay ... What's in the pot?”
B: “Rice gruel with egg broth.”
We don’t want to spend the next 50 lines saying “Rice gruel with egg broth.” Nor do we want to just say “gruel,” which sounds like something ladled out in a Depression-era orphanage. In fact, this is a steaming bowl of Japanese comfort food deliciousness. So we apply the rule in reverse, and bring back the untranslated term from the original script:
A: “Okay ... What's in the pot?”
B: “Ojiya — rice end egg porridge.”
Now we can safely use the term “ojiya” for the next 50 lines. This ends up working better on several levels: it makes the dish sound more traditionally Japanese, it strikes the right emotional tone, and it helps us shave extra words from our lines.
P.S. - If anyone knows where I can get a really good bowl of ojiya in New York City, I’m all ears.

A good editor is a good reader.

By that, I don’t mean that he or she is well-read (although that helps). And I don’t mean that he or she reads exceptionally fast (although I’m sure that helps, too).

An editor’s most important job is to serve, quite literally, as the reader’s proxy. If you want to edit anything — a magazine article, a TV script, a visual novel — it’s your job to approach the text not as yourself, but as someone you’ve never met, someone who doesn’t share your likes, your dislikes, your accumulated knowledge. And that doesn’t mean approaching the text as some imaginary “ideal reader” either. They, like unicorns and affordable housing in San Fran, simply don’t exist. Seriously, when you ask a content creator to describe their “ideal reader,” they invariably end up describing themselves. Instead, it’s your job to edit for the “average reader.”

And just who is that? And how do you edit for them? That’s going to vary from title to title. If you’re editing some hardcore and super-niche VN, your assumed reader will be very different than that of some light and frothy moege. (And if you’re editing a Sakura title, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Let me buy you a shot.) That said, I do have some basic ground rules I try to follow.

1. Anticipate that this could be the reader’s first VN.
I've decided to edit visual novels because I believe in them as an art form. I want to see their English releases improve in quality and become more widely accepted outside of certain closed cultural circles. That means I choose to invite new VN readers into a text and make them feel, if not at home, then at least like a welcomed guest.

Stop. Put down the pitchforks. I’m not talking about dumbing down VNs. This is simply Writing 101. Among the authors I know, a common credo is, “A good novel teaches the reader how to read it.” (Unless it’s trying very, very hard to be unreadable. *cough*) A text in translation needs to work doubly hard to achieve this. First, it needs to bridge the gaps in cultural knowledge between the original audience (Japanese VN fans) and the secondary audience (Western VN fans). Otherwise, the work becomes much harder to read and enjoy than the author ever intended.

As you edit, read with beginner’s mind. Where might someone new to the VN genre get hung up? Which cultural nuances might prove confusing? Ask yourself if there’s a way you can bring clarity to those aspects without diluting the original text. If you do your job right, they’ll seem organic enough part of the VN that the experienced reader will barely know they’re there.



2. Choose to operate on the same timeline as the reader
As an editor, you have a luxury the reader does not: access to the full text. You probably go into the project already having read a large chunk of the VN several times over. Maybe you were even involved in the translation of it. Whatever the case, you run the risk of your brain filling in gaps that might leave the average reader confused.

Think of yourself as Bill Murray midway through Groundhog Day. Trapped in those endless 24 hours, he bull-rushes through his routine, responding not to what people are actually saying, but what he remembers them saying in past loops. He falls prey to over-familiarity and, as a result, alienates everyone he meets. It’s only when he learns to interact with people in their timeframe again, living and responding in the moment, that he finally gets what he wants. (The girl. It’s always the girl.)

Be late-movie Bill Murray. Edit mindfully.

When working on KoiRizo, I forced myself to do three separate editing passes. First, I tackled each script completely blind, going in with no more knowledge than any other reader. No cheating, no reading ahead. As I encountered lines that left me, the reader, feeling like I just missed something, I edited them as best I could but flagged them for later. Maybe the author intended that line to be cryptic. Maybe it was foreshadowing. Or maybe something got lost in translation. No way of knowing, so best to keep moving.

After reaching the end of a script, I’d start back at the beginning and do another full edit, this time focusing on the lines I’d flagged previously. VNs tend to be episodic, so if I hadn’t found the answer I needed inside that self-contained script, I elevated the flag and left a comment for the translator asking for clarification.

Finally, when I’d finished an entire route, I’d go back do a third, quick edit through the whole thing, top to bottom. I had all the facts from the scripts and all the notes from the translator, so if something still wasn’t working, it was likely all my fault. And that meant it was time to really hunker down and do some major surgery.

