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Libra of the Vampire Princess - Releasing May 16th, 2017


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37 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:

Kabu's point is a good one, though: games are massively more complex now than they used to be. VNs, honestly, shouldn't be by as much since they aren't that much more complex than they used to be (generally), but if you look at the thing that's delaying them in the case of Libra, it's exactly the new technology they aren't familiar with: Steam features.

For AAA games, it's clearly the complexity that leads to this. Hundreds of people work on one AAA game at a time. Scheduling a single project with that many moving parts is exceptionally difficult, and when such a project undergoes a large directional change (which happens), turning that ship can easily mean years of setback and lost work. Alternatively, if they have that kind of directional change and then choose not to delay, and instead just ship what they can by repurposing their assets and building something with it, we end up with Destiny (that is, in fact, what happened to Destiny, and why the story is incoherent and basically non-existent).

Yeah, VNs without gameplay elements (like rpg's) can practically just be thrown together with many of the existing engines I'd imagine? Most of the effort goes into content creation.

AAA games would be even worse off if they didn't have additional middleware (game engines). You'll still have to interact with certain APIs and there's a learning curve but at least you don't have to recreate the wheel. Well, I suppose the main purpose is for portability between platforms. At any rate it still takes quite a bit of effort to customize them for the intended target. That's why certain publishers love having franchises with regular 1-2 year releases. They can maximize the investment in whatever engine (homegrown or off the shell). The downside being they tend to vary little and are are rather cookie cutter.

Another example (iirc) is overwatch? Wasn't that created using the leftover assets of the now defunct Titan MMO? That one had been in production for quite a few years. Don't think it was shadow of the colossus level but was getting long in the tooth.

At any rate I think it's fair to say someone('s) dropped the ball in most of these examples. Though some of it might have been simple bad feedback from internal testing. Creating something "fun" isn't an exact science after all. While we can't really say if it resulted in a better game I can at least appreciate the desire not to fail.

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55 minutes ago, shadowolf64 said:

:reeee: What is taking so long?!? I think the update to say they submitted it to Valve makes the wait worse... It's not like Valve checks for quality or anything... how long does it take to put something up on a server <_<

Approval process doesn't usually take this long. It makes me wonder if there are other issues at play.

In other news, from what I've seen from people who got the physical edition, the translation seems bad. Like, VERY bad. It's perhaps above Moenovel and Taisho Alice levels of badness, but not by a whole lot. Mikandi Japan completely and utterly butchered the translation. They should be ashamed.

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I think if they're transparent about whats going on, some people may understand. They said that the game will be released on the 16th, then on that very day they say that it will be postponed because of that steam thing. I don't think they suddenly up and realised that "hey, we need to get that steam thing done" on the very day they're supposed to release the game. They could have mentioned it earlier, that the game may be postponed.

Then they pretty much just post pictures and mention that it's coming on soon, with a lot to discuss, also regarding the 18 plus version. Besides that they've been silent about what exactly is going on. They should have at least updated their kickstarter page with a notice by now.

Initially i thought i'll get the game on the release date and try it out before Dies Irae comes out but now i'll probably just wait and see if they make improvements if the translation is in fact really that bad. I'm actually kind of glad now that I didn't buy it first lol, not that i was affected by this whole delay business since i'm not heavily invested in it.

Just mentioning what i noticed. If it turns out to be as bad as decay mentioned, then the people that supported them on kickstarter may feel really hurt by it. 

Ps: I'm sure Dies translation will be really great considering the people that have been working on it. Looking forward to the read.

Edited by DharmaFreedom
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Some samples to tide ya'll over:

"She grips in her hand something that looks like a leash and it's connected to the thing tied around my body."

Because who needs commas? Or grammar in general? There are quite a few lines where it seems like they straight up forgot to use commas. Of course, that's almost the least of this line's problems. It has the prose of a twelve year old's Spongebob Squarepants fanfic. From pointless repetition ("grips in her hand"), to frustrating vagueness ("the thing tied around my body"), to word usage that's uncommon in English ("my body" when "me" also works). It's the kind of line you have to read two or three times to figure out what it's saying.

"Stream with reduced force runs along her thighs like water trickling from rocks and flows onto the washing area of the bathroom."

Bwueahhh!? First of all, welcome to the first of many pissing incidents in Libra of the Vampire Princess! I hope you like pee, because boy does this VN have a lot of it. 

