Deep Blue

This is a VN by Windmill, the company that made Hyper Hyspeed Genius and Kamigakari Cross Heart, both great VNs, even if they were wildly different in focus and genre.  While this VN doesn't quite measure up to them overall, it does have its moments, which I will outline below.
First, the common path... it is your classic charage common path, though with the fantasy twist that the protagonist is sucked into another world whose only real differences materially is the existence of magic and the lack of cell phones and television.  This VN tends to return to a slightly older comedy methodology, in that there is a relatively high amount of what is called 'lucky sukebe', with heroines that generally forgive the protagonist... eventually.  The common route does a good job of introducing you to the characters, including the protagonist and heroines, and - like most sensible common routes - it has a single split-off point for all the heroines.
The heroine routes... are extremely heavy on the ecchi and icha-icha.  I'll be blunt, this VN makes no bones about the fact that it is focused on moe, ecchi, ichaicha, and romance.  The drama is generally minimal and kept toward the end... and generally resolved with extreme ease and high speed so they can get back to the H-scenes, dating, and the excuse for an adorable final CG of the heroine that is the epilogue.  Technically, the Nightmare, Lisley, is the main heroine... but there is no significant difference in length or quality between hers and the other paths. 
The protagonist for once is not a negative element for the story in this charage.  He is indeed a kind-hearted harem-king style protagonist, but he is actually reasonably capable and actually has a personality that women might find attractive in a more general sense.  His general endless optimism and his 'tennen' inability to see things in a negative light are the most obvious examples of this.
Overall, this VN is a decent choice for someone who wants a soft, ecchi VN that stops well short of a nukige and has a decent but not particularly bumpy ride to each heroine's endings. 

If you’re the image editor for a VN translation, you’ll probably spend at least half your time setting English type. Lots of it. (The other half will be spent laboriously retouching out all the Japanese text you’re about to replace.) Sounds simple on the surface, right? Any pixel monkey can copy/paste from a translation document.
But there’s a lot more to good typesetting than just clicking with text tool and banging away on the keyboard. Just like good prose, there’s a certain rhythm to good type. A practiced designer will make numerous small adjustments along the way that allow the to reader glide effortlessly through whatever’s being said. Reading good type should be like driving on a well-paved road.
And the one thing all good display type has in common: someone took the time to kern it.
The Basics of Kerning
I won’t go into a detailed discussion of kerning here — the terminology, the history, the fact that it sounds like something you’d have to pay an escort extra for. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, there are lots of sites out there for you to read. Better yet, buy yourself The Elements of Typographic Style, the best book about type you could ever hope to own. Call it an early Christmas present to yourself. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that kerning means to adjust the empty space between any two adjacent characters, either bringing them closer together or pushing them father apart.
And why would you want to do that? Otherwise, you’ll have gaps and crashes in your type that’ll make things feel ever so slightly off.
To illustrate, I browsed over to a free font site and downloaded a typeface at random. (There’s a very good reason I did this, rather than using some industry-standard font like Helvetica or Times Roman. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Downloading, downloading … done! Okay, let’s set some type.

Here we have a few words set in Font X — name redacted to protect the innocent. At first glance, everything seems fine. But then you look closer and start noticing little things. Like what are these weird gaps between the first two letters of some words? Some are almost as wide as the full space between words.

And hey, what about these letters over here that are more or less crashing into each other? That can’t be good, right?

Nope. These are problems. They need to be fixed.
Kerning Pairs
The reason I picked a free font is because most professional typefaces (aka, “ones you pay a lot of money for”) are designed to avoid the majority of such issues. Once a typographer has crafted all the characters for a font, he or she will then spend countless hours specifying “kerning pairs” for it — basically, instructions on how close each letter should sit next to every other letter. (Here’s how close A should be to B, here’s how close A should be to b, etc.) While some letter pairings may look good at default spacing, others will need to pull tighter or push father out to look right. Professional fonts will often contain hundreds of these kerning pairs. It’s mind-numbing work that takes far more time than most amateur typographers are willing to put into a freebie font project.
That work still needs to get done, however, but now it’s on your shoulders instead. And, since most fan translation projects use free fonts for budgetary reasons, odds are you’ll have a whole lot of mess to clean up. Congratulations! Thankfully, once you’ve learned how, it’s pretty easy stuff.
I work in Photoshop, so I’ll be showing its kerning interface here. If you use another program, it likely has something similar. Here’s Photoshop’s character palette, with the kerning field highlighted:

The "0" you see there means there’s no kerning currently being applied to the characters on either side of your text cursor. Make this number negative, and the two letters will start pulling closer together. Make it positive, and they’ll start pushing farther apart. (Photoshop measures this in units 1/1000 ems, but that’s bar trivia you don’t really need to remember. Just know that in most cases, you’ll be entering numbers in the range of -100 to +100.) You can see the results of some sample values below.

In Photoshop, you also have the option of “Metrics” (apply whatever kerning pairs the typographer included in the font, if any) or “Optical” (let Photoshop guess what looks good, basically). Play around to get a feel for things, then advance your cursor through your type, letter pair by letter pair, and adjust this value until the two letters are the right distance apart. Rinse and repeat. And what’s the “right” distance? The one that looks right, of course. It’s a subjective thing, and this is where practice and design experience come into play. 
Like The Sands Through The Hourglass
One of the first art directors I worked under offered me this analogy, which I’ve always rather liked: Imagine the negative space between letters as vases lined up in a row. They’re all different shapes, these vases, but you want each to be able to hold an equal amount of sand (or M&Ms or whatever). Kern until your vases all look like they could all hold the same amount. This is an imprecise rule, of course, and you’ll often want to make your “vases” bigger or smaller for visual effect, but it gives a beginner a good baseline approach.
So let’s take that approach here. Let’s go through, fix all the obvious gaps and crashes we noted earlier, then make smaller adjustments to even out the text overall. (We call this giving the type an even “color.”) After some quick fiddling, we end up with something like this before and after:


It’s subtle, but the "after" type just feels nicer overall. And if your text is a UI element that some poor reader will spend countless hours staring at, you want to make sure it’s as nice as you can manage. Because the longer you spend with something, the more obvious and annoying its flaws become. (Said every roommate ever.)
The good news is you don’t need to do this everywhere. It’d be insanity to kern entire sentences or paragraphs of text, especially since the effect is barely perceptible at those point sizes. You only really need to worry about kerning display type — things like buttons, headlines, title screens, etc. If your type is over 16pt, it probably needs to be kerned. The good news is, as you learn the keyboard shortcuts for your particular application/platform, you’ll be able to breeze through a piece of type in a matter of seconds. In fact, a lot of designers find sitting down and kerning type to be mindlessly relaxing, like knitting or playing Minesweeper or making fun of the animations in Fallout 4.
Mind Your Gaps
So that’s kerning in a nutshell kernel. It’s the absolute easiest way to step up your type game, and it’s quick enough that there’s no reason not to do it. As a bonus, there’s a fun little online game out there to let you practice your kerning skills in hypothetical situations and compare them to a professional designer’s solution. It’s a fun way to kill some time at work while you boost your skills.

Yes, I have indeed decided to add books to my regular posts, mostly due to Rooke's suggestion.  Understand, if you think I've read a lot of VNs... that is nothing in comparison to the number of books I've read over the twenty-eight years since I learned to read.  That number is somewhere in the tens of thousands... and one of the reasons I can be so intolerant when it comes to the excessive reliance on conventions in VNs, lol. 
Honor Harrington
Honor Harrington is both a character and a series written by David Weber, one of the more famous science fiction authors out there.  He tends to write military sci-fi, mostly, and in a different way from Ringo (Ringo being the most famous name in military sci-fi), he has reshaped the way I saw science-fiction to some extent. 
Honor, in the book On Basilisk Station, is the captain of a light cruiser named Fearless that has been exiled to the hardship post/dumping ground of her star nation's holdings for the crime of being an incidental part of the humiliation of one of her more well-connected superiors.  Throughout the series - up until this point (there are over twelve books now, and Harrington is both older and wiser), Harrington in many ways embodies all the military holds up as an ideal.  She is courageous, intelligent, aware of her duty, and she has a knack for ending up in the worst positions you could imagine (both politically and militarily).  Her character, over the course of the series, advances from a somewhat immature young officer to a wise woman who is all to0 aware of the cost of doing her duty.  She and her treecat (an alien empathic animal that occasionally forms bonds with humans) survive some of the worst hells, psychological and physical, that you could imagine existing in the mortal universe... and endure the loss of those who don't.
Now, a good military sci-fi series is no good without an enemy empire to deal with... and in this one, it is the People's Republic of Haven, a massive interstellar star nation with an apparently overwhelming advantage in numbers... but an economy that is going down the drain to the welfare state and the deliberate sabotage of the education system by the political elites (sounds kind of like a combination of democratic socialism for the first and Republican education policy for the latter, lol).  In Haven, over two thirds of the population is on the Dole, the name for their welfare system which basically hands out a living allowance to everyone who wants it... in exchange for making the 'legislature' and all other government positions hereditary some three centuries before.  Unfortunately, this has caused a slow but accelerating decay in the system as a whole, as entire generations grow up with the deliberately castrated education system and no incentive to try to rise above their peers.  This has led Haven to a very simple - and short-term - strategy... conquer neighbors, gut their economies to feed the worthless mouths of the mob, then include them in the Dole... rinse and repeat, ever expanding outward.  Unfortunately for Honor's homeland, Manticore, it has been slated as the next morsel to go down the throats of the faceless masses, and the antiquated but massive navy of the 'Peeps' is planning to make itself the fork.
The first few novels are basically preliminaries to the outbreak of open war (albeit bloody ones), where Honor finds herself in some really nasty situations as she does her duty and in the process incidentally foils the best-laid plans of the other side. 
One thing to keep in mind is that warships in the Honorverse tend to have hundreds to thousands of crewmen... meaning that every breach of the hull can kill dozens, further meaning that even in a 'minor confrontation' dozens to hundreds will die... and Honor rarely gets into 'minor confrontations'.  The guilt of a commander that loses men to the enemy is an important theme throughout the series, though not a primary one. 
Manticore, Honor's homeland, is a small three-planet, two-system star nation at the beginning, ruled by a constitutional monarchy, complete with a House of Lords and a House of Commons... Generally speaking, the position of the monarch is kind of similar to the current one of the Queen of England, both in law and substance... in other words, while she has very little actual direct authority by law, her influence is immensely strong, both as a symbol and as an individual.  The House of Lords, which was basically formed by ennobled 'original' colonists who were there before the plague that caused them to bring in large numbers in a second wave, is supposed to act as a restraint on the elected House of Commons, and generally the Prime Minister is chosen from amongst its members.  Manticore is probably the most advanced nation in the entire human-ruled galaxy (outside of genetics, which is Beowulf's and Mesa's specialty), at least partially because their prime system is at a wormhole junction that allows a much faster movement from one end of the ginormous Solarian Union to the other.  This gives them massive amounts of money and direct access to technology from other worlds that has let them build up a huge advantage in relative terms over the People's Republic, which is an issue that is important throughout much of the series.  In many ways, it is easy to think of Manticore as a futuristic version of the British Empire without the colonialist tendencies and racial arrogance.
Throughout the series, characters on the 'side of good' are put in situations that are pure hell, forced to make hard decisions, and they frequently live or die by those decisions, with Honor always at the forefront.  The series as a whole is really well-written... with realistic-feeling antagonists and easy to love characters on both sides of the war (Theisman from the second book comes to mind for the People's Republic), as well as people that are truly worthy of hate and contempt on both sides.  The more serious elements are broken up by the humorous interactions of Honor, her subordinates, and her friends, and there are many times throughout the series when big issues of morality are brought to the forefront (such as the morality of gene-manipulation, stating a big one). 
If there is one thing you'll notice about any David Weber book... it is that he manages to create characters that make you want to cheer them on... even on the other side.  He rarely, if ever produces a side of one of his books' wars that doesn't have people that are good despite the system they work within, and even the best of his people - including Honor herself - have their moments when they show the baseness of human nature's darker side.  Honor is the type that leashes her dark side with duty and unleashes it on the enemies of her people... but that dark side definitely exists, chained beneath the surface (as is seen rather clearly in the second and fourth books). 
My conclusion about this series - which I've reread four times - is that I can honestly recommend it to anyone who likes science fiction and space operas... but for people who can't handle complexity - both of scenario and of moral/philosophical issues - they will probably have difficulty with it.  The Honorverse is still going strong, currently... though it has several anthologies and two side-series (one based in the early days of Manticore and another focused on characters involved in the anti-slavery movement).  Honor herself hasn't been sidelined... but the story has evolved beyond that small portion of space that contains Haven and Manticore, meaning that it is not so focused around her anymore. 

Mmm... first of all, this is by Onamatope, a company previously known only for its harem-ge from the Mecha-con series.  The Mecha-con series fell somewhere into that thin area between a nukige and a moege, and it was actually pretty decent for something in that area of the VN universe.  So, keeping that experience in mind, I went into this VN with a more open mind than some people probably would have.  Fortunately, this VN wasn't a disappointment, precisely because I wasn't looking for it to be something out of this world.
Ok, first... this is a chuunige, in the sense that it follows a format I think most people will be familiar with... this young guy is transformed and forced into a world where he has to fight to survive, with many pretty girls around him... sound familiar?  It should.  That right there is the basis for about ninety-percent of the entire 'gakuen battle' type chuunige sub-genre.  In a few ways, this VN definitely borrows from Draculius, which I still think is the best non-superviolent vampire VN.  There are a lot of differences between the two... but they share the commonality of allowing for a coexistence of slice-of-life and comedy with a more serious background story. 
I'll say it straight out though... there should have been an Iris path.  I don't say this because I'm a lolicon (though the protagonist and his ancestors all were, apparently) - as I'm not - but because Iris was, at first, second and third glance, the most interesting female character in the VN.  All the heroines had their moments... in fact, I was really, really surprised at the degree to which they managed to balance all the paths and gave the heroines an equal amount of story.  Due to the fact that the first half of their paths are the same, you might think Aoi and Lycoris got a bit screwed over, but their events after the split are distinct enough - and long enough - that I can't really say either got screwed over by the scenario designer's choices.  In that sense, this VN is something of a triumph of the art of scenario design, which was one of the areas in which Onamatope generally shined in its near-nukige Mecha-con series as well (one of the reasons my impressions of those games were positive). 
In terms of raw writing... the battle writing is actually some of the better non-Light and non-Propeller I've seen.  That isn't to say it is first class, because it isn't.  The protagonist is way too much of a hetare when it comes to dealing with his vampirism, and the fact that they chose to make all the heroines, sub-heroines, and the protagonist a bit 'baka' was a bit of an odd choice that had moments where it fell flat.  The regular narrative writing is better than you generally see in a nakige (which generally get favored with the best moege-variant writers), and I can honestly say that the pacing didn't throw me off very often, though there were some shaky moments midway and early on.
In terms of visuals... this VN definitely needed more combat CGs.  I knew they would cut corners on this, as Onamatope is not a company that can afford the kind of budgets for visuals that monsters like Will and Light can.  There was a bit too much reuse of the same tachie poses to simulate combat, and the best I can say is that they gave the protagonist a face and a tachie for once, which was a huge plus.
... unfortunately they didn't give him a voice.  Perhaps one of the biggest no-nos with a modern chuunige is to fail to give the protagonist a voice.  The simple reason for this?  Because the protagonist in a chuunige is always intended to be an actual person, rather than a simple self-insert.  As such, it is rather ridiculous to give into that particular convention when even using a random staff member would probably satisfy most people. 
Generally speaking, the music in this game is... generic-sounding in the sense that chuunige music can ever be generic-sounding.  That means that the tunes are ones I suspect get sold to every company intending to make this type of VN, with a few twists and changes in the rhythm to make them sound different to the ears of someone who doesn't listen.   On the positive side, there is no point in this VN where I felt like the music was misused, which is a far bigger flaw that simply reusing music tracks from other games.
Overall, what can those of you looking forward to the localization look forward to?  I'd say that if you want some slice-of-life with vampires merged with a low-level chuunige story, this will definitely be something to look forward to.  On the other hand, fans of more serious chuunige will not be satisfied by this, as the game is just to light in the slice-of-life scenes and the protagonist is a bit too much of a near-hetare when it comes to the vampire issues. 

Mmm... having finished the final path, my conclusion is pretty clear... This is a game that had a lot of potential that was primarily screwed up by how poorly executed certain game mechanics were and the way they did the two protagonists.  In my previous posts, I already went over my feelings on the two initial paths and their protagonists, so I'll leave that where it is and move on to the third path.
The third path - the true path - basically shifts gears completely, drastically altering the series of events immediately after Kai and Shizuma clash mech to mech for the first time.  This is partially because of certain revelations that occur immediately before, and things progress rapidly to a revelation of the people hidden backstage... and the traditional 'lets go kill the bastards who have been manipulating us!' last ride down the mouth of hell.  To be honest, after the mess they made of the other two paths, it was really hard to get up any enthusiasm whatsoever.  Kai's path felt staid and forced, whereas Shizuma's path was... unusual but horribly painful to play through, primarily because of Shizuma himself. 
Shizuma actually becoming a human being is probably the best thing about the third path.  He drops the paranoia and most of the angst, and he actually become something approaching psychologically stable.  If he'd managed to drop into that mode in his own path at some point, I probably would have been more forgiving, lol. 
Other than that... Kai never does really grow that much.  He remains a two-dimensional prop with a fondness for airheads (all three of the heroines are airheads or exceedingly naive in some way).  He spouts formulaic phrase after formulaic phrase, right through to the conclusion.  It doesn't help that the manipulators behind the scenes are also less than inspiring, once the initial emotional release is achieved. 
My final conclusion on the series canon issue is that one or the other is canonical but they can't coexist with the inconsistencies obviously present.  Chronologically, Kenseiki would have had to have happened after Yumina but before Corona.  Unfortunately, certain events in Corona make that impossible, so I had to just give up, in the end, on figuring out whether Eternal intended any of the series to have a true chronological consistency.
Also, the difficulty spike near the end of the game is a bit ridiculous, though I was still able to get through it by picking off enemies at the edges until I'd isolated the more annoying ones... that and strategically making certain my people with support skill-blocking skills were available to all the other characters at all times to deal with the really nasty support skills the bosses tended to have.
This is also true of Corona, in a way... There is a huge difficulty spike near the end of that one that makes it virtually impossible to achieve victory without abusing the protagonist/redhead/Corona combo to blast away the bosses' barriers. 
My final conclusion about the game as a whole?  It would have been much, much better if they had made it consistent with the series' other games and had fixed the leveling so that all the characters would level together (I loathe the grinding that is inevitably required in srpgs where you have lots of characters who level individually).  I also think it would have been better if they had really, truly made using Stigma and Alpharia a 'good thing', as they are both as weak as kittens, except for their support skills... and as mechs combined with their respective protagonists, they actually make Shizuma and Kai a little weaker, in some ways.  The sword-people proved useful throughout the game, though the fact that some of the best party-attack skills are on them, so having them constantly equipped frequently felt wasteful.  Story-wise... Kai's path was tolerable, Shizuma's path was painful, and the third path was good... but that just means they made the first three fourths of the game into a slogfest, which is a huge downer.  Giving the sub-heroines their own unique paths was a good choice, as it gave them a chance to be distinct from one another.  Unfortunately, the fact that the third path makes it all irrelevant kind of kills the fun, doesn't it?