Technically, I also did a fourth edit pass once I’d finished the entire VN, since some of the routes had little in-jokes and references to other routes, but I consider that more of an enhanced read-through than anything, since I was only making tiny tweaks. Which brings me to my last point ...

3. Read, read, and read again
You might be done editing, but you’re not done reading. Find that beginner’s mind and read through everything again. And again. And again. Forget that you’re the one who rewrote the words on the page and just try to approach them anew. Be the reader. Each time, you’ll probably find something new — typos, grammatical errors, slight nuances you might have missed earlier that change the whole meaning of a line.

I read through KoiRizo a bunch of times and I know I still missed all sorts of things. Sorry! I've been kicking myself whenever I see the occasional typo report float through. (Editors are not proofreaders, by the way. Or vice versa. Fodder for a future blog post.) But at a certain point, a work just wants to get out in the world, warts and all.

And that’s another part of editing: learning to let go.

I’m a research junkie. Before taking on any new venture, I tend to waste stupid amounts time reading up on whatever it is I’m about to tackle. So when I got it in my head earlier this year to try editing a visual novel, the first thing I did was start googling like mad:
“visual novel editing tips”“visual novel editing advice”“visual novel editing examples”“should my baby’s poop be this color?” (Okay, I was multitasking. The answer is “yes,” by the way, but call your pediatrician if it stays like that for more than two or three days.)

It didn’t look good. I stumbled on a blog post Moogy had written on VN editing way back in 2009, but that was pretty much it. Still, to paraphrase Cadillac cribbing Brené Brown quoting Teddy Roosevelt, better to dare greatly and fail than just sit around and whine. So I dove in head-first … and landed head-first. I’d been hoping my experience in writing and editing ad campaigns would help me make short work of things. I mean, how different could it be?



Very different, as it turns out. I made a ton of rookie mistakes, followed by a bunch of slightly less rookie mistakes, topped off by several “Did you seriously just do that?” whoppers near the very end. Yet somehow, 36,000+ lines later, I managed to stumble across the finish line, just having edited my first visual novel. The result, MDZ’s translation of Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort, turned out pretty nicely, all things considered. (It should be releasing any day now. I’ll link to the patch when it does.) Of course, I still can’t read any of the scripts without obsessing over the countless things I wish I’d done differently.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. Back when I first started, I couldn’t find any good resources on VN editing. Don’t worry – this won’t be one either. I’m still a rank amateur by any standard, so I wouldn’t presume to offer authoritative advice to anyone. But what I can do is discuss the various editing challenges I faced, my approach to them, and the many, many different ways I fell flat on my face. I might not have the right answers, but at least I can point out some of the things you might want to start considering if you’re planning on editing a VN.

Here's another way to think about it: In the (insanely great) Dark Souls games, there are bloodstains scattered throughout the game world marking places where other players have met their demise. Activate one, and you can see a spectral re-enactment of their final few seconds. Point being, if you see a bunch of bloodstains massed around a door, you can be sure something there’s something truly nasty lurking on the other side. It's probably a good idea to stop, watch, and learn from others' mistakes before going any further.

Let me be your Yoko Ono bloodstain. 

The following list only contains threads made from June 20 to June 27, any older thread will be placed under the "Updated" banner if new relevant content is added to it.



If you don't know how the list works, please check the project
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Visual Novel Discussion
Is it good to read two routes of the same VN the same time? (Link)
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Eternal Senia RPG maker game (Link)
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Summer 2015 Anime Chart (Link)
Some places you should visit when coming to Indonesia (Link)
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Blog posts
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"For sale in Japan only": A Japanese developer's perspective on the eroge embargo (Link)

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You know what's interesting, is that I'm not actually TRYING to do 3 covers a week. I'm amazed that the number has been exactly the same for the past few weeks, despite schedule changes and all that. Oh well, it's not like it's a BAD thing.

Anyways, new releases for the week:

Ningyo Hime- this one came out pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2wo1seKwSo

My Soul, Your Beats!- I did this one because I've wanted to do it for years to celebrate the release of Hell's Kitchen and First Beat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeUF660-niI

Lilium- I used to love this song. I love it a little bit less after singing it multiple times in a row. This was my attempt at doing something "different," and, well... hmm. It's not terrible, but my god, never again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTgbm1TGYSA

And then there's one more thing: a collaboration between Kitty-tama and I on "Find the Blue." If you only listen to one of my covers this week, please please PLEASE make it this one. We worked reeeally hard on it, and since I didn't mix it, it doesn't sound like the screams of a dying cat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiolEmFZSEQ

Another week, another post. Let's get to the point, since I don't feel too great right now and want to stop moving for the rest of the night.