Aside from the aforementioned lack of commas, this line also introduces another common issue: the lack of articles. One of their many translators seems to have frequently left them out, and their editor(s) didn't catch a it very often. I'm guessing that their staff had very few people whose first language is English, and it shows.

Just like the first line, even if this line had proper punctuation, it could be worded much better. Like, "down rocks" instead of "from rocks," though that metaphor is super clunky anyway. "A weak stream" instead of "stream with reduced force." I mean, really, trying to slap some band-aids on this line is idiotic. It needs to be thrown out and rewritten completely.

"It is simply impossible to stop mindlessly flowing pee with a thin cloth."

I want to mindlessly flow this line into the fucking garbage can. "The thin cloth of her panties is no match for the uncontrollable flow of urine." I spent ten seconds thinking up that alternative. It's still quite bad, yet somehow a hundred times better than what they had. The two chief problems being 1) the way their version is phrased makes it sound like stopping the flow is an active effort, when it is not, and 2) maybe I missed this in biology, but I'm pretty sure urine doesn't have a consciousness, and so the piss can't be "mindlessly flowing."

"But so many weird things happened recently like, a random attacker and cosplay girl. And close to me, two transfer students from a small country I never heard of before called Racronia."

I'm sorry, but I'm still not fully sure what the fuck this line is saying. What happened with the attacker and cosplay girl? What did the two transfer students do??? This is what happens when you throw grammar out the window. That second sentence is one very long sentence fragment. At least this line has commas. One of them isn't in the right spot, but hey, it's progress! Oh, also, it's Lacronia. They can't even get their own proper nouns right.

"Well, I'm your fiancee. As the two people who promised each other the future, it is proper to live together."

And in this case, an article showed up where it wasn't needed! C'mon! And what the hell does "promised each other the future" even mean? It sounds really poetic and meaningful, but I'm pretty sure it's not actually supposed to be. An overall incredibly awkward line. 

"Hooray, Master's got a lawful wife! After this, suck as much blood as possible and keep your favorite mistresses! Yay, harem, successful man!"

Boo, Libra, terrible fucking translation! Mari is a ditz, but she's at least be able to form complete, comprehensible sentences. Also, Shuma doesn't have any mistresses to keep currently, that line is about acquiring new ones. This maid is obsessed with encouraging the protagonist to create as big of a harem as possible. It would be funny if it was actually translated halfway competently.

 

This is basically the entire translation. Some routes will likely be better than others since there were multiple translators, but I wouldn't get your hopes up for anything being especially good.

Edited by Decay
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6 minutes ago, Decay said:

welcome to the first of many pissing incidents in Libra of the Vampire Princess!

Huh what do you mean!? please don't tell me this game has some magical power transfer through pee or something. Honestly i didn't research much about Libra, I thought it's some chuuni game with vampires. Roughly how often do these scenes pop up? does it only occur during h-scenes?

12 minutes ago, Decay said:

I'm pretty sure urine doesn't have a consciousness, and so the piss can't be "mindlessly flowing."

:wahaha:

 

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3 minutes ago, DharmaFreedom said:

Huh what do you mean!? please don't tell me this game has some magical power transfer through pee or something. Honestly i didn't research much about Libra, I thought it's some chuuni game with vampires. Roughly how often do these scenes pop up? does it only occur during h-scenes?

I don't think there's any substantial story relevance to the pissing. The peeing mostly happens in the h-scenes, but there's at least one pissing scene in the common route, not attached to an h-scene (the one I posted excerpts from).

The game is pretty light on the story. It has some chuuni stuff, but it's mainly a light hearted slice of life styled moege.

Edited by Decay
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2 hours ago, DharmaFreedom said:

Ps: I'm sure Dies translation will be really great considering the people that have been working on it. Looking forward to the read.

Why not judge it by yourself, watch this:

 

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6 minutes ago, Decay said:

That's a poor way to judge it, since those use old, outdated versions of the script, much to the translators' own frustration.

Sorry I was not aware. Those videos were posted quite recently though, considering the game is supposed to come out in a little more than a month from now, it's weird that they would post gameplay videos using an old script even though the game is already supposed to be about wrapped up for release.