I'll be perfectly honest... having finished Shizuma's path, the only thing I can say is that he was a total douche-bag intelligent self-hating moron to the end.   Being inside his mind was depressing, right from the beginning to the end. While I loved most of the other characters on his path, I hated him and his heroines, also from beginning to end.  Similar to Kai, he is actually more effective on foot than he is riding in Stigma.  Stigma is slightly more durable than Alfaria, and she definitely has a lot better support skills.  However, when it came down to it, all that meant was that I had to keep a piece of deadweight alive through the entire game.  Gameplay-wise, that is a nightmare in both Kai's and Shizuma's paths. 
I did like the characters in Shizuma's path more than the ones in Kai's, because they seemed more human (except the psychopath).  Unfortunately, there really was no reason why they should have stuck with Shizuma.  He resents them through most of the game, takes out his frustrations on them frequently, and generally makes an ass of himself.  Also, there was a huge load of 'what was the point of all that?' self-pity from Shizuma for about the last half of his path that made me feel like I wanted to smash his head in.
Shizuma's story is dark... but it isn't the kind of darkness you can sit back and take pleasure in.  It is the kind of darkness that gives you a headache because it is largely born out of Shizuma's idiocy after a certain point of the game.  Yes, I unreservedly hate Shizuma.  I don't mind characters that get twisted by the things they have to do, but self-hating, self-pitying idiots with 18 Intelligence and 0 Wisdom make me want to smash things.  He does not evolve or really learn from his mistakes, and his paranoia gets old, fast.
Story-wise... there are way too many inconsistencies between the two paths, even where they meet.  I had to honestly throw my hands up in frustration at trying to figure out how they meant the game to make sense.  Not only that, but throughout Shizuma's path you see bits of the backstage that should have really come to the forefront at some point but fizzle out, with the inability to access the third path making me want to do the 'crazy dance'.  There should be a third path, because none of the crap that happens in this game is conclusive in any way.  They hinted at a third path before release.  So why can't I access it after completing both paths once, I wonder?  If they mean to release it as a sequel, I'm just going to forget about this game entirely.
I am also at least partially sure that heroine choice actually effects things more than it really should in this type of game, due to the sheer amount of extra battles I had to fight in comparison to Kai's path.  Since Veridadear is a really easy to notice secondary heroine, I suppose going down her path probably creates a much different outcome from choosing Alfaria.  Choosing Stigma in Shizuma's path resulted in a nightmare rollercoaster of endless death that made me bored halfway through (I know that sounds impossible - me loving endless death -, but the way the story for Shizuma's path stumbled so completely after the turning point made me want to scream).
 
Update
Ok, the thing you have to do to access the third path is to complete Stigma's and Alfaria's path, as I suspected *sighs*.  The difference in length and difficulty between Alfaria's path and Veridadear's path is pretty extreme... and at the end, after playing through the equivalent of two full VN-rpgs?  You have to play yet another path... the best thing I can say about it is that you actually find out what was going on behind the scenes to some extent early on.  I'm really tired of this game... for obvious reasons.  Nonetheless, I'll keep playing this until it is over, lol.

So far, the protagonists of this story are its biggest downside.  I don't say this to be mean... I just felt I needed to be frank with you all.  The story itself is generally interesting, as is the cast of side-characters... but both protagonists definitely leave something to be desired.
Kai
Kai's side of the story would probably be best referred to as the 'Light' side of the first part of the VN.  Why?  Because, for all the horrible things that happen during the course of his story, none of them really tarnish or dirty him personally.  That is fairly typical of a jrpg protagonist, as the 'natural hero' types tend to never really get dirtied by all the horrible things that go on around them or the people they have to kill in the course of the game.  Oh, early in the game he is a little bit more pathetic, but when he loses a comrade, it drives him to 'resolve himself' to the fight to come with the typical guilt-driven passion you see from any number of similar heroes.  To be honest, the degree to which his personality and character development is cliched is startling.  Most writers make an effort to at least move the protagonist a little away from the 'middle of the road' archetypes...
Shizuma
Shizuma is a problem for an entirely different set of reasons.  Number one is that he is a resurrection of the 'angst-driven anti-hero protagonist who is always irritated with or angry at something'.  As I've gotten into his path, I don't see this quality fading all that much.  Worse, he seems to have the fatal character flaw of being a smart idiot.  He is intelligent, but he is blind to the obvious pitfalls around him.  He fails to even consider that a certain delusion early on might be wrong, due to his obsessive personality, and he fails even more to choose an intelligent path to his goal, despite apparently being fairly smart.  A lot of this comes from the impatience that is endemic to this kind of protagonist... but that doesn't change the fact that he looks like an idiot through almost the entire first quarter of his path, despite having the typical elitist arrogance of the naturally capable ('What, you can't do that?  It's easy though.').
 
Edit: For those who are interested, Eternal has released an update fixing the bugs stated in the previous post, as well as rebalancing certain aspects of gameplay - the general weakness of combined mechpeople and a few other issues.  11/01/2015 1:33 AM, US Central Time

This blog is all about owning my mistakes and putting them on public display, so let’s do this. And yeah, I knew this one was going to come back and bite me in the ass. This was my albatross. This was my giant ass-biting albatross.
The great “tricky” debacle of 2015
So there’s this word that shows up in the English translation of Koisuru Natsu no Last Resort. If you’ve read it, you might have noticed it once or twice.
“Tricky.”
Umi, the main heroine, falls back on this word a lot to describe the protagonist. She uses it when he’s being nice. And when he’s being a jerk. And when he’s chewing food. And any other opportunity she can think of. Basically, I think she gets paid 100 yen every time she manages to work that word into a sentence. And let me tell you: girl is pulling down bank.
Of course, this is a translation, so she’s not actually saying “tricky.” She’s saying something similar in Japanese. And therein lies a tale of woe and sorrow.
The backstory
But let’s rewind a bit first.
When I came aboard the KoiRizo team, it was to edit a single route: Nagisa’s. Makes sense — I was a first-time VN editor, and Nagisa’s route was the shortest in the game. Moreover, it was an unlockable, which meant that comparatively few people would end up reading it. Other editors were already hacking away at most of the remaining routes anyway, so that was all fine by me.
As I worked my way through Nagisa’s scripts, I saw the word “tricky” pop up once or twice in Umi’s dialogue as a personal insult and it just seemed ... odd to me. Tough math problems are tricky. Opening a stubborn jar of peanut butter is tricky. People? Less so. I’m an editor, though, not a translator, so I did what I was supposed to do: flagged it for TLC review, left a comment with my concerns, edited the line as best I could, then moved along. The translator on the project had made it clear he wouldn’t be reviewing any edits until all the routes were finished being edited, so that’s about all I could do at the time.
When I finished cleaning up Nagisa’s route, I was asked if I wouldn’t mind tackling Shiori’s scripts as well, which no other editor had gotten around to yet. “Sure,” I said, and set about tidying that up as well. The word “tricky” popped up a couple more times, so I did the same thing: flagged it, reiterated my concerns, then kept on editing.
I finished Shiori, and was asked if I’d pick up the common route and Umi’s route; the editing on both of these had apparently stalled. Okay, what had started out as a quickie project for me was slowly turning into something much more time-consuming. I could see that. But I was still having fun, so I agreed. I started with the common route, where Umi has more screen time, which meant I started seeing the word “tricky” a little more often.
And I started to worry.
I flagged it, left a comment along the lines of “See my earlier notes on tricky,” and kept editing. I was determined not to get hung up on one silly word. It was becoming clear that this was sort of a catchphrase word for Umi, and I didn’t want to change the translation in my scripts if all the other editors’ scripts were keeping it as is. It’d be like if a screenwriter on The Simpsons decided that “D’oh!” sounded dumb, so Homer should say “Ooops!” instead — but only on the episodes he/she worked on.
Anyway, I finished the common route and moved onto Umi’s. And lo, I gazed into a bottomless abyss of trickiness.