First, Renai Circulation, which I got a request for a couple posts back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8Yh3VCAP7M

Next up, Distorted Pain. Denkare is the shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi8h34JLn_o

Finally, Pandora no Rakuen from the euphoria OVA. My pick of the week, without a doubt. It was worth the months it took to find the instrumental.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GicyQ1ZrPG4


Now, hopefully I'll get my laptop back soon and be able to record. (My desktop doesn't have a microphone. Yaay.) If nothing else, I have an actual written blog post planned for the near future, so I won't be totally inactive.

In honour of this being the 25th Moeblog post, I've written a little poem. Ahem...

There once was a man named Moe
He had a lot of moe
So he posted the moe
Something-something the moe
Moe moe moe moe moe moe moe

Well, my first post like this was a success, so let's do it again, shall we? Great! Let's get down to the meat of this post.

This was apparently the week of full versions, as 2 out of my 3 were full versions of songs I had already done. For example, the full version of Clear's OP, Garasu no Loneliness:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlNCfCjg5-o

But sandwiched in between those two was a slightly more... ambitious project. This is probably my pick for the week in terms of quality and overall pride in my work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ9RxxZPm1c

And finally, the full version of a song that's near and dear to my heart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeZg3t-EHGE

That's it for now, hopefully I'll be back with more next week! Thanks for listening!

Welcome to my VN Blog! As for a why I'm making this blog: I've always wanted to do write-ups on VN's I read. I admire those reviewers who can see deep into all levels of the story. It's also those people I depend on to make sense of mystery of complex VN's like Subarashiki Hibi or Cross Channel. But varying levels of astuteness aside, I love to share with others this hobby of VN's and see all the peoples' different reactions.
 
As for why I don't consider myself to be reviewing visual novels: I don't really set out to judge the VNs, I usually only do so if I feel confident about my understanding of the VN and the genre/design-space it is working in. As an aspiring hobbyist writer, I am interested in components of a story (themes, characters, setting, scenes) and how they are used to construct good stories from different genres. And thus, I am apt to focus on those areas.
 
When a story's or route's setup interests me but the route doesn't come though, I tend to fill in the blanks and explore different possibilities. "A disappointing story is one with tons of possibilities.", I like to think. In that sense I can spend a lot of time on things that aren't even about the VN in question.
 
If you have read some of the VN's I post about, or end up so in the future, or if something here catches your fancy, please do make yourself comfortable. Stay a while, relax, comment. You can expect about two posts for one visual novel a month. (Eeek! This writing business is hard!) That's a little slower than how fast I go through VN's, but I probably won't post about every VN play.
 
PS: Feedback is welcome! Are you interested in this stuff? Should I put the tangents in a seperate "tangents" post? If no one wants to read it, I'm happy to stick on topic and focus on just the VN's.

Mr. Meogii's First Recognition Post.


Hello Guys ! Meogii here, bringing you your ever so loved members' highlight. Today we will be zoning in on Suikashoujo. She has been a member of our community for almost a year now and it pains me to see that the majority of us do not yet know what she's been up to. She enjoys singing, so much so that she has taken it upon herself to make song covers to go along with her music. I don't know about you, but I don't think I'd ever find enough courage to allow other people to listen to me sing. Be it in real life or over the Internet, such a feat requires confidence - something I'm sure Suikashoujo has in her great and pleasurable singing. Down below you'll find her latest video so if you like it, be sure to check out her channel for more awesomeness. From the community and myself, we wish you all the best regarding your future works.

Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube....GMm-XabSB6VXgrA

Latest Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ9RxxZPm1c

Hey guys, so I was thinking about how I wanted to use this blog in terms of promoting my song covers, and I realized that making a new post every time I upload something is overkill, since- for the moment, at least- I'm uploading multiple times a week. So for the foreseeable future, I'll be making a post with links to everything I've done that week.

First off is one that's a week and one day old, but it's new enough that I'll count it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKBg9wMf_Y4

Next is one from a few days ago. Honestly, this is probably the weakest of the bunch, so prepare yourself if you subject yourself to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhAiswNUYe4

And here's the newest one, just uploaded a few minutes ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UL9Hlnz3dI

This is a few days old at this point, but seeing as I'm just now creating this blog, I figured it would be nice to start off with a link to a project I'm really proud of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKl5hnGsI3M

This is Gentle Jena from Planetarian, with lyrics I wrote myself. I had a lot of fun with this, and I may do more similar projects with VN BGMs in the future. The lyrics and some explanation of said lyrics are in the video description, if you're curious.

By the way, I'll probably do my first review soon. I haven't decided which VN to do it on yet, but look forward to it, I guess.

Introduction


This is probably a fucking terrible idea but I felt like making a blog to talk/rant/cry/be dumb about stuff. I'll try to be serious about mostly everything I say here, but I doubt I'll manage to not end up lightly flaming or saying bullshit sometimes, sorry in advance about that. T_T

I'll use this post to talk about my trip to Japan as well since blogging two lines would be hella lame.





Japan


Alright, where should I start? Well, my nationality might be Brazilian but my ethnicity is Japanese, so I always had a bit of interest on Japan. I lived there when I was a baby but that doesn't counts anyway. I went there with my grandparents, younger brother and fucking four cousins - two of them stayed with their parents there though -, just imagine the disaster the whole thing was. Getting everyone ready on the airport was hell, the airplane was hell, getting our luggage was hell, bathroom breaks were hell, the whole thing was basically hell if you didn't got it yet. I don't really talk to any of them aside from one of the cousins, which is the closest to a regular family interaction that I have. I call him Mini-Bitch because of reasons and that's how I'll be referring to him through the post.

When we actually landed in Japan and got out of the plane, holy moly what a cold place. We went straight for my aunt's house where we all would stay for the whole trip and got received with a really nice dinner, assorted traditional foods on the table and some fucking delicious apple juice on the fridge. No, seriously, that juice is worse than drugs, Mini-Bitch and I bought it wherever we found it, that shit is fucking dangerous lmfao.

Food was delicious, seriously, the meals felt solid but never really too much that you'd feel heavy, unless you're dumb like me and orders a goddamn three plates large curry dish and eat it all, then you're probably going to die for around an hour just like I did. Not gonna lie though, the lack of meat was hard to deal with after a while. Even when there was meat on the dishes it wasn't the same thing, mostly due to how they prefer to prepare it which is not exactly to my tastes, but still a bit above decent. Fucking drink machines every fucking corner sucked my coins dry on my first week, took me a while to notice where the fuck they were all going. Keep that in mind if you ever visit Japan, 100~130 yen for a good drink basically anywhere might not look like a lot but it'll consume your whole wallet before you notice.

I visit a shit ton of places but I'll only talk about a few of those, either because it was really cool or because it left a great impression for whatever reason. First of all, Osu Kanon had a shopping district that was pretty legit when compared to the other places I visited, maybe it's just because it was the first place I visited when I got there but I'll definitely try to go there again someday. During christmas I went to somewhere-whose-name-I-never-got-to-know and had my first white christmas in my whole life, such magic (Christmas happens during Summer here). I had my first snowball fight, there's something simply unique to feeling your body slowly hardening due to cold after being hit a thousand times by dumb-shits who don't know how to aim when you team up, and I also built a failure of a snowman that I love a lot, I'll never forget you Pedrito. (´._.`)

New Year was w/e, we just had a kinda fancy dinner with crab (which is not exactly that good anyway) and some booze - best part right here. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Japan has some delicious alcoholic drinks and I'd love to have tried more of them but I couldn't buy anything since I'm not old enough, so all I got my hands on was whatever my aunt had lying around on her fridge and occasionally something I managed to convince her to buy me. ヽ(͡◕ ͜ʖ ͡◕)ﾉ

Talking about booze, I'll leave my rant here that I couldn't find a single decent vodka there! End of rant, so let's get back to cool places. I really liked the planetarium and the aquarium since I had never been to any of those before. I saw the stars Yumemi, I saw them ;------------;. Went to Disney again and that place is seriously overrated. It's a good park and all that but you can't compare it to other Japanese parks or stuff like Universal Studios, Disney is all about making dreams come true and believing in magic. While I look like I'm flaming it, I spent my whole fucking day singing "Do you believe in magic?" so ヽ(◉◡◔)ﾉヽ(◉◡◔)ﾉヽ(◉◡◔)ﾉヽ(◉◡◔)ﾉ. I won't talk about the other parks because I'm not really into amusement parks, they were really fun though, I just don't get all crazy over it.