Edited by Nier
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5 minutes ago, Nier said:

Sorry I was not aware. Those videos were posted quite recently though, considering the game is supposed to come out in little than a month from now, it's weird that they would post gameplay videos using an old script even though the game is already supposed to be about ready to bundle for release a month from now.

It is indeed weird, and nobody knows why it is happening. Light is not using the latest version of the English script for their test builds, which is what they're recording these videos using. We can only hope that they remember to package the correct version of the scripts with the release version of the game.

ANYWAY, this thread is about Libra, let's talk about that some more!

"With only that, my body laying on the floor moves in front of her. My feet are hovering above the ground."

Actually, let's not.

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2 hours ago, Decay said:

"With only that, my body laying on the floor moves in front of her. My feet are hovering above the ground."

Actually, let's not.

Anybody starting out in writing or translation should read this VN. They can regard it as a long and arduous lesson on what not to do when writing something in English.

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6 hours ago, Decay said:

Terrible TLs, <snip>

Phew... that sucks. I had very high hopes for this localization. They were so good at the PR side of things, unlike so many other companies.

I am interested in seeing if the terrible TL quality reflects in accuracy as well, so I'll probably buy the game on release and compare some of the TLed lines to the RAW text. Might make a post in here when that time comes, unless someone has already done it by then.

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Well, guess we need to wait longer if the problem was the translation? Although I think I was more in line with Dergonu though in regard of the line, since at this time we didn't had any comparison between RAW and translated yet. But then again maybe Libra translators wasn't quite familiar with English.

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I hate to play devil's advocate here, but if people are so hard-boiled about English translations and are gonna be super picky, why not just learn Japanese so you can read the original content? I know that seems like an asshole thing to say and I'm not trying to be. However, while it is a slight distraction to see some of the bad translations that Decay pointed out, they don't seem to ruin the enjoyment of the VN as it was intended. When you look at VNs that have tens of thousands of lines of text, and you pick maybe 10 out that are bad, isn't that a bit much?

I've played VNs that have bad translations in them and, while distracting, it didn't really ruin the overall enjoyment factor. I think the frustrating part for me is that it takes a LOT of time to get an English translation and games normally don't get a second translation, so the fact that we have English to read at all should be appreciated. However by that same logic, I also appreciate the counter-argument that it should be done right in the first place.

Note I'm not making excuses for bad translations nor am I saying it's acceptable. I guess I'm just saying we should all calm down a little bit and maybe appreciate that the translation is provided in the first place.

Edited by voidpointer
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22 minutes ago, voidpointer said:

I hate to play devil's advocate here, but if people are so hard-boiled about English translations and are gonna be super picky, why not just learn Japanese so you can read the original content? I know that seems like an asshole thing to say and I'm not trying to be. However, while it is a slight distraction to see some of the bad translations that Decay pointed out, they don't seem to ruin the enjoyment of the VN as it was intended. When you look at VNs that have tens of thousands of lines of text, and you pick maybe 10 out that are bad, isn't that a bit much?

I've played VNs that have bad translations in them and, while distracting, it didn't really ruin the overall enjoyment factor. I think the frustrating part for me is that it takes a LOT of time to get an English translation and games normally don't get a second translation, so the fact that we have English to read at all should be appreciated. However by that same logic, I also appreciate the counter-argument that it should be done right in the first place.

Note I'm not making excuses for bad translations nor am I saying it's acceptable. I guess I'm just saying we should all calm down a little bit and maybe appreciate that the translation is provided in the first place.

As someone who is learning Japanese, and intends on becoming a professional translator, I don't like this mentality. It is the job of the translator to produce a good translation that pleases the readers, and not a poor translation that is hard to understand, (or worse, one that is straight up incorrect.) People being okay with bad translations means the people who translated said work gets away with it, and more bad translations could surface in the future. If no one speaks up about someone's work being bad, then the translator and the localization company won't learn.

It's okay to criticise translators if their work is sub-par. I know for a fact that my first work wasn't the best, and I use the feedback I got from that as motivation to get better in the future. This should be what all translators tries to do.

So, I think it's important that the community speaks up about something if there is actual issues in a localization. Based on the lines Decay has posted in this thread so far, the translation looks very awkward. I hope the lines are at the very least accurate, (I'll be checking this later when the game comes out,) but even if they are, we should definitely let Mikandi Japan know that their work is in need of some serious editing. If they aren't made aware of the fact that their work isn't that good, they could just keep making sub-par translations for the foreseeable future, which would suck for them and their fans.

With the amount of good localizations that has been released in the past few years, this community should be allowed to have high standards when it comes to translations.

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30 minutes ago, voidpointer said:

I hate to play devil's advocate here, but if people are so hard-boiled about English translations and are gonna be super picky, why not just learn Japanese so you can read the original content? I know that seems like an asshole thing to say and I'm not trying to be. However, while it is a slight distraction to see some of the bad translations that Decay pointed out, they don't seem to ruin the enjoyment of the VN as it was intended. When you look at VNs that have tens of thousands of lines of text, and you pick maybe 10 out that are bad, isn't that a bit much?

I've played VNs that have bad translations in them and, while distracting, it didn't really ruin the overall enjoyment factor. I think the frustrating part for me is that it takes a LOT of time to get an English translation and games normally don't get a second translation, so the fact that we have English to read at all should be appreciated. However by that same logic, I also appreciate the counter-argument that it should be done right in the first place.

Note I'm not making excuses for bad translations nor am I saying it's acceptable. I guess I'm just saying we should all calm down a little bit and maybe appreciate that the translation is provided in the first place.

That is ever the conundrum, is it not?

I don't want to pay for product X, because it's bad quality!
But if I don't pay for product X they will stop making product X. We should be thankful there is product X at all.
But then they'll just keep making bad product X. Whatever will we do?

Up to you's, the answer. Set your own limits on what is acceptable and what is not.  Personally, I like supporting even bad quality products when the company has half competent PR, as then I can at the very least convey when something is of inferior quality and hope they do better next time. I can do this because my standards are actually rather low, and I'll accept most things. If a product being of bad quality actively impairs your enjoyment, there may be other things you could be investing on.

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It is our right as consumers of visual novels to discuss and point out the level of quality of the product. I personally don't have the mentality that, "hey at least i can buy a VN even if the quality isn't up to par". That's not right for me, I mean if the translation isn't smooth and reading it may prove to be annoying, i appreciate it when people point it out with examples. I can then choose not to buy it and buy something else instead. 

I don't need to learn Japanese just because I'm not satisfied with the translation quality done by companies that are supposed to specialise in translation. Its a new time for Vns in the west now, there are many available for people to pick and choose. I've got over 30 vns in my backlog that i may read when i have the time. Honestly i'm not interested in learning Japanese right now and am fine with just picking up the Vns already available or will be coming soon.

I mean, mikandi had like a year to translate the game and polish it up. They aren't creating the game, they're translating it. I think a year is ample time to get it to the best possible quality by apparent professionals. If this was a fan translation, hey take years if you want. You're doing it on your own time, you didn't ask for anyone's money to do it. But if you're a professional then people are going to have high expectations for quality. 

I've read hundreds of books in my time and I don't think i've ever had issues with books not being proofread properly. It really shocked me when i first starting reading visual novels, how official translations done by professionals can have so many errors that have been pointed out and never addressed or edited. Like its just an accepted fact that just because there aren't many Vns out there, they can just cut corners with releases and people will just go "oh well, it can't be helped, we don't have much of a choice anyway...". Its a sad thing to see. 

Visual novel companies should endeavour to release products of the highest quality and translations that are honest and accurate to the meaning of the original scripts. It is their duty as professionals and it is also their responsibility to consumers and the creators of those games.  

Edited by DharmaFreedom
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1 hour ago, voidpointer said:

Note I'm not making excuses for bad translations nor am I saying it's acceptable. I guess I'm just saying we should all calm down a little bit and maybe appreciate that the translation is provided in the first place.

Well, seeing those sample sentences has turned me off from even playing the VN, to be honest. I supported the Kickstarter because the team seemed passionate about bringing their first visual novel over, not because I thought Libra looked all that interesting. But it seems like they didn't care/weren't competent enough to handle the task. 

The end product is all that matters to me. All the PR speak leading up to it is pointless if I can't enjoy what I'm paying for (and at the end of the day, I couldn't care less about the people involved. I'd throw out the nicest translator in the world in a heartbeat if he was trash at his job).

I've read poorly translated VNs before but Libra looks like it might be the worst (I purposefully avoid the infamously bad ones), which is pretty disappointing. I'll accept plain, overly literal translations as a last resort at times, but I don't know if I want to read dozens of hours of translