Conjueror

Let’s not mince words here. The ellipsis is a blight upon English translations of visual novels. It must be uprooted and killed with fire.
Before the slaughter begins, however, let’s review some basics. As the name suggests, the ellipsis represents an elision — that is to say, omitted content. It functions as the “yadda yadda” of the English language. It is the “Step 2: ???” before the all-important “Step 3: Profit!” A writer deploys those three little dots to indicate either the intentional removal of something that once was there, or the pointed absence of something that should have been there.
That’s it. That’s what the ellipsis is supposed to do. You wouldn’t know this, however, by reading nearly any English translation of a Japanese visual novel. Ellipses are scattered across the text like so many rhinestones on the sweatshirt of a Midwestern mom. They’re at the beginning of sentences, the ends, stuck randomly in the middle — sometimes even chained end to end like a writhing Human Centipede of punctuation, each little dot in the chain crying, “Kill me now!” into the anus of the next.
It’s an absolute abattoir in there.
This particular road to hell is paved with good intentions, however. You see, all those ellipses are also present in the original Japanese and, in an attempt at faithful translation, the TL teams have left them all sitting there for you to enjoy. The original writer had a reason for putting them in, the reasoning goes, and it’s our job to offer the purest translation of his/her vision possible.
This, of course, is bollocks. Punctuation operates differently in different languages. Japanese ellipses are used much more liberally than their Western forbearers, particularly in popular culture (e.g., manga. light novels, etc.) Want to indicate a pause? Ellipsis. Silence? Ellipsis. Passage of time? Ellipsis. Need to fill some empty space? Ellipsis. Is it Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday? Ellipsis, ellipsis, ellipsis. When ported over to English, most of these usages look less like carefully crafted sentences and more like a transcript of a particularly drunken Snapchat session.
Put simply, what works in one language doesn’t always work in another. When I’m translating a Line of Text from German, for Example, I don’t capitalize all the Nouns because that’s how it was in the Original. I normalize it for English. The same needs to be done in any VN translation.
My current rule of thumb while editing — I’ll bold it for you in red here — is as follows: Remove/replace all ellipses in a line of Japanese text unless doing so irreparably breaks the sentence or significantly changes its meaning.
Luckily for us, English has a toolbox full of punctuation to get the job done. Commas, semicolons, periods, dashes — they’re all your friends. So let’s discuss some common situations in VNs and how we might handle them.

The trailing ellipsis
You’ll see lots of these littering the ends of sentences and lines, mostly to little effect. More often than not, they indicate a thought closing on anything other than a 100% full and decisive stop. Since they don’t hold the place of omitted text, we can almost always replace these ellipses with periods.
There are a handful of situations, however, where keeping a trailing ellipsis makes sense. These include:
The Pregnant Pause: 
When something’s strongly implied at the end of a sentence/line, but left unsaid for dramatic effect.
The ellipsis fills the place of the implied content, so it gets to stay. (Fun bonus fact: pauses are the only things that can get pregnant in VNs.)
The “And So On”:
When a statement is implied to continue for an unspecified length beyond the end of the sentence/line.
The ellipsis here indicates there may have been a few more beers after Michelob, but the writer has decided to spare us and jump straight to Bob’s objection. Had this been more interruptive in nature, with Bob cutting Joe off immediately after “Michelob,” the ellipses would have replaced with an em-dash (—).
The Trail-Off: 
Similar to the “And So On,” but with the character choosing to let a statement taper off into nothingness, rather than the author.
The opening ellipsis
You’ll see these slightly less often, but they’re by no means infrequent. Typically, they indicate some slight hesitation at the beginning of a line of dialogue. But again, the nuance ends up being so slight and the impact so watered down through overuse that you’re almost always better off removing these ungainly beasts. An exception can be made for:
The Reverse Pregnant Pause: 
Just like the original Pregnant Pause, but it appears at the beginning of a sentence. Often holds the place of something a character doesn’t want to say.
Rather than just pausing in passing, Joe is actively not admitting he thinks Joe is a jackass. That makes this line a strong candidate for an ellipsis.
The mid-sentence ellipsis
So, so many of these. You’ll close your eyes at night and they’ll haunt you. They’re almost always meant to indicate a slight pause in speech or thought, but trying to the read the resulting text is an exercise in frustration. There are... just so... many unnecessary... gaps. (Full disclosure: When writing scripts for TV, I’ll use ellipses like this a lot. But that’s for a very specific purpose: helping to communicate the particular rhythm of a line to the actor(s). I always avoid this in audience-facing text.)
In almost all cases, unless there’s a marked pivot in thought, a comma will suffice.
If the ellipsis is holding together two complete yet interwoven thoughts, a semicolon will do nicely.
If the ellipsis is holding together two complete and independent thoughts, a period should be used.
If ellipses are used to indicate an interruptive thought, one that breaks the main flow of the sentence, em-dashes can be used.
Again, there are a couple situations where these mid-sentence ellipses can remain:
The Ta-Da:
When a pause is used for obvious dramatic effect, the ellipsis should be kept.
The Shatner:
When halting or stilted speech is intended for dramatic/comedic effect, ellipses may be retained.