Alright, let's move to Tokyo now. I visited some cool places that once again I never got to know the name, had some good food, slept on a good hotel and managed to get some booze once again woooooo. I visited Akiba twice and God what a crazy place. First time there was when I met Ren, who I'll talk more about in the end. It's an amazing place that is really fun to just hang around and look at the showcases, specially the figures. I'm not a collector but I got myself some just cuz I tilted and felt like spending money that I could have saved for more VNs, food or clothes. Honestly, I never thought I'd ever see that much porn on the shelters of a store that wasn't specifically a porn store lmfao, gotta love sofmap. I'll try to post pictures later or maybe just make a video about the shit I bought, dunno about it yet. Oh yeah, idols are fucking everywhere, love live is like cancer jesus macaroni penis what a joy it was to listen to u's songs everywhere.

Hm... I think that's enough to define that my trip was amazing and I'd love to visit the country again, fuck, I'm actually going to try and become a teacher there. Talking about teachers, let's talk about Ren now. Oh boy, how do I start this? Ren is a fucking giant and I'm a dwarf, that was basically how people saw us there probably. I came out of the subway station, first thing I see is a tall foreigner with a red-beanie, just like the one Ren said that he'd be wearing, I just wasn't expecting him to be like, 20~30 cm+ taller than me (ﾟーﾟ). He showed me around the place, taught me the good places to get some cheap stuff and explained about a lot of things, such as sofmap's green/blue warnings on used games and how pre-orders work. We had some quality-time you know? Talking about weeb shit and eating McDonald's with no french fries, btw McDonalds became a thing that I always have to mention when I just wanna drop a random comment to some thread of his or a reply to him, I don't remember how it started but it was probably me being retarded. There's not much to talk about our meeting really, we went around the stores hunting for porn games to talk about, had some laughs looking at how broken their english was on game covers, had some McDonald's, quality-time, more laughs as he would hit his head on signs placed on the ceiling of the stores (LMFAOJA8FHEAFHA) and we shared life philosophies that can't even be expressed in digital letters, fuck binary. Great times, buddy, great times. Until he started showing me Love Live hentai, that fucker ruined my idols forever (ಠ_ಠ). I said it before though I can't recall the context, but I'm definitely going to kill you.

I think that's it. I did no edits and I don't think I'll do any just for the fun factor that is reading something written literally straight from my mind, as in I thought about something and wrote it down immediately without thinking about how I'd order things (Akiba was before Christmas). I just thought about it and I actually only mentioned Mini-Bitch once here even though I made it look like he was going to be present everywhere lol. He's a piece of shit but he made this trip a lot funnier than I expected so shout-out to him though he'll never read this nor know about the existence of this blog . Okay, I think that's it, I'll add an @edit below if I remember something relevant to add. Thanks for reading everyone.

The following list only contains threads made from May 02 to May 09, any older thread will be placed under the "Updated" banner if new relevant content is added to it.



If you don't know how the list works, please check the project
thread.







Discussion
VN Reading Club Revival (Link)
Favorite Visual Novel publishers? (Link)
Otome games and the difference in emotional involvement (Link)
Do otomeges have a higher chance of success than galges in the Western market? (Link)
Western Genres for VNs (Link)
Am I dreaming? Sakura no Uta -Sakura no Mori no Ue wo Mau- to be released on 07.24.015 (Link)
(Spoilers) Was Terra a good route? (Rewrite) (Link)
How Can Visual Novel Players Expose Newcomers to the Genre? (Link)
How do you read VNs (Stolen from reddit) (Link)
Has a VN ever made you depressed? (Link)
Complete This Conversation - Episode 02! (Link)
How do you determine that you have read a good Visual novel ? http://forums.fuwanovel.net/uploads/emoticons/default_happy.png' alt='^_^'> (Link)

Blog Post
Sakura-Con 2015 (Link)
Anti-Feminism in VNs (Link)
Japanese Word Processor / JWPce - The dictionary (Link)
A farewell and some messages (Link)

Announcement
Magnificent//Omniversal Love (OELVN Project - Development) (Link)

I'm an obsessive VN player, and I doubt there are many here who could match my experience. However, there is one issue I've more or less deliberately closed my eyes to when it comes to VNs... and that is the sheer amount of anti-feminist propaganda inserted into untranslated Japanese VNs in general. There are a number of major, really obvious examples of this, and I'll go ahead and describe them for you.