You sly dumbass, you.
Now let’s talk about the actual word. In Japanese, it’s “ずるい” — “zurui.” And, true to its definition, zurui’s a tricky word to pin down.
It’s often translated as “unfair.” (Or so I’ve been told. Again, I’m an editor, not a translator. I took a Japanese class or two a few years back, so I have a basic familiarity with the rudiments of grammar and vocabulary. I’m good for: “Hello, I only speak a little Japanese. Sorry! What time is it? Where is the train? I am a very cute peach.” And that’s about it.) But there’s a little more nuance to it than that. Getting cancer is unfair. Having your advisor take credit for your thesis is unfair. “Zurui” implies a level of deviousness, impishness, slyness, craftiness, and yes, even trickiness. Someone who’s being “zurui” knows they’re getting away with something — and they’re okay with that.
Moreover, it has a secondary meaning of being miserly, which is something that definitely applies to Soutarou, the protagonist of KoiRizo. I have to imagine that wordplay was not lost on the writers ... or the characters.
There’s no one good English word to capture all those layers of meaning. When Umi uses this word to describe the protagonist in KoiRizo, it’s clear from context that her emotional shading varies from line to line. Sometimes she’s straight-up pissed at him and is telling him off: “You jackass.” Other times, she’s more of a late-game tsundere and says it playfully, even affectionately: “You sly dog you.” But she uses the same Japanese word every single time. Sometimes she’ll even say it six or seven times in a row without taking a breath.
“Zurui. Zurui. Zurui. Zurui. Zurui. ZURUI!”
It was her catchphrase. And in pretty much every instance, it had been translated as “tricky.”
If the word only appeared once or twice in KoiRizo, I could have swapped in the contextually appropriate English replacements and been done with it. (I actually did this in a handful of places throughout the VN, usually when it was clear she was at one extreme of the word or the other.) But given how often it showed up, I felt somehow obligated to honor authorial intent. This was Umi’s pet phrase for this guy she’d fallen in love with. At one point, I think she even uses it as all the parts of speech in a single sentence. If I started changing “zurui” to different words every time, she’d lose a fairly important character quirk.
After looking at all the options, the translator’s choice of “tricky” started seeming like it wasn’t a half-bad compromise after all. It got across that Umi thought the protag was dealing from the bottom of the emotional deck, but it also had a playful, teasing quality. It was never the best word in any particular instance, but it seemed like it might be flexible enough to be just sorta kinda okay in all instances.
That argument makes sense, right? I thought so at the time, anyway. And so I left “tricky” as it was.
Boy, was I wrong.

Mea culpa
I overthought it, plain and simple. I forgot my personal rule of writing and editing: Make the journey as frictionless for the readers as possible. Don’t let them get snagged on odd phrasings or slightly off words. Keep them immersed in the story.
I’d forgotten how jarring that “tricky” word seemed those first few times I saw it in translation. As the months passed, some sort of editing Stockholm Syndrome set in and I actually started thinking it might be an acceptable option.
In short, I messed up.
When I read Umineko for the first time, Battler’s use (and abuse) of the word “useless” seemed so ill-fitting to me in English prose that I almost gave up reading the VN right then and there. But now, I sort of understand how the Witch Hunt team might have, over time, come to see this ungainly adjective as the best compromise for their main character’s catchphrase. It doesn’t make me like it much more, but I can see how they ended up there. (But don’t get me started on “turn the chessboard over” vs. “turn the chessboard around.” The latter works; the former leaves you with a bunch of chess pieces on the ground.)
So here's the deal: It doesn’t matter that I had to make literally hundreds of judgment calls like this over the course of editing KoiRizo — what to do with Yuuhi’s numerous nicknames for the protagonist, as just one example — and 99% of them turned out okay (I hope).
What matters is there’s a big lump of tricky sitting in the middle of the visual novel. And it doesn't work.
I signed off on it. And I take full responsibility for that.
So what to do? Not much, to be honest. It’s one of those things I’d love to revisit if given the chance, but a 2.0 KoiRizo patch seems unlikely at this time. MDZ keeps his own counsel, but he seems to have moved onto other pursuits.
And that, as they say, is that.
Postscript
As I mentioned, the original intent of this blog was to put a spotlight on my many missteps as a first-time VN editor. That hasn’t changed. I might also try to throw in some helpful life advice from time to time, but I’m mainly happy to let my blunders serve as good object lessons for other aspiring editors.
That means you should feel free to discuss any boneheaded decisions you think I might have made. Odds are I’ll own up to them. I've got a very thick skin, after all. I just ask two things:
1. This blog is about editing. If you have issues with someone’s translation choices, I kindly ask that you take it elsewhere. I hear Fuwa has really nice forums for that sort of thing, y'know? But if you have issues with how I edited someone's translation, then bring it on.
2. Please don’t be a giant pixelated dick about it. No one likes a pixel pick.

Due to work and school, I haven't been able to progress as much as I would have liked with this VN, but I have gotten moderately far, so I'll give you a bit of an update on my experiences.
Gameplay Comments
First, the gameplay... this is a straight strategy rpg in format, but it does have a few twists.  First, the characters known as 'mech-people' and 'sword-people' can become what their name is... literally becoming a mech or a sword, through their pact with a particular character.  In the case of the mech-people, this not only creates a more powerful unit to stand on the field, it also extends their attack range, making them more effective on the battlefield, both offensively and defensively (though at the cost of skills the mech can use being lower level and fewer in number than the characters in question).  In opposition, the sword-people directly enhance the stats of their partner, giving them wider movement range, more powerful attacks, stronger defenses, etc.  When joined with someone, both sides gain a precise fraction of the experience they would have otherwise gained (in the case of the Kai/Alfaria/Beldadia combo It gets split three ways, for instance).  This has some advantages and more disadvantages.  The advantage is both characters can get experience from killing enemies... but this advantage is weakened significantly by the fact that characters that join in a group combo generally get more experience than the two joined characters, making it a trade-off for grinding. 
Speaking of grinding... this game's experience-gaining is a huge pain in the butt, not the least of which because the enemies do massive level jumps (think two to five levels per battle), which makes it a serious pain to keep up, since your levels don't gain fast enough to make leveling anything other than a grind (you can replay any battle at any time on the world map).  Another huge downside of this game... Alfaria is pathetically weak when not transformed, but Kai is actually more powerful on foot, at least midway through the game.  This makes using the mechform usually not worth it for these two, except for the enhanced hp, but it does make it necessary, because Alfaria dying is usually a game over.
Story and Characters
So far, I'm still on Kai's side of the story, so I think it is going to be a while before I switch over to Shizuma.
I'm going to be blunt... Alfaria feels a lot like a weaker, more naive version of Corona from Corona.  She's basically a little kid in an adult's body, with a little kid's thought patterns.  This is understandable in the context of the story, but it can be pretty annoying.  Kai is pretty much your typical rpg protagonist... right down to the naivete and impulsiveness.  To be honest, that irritated the hell out of me at first, though it has subsided somewhat as the story goes on (though he still has bursts of insanity where he does something unbelievably stupid).  I chose Beldadia as my first playthrough heroine, and she is fairly interesting, not to mention she is a returning character from Yumina and Corona, a heroine for the first time in this one.  I thought about spoiling her here, but lets just say that this VN puts her more in the spotlight this time around and let it go at that.
The story in this VN is actually pretty good, in typical VN fashion... why do I say typical?  Because in many ways, this story reminds me of why I generally go to VN hybrids more than actual srpgs and rpgs nowadays.  Why?  It is pretty simple... no taboo subjects.  The story is dark, it is violent, and the characters make mistakes that actually get people killed in large numbers.  Today's jrpgs tend to avoid things like death, except in the abstract, and as a result, their stories tend to... suck.  Yes, I said it.  Modern jrpgs suck donkey tits.  The rare exceptions just prove the rule, rather than proving it wrong. 
That said, I don't know if I approve of them putting multiple protagonists in this story, especially considering the number of times the two protagonists end up clashing (it kind of  feels like they are ruining the plot, to me).  I'll have to see what it is like when I get to Shizuma's part before I decide if I can forgive them for committing the cardinal sin of a serious VN. 
Well, that's it for now... cheers!

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.

I'm guessing some of those that follow my blog are wondering why I haven't started up any random VNs this month... there are a number of reasons.
1) I'm busy.  I have my work, with an addition of university, which takes up about 80% of my time, save for a few days like today when I have time to rest and relax.
2) I simply don't have an appreciation for anything in my backlog right now.  I cleared out most of the most interesting stuff over the last two years, and I'm keeping what little is left for a truly rainy day, when I'm not busy and I don't have anything better to do.
3)  This has been a very dry quarter.  July, August, and September were mostly dry of interesting releases, and I'm saving up energy for Kenseiki Alpha Ride, which I promised certain people I would play early on, rather than waiting until a later date as I commonly do with most gameplay-VNs.
4) This has been a particularly bad month irl.  I've been helping my brother get ready to move his family into our place for a few months while their old place is on the market and they are closing on their new place, I've been applying for a graduate program, and I got several major commissions that have kept me locked down a lot more than I would have liked.
5) I promised myself I wouldn't play any more moege/charage until I've played Kenseiki or the new Fortissimo. 
Now for my thoughts...  Today's post is going to be focused on what makes a good chuunige.
I should probably define the origins of chuuni as opposed to what a chuunige is.  First of all, if any of you have seen Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai, you have at least a vague idea of what chuunibyou is like.  Basically, take your average D&D nut or cosplayer and add some delusions of glory to him, and you have a chuunibyou patient.  That's simplifying matters somewhat, but it is also fairly accurate for a good portion of them, though.
Chuuni, on the other hand, is literature, games, anime, etc. that feels like it comes out of the mind of a chuunibyou patient.  Drama on a large scale, often in somewhat familiar settings, is probably the easiest and most obvious way to tell if something is chuuni.  In addition, in a good chuuni-anything, the protagonist is never a self-insert carbon copy of your average harem-building protagonist.  I say this because it is the easiest way to tell when something isn't a chuunige, as chuuni protagonists are supposed to experience and/or be something that is beyond what you can experience in your life, whether it is psychologically or physically. 
Most chuunige have action of some sort, but not all of them do.  A famous chuunige that isn't mostly action - that a lot of you will have played - is G-senjou no Maou.  In a way, Sharin no Kuni can also be considered a chuunige, for a similar reason. 
The more 'standard' type of chuunige is the 'gakuen battle' type.  The most obvious translated examples of this are Tsukihime, FSN, and Comyu.  In this type, a schoolkid somehow gets mixed up in a horrible situation that should kill him right off the bat, but he somehow survives to become central to 'the conflict'. 
A rarer type is the 'mature protagonist taking on the world' type.  This is easily my favorite type, as protagonists in these VNs tend to have more solid philosophies and are less... idiotic.  I think most people will agree that Shirou from FSN is a bit immature, though he had mature aspects.  However, protagonists in these are adults, whether they are grown up fully or not.  An example of this type that is translated would be Sharin no Kuni's protagonist.  For untranslated, Hello, Lady and Vermillion Bind of Blood (Toshiro from Vermillion reminds me of Auron from FF X, hahaha)  come to mind.  Generally speaking, the themes of these VNs will be a lot larger in scale than you usually see in the gakuen battle types.  This is because the themes are generally written to keep pace with the protagonists, lol. 
The last type is the 'poetic' type, where a writer is obviously masturbating with his keyboard.  Masada's works are the most obvious examples of this (Dies Irae, Paradise Lost, Kajiri Kamui Kagura), though Light's 'other' chuuni-crew also writes similar VNs, and Devils Devel Concept and Bradyon Veda by Akatsuki Works both fall into this category.  In this type of chuunige, the action, the story, and the visuals all exist as an excuse for the writer to try to blow you away.  Currently, the only one of this type in translation is Tokyo Babel, whose release is sometime off... though I'm tempted to include Sekien no Inganock in this crew.  For someone who loves complex, deep prose, these VNs are pure crack... but in exchange, they are also incredibly difficult to read for someone not native to the language.
Overall, reading chuunige is all about having fun.  It isn't about being moe-ed to death or being awed by the pretty pastel colors... it is about enjoying the part of you that never quite gave up that desire to be or see something more...

Hello, my name is Clephas, and I am/was a weaboo.  *snickers at the AA reference*  I'm mostly posting on this matter to give those otakus who aren't necessarily weaboos an idea of what it is like to be a weaboo (ignoring social problems, for the moment, haha) and just why we exist in the first place. 
First, to correct a common misconception... not all weaboos are solely obsessed with Japanese culture/history/etc.  In fact, most Western ones are or eventually become interested in all Asian cultures.  There are a number of reasons for it usually starting with an obsession with Japan, and I'll try to cover them all for you. 
The most obvious reason is that Japan's culture is so obviously different from anything in the average Westerner's personal experience (extracting those that come from first-generation Asian immigrant families).  To be blunt, the average American can at least guess at European sensibilities and the average European can do the same, with some mental effort.  We share a basic religious background, our social contracts are based on the same basic philosophy (with differences in preferences), and we tend to have similar cultural ancestors if we look back into history.  Heck, even most of Latin American can say the same.  So, for the average white-on-white Westerner (or Hispanic as the case may be), there might be numerous personal differences, but the actual cultural differences are in the details rather than the base elements. 
On the other hand, there is literally no common base between us and most Asian cultures, save that which we forcibly transplanted during the colonial days of the past two centuries.  Whereas we experienced various types of paganism and polytheism followed by Christianity, they experienced Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto... the list goes on.  Not only that, the way we developed our cultures was essentially different.  Confucianism in China (and the symbol of the Emperor in Japan) provided a sense of structure and continuity for centuries that altered greatly the way Chinese see the world even today, though most of its precepts have been altered almost beyond recognition in the millennia since their development.  This sense of continuity (in aspects other than philosophical) over such a vast period of time is perhaps one of the biggest causes of differences between Chinese culture in particular and Asian culture in general.  To be blunt, when the Chinese were already an Empire, our ancestors were mostly banging on drums in small settlements across the face of Europe, begging the elements not to starve our children or flood us out.  The 'weight' of culture is so much greater in Japan in China that Westerners in general and Americans in particular can't help but be impressed (or offended/frightened as the case may be) on first encounter with it. 
That said, whether that first impression turns to fascination or apathy is entirely based on the individual.  People that are more curious are more likely to get sucked into it, whereas those who prefer what they already have are more likely to simply set aside that first impression and move on. 
Another reason is that Japan is really really good at 'advertising' its culture... without really trying.  How many of you watched Pokemon, DBZ, or even Voltron or Robotech as kids without even knowing what it was?  I think you'd be surprised at how many otakus received an early baptism of Japanese ideas that planted the seeds for an eventual otaku and/or weaboo transformation.   For that matter, how many of you saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (new or old) or one of the more modern Batman movies?  Perhaps because of the intimate role we played in rebuilding post-war Japan, as well as the stream of Japanese who immigrated after the war, Japanese influence touches lightly on a great deal of our urban society (less so on the rural, though). 
The 'second baptism' that most Americans experience is negative... it is history class when you hit WWII.  The ferocity and apparent insanity (in the average Westerner's eyes) of the Japanese during the war causes an almost involuntary fascination in those who read about it, that frequently leads to a search for answers as to just why they acted the way they did during the war.  This inevitably leads to the samurai culture (both popular and historical), thus frequently creating new weaboos in droves, despite the fact that the WWII history is pretty horrifying the way it is presented (and even worse in reality).
No one is more mouthy and annoying than a new convert of any sort... and those weaboos that most annoy people are generally this type... the ones who haven't yet realized that their obsession can annoy others and thus can't stop themselves from chattering endlessly about some new aspect they discovered along the way, as if they were the first to find that particular fact out. 
Tips for tempering your obsession
If you are a weaboo, it is almost inevitable you will say too much to someone who isn't interested at some point.  In that way, it is a lot like standard otakuism.  However, if you want to at least limit your annoyance factors, here are a few tips.
1- Don't beautify every single aspect of Japanese culture you find.  Samurai culture led to the insane nationalism and mass suicides of WWII.  Geisha were glorified prostitutes (albeit artistically beautiful ones).  Ninja were spies descended from thieves and common murderers.  (etc. etc.)
2- Be aware that Japanese culture can take some seriously ugly turns in the modern era (the fact that police don't get involved in domestic affairs, the weak rape laws and enforcement of those laws, bullying in schools and at work, hikikomori, karoushi). 
3- Be aware that the excessive pride of some Japanese has led to a resurrection of the same nationalism that caused their involvement in WWII (modern historical revisionism focused on WWII and the events immediately preceding it is a prime example of this).
4- The Japanese really did do most of the horrible things their neighbors said they did... not to mention the POW camps where they held the Philippines US troops during the war.
5- Japanese gun control only works because they have no history of regular people possessing personal arms.
Well, that ends my lecture for the day. 

Komorebi no Nostalgica is one of the more interesting VNs I've read in the past three years.  I occasionally go back and play one of its paths when I want to restore my faith in VNs, and one of its primary themes is artificial intelligence.  There are a number of different viewpoints represented in the VN about AIs, ranging from classic horror stories and instinctive repulsion to acceptance and/or affection. 
Cinema, who is the source of most of the central conflicts of the VN, is a humanoid robot created before the big war that basically wiped out the internet archives and a lot of humanity's knowledge of its own past.  She was apparently customized immensely by the man known only as the 'Store Manager', who ran an underground video rental shop with her as the clerk.  She isn't a heroine, but it wouldn't be incorrect to state that she is the focus of all the major events of the story.  In many ways, her personality and setting resemble that of the heroine from Planetarian, and those who played that ancient will probably be able to easily recognize the earnest, almost childlike nature of the two. 
The generation of humanoid robots after her eventually developed a self-determining will and intelligence, becoming fully sentient, sparking a pogrom (of humans slaughtering robots that were suddenly seen as a threat) that led straight into a war that shattered human society as it existed at the time.  The war was... a draw, though a draw that turned out more to the advantage of the robotic Metasera than to that of humanity.  During the war, Cinema was put into hibernation and hidden by her creator, until she was awakened by the protagonist and his hare- *coughs* friends. 
The Metasera, having gained the right to self-determination in exchange for forfeiting their right to aggressive self-defense, live in small arcologies based in just about every major city of the planet, learning from and aiding humans as they seek to evolve their budding intelligence and emotions further.  One of the heroines, Fluorite, is a Metasera, and it is through her that you get the writer's insight into the idea of the results of a 'naturally occurring' AI. 
Cinema, on the other hand, presents an entirely different path to the same goal... she is a low-spec virtual intelligence that is designed to grow into full sentience and in the end gains a far wider spread of emotions than the Metasera... while also showing off a surprising degree of emotional development, even before she gains that sentience.  The idea of an AI that develops intelligence before emotion and causes a war (the Metasera) versus an AI that develops intelligence after emotion and is a friend to humanity from the beginning (Cinema) is one of the many hidden themes of the VN. 
There were innumerable times in the VN that I felt intellectually stimulated or driven to express raw emotion.  The story is just that powerful, after all.  Moreover, the protagonist and friends are of the first generation to grow up without knowledge of the world prior to the Metasera, and it is the writer's portrayal of this aspect that is frequently the most interesting.