The empty line ellipsis
You’ll see a lot of these. Holdovers from manga and light novels, they are explicit indicators of silence, being at a loss for words, holding one’s tongue, etc.
In English prose, these silences would normally be held with narration — e.g., “Baconator just sat there, dripping ketchup.” You’d never see a sentence such as: ‘Harry Potter said, “...” and continued looking out the window.’ That’s because, unlike most VNs, traditional novels don’t have the crutch of character sprites and name cards appearing alongside dialogue. Due to such VN conventions, along with the technical limitations of translation — it’s frequently impossible to replace character dialogue with unvoiced narration — you should almost always leave these ellipses in place. Based on your best judgement, you can also choose to leave such variants as the questioning silence ("...?") and the excited/alarmed silence ("...!").
It should be noted that such empty line ellipses can also be used outside of dialogue. Often, these will just indicate time passing. There’s also a long tradition in Japanese art of the “pillow” — a held moment of contemplative emptiness. It’s the bit of formal textual throat-clearing at the start of a poem. It’s the 10-second cutaway to a babbling brook that connects two scenes in a movie. In a VN, this pillow can evidence itself as a single line of narration, empty save for an ellipsis. There’s no good English alternative for this, so it should be kept wherever you encounter it.
Extra credit: The multi-line ellipsis
I saved this one for last, because it’s a bit of a special case. Against all my better instincts, it involves adding ellipses in places where the original text has none. It’s painful but it’s for a good cause.
Sometimes, when editing or translating a VN, you’ll run across sentences that spill over onto two or more lines.
Unlike in poetry, which uses line breaks to very deliberate effect, these multi-line monsters are almost always the result of the VN writer just running out of highway and choosing to keep on driving. Whenever possible, you should attempt to restructure such sentences so they don’t break across lines. Often, splitting an overly long sentence into two smaller ones will do the trick. If it resists your best efforts, however, maintain the break and indicate it with ellipses — one at the end of the first line, the other at the beginning of the second.
How many dots? ALL THE DOTS!
Another peculiarity of ellipses in Japanese VNs is that they don’t always have three dots. Depending on context and the arbitrary whims of the writer, you’ll typically see anywhere from two to six dots at a time. I’ve even seen 27 in a row once. I think it was a sex scene. Or a fight scene. Maybe both.
Don’t let this worry you. If you’ve been following my advice, you’ve already purged most of the ellipses from the text. Of those that remain, almost all can be reduced down to familiar three-dot English ellipses. But as always, there’s at least one exception.
Content-bearing pauses: In most cases, it’s of little concern to us whether an ellipsis consists of three, four, five, or even six dots. They’re all slight variations on the standard pause, but since English punctuation doesn’t make any such distinction, neither will we. An exception comes when the length of a pause not only adds flavor, but provides content. Consider the case of an ever-lengthening silence:
The lengthening of the line suggests the passing of increasing amounts of time; the scene isn’t the same without it. Or consider an explosive outburst after a deafening silence:
If you opt to stretch out an ellipsis like this, only do so in increments of three. If you’re musically inclined, think of three dots as a quarter note, six dots as a half note, etc., each one holding the silence just a bit longer than the last. Following the rule of threes keeps the text visually streamlined and helps if you ever need to convert a bunch of soft ellipses ( “...”) to hard ellipses (“…”) late in the translation process.
A quick note about spacing
I opt to keep things simple. If an ellipsis is at the start of a sentence or line, put one space between it and the first word. If it’s anywhere else, use no space before the ellipsis and one space after. If it’s a string of ellipses, it should be an uninterrupted series of dots with no spaces in between.
There are also differing schools of thought as to whether an ellipsis at the end of a sentence should also be followed by a period, resulting in four dots total. Again, I opt for simplicity here and advise three dots in all cases.
The mark of the beast
It’s easy to tell professional translations from fan projects, it’s said; just count the number of dots. While not always true – plenty of slapdash commercial releases exist in the wild — there’s definitely something to this. More often than not, fewer ellipses are a sign that someone has taken the time to not just translate a text word for word, but thoughtfully localize it.
Seriously, just dump the dots, folks. Your readers will thank you for it.

So this time I'm going to review this awesome novel, some users even consider it the best vn out there by far, a true kamige through and through ....
 
...sadly this is not that Dies Irae neither is Masada involved in this title in any way  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This DIES IRAE (all in caps, because why not?) is the work of a company called Family Soft. They mostly made games for PC-98, 88 and MSX on the 90', later on they released some for the ps1. 
This visual novel is your typical interactive adventure game, that hybrid between a visual novel and adventure game, just like Snatcher, YU-NO or Desire, among others.
You can choose between 2 heroines from the get go and their stories, while not the same, they are in fact related and they go in parallel through out the whole game even interacting and working together at some points.

(the main characters of the novel)
The protagonists are Kimu/Kinbari (Kim/Kimberley) and his side partner Rii (Lee) and Kurisu (Kris) i'm not very good with translating katakana names so forgive me if they are wrong , both of them are professional detectives and they have very opposite personalities.
Kimu on one hand is very cheerful and lively all the time, joking around with every single character (even with her boss), specially with his partner Rii and the receptionist Maria of the police station that she works for. On the other hand we have Kurisu, she is very serious and doesn't joke at all, very quiet too, sadly the game doesn't develop the characters practically in any way, we are just tossed into the game and in the next second we are already investigating some murder case or killing a guy, yes if you play with Kurisu you literally kill a guy 10 seconds after starting the novel xD but like I said there is no backstory whatsoever, later on we do find a bit of pieces of the relation that Kimu and his side partner and best friend Rii have but just a little.. the novel only focus on resolving the murders and nothing else.
 
Plot
In terms of plot, there isn't much to talk about, is just a regular murder investigation that ends up being a much bigger issue, revolving gang members, the mafia and later on some sci-fi elements, to be honest it wasn't anything I haven't seen so far in this types of vns or this genre in general, although it does throws you some plot twist that you wont see them coming which will leave you a bit shocked, but overall nothing really stands out.
 
Graphics
In the graphic part, you have a pretty decent art style and sometimes with some really good "drawings" and CGs, It has some pretty gruesome scenes, sadly (or lucky for you depending on your tastes) there is no eroge. The characters are portrayed inside a side box and will change depending on what the characters are saying or felling just like your typical vn, they use this instead of the whole body characters sprites, although there are a few "whole body sprites" in the game too. As the sucker I am for old school pixel art style I just love it.

(the character portrait in the left side and some random violent scene at the right)
 
Sound
There isn't much to talk about here, the music is really nothing special, not bad but you won't remember the tracks after playing the novel, nothing to highlight, so yeah it does it jobs and that's what matter I guess.
 
Gameplay
Now the most important part... the gameplay, this is the biggest flaw of the visual novel. The gameplay is divided in two parts, the fighting and the way you progress in the novel using four types of commands, those are Move, Talk, Look and finally Act.
Move: will make you move through out the level, which is often divided into big section, for example the police station, the city, the slums etc.
Talk: will make you talk to yourself, other characters in the place you are or your partner if she is with you at that time.
Look: is pretty much explanatory, you will look into the scenery and search for clues.
Lastly you have Act, which will give you the option to interact with the scenery or things that are inside the scene itself, sometimes to progress by interacting with the scene and others is just for fun like harassing your partner or Maria if you are playing with Kimu.

(all the location you can move in the "city" map)
Now to progress you need to do every single option, exhaust all the dialogs, check every single little thing etc etc. This is a big problem because most of the time you need to do them in certain order and if you don't you won't progress. For example in one part you will have to check the same fence several times but in some specific order and then talk to a character just to gain a new action to progress, this is just  a pain in the ass and holds back the story and the game.
There is also an specific part of the game where you find yourself trapped in a maze inside a mine, it took me literally 1 hour to beat that part because of the combat and this is the other huge problem of the game ... the combat...it is terrible in any way you can think of, some parts or certain events have fighting scenes which are mandatory and they are hard as hell...

(The mines, you will be here for a while...trust me)

The fighting is turn based, but is so random and so fast that without using save states is pretty much impossible to beat, even using save states and lowering the speed of the fights(I used an emulator and cheat engine) I had so many troubles beating some fights, one fight took me 30 minutes.
You have your a health bar, four commands (forward, backward, offense and defense) and some kind of stamina bar to use which is constantly moving at light speed and doesn't follow any kind of rule. The game compares how much stamina you have against your opponent and depending on that you will hit, get hit or do nothing.
Now you think, offense will do some kind of attack and defense will well defense yourself but nope, sometimes defense attacks and offense does nothing and everything drains your stamina, losing your stamina means that you will get hit in that turn and probably the next 4 turns too. The enemy have almost unlimited stamina while you do 2 hits in a raw and you are done for.
The only good thing about the combat is that from time to time you can do an special attack which triggers a short full animation showing your character using a gun or doing some kind of fighting pose, nothing fancy but is nice to see.

(The combat)
 
Verdict
Overall I enjoyed this novel because it was dark and it wasn't afraid to do and show you what most of novels this days are and Kimu was a funny character to play with. The gameplay system is what made this novel really flawed but even with those drawbacks and flaws I still enjoyed although I can understand if someone doesn't want to play it or drop it after a few hours in because of that. 
Difficulty to read:
In terms of how difficult it was to read, it wasn't the hardest novel I read but it wasn't 120 yen stories or sanarara either, it's full of katakana terms and names (you will read more than 20-30 names in katakana I'm not joking..) Kimu is overall fairly easy to read, because she is a bit juvenile so her speech and thoughts are fairly easy to understand while Kurisu is more depressing and mature so her thoughts and dialogues are a bit more difficult, also later on the game gets a bit hard when the sci-fi elements kick in, by no means an impossible novel to read or understand.
 

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.

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I wrote previously about a display bug in Dual Tail's strategy eroge Venus Blood -Hypno- that prevented interface text from displaying correctly in non-Japanese Windows. Fan hacker binaryfail generously donated a patch that fixes the issue. I sent this patch to Ninetail (parent company of Dual Tail) via Twitter, requesting that they include the fix on their official support page. Project manager and game designer Keimaru responded to me in broken English. His response, edited by me, is as follows.

Original:




I thanked him and went my way. A commentator on Reddit later informed me that Keimaru had posted a much longer comment in Japanese. This comment showed such sincere and thoughtful consideration of the issue, from a Japanese developer's standpoint, that I decided it needed to be relayed to the English audience.

Japanese eroge developers are well known for their reluctance to get involved with the Western market. Packaging and splash screens prominently declare "For sale in Japan only". Westerners tend to dismiss this policy as apathy for foreign fans, even regarding the practice with contempt as just another manifestation of Japanese isolationism and xenophobia. When eroge companies block foreign IPs, they automatically assume that the company has closed its doors to Western release (despite abundant evidence to the contrary). "The companies are just being xenophobic," they say with bitter contempt. "Might as well just fan translate their titles, since they'll never officially release their games in English. They don't want dirty gaijin playing their games."

It's about time that we get the other side of this story. And who better to deliver it than a prominent and well-loved Japanese developer--one puzzling over how to respond to a bug that prevents foreign fans from playing his games? I provide my translation of Keimaru's Twitter comments below. I regret that my translation skills could not fully convey the honest simplicity of the original message, but I did my best to at least get across the ideas and intent.
I don't know about you, but Ninetail just earned one new (very loud) fan. For an example of one of Ninetail's outstanding games, see my Venus Blood -Gaia- review! (NSFW version, SFW mirror)

Special thanks to those of the Fuwanovel community who provided feedback on the translation, especially Majikoi fan translator dowolf.