1. The 'female teacher who never gets married because she acts too much like a guy' archetype. This isn't even a heroine archetype. It is just a side-character archetype... but literally the most common non-heroine, non-protagonist one in existence other than the 'idiot friend' one. How is this anti-feminist? First, it assumes women with certain qualities - hard-working, focused on their jobs - aren't attractive. Second - and more insidious - it assumes that all such women should want to get married, so it is something of a double-whammy.

2. The 'strong-willed heroine who becomes completely submissive the second she and the protagonist become lovers' archetype. This is perhaps the most insidious of the heroine archetypes when it comes to this issue. This is more or less a manifestation of the hidden widely-held Japanese male belief that even the strongest woman secretly wants to be dominated by a man. Yes, there are plenty of otherwise strong-willed women that use mild SM as stress relief, but the same can be said for men...

3. Otome games. Yes, I know some would protest this, but it is really obvious, when you play them. First, almost all otome game protagonists are easily-dominated wilting lilies or women who become so the second they meet a strong, handsome man. Second, even those that aren't spend a ridiculous amount of time being 'rescued' by men (Damsel-in-Distress Syndrome). Third... exactly how many otome games do you see that appeal to women who prefer to be dominant, in general?

There are any number of such themes, archetypes, and concepts that demonstrate this little reality, but it is something you should probably keep in mind when you think you are going a bit over the edge playing moege, thinking real women might be like those on the screen. Remember that while some women really do fill the archetypes, they are exceptions, not the rule. At the same time, assuming that they should fulfill those roles/archetypes is one habit we probably shouldn't import from Japanese otakus, despite our taste in games, lol.

Hello everyone! Rose here, bringing you guys another member highlight. Today we'll be talking about someone who has been around for quite a while now but might not have caught your attention yet, even though he deserves it a lot. Zalor has been here for two years now, and while he doesn't have ten thousand posts nor three hundred threads created, he surely made the few ones under his belt count. Most recently, he proposed some interesting discussion topics that were also mentioned in our "Threads you should check out" list, so you might want to check them out.

Now, as the title implies, he has done a few analyses that will be linked below, together with a small commentary about each of those. When it comes to VNs, a lot of people say that we lack some content that other fandoms have in amplitude, such as fanfictions, fanarts, well-though theories and articles in general, and that much is pretty much true. For that reason, people like Zalor are amazingly valuable to our community and his work deserves a lot of recognition, not only for being a content that we lack, but also for their admirably high quality. Unfortunately, as I haven't read Narcissu nor Kanon, I couldn't write something about those analyses but I reached out for people who did but had never read his works, so reading their thoughts was even better for me, and surely it'll also be like that for Zalor.



"The greatest tribute you could pay an artist is to seriously think about their work"



-
Zalor
Perspective in Saya no Uta (Link)

"A fantastic analysis! From the well-crafted introduction to the relatively comical last line, Zalor delivers some nice thoughts about what could very well be one of the most complex and deep translated VN to date. Not only pointing the protagonist, he also shares insights about the perspectives of all the main cast on the many possible ways to see and understand the world built in the novel. I'd also like to give a quick shout-out to Plénitude, who made interesting observations and rethought Zalor's interpretations, adding a lot to the discussion." -Rose

Kanon: Mai and Sayuri Analysis (Link)

"It was a really good read, well thought out, good amount of detailed analysis without nitpicking or over analyzing, he drew parallels well and I personally liked the fact that while Mai is more focused in that route you agree with my assessment that Sayuri is by far the more tragic of the two heroines." -krill

Narcissu and Death (Link)

"Wonderful analysis of Narcissu. Just as the tale of Narcissu is a somber one, the analysis follows suit going into detail through the various interactions between the main character and Setsumi. A specific standout point would be the relation drawn between sensuality and death, which was particularly well thought-out. And finally, with a reference to the literary genius, Joesph Cambell, and a well structured conclusion, I found that our opinions agreed greatly. Narcissu truly is, as Zalor said, an 'uncensored portrayal of the complete hopelessness and isolation in facing death'." -LinovaA






With this, I'm ending this recognition post. I hope you guys enjoyed it and that our brief comments were enough to get you guys interested in his works. Zalor brings a lot to our community and I hope to have the pleasure to read more of his analyses in the future. Keep up the amazing work, soldier. Your efforts are definitely appreciated!