I’m on a much-needed vacation deep in the woods. There’s running water, crappy mobile service, something that could generously be described as “heat,” and not much else.   Also, I’m fairly sure an owlbear rummaged through our garbage last night.   This means you have a whole week free from my inane ramblings. It also means that on a scale from “wearing underwear today” to “not wearing underwear today,” I’m not wearing underwear today. It's vacation and I don't wannuh.     Deal with it. Then discuss.

If I could give you any two pieces of advice, gentle reader, they would be: don’t eat unopened mussels, and don’t proofread anything you’ve edited. Neither will end well for you.

I always scratch my head when I see a visual novel translation project with the same person listed as Editor and Proofreader. Or worse yet, Translator, Editor, and Proofreader. Or (and I know I’ve seen this at least once) Translator, TLC, Editor, and Proofreader. I’m all for DIY, but that's a disaster waiting to happen.

Here’s the rule: If you’ve touched a piece of copy in any one of these roles, it’s tainted for you in all others. Sorry, that’s just how it is. These jobs are meant to be a series of checks and balances to help ensure the quality and accuracy of the content. If a single person takes on two or more of these roles, you’ve got problems. If one or more of these positions goes completely unfilled, you’ve got problems.

It’s not that you wouldn’t be capable — many editors are amazing at proofreading, and tons of translators are wonderful at TLC — but once you’ve worked with the text in one capacity, your familiarity with it makes you far less effective in any other role.

Our stupid, stupid brains
Like so many things in life, it all comes down our stupid brains being more helpful than we want — kind of like an overeager toddler who just handed you your iPhone. In the shower. (Thank god for Applecare+.) Whenever our brains see a gap in content, they try to fill it whether we want them to or not. “Hi, I’m your brain. Hey, is there a word missing there? Can I make a fairly good guess as to what it is? Wheee! I’ll just pretend like it was there and we read it and nothing’s wrong. Now let’s go think about boobies some more! BOO-BEES! BOO-BEES!” And the more familiar your brain is with the work in question, the easier it is for it to fill in those gaps. It already knows what to expect, and it’s just waiting to jump in and save the day.
Our brains must be stopped before they kill again.
The easiest way to do this is, at each step of the creation and revision process, have someone ready look at the content with fresh eyes and no preconceptions. Simple as that. You wouldn't go get a second opinion from the doctor who just provided your first opinion, would you? So don’t do it here. Don't double-up on jobs, and don’t leave positions unfilled. The final product will be better for it.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Easier said than done. Finding good volunteers is tough and people flake out or have RL commitments all the time. So what then?


 
The nuclear option
When I got my first job in advertising, I was an idiot. Thankfully, my first creative director was not. A highly accomplished copywriter, she’d penned dozens of the brand slogans that had littered my youth. Suffice to say, she knew her stuff. (You’d probably know her stuff too, if you saw it.) And this was one of the first things she taught me: “Never, ever proofread your own work. But if you have to ...”

That’s right, she had a trick. A big red button on the wall of her brain that said, “PUSH ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.” You never want to proof your own work, but sometimes you don’t have a choice. Sometimes you’ve rewritten the copy deck five minutes before the big pitch and there’s no time to send it back for proofreading. That’s where the trick comes in.

Read it backwards.
Start at the very last word and read your way back until you hit the first. This strips away all meaning from the text — your brain isn’t leaping in with a guess as to what comes next — so you can focus on minutiae like spelling, punctuation, repeated words, etc.

This is a relatively laborious process, unfortunately, and it doesn’t scale well to an entire visual novel. But I mention it here in case you find yourself with a few lines or even a short script that needs a proofing pass and you’re the only one around to do it.

.it of habit a make don’t Just.

Full disclosure
By the way, I’ll be the first one to admit that v1.0 of the KoiRizo English patch has typos. In my role as editor, I tried to work as cleanly as possible, but over the course of 36,000+ lines — I figure that’s gotta be at least 250,000 words — a few foxes got into the henhouse. The team didn’t have any proofreaders, and the QC process wasn’t nearly as robust as had initially been hoped. (Zakamutt touches on that here.) But you know what? For all of that, I think the launch product came out comparatively clean. I still want to drink bleach and die every time I see a typo report, of course, but that comes with the territory.

And with any luck, there will be patch updates forthcoming that address some of these lingering issues. Which is good, since I’m running low on bleach. And lives.

You know how you can translate Japanese far too literally and end up with stilted and nonsensical prose? It’s also possible reinterpret Japanese graphics far too literally and up with an illegible mess. Case in point: vertical type.

Japanese text is typically typeset one of two ways: the traditional tategaki style (characters arranged in vertical columns, read from right to left), or the more modern yokogaki style (characters arranged in horizontal rows, read left to right, as in English). When editing images for visual novels, you’ll usually be dealing with a lot of tategaki, but it’s possible you’ll encounter some yokogaki as well. Unless you just bought a pamphlet from that crazy guy hanging out beneath the subway stairs — Happy Birthday to Gravy! I’m Made of Bees! — you will literally never see English typeset this way. So how do you handle it when you do?

Typically, as long as you have the room, you’d set it the same as you would any other English text: horizontal, left to right, for maximum legibility. But what if you don’t have room? Particularly when dealing with UI elements, you might only have enough real estate for a single vertical column of characters. What then?

Grab it by the spine
Thankfully, generations of English-language typesetters have already solved this problem for us. Just walk over to your media shelf and look for yourself. See all those books, DVDs, video games you’ve got lined up there? Not only did you spend an obscene amount of money on those — seriously, how are you ever going to pay off your student loans this way? — but their spines all display titles the exact same way: horizontal type, rotated 90 degrees clockwise so that it reads from top to bottom. Any designer worth his or her salt will tell you that’s how it’s done.

So there’s your answer. Do that. You’re welcome.

But now you face a much bigger challenge: convincing non-designers that this is, in fact, the best approach.

The vertical smile frown
This came up once on a project where almost the entire UI was arranged in vertical lines of Japanese calligraphy. I’d painstakingly set hundreds of text elements in the correct bookspine-style, only to get a note back from the project lead asking that everything be re-typeset in the exact manner of the original Japanese, character stacked atop character.

Y
o
u

k
n
o
w
,

l
i
k
e

t
h
i
s
?

I’ve been a professional designer for enough years that, honestly, I forget not everyone gives much thought to why you don’t set type like this. So in that sense, the request didn’t annoy me; I understood the motivation behind it. But I did end up having to write a fairly lengthy defense of bookspine-style type as a result. Since I’m not the first person to face this problem, and I know I won’t be the last, I thought it might be useful to summarize a few of those points here.

If you’re an image editor, maybe it’ll give you ammunition to back up your case one day. If you’re working with an image editor, maybe it’ll provide some insight into the thought he or she puts into typesetting. If you’re my mom, maybe you’ll finally believe I learned something in college.

The End of the World as We Know It
Seeing is believing, so let’s try all the options and see for ourselves what works and what doesn’t. I’ve cropped in on a small slice from a hypothetical UI sprite sheet for our discussion. I’ve also simplified it, hiding all the various hover and active states, so all we’re dealing with is the vanilla text.
Here’s the original edited version:

For this project, we need a script/calligraphic type that will remain legible even at very small sizes. (I do all my VN reading on an 8” tablet, so I use that as my small-screen baseline.) We land on this font here, a clean Western script that still feels right at home among traditional Eastern design elements. And since you can see that some of the UI text runs very long — these are chapter titles, I imagine — compactness is also a consideration. This typeface handles that quite nicely.
Let’s see what happens if, rather than bookspine-style, we run these lines vertically:

What’s wrong here? More like, what isn’t?

It doesn’t fit: Unlike squarish Japanese characters, English letters tend to be taller than they are wide. This means if you stack them vertically, you’ll end up with something that eats up almost twice as much space as horizontal type. You’ll need to reduce the point size to make everything fit. Or worse yet, squish the letters vertically to compensate. Yuck.

It fights against the letterforms: This is a script face, so it slants rightward, one letter leading the eye into the next. Moreover, lowercase letters set in script often physically join to one another, as if written in a smooth, flowing hand. A vertical stack is antithetical to both of these: there is no “next” letter to lead the eye into, nor is there any adjoining character to connect to.

It looks like a gap-toothed palooka: Notice how some of the letter pairs almost overlap, while others have relatively large spaces between them. This is another reason English type wasn’t meant to stack vertically. Even though there’s exactly the same amount of space between the baseline of each letter, some have descenders (e.g., the “tails” of the letters y or q), some have ascenders (e.g., the “flagstaff” of the letters b or d), and some have neither (e.g., x or o). This gives the vertical type a drunken stagger-step of sorts, an ungainly visual gait that we’d like to avoid at all costs.

It doesn’t handle punctuation well: There’s no graceful way to handle periods, colons, and so forth in vertical type. You could center it below the last letter, as in the original Japanese, but that looks confusing in English. And how would you handle a possessive, like “Darbury’s cat”? Stacked vertically, it would look more like “Darbury, scat.” (Fine. See ya, ingrate.)

It’s borderline illegible: There’s been lots and lots of research into the science of how people read — how we recognize letters, words, and sentences. There’s a lot of pattern recognition going on in our brains and, for native speakers of Western languages, those patterns almost always work horizontally. Setting type vertically can literally slow down reading and comprehension speed by an order of magnitude.