In the Fallout 4 thread here, I was seemingly cynical on the game for no reason. I have reasons, I just didn't post them. So to not be that bitter pointlessly cynical guy, I'll talk about why I'm still not very excited for FO4. I'll start by talking about Bethesda's older games, because a lot of posters here weren't around for them, and I'll establish the trends that make me skeptical of more Bethesda-produced open-world RPGs. Bethesda started the Elder Scrolls series as just some self-insertion sandbox for their in-office D&D campaign. This is fine, Arena was a charming game in its own right. But it had nary an ounce of narrative to it, which was normal for anything other than adventure games at the time. The world was threatened and you were given a vague directive at the start, you went from dungeon samey dungeon, and eventually found the bad guy, killed him, and won the game. With Daggerfall, you had a bit more introductory story. The world was in trouble and only you can save it. You had to accomplish several tasks before confronting the big bad. Every once in a while you met with an NPC who had small amounts of exposition. There were more side-quests strewn about with some pretty basic objectives, mostly without any story behind them. The game was procedurally generated (not on the fly) so that's to be expected. There were also books around that explained the world a little, it was pretty interesting. You went from dungeon to samey dungeon, killed the bad guy, won the game. By this point, people started expecting more from not just RPGs, but from games in general. Narratives were becoming a big thing, Bioware and Black Isle started doing their things with storytelling in RPGs, and Metal Gear Solid in action games. Bethesda felt like they had to adapt, they had to tell cool stories with strong narratives in their games, too!

Morrowind was actually a pretty dang good first attempt at this. The world building was surprisingly strong, the setting was unique and interesting. It held inspiration from Heart of Darkness, which was fairly bold for a fantasy RPG. There was a complex political climate with clashes between colonizers and the colonized, on top of this world-threatening event that's going down. You met many of the people deeply involved with the sticky situation the island finds itself in, including the local god-king Vivec who is holding the island hostage by artificially suspending a giant meteor above it (including preserving its inertia) and claiming that if followers stop worshipping him, the meteor will crash and kill everyone. Welp. There's lots of cool stuff like this strewn about. But here's the thing, it's all relating to the setting and the backstory. Anything beyond that is pretty threadbare. Your mission was to find the savior the dark elf prophecies speak of so this person can save the world from some looming evil. You go from dungeon to samey dungeon, and BIG TWIST: you were the savior the whole time! You save the world, game over. You saw a lot of cool stuff along the way, but it felt more like a sightseeing tour than a proper narrative. You were an agent following the whims of others the whole time, too. You get the sense that no one at Bethesda had any experience writing these kinds of stories. But the world-building was so cool that you wanted to keep exploring for hours on end, seeing the unique sights of Morrowind and getting involved in their conflicts. The main quest kind of sucked, but the side quests were a lot of fun. They themselves didn't have particularly strong stories and were mainly filled with one-dimensional characters who just wanted a task done, but there was some real neat stuff thrown in there, like the last dwarf alive, in some plague colony, with his lower body replaced by mechanical spider legs. Cool! It was also the first TES game with an extensive mod community.






(Morrowind was full of bizarre flora, fauna, and architecture)


Oblivion was a disaster in a lot of ways. The industry was firmly planting itself in support of strong narratives in not just certain kinds of games, but ALL games, now. While Half Life did a lot for storytelling in shooters at the time, it was nothing in comparison to Max Payne, an intense third-person shooter with a lengthy, twisting plot and plenty of dialog. There was Warcraft 3, a real-time strategy with an epic fantasy story attached (the previous WC games had stories that were more window-dressing than anything). If your game didn't tell a long, complex story, it was junk. It didn't matter what kind of game it was. Even Rockstar got in on the trend with their nonsensical murder simulators, Vice City and especially San Andreas. Bethesda could not afford to release an open world RPG without an absolutely epic story. But here's the thing, they SUCK at at storytelling! They're good at writing backstory, at worldbuilding. Every other facet of their writing is terrible. But gosh darn if they weren't going to try. They splurged on several very expensive voice actors to deliver their surely incredible dialog, then only had a handful of VAs rest for the rest of their hundreds of characters. Oops. The dialog in the main questline was as generic as possible. There were no truly interesting hooks to it, the player didn't have to make any difficult decisions, and the characters were as flat as cardboard. You were tasked to find the savior, did so by going from dungeon to samey dungeon, doing a LOT of busywork in closing those damn oblivion gates, and BIG TWIST: there is no twist! You find the savior and he defeats the final boss, saving the world for you. You weren't even the main hero! Bethesda's one saving grace, their world-building, failed them here. Cyrodiil was originally written as a dense jungle with interesting, dynamic cultures, but was retconned because they deemed verdant plains and deer-filled forests to have more mass appeal in the US and Europe. They spent a lot of money developing a complex AI system where every NPC would have needs and wants, and would seek out their own methods to fulfill them, and then disabled it because it didn't work at all. One thing Bethesda did do is up their game on the side quests. A lot of them were generic, but there were these main guilds in the game, and each one had their own storyline, and some got reasonably involved. They were mostly kind of middling, but the star of the show was the Dark Brotherhood questline, where you join a guild of assassins. There were twists and turns to its story, shady characters with grey-area motives, many assassination contracts had complex setups, and there were multiple endings to the quest line. It felt like its own game. Looking back on it, it's really nothing special, but it was like a small pond in the middle of a scorching desert, an oasis players took solace in and gathered around as a shining example of how to do questing in an open world game. One man wrote and designed all of these quests, Emil Pagliarulo, and his work stood out so much from the rest of Bethesda's offering, they handed him the reigns to all of Fallout 3.

Fallout 3 was a cool game, although it didn't feel very much like a real Fallout game. I'm not talking about the shift in perspective and gameplay, but the shift in tone, storytelling style, and world design. And you know what? Bethesda's writing still sucked. It became clear that Emil Pagliarulo is not an especially skilled writer. When taken out of the sea of shit the rest of Oblivion was, Emil's quest design and writing was shown to be fairly amateurish and not actually all that interesting. The story still felt uninspired. It was a personal story to find your father (and maybe save the world in the process), but therein laid the problem. The player character was still nameless, mute, and devoid of personality. Can you really tell a personal story involving family with that kind of setup? Well, you can, but you can't get anyone to care. And while the world design was reasonably interesting in its own right, with plenty of unique sights to see, the setting overall was a total failure. It was meant to be 100 years after the apocalypse, but it felt like it was just one year, with no organization, barely anything in the way of factions (other than two shadowy organizations), and people still scrambling and scavenging to survive. I still had more fun with it than I did with Oblivion, but it felt so lacking in so many areas. A couple years later, New Vegas came out developed by a different studio, one staffed by members with experience developing previous Fallout games, Obsidian Entertainment. And it totally clowned Bethesda and their attempt at a Fallout game. It had its own set of downsides, but gosh was New Vegas fun. Many characters individually had more depth to them than the combined depth of all of FO3's characters combined. The quests had a wealth of options, diverging branches, and alternate outcomes. The dialog was often witty and compelling to listen to. The world truly felt like how a post-apocalyptic world should feel like, with budding governments, organized banditry, and more overt faction wars competing for territory with the citizenry caught in the middle. They even managed to make the story feel personal despite your character being a no-name cipher. Many of the dungeons felt more unique. There was more loot with a crafting system. The combat, armor, and weapon systems felt more balanced and more fun. The one point I will concede is that aimlessly exploring the wasteland felt a bit more frustrating and less rewarding.






(an example of the branching structure of one side quest in New Vegas)


Would Bethesda learn from their mistakes in Oblivion and Fallout 3, and Obsidian's triumphs in New Vegas? Yes and no. Skyrim was fun. Bethesda's world-building strength has returned to them Skyrim was gorgeous, varied, and a joy to explore. They incentivized exploration in some really smart ways. Character leveling didn't feel so broken. The story, though, was still a problem. Bethesda is still shit at writing. You are the chosen one, overcome these trials, delve through dungeon through samey dungeon, kill a dragon or two, and save the world! It was still stock fantasy fair, without a hint of depth or creativity. That's okay though, because exploring the world is fun. What about the questing in the rest of the world? Well, the faction quests felt like stepped-up versions of Oblivion's faction quests. They had a bit more dialog, a bit more story to them, but most of them were still kind of mediocre. The characters were still largely one dimensional. Most of them did allow you to make a decision or two, which could affect the outcome in some inconsequential manner. The stand-out side-plot in this game was the civil war. It created an interesting political climate, but how much did it really impact the world? You could side with one faction or the other, and each had their own quest line. The faction I sided with lead up to a cool battle where we laid siege to a major city, and assaulted it. There were missions that lead up to it that determined the effectiveness of the soldiers, siege weapons, etc. When you finally got into the battle, and catapults were going off, spells were firing, and soldiers were charging the gates, it was so cool! Then the scripting broke at multiple points, requiring reloads. Well, it's an Elder Scrolls game. Then you won the battle, some buildings were smoldering a little, and a different man sat on the throne. That was it. You could go into towns occupied by the opposing faction and no one would bat an eye at you. It felt like the battle had no impact whatsoever. It was all a bit underwhelming. Bethesda repeatedly teases the players in their games, make grand promises, and fail to deliver time and time again.

I'm kind of getting sick of being disappointed. I'm getting sick of being a no-personality mute who is little more than an errand boy. I'm sick of the samey dungeons in every single game. I'm sick of the quest design that feels like you're going down a straight predetermined line instead of doing things your way. I'm sick of the shoddy writing, the shallow characters with crystal clear motivations, the stale and generic dialog, and the simple boilerplate storylines. Yes, Bethesda makes some great worlds to explore, but you know, I've played every single Bethesda game. I've played plenty of other compelling open world games. I've kind of had my fill. I watch the Fallout 4 trailer and am filled with apathy. I'm not saying Bethesda should ditch the open world, not at all, but I need something more. I'm looking forward to E3 this year. I'm a long-time fan of Bethesda's games, and I desperately want them to prove me wrong. But I won't hold my breath for it.

----------------------

On a side-note, The Witcher 3 has been giving me that something more. Its characters are all fascinating, even the minor ones. The story is a compelling search for your adopted daughter in trouble. The quests are sprawling with many avenues of approach and outcomes, even the side quests. The writing is entertaining and never fails to capture your attention. You are prompted with so many decisions on such a constant basis, all of which have some impact on the world big or small, that it no longer feels like you're playing a god controlling the fates of these characters, but you ARE Geralt of Rivia, in the world, making these decisions. It's an incredibly immersive experience. You end up never wanting to reload and take back your decisions, because they become so personal. And the open world is not sacrificed even a little in the face of this narrative experience, with a huge world to explore with an enormous amount of things to discover. The Witcher 3 allows us to have our cake and eat it, too. What is a Bethesda game in the face of this?






(as I write this, I'm itching to jump back into The Witcher 3)

Winged Cloud. Guess I don't really need to make any introduction, since they are already well-known in visual novel community for their boobs-first-story-later "Sakura" series. Of course, after getting a mountain of money poured into their pocket with their previous titles, there is no way that they don't want more. May 29th, they released the 3rd one in the series - Sakura Fantasy Chapter 1. Yes, this is only the chapter 1, because they want to milk as much money as possible from this game (that said, the price is still the same as other "Sakura" games, which is 12$). And here I am, with my B-52 Bomb Squadron, ready to engage them.

WARNING: 18+ 15+ MATERIAL BELOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.





SYNOPSIS

The new visual novel from the makers of Sakura Spirit and Sakura Angels.

Sakura Fantasy Chapter 1 is an exciting visual novel fantasy adventure where you decide the development of the story by the choices you make.

It is the tale of an aspiring female protagonist who wishes to aim to become a knight.

CHARACTER

1. Raelin





Protagonist. A novice knight with the special ability a.k.a "gift" of "farseeing" (basically, let her "spirit" leaves her body and goes looking around). A perverted girl with the hobby of peeking at other people's nude private moment and getting nude herself.

2. Gwynne






Raelin's best friend. She handles paperwork in the barrack, and rarely participates in actual combat practice. She has the gift of lighting (summoning lighting and such).

3. Keira






Raelin's instructor. A serious and harsh girl, especially toward Raelin. She has the gift of stone skin.

4. Ardena





The Empress. An emotionless girl, or should I say, thousand years old grandma Her gift is currently unknown.

STORY

To summary, Sakura Fantasy is about Raelin, a novice knight that is currently training in some random barrack in some random empire. For some reason, she got the gift of farseeing from someone called "the creator". For some reason, she wanted to become an excellent knight in the army to fight again some kind of monster. One day, in her sleep, she found herself getting stucked in a swamp with a huge monster, but decided that it's just simply a dream after she woke up.







Yup, dark.


Sometime later, she was assigned to be the castle's guard. There, she met a strange girl who told her about "a star may soon falls from the heaven". She did not understand it well, until later of the day, when it really happened: A star fell from the sky, crashed down to somewhere outside the "wall" (which protect the city from monster).

Despite the opposition of the Council, the strange girl - who now revealed as the Empress - decided to assemble a group of brave soldiers to seek for the fallen star. Of course, everyone can guess who would be in that group: Raelin - the protagonist, Gwynne - best friend, and Keira - the tsundere instructor.





After crawling through the swamp filled with all kind of perverted monsters that you can expect (slime, tenta-tree) and fought a super anti-climax battle with a "slime girl" (which she soon retreated after throwing out some random attacks), Keira suddenly got shot down by a strange girl. Turned out that that girl - Ethy - mistook Keira with a monster - or something like that. The group then took a break at the small village where Ethy lived.

Before departing, suddenly, a huge monster came to attack the village. The group fought back, and won after a deus-ex-machina battle. They had a big feast, and Ethy ended up joining them after the Empress's spirit emerged from Raelin and talked to the villagers - who had a lot of respect toward the Empress. Anddddd that's the end of chapter 1.





Man, there are so many things to talk about that I don't even know where to start anymore.

First off, language. When Winged Cloud first released Sakura Spirit, they got a full container of rocks for the omfg English in the game. This time, there are improvements, but STILL NOT ENOUGH. I mean...






Yes, I'm not a native English-speaker, but I'm damn sure this is NOT how you use "wake" in a sentence! Btw, this is just the 4th sentence into the game! Other parts of the game are also trashed with random weird sentences all over the place.
In the synopsis also: "female protagonist who wishes to aim to become a knight". No no no, you either "wish" or "aim". You don't "wish to aim". That's retarded.

Secondly, detail. You wonder why I used so many "someone", "something", "somewhere" in the summary? That's because the game simply explained ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about those. They just throw the players into the game environment and leave them there dying with no information whatsoever. What is this empire called? Why did Raelin join the army? What are they fighting against? Where did those monsters come from? What's the current situation? What exactly is "gift"? There are simply no answer for those very basic questions. All there for players to know, is that they are soldiers with "gift" in an empire fighting against monsters. Done.
Let's take a look at the 2nd choice, about 2 minutes into the game:






Before this choice, they did not mentioned a damn single word about what the hell is this "gift" thing, and suddenly, they tell players to make a choice related to that "gift" thing. Are you trolling me here!?

Next, the consistency. In a sword practice scene:






Excuse me, girl, but those things are called "dummy", not "doll".


Realizing their mistake, in the later scene, not far from this scene, they changed it back to "dummy", but decided to keep the "doll" in this scene as it, just to remind the players "Oh, we actually wanted to use doll but it sounded too dumb so we changed it to dummy instead".
In another scene, when Gwynne told Raelin "You should not sleep in late." ("sleep in late", meh...), Raelin replied: "I was making strange faces? Like what?". Errr.....what? Raelin, are you still sleepy? She did not mention a damn single thing about your face you know!?

Fourthly, "the creator". In this game, "the creator" is pretty much "God" in this empire. "He" (nah, don't know the gender) granted people with gift, for some reason. And also for some reason, only granted it for some people, not all. And because he is the "God", some sentences in the game became weirdly funny:





Who were you thanking there, Raelin? The "creator" who granted you the gift, or did you just break the forth wall and thank Winged Cloud?

And finally, the choice. According to Wingled Cloud, players can "decide the development of the story by the choices you make". Nooooope. Most of the choices are absolutely pointless, they affect nothing toward the story development. In like half of them, Raelin will just go ahead and do whatever she wants to do, regardless of your choice. There are only 2, or maybe 3 choices that really make a different, that will result in different CGs, but even then, nothing is actually changed in the flow of story. There is no route, no bad end, so you are free to make whatever choice you want. You want to stay loyal to one girl? Go for it. You want to make a harem (in your imagination)? Go for it. You want to be a coward and always stay in the back line? Go for it. You want to be a crazy girl who charge headfirst into the monster without a single care in the world? Go for it.

You want to go commando? Go for it.






GRAPHIC

Well, it's Winged Cloud, so you know what is coming. Nice art as ever, with a heck amount of boobs, ass and fan-service. 80% (or more, I'm suck at math) of the CGs are fan-service. How did this thing even get through Steam again? No wonder why they can attract a bunch of perverts on Steam buying their games. Eeeeveryone fell for the honey trap. Not me, I pirated.






MUSIC

Just your normal everyday BGM, nothing to talk about. Actually, did they reuse some BGMs from their previous games...?

CONCLUSION

I will just say one thing: Please, stay away from this trash. Don't pour more money into Winged Cloud's pocket, giving them motivation to create more disasters. If you want something to spend your money on, then go for Grisaia (or wait for the 18+ ver if you want), Neptunia, or even Akiba's Trip. Much better.

Pros:
- Nice art.

Cons:
- Still have Engrish.
- Unexplained story, detail.
- Pointless choices.
- No route (this game is not designed to be a kinetic novel).
- Lack of consistency in wording and sentencing.
- Overused fan-service CGs.
- Overkill price.

Score
Story: 2/10
Character: 5/10
Graphic: 7/10
Music: 4/10
Overkill price: -2
Total: 2,5/10







My previous review:
Love Rec. (Trial Edition)