And so we begin...really really late. Sorry bout that but RL got hectic for a few weeks. PS: I cut this blog post down from 3,000 words, to less than 1,500. You're welcome

Welcome to the start of my blog series. The way I’ll organise this critique is to go through different writing techniques first, and then showcase how they were badly used by Winged Cloud. Unfortunately due to very strict time-constraints I’ll have to split this first entry into 2 components, so in this blog post I’ll discuss the first writing technique, in the next blog post I’ll analyse how that technique was used in the game. Then in the blog post after I’ll introduce the next writing technique and so forth.

Eventually I may even get to story, character, and the purpose of scenes. Bear in mind the following are my thought processes about writing techniques, which I assembled myself.

A necessary Beginning

What is “good writing?” “Good writing” is the flimsy excuse people on the internet use to give their criticisms weight. If you don’t like a book because the book isn’t for you, then the reason you didn’t like the book would lie on your shoulders. That sounds an awful lot like being your fault. People never want things to be their fault, it’s right up there with taking responsibility for their actions. Ew, who wants to do that? But if you said you didn’t like it because it was badly written, well, then the fault is the book’s and not yours. This is a much better feeling to have.

But seriously, what is “good writing?” Well, "good writing" is what happens when you take on-board every piece of writing advice given to you over the years and produce a novel which is completely unsellable. That book could be said to have been written in a “good style.”

AHHH! WHAT IS “GOOD WRITING?!” Okay, okay, the concept is ludicrously straight forward. A story-teller has a story they wish to tell, and in a novel the writing is the method with which that story is conveyed to the reader. If the storyteller can convey vivid and engaging images of the scenes to the reader, then they have succeeded. If the images are not so well conveyed, they could still have succeeded. If the imagery and pacing have been completely screwed, then we can say the writing is not good. A writer’s goal will always be to maximise the impact of their writing so the image is conveyed in an impactful way. Language techniques will be the tools the writer will use, and this goal will consumer their lives.

In a visual novel the concept is much the same, but less involved. The writer must still convey the bit that are not shown by visuals and sound to the audience.

Simple, no? So now on to the first technique.

Technique #1 - Show vs Tell, and when to use each

Ugh, what a clichéd piece of advice to begin with. Well, there’s a very good reason I started here, and it involves a hat and some small pieces of paper. But let us delve into this "oft-dished-out" piece of advice.

Everybody always tells budding writers to “show” and don’t “tell,” but the truth is if writers always followed this advice their work would be bloated, it would be boring, and it would be so weighty that nobody would be able to lift the damn thing. A writer will “show” some bits, and they’ll “tell” some bits. What technique they use at each point is a decision only the writer themselves can answer (this is part of a writer’s “style.”)

So, what does it mean when a writer “tells” something. Well, what generally happens is the narrator observes the circumstances happening around them, but instead of funnelling these observations to the reader, the narrator funnels the conclusions they draw instead. These conclusions will tend to be short, categorical statements (like he was tall, or he was miffed) because that is what we humans tend to do, make a bunch of observations, condense these observations into a conclusion which fits nicely into a category, and file that information away. When this method is overused the problems it can cause are many - not enough information to produce a decent image (you’ve reduced the information so it fits into a bite-size statement,) each person categorises things differently (leading to incorrect images being formed,) and pacing issues (galore.)

For example, if a reader is told a man is angry, this not only limits information and leads to a less detailed image, but people associate "anger" with different behaviours depending on their own experience and the environment they grew up in. So where the character actually clenched their fists and glared, the reader could have imagined him dropping to his knees, repeatedly whacking himself on the head with a tea kettle, and screeching to the heavens. This affects character development.

But we humans tend to have very few stock images for each category, so what happens if more than one person in the story is “angry?” What happens if 4 people got “angry”? 6 people got “angry?” Then the reader will be imagining multiple people whacking themselves on the head with a tea kettle. And if everybody gets angry at once? Well, let's just hope there’s a hell of a lot of tea kettles.

But it doesn’t stop there, every “chair” would be the same, every “2 story brick house” would be the same, every “table”, every “hand”. All “approaching footsteps” would sound the same, even if one of the characters had a peg-leg, and another was a fat, slobby, 4-legged centaur who cried great, soppy tears whenever he had to climb a set of stairs.

And we’re still not done, because that’s not the only thing an overuse of “tell” does. An overuse of “tell” takes away the manipulation of pacing a writer wields at his disposal. By it’s very nature, the lack of description in “tell” automatically speeds up the pace of events, but during those periods where you want to denote a passing of time or during those periods where you want to slow down the story, more description is added to give the reader an actual and innate feeling that time has passed.