So let’s be clear: this sucks. But there are a few things we can do to slightly minimize the suckage. First, let’s set everything in all caps. Like this
That eliminates our gap-tooth problem; uppercase letters don’t have ascenders or descenders, so all the letters now appear evenly spaced. But we’ve had to reduce the point size even further to make everything fit. (We started out at 20pt. We’re now at 12pt.) Also, our calligraphic type still slants to the right, making each letter feel like a drunk who leans against a wall only to find it isn’t there. We want a handwritten feel to the type, however, so we try switching to an upright block letter font instead:

This is pretty much as good as it’ll get ... and it’s still not great. It’s still hard to read, and we’ve had to sacrifice the elegance of a script typeface. But wait — it gets worse. Right now, these lines have lots of padding left and right, since I’ve hidden all the other elements on this sprite sheet. What happens when they sit closer together, as they probably will in-game. You get this:

I don’t know about you, but my brain wants to start reading horizontally adjacent words as sentences: “It birds and eye listen” Huh? It’s like trying to drive an SUV where the steering is constantly pulling to the right. It’s not what we’re looking for in a car, and it’s not what we’re looking for in our typesetting.

In short, vertically set text is a god-awful mess. Don’t use it. (Obligatory waffling: Okay, maybe if there’s one or two vertical buttons in the whole game. And maybe if they were really, really short — you know, like “SAVE” and “QUIT”? Maybe then you could get away with it. But otherwise, nononono a thousand times no.)

Introducing my backup singers
I’m not the only one preaching this gospel. These fine folks agree:
 
 
 
 
 

So the next time someone asks you to set vertical type, just say no. Then link to this blog post and tell ‘em Darbury told ya so. 

I've played a number of releases from September's releases, and I'm currently playing Renai Phase (which I'd promised not to, as Giga is incapable of making anything truly great outside of Baldr). However, this month really doesn't have anything I'd really consider VN of the Month material... Seikishi had its fingertips on the vague possibility, and it is undeniably the best thing I played from September. Unfortunately, 'the best from September' is not good enough.
 
The reason I'm already putting a 'batsu' mark on Renai Phase, even though I'm only halfway through it... is because the 'koukan do' system intrudes into the VN in a manner that breaks the storytelling completely. Whereas in most VNs, you have to guess which choices do what with how the heroines feel about you, this VN commits the sin of making a noise and showing a little visual effect every time... and it is really intrusive. I know this might sound like nitpicking, but the sheer number of choices in this VN means that this is hair-pulling level annoying. Not only that, but the protagonist in this VN is fully nameable, without the brilliant system Hoshi ori used that allowed it to have redeeming value. Last of all, the greatest sin of this VN is that, from the very beginning, the protagonist is setting out to get a girlfriend on a whim. To be honest, VNs that steal from dating sims piss me off in general, but this one is particularly offensive, in my eyes. Unless the heroine paths are superlative, in my opinion, this VN has already axed any hope of being VN of the Month material.

*** astro has shared contact details with Joe. ***
Joe: Hi astro, I'm wondering can u pls translate Aiyoku no Eustia?
 
Me: sorry I really don't have time to take on more projects right now
 
Joe: But it's a rly good game
 
Me: I'm sure it is. look, I hope that you're not asking me to do it for free at the very least - I don't even know who the heck you are
 
Joe: Well how long will it take u to do it? I can pay u $2000 at most depending on how long it takes
 
Me: ...Do you have any idea how long the game is?
 
Joe: No idk japanese so I've never played it before
 

 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Well, this isn't really Tay's fault, but my rule of thumb is to always blame Tay. taypls

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.

Introduction:
 
When it comes to reading VN's in Japanese, required skills can be grouped into four areas: Vocab, grammar, basic parsing skill, and kanji skill. In this post, for each area I'm going to explain:
-what knowing skills in the area are good for
-how you might study them
-how much you'll need to start reading.
I'll also give some related tips.
 
The requirements mentioned below are a conservative estimate. I've known people who've jumped in to playing VN's with less or much less, but I'm giving a safe estimate. A level which at most people, without any special knack for learning languages through immersion, should be able to gain traction. If you learn this much before starting an easyish VN, the amount you are completely lost should be significantly less than the percentage you are able to pick up and improve from.
 
This is not a comprehensive how-to guide by any means. Just an informative post.
 
------------------
 
1. Vocab
 
Knowing enough vocab to study your grammar resource without being bogged down by vocab:
-About 30 verbs and 50 other words for Genki 1/ Tae kim Basic.
-By the time you get to Genki 2/Tae Kim Essential you'll want a good set of verbs (about 100), and maybe about 300 total vocabulary.
-~600 words about how much you'll want to be able to study N3 grammar without getting bogged down in vocab.
 
Having enough vocab to start your first VN:
-I recommend over 1000, but anywhere from 800-1300 is good. I remember trying Clannad with only 800, and I felt like ramming my head into a wall. It's also important to pick an easy title. It will still feel hard no matter what, but an easy title will be much more helpful and rewarding to play. You also must just translation aggregator and ITH. They are the reason why Visual Novels are the best medium for learning Japanese out of anime/books/movies/drama/etc.
 
Vocab Lists:
There's a dedicated verb list here: http://nihongoichiban.com/2012/08/13/list-of-all-verbs-for-the-jlpt-n4/
Verbs are helpful to learn, because they are often the most important part of the sentence AND you need to to have stuff to conjugate.
In general JLPT-based vocab list is here: http://www.tanos.co.uk/jlpt/jlpt5/vocab/
 
Regarding English definitions:
Be mentally open and flexible. If the english definition doesn't quite add up, don't try and think about it too hard. Focus instead on associating the word with the situations where you see it.
For example, you might be confused by the word 都合 and it's unhelpful definition J-E definition, but if you seen 都合がいい used in a situation where you know it means "is convenient for me" from context then remember that occurence. There might be (there are, in fact), other usages of the word 都合, but that doesn't hurt you in anyway. The next time you see 都合 you can pair it against this meaning and see if that makes any sense.
 
2. Grammar Skills
 
With N5+N4 grammar you will be barely able to start making your way through a VN. Without N4, you will have quite limited gains in the long term from reading visual novels. (Equivalent to Genki 1+2.)
-Required to be able to play VN's
 
With N3 grammar, everything will feel a lot clearer, the amount of grammar you'll understand will exceed 60%. (Equiv. to Intermediate approach to Integrated Japanese). Highly recommended to study this before or soon after you start your first VN.
 
N2 grammar further cuts the amount of unknown grammar you face in three.
 
N1 is kind of like a bonus that gives you a lot of uncommon or formal expressions. It's NOT comprehensive at all, in terms of covered all Japanese phrases. From my experience, some of the phrases you learn in here show up often in novels (ばかり、んばかり), others quite less. Good to know, though
 
Expressions not covered in JLPT
There are a lot of patterns and phrases not covered in JLPT that you will see in typical native reading material. Examples (社長に議長, phrases like なんだと！？ Xってなんだ？　ですって！？　～てくれないかな。 オレって、なんてバカなんだ ) Not to worry, many of them can be picked up as you go. For the rest, once you get settled into reading, you can start noting down those phrases you don't get and google them or ask other people.
 
Imabi for grammar
You can also try studying from http://www.imabi.net/. It's a phenomenal reference, it's just goes into tons of depth, too much. I think there's 2 or 3 times as much information there is covered by JLPT up to JLPT 1. As such it's going to be overwhelming for a beginner and is much better suited as a reference for intermediate or advanced learners.
 
3. Basic Parsing Skill
 
Knowing the different types of words (Covered by doing a vocab list of about 100 verbs, and then the JLPT 5 list. You also have to have done or be doing Tae Kim's Basic Guide, since he explains what na-adj's, i-adj's, and other word types are, etc.).
-(nouns, suru-verbs/nouns, verbs, na-adj's, i-adj's, adverbs, temporal adverbs)
-Required to be able to play VN's.
 
Knowing the basic sentence structure and how words can modify each other and fit in a sentence.: (adjectives modifying nouns, verbs).
The knowledge is covered by Tae Kim Basic + a mix of Essential Grammar and Genki 1/2. I personally find Tae Kim's explanation good even though the learning curve is steep and his lessons aren't good for review like Genki books are. He tries to convey to you the big picture.
-Required to be able to play VN's.
 
Being able to breakdown sentences and spot the different types of words based on their position.
-you can practice this by reading bits of text in your genki textbook, but more likely, the first time you really gain this skill is going to be the first month in which you read a visual novel with TA. Heavily practiced during your first month or two of reading VN's.
 
4. Kanji Skill:
 
Learning to spots radicals in kanji (could be covered by doing the 214 radicals, about 1 month. You could also do this ongoing basis, learning how to spot the radicals that make up a kanji, for the words you learn.)
-not needed to read VN's with TL aggregator, but extremely helpful for learning new words which have new kanji.
 
Learning to remember kanji, ie. start recognizing when words share the same kanji. (it is a long ongoing gradual process. You can start doing this with the vocab you learn once you are comfortable learning vocab. You can also pick out words you see in vn's and check whether they use the same kanji by typing them out (example 朝（あさ）　and　朝食（ちょうしょく）　use the same kanji.). Oh course, to be able to easily produce the kanji you want to compare you need to remember how to spell a word that contains it (in this case 朝). So, as your vocab expands, you'll be able to compare more kanji. Note that to be able to do this comparing you must be able to spot radicals in kanji (previous level skill).
-moderately helpful for learning vocabs. The same way remembering radicals helps learning with kanji: if you know the kanji clearly, you can remember a word just by the two kanji it uses, which is very precise and doesn't take a lot of mental bandwidth. It also means that you will much more rarely confuse words which have similiar looking kanji.
 
The following two skills are for more advanced, they won't be particularly useful until much later. You might not notice the problems they solve until later as well. I include them mainly for completeness.
Learning on-yomi for many of the Jyouyou kanji (start when you are intermediate-advanced, a medium-long process)
-helpful for exactly what it is, reading kanji words and compounds correctly.
-don't need to worry about this. From learning vocab you might pick up some of the common ones, but there's no need to pursue this actively for a while.
 
Learning kanji meaning: (start when you are advanced, and can use a J-J dictionary)
-suffixes like 府、省、性、症, as well normal kanji whose different meanings apply to clusters of words.
-helpful for kanji compounds which won't directly show up in dictionaries
-helpful for developing a native level understanding of vocabulary (not everything can be learned by exposure). A lot of literary words are fairly influenced by their kanji meanings, though sometimes consulting the word differentiation explanations can be more helpful.
 
 
 
One last topic...
 
On learning enough grammar and jumping into works too difficult for you.
Reading a VN isn't the best way to learn basic sentence structure. However, it's a great way to reinforce grammar points you've learned. It's also a great way to get an understanding of conversational patterns you won't find in textbooks or JLPT. But you won't have the presence of mind to pay attention to that if you are bogged down by not knowing basic grammar.
There are benefits for venturing early into native material or difficult vn's, but you wouldn't give a grade two student Tolkien, or even Harry Potter to improve their English. All the fancy prose and unusual concept would distract you from the more immediately useful things like, say: basic sentence structure.
There are works which are the right level, and there are VN's which you really want to read. For the best experience, it's best to find some combination of the two.
 
------------------
 
Ok that's all for now. Feel free to ask any questions: I didn't really go into the details of how to study, instead focusing on the, well, skills involved. But it's also hard to remember what it's like for someone just starting out. I remember parts of studying very clearly, but I forget the thousands of things I used to be puzzled through varying stages of understanding but now take for granted.
The process was all I could think about for the longest time. Now I don't give it much thought, it's just a regular part of my life, reading and a bit of studying. It's not bad idea, to just find a type of study that you know is helpful, stop thinking about all the right ways and wrong ways and magic tricks which don't exist, and just do it, for a while. Regularly. For a month or three.

And now a little something for all you image editors out there. (If you don't speak Photoshop, just keep walking; there's nothing for you here.)
Some visual novels make image edits simple — the UI is mostly flat colors, 90º angles, and 1-bit transparencies. Easy peasy. Meanwhile, some more recent VNs like to store all their UI elements as semi-transparent overlays with full 8-bit alpha channels. If you've ever tried editing these, you know what a pain they can be.
And so, I came to love a command I've never had to use before in all my years with Photoshop — namely because if there's a transparency on something, I'm usually the one who put it there in the first place.
Ready? Tattoo this on your arm: Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency
Let's look at one possible scenario where it might come into play: Text on paper.

At first glance, doesn't seem like it would be too hard, right? Then you get it into Photoshop and realize it's a mix of transparent elements and fully opaque type.

If you just grabbed the rubber stamp tool and tried cloning out the text right now, you'd end up with something like this.

That's because your cloning source is semi-transparent. The trick here is to separate out the 8-bit alpha channel from the source image so you have an entirely opaque image. So with the source layer selected, choose Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency, temporarily disable the resulting layer mask, and you get something like this.

From there, it's just a standard retouching job. Once you clone out the type as best you can, you're ready to add new text from your TL team. (In this case, since the type and paper are at two different levels of transparency, you'd also need to do a quick cleanup on the layer mask. If you look closely at the mask thumbnail, you can see the type as pure white on a 60% gray. Just paint over that part of the mask with more 60% gray and you'll be good to go.)

Enable the layer mask again, export as a file with 8-bit alpha support (a PNG, most likely) and you're done. This was a fairly straightforward example, of course, but the basics remain the same no matter how complex the retouching job.
Now rinse and repeat 500 more times with all the rest of the game files. Aren't you glad you decided to take up image editing?

Typical Dragon Race Members: "Ururu-sama Banzai! Ururu-sama Banzai! Ururu-sama Banzai!
 
lol, setting that aside, this is the ending of the Tiny Dungeon series (so far anyway. I'm sure they'll eventually reuse the setting, if not the characters). First of all, it should be noted that this VN does not have the impact of the rest of the series. It is mostly comedy, with a few really cool combat scenes mixed in (Veil vs. Note is pretty awesome) and H-scenes for all four of the new heroines. This also serves as the harem ending for Tiny Dungeon, and it was apparently created on the request of fans, as the epilogue of Brave or Slave was a bit truncated.
 
Anyway, this is based approximately a year after the events in Brave or Slave, and it starts as Miko, Hime's little sister, is entering the school, entirely unaware of what happened to him a year before, believing that his position is as weak as it was before (basically, members of the human race are considered trash by the other races because it was a human who deliberately started the inter-world war twenty years before). So she is startled to find how much things have changed.
 
While there are plenty of service scenes in this VN, and as always the dragon race is insane about Ururu (see the pic above), a lot of things have changed for Hime and friends in the previous year, as a result of the events of Brave or Slave. Since most of this VN is comedic slice of life, it might seem a bit disappointing to some, but there are some good action scenes, including a really awesome one at the end, where Hime shows off his best.
 
Anyway, as an extended epilogue and extra after story, this is a more than adequate experience. However, without the previous VNs, it wouldn't make a lick of sense. The new characters all have a legitimate reason for being there, but since they all have their own motives, it is a bit hard to sort through it all. I do think that they should have had the VN extend across a longer period of time, preferably letting Miko get more out of her trials at the school, but that is probably asking a bit too much, lol.

Tou no Shita no Exercitus, as I mentioned in the previous post, pretty much eliminates most of the problems that Verethragna had in terms of the card combat system, in exchange for a loss of any real challenge, outside of the last boss and a few others along the way. That impression didn't change throughout my experience of the last few chapters of the game, so at this point, I won't bother rehashing that explanation.
 
More importantly, I thought I should mention that this VN doesn't commit the greatest sin of a gameplay hybrid by using the gameplay in place of narration (rather than to supplement it). Its combat scenes have decent (if not overwhelmingly good) narration, and there is a general sense that this was someone's work of love, as well as business, which is relatively rare in VNs these days. The plot, while not anything new (the setting channels Wild Arms and Mana Khemia, which had me cracking up a bit) is nonetheless solidly written, and the characters, while sometimes a bit overly comical in nature, were generally well-described and developed by the end, with a few exceptions (Ruana's team, the tower keepers), though this was alleviated by the large number of side-events you could access during the last chapter to get to know them.
 
The existence of money is actually pretty pointless, since you can get by just by using the cards you pick up along the way (though third level single-enemy magic attack cards can only be purchased in the store, as far as I could tell). On the other hand, this means that you are free from the need to budget, instead allowing you to focus on dungeon-crawling to get your levels even with the enemies and obtain cards you might find of use.
 
Overall, this VN was surprisingly good, leaving me with a general good feeling, though it wasn't exceptionally awesome. This VN would probably suit the tastes of people who like the Koihime Musou series (if you excise the first game, which was localized) and other 'light' gameplay hybrids, where the gameplay is designed to be easy to navigate. It isn't anywhere near kamige level, but it is nonetheless VN of the Month, August 2015.

This is the first of August's releases I'm playing, and to be honest, I didn't really have any hopes for this VN... in a good way, my belief that it would suck was betrayed, though this is a very problematic VN, in a number of ways.

1. It is LONG. This VN is way too long for a story that is almost entirely slice-of-life (though it is an extremely abnormal life) and considering how self-abusing the protagonist tends to be.

2. The music cuts out at irregular intervals, and frequently it doesn't make sense when it does.

Those are the obvious flaws, and I'll just leave it at that. For a doujin VN, the art is about as good as it gets (outside of a few miraculous works of art that pop up once or twice a year). The match of characterization to art is pretty good in this case (in other words, the characters' personalities are properly matched to the expressions and poses of the tachie), though there is very little in the way of pose variances in comparison to a commercial VN.

Most of the music in this VN is generic (though the opening and ending songs are decent unique ones), but it is used properly - where it doesn't cut out and leave you hanging - so there isn't a lot to complain about.

Story-wise... the concept is interesting. The basic idea of the protagonist is that he is cursed to be the 'idiot friend' (think Sunohara from Clannad) who exists entirely to help the protagonist get together with a heroine or to kick him out of his mood and save the heroine. The thing is... he has at least forty groups of such 'osananajimi' characters, each with a 'protagonist' of its own that he has to help. The basic impression is that it is like a full time job... a job he really, really hates.

To be honest, I was kind of amazed they went with a primarily serious story (yes, it is serious) despite the seemingly humor-focused idea of the story. Oh, there is indeed a ton of laughable points... in fact, it is impossible to avoid them even if you try. However, the baseline of the story is serious, to the point where you have to wonder just why they had to lay it on so heavy in the latter part of each heroine route. (incidentally, I'm half-sure there is a hidden heroine route in here somewhere, but because this is a doujin VN, there are no walkthroughs to help me find it, lol)

Well, my conclusion after having played the obvious heroine routes is that this is a decent VN... but only decent. It doesn't get beyond that, primarily because its flaws are glaring enough that they offset most of the good points. This VN could definitely have done with a bit of cutting the fat, especially when it came to the repetitious gags and constant foreshadowing with no progression (it took way too long to get to the point) in Nanami's route.