When a writer “tells” a reader that "half an hour has passed," it doesn’t give the reader a visceral sense that time has, actually, passed. However, wondering about the significance of a man’s hitched up trousers for 5 or 6 very long paragraphs will impart a VERY visceral sense of time passing to the reader.

So, does a writer need to "show" everything with their prose? No. Often you may not want much detail, sometimes you’ll want to speed up the pace of the scene. Maybe you want to employ default reader images somewhere in your story (here a writer can use “tell” to their considerable advantage.) Flip to any page of any published book and it will always contain a mixture of “show” and “tell.” What mixture you choose will depend on what style you want to employ. But the reason this piece of advice is so clichéd is because many people don’t put enough detail into their writing to impart a decent image to the reader.

How this applies to Visual Novels

Visual Novels are a different medium to novels, and with their inclusion of visuals and sound the prose doesn't need to be as dense. But unless the visuals and sounds paint a complete picture, like in The Walking Dead, some prose will still be necessary and standard writing techniques apply.

Next Post: How Sakura Spirit handled this technique
Next Next Post: Redundancy, bloat, and the value of precision.

For those that don’t know, the other day some villains ambushed me and they gave me a task – to produce a writing critique of Sakura Spirit. This, they say, will entertain the masses and provide much mirth for those on Fuwa. It is a task I went into full of hubris.

But first some background. Sakura Spirit is an English developed Visual Novel with extroadinarily pretty art, and yet it suffers from a horrible reputation. A reputation even more repulsive than those terribly translated, doujin, nukige abominations Mangagamer spews forth. The mere mention of this title produces hisses and insults from nearby people, reactions you’d usually only hear if you gatecrashed a teenagers party. Dressed in only a bathrobe and slippers. Shouting that it was past your child’s bed-time, you were here to collect them, and had anybody seen them?

There’s very few people or institutions that could release something so aesthetically beautiful only to produce such disgust in the public, and my money’s on the Government.

And so I went into this challenge supremely confident, reassured by the knowledge that the Government has never done anything right. I would be gifted a game that was completely horrid, and I would need to apply only a minisule amount of brainpower to produce a detailed critique. How misplaced a feeling this was!

But onto specifics, why the uproar over such a beautiful looking game? Well, there’s 4 reasons: there’s no plot, it’s a game about sex but there is none, it’s an English developed visual novel with Japanese words and phrases sprinkled everywhere, and the writing is horrid. So the only positives to the game are the pretty art, and the fanservice.

But surely gamers are a smart species, they wouldn't fork over good money just because of some large, oil-smeared boobs, am I right? That would be like watching NASCAR for the crashes, or watching a foreign film to laugh at the funny mistranslations in the subtitles.

But I was wrong. Over 100,000 people own Sakura Spirit, and that’s more than the entire voting population of Aruba. And most of them appear to have thoroughly enjoyed themselves, if the review system on Steam can be taken at face value.

Which it can’t.

But here’s the thing, if a small indie studio can sell over a hundred thousand copies just by including some nice art, and sprites with reflecting boobs, then there’s no incentive to provide a decent story or good writing. Writing takes time, and good writing even more so, and if there's little monetary reward to head down that path then people won’t.

But unlike Winged Cloud, Sekai Project is a production studio and DO have a professional reputation to maintain. In response to the uproar they made some apologetic sounds and issued some vague promises on Reddit. They said they asked Winged Cloud to “improve the grammar and writing” and have since “changed their QA procedure”. But despite their revamped QA procedure the situation repeated itself with Nekopara, another awfully pretty game that was obviously translated by the Government. This didn’t bode well for their first promise.

So over the next few weeks (Fuwa time) I will analyse the game’s writing to find out how much it has improved, and what writing issues are still included in the script. Obviously they wouldn't have been able to shoe-horn in a plot, or much additional character development, but what have they improved and how bad is the writing in its current form? Is Sakura Spirit finally worth purchasing or is it still nothing more than a glorified erotic CG gallery… with no actual porn?

That’s what we’ll find out.

As could have probably been easily predicted, I last left off 5 minutes near the end of the demo. As a consequence, the final one ended up being the shortest episode. Still, I've included a little bonus at the end, although equally short. This video is also in high quality, at least when compared to the rest.


As for what I'm doing next, which is assuredly not the question first and foremost on your mind, I'll actually leave it up to your capable minds. I can do most everything except that which I haven't personally approved.

Until then, excuse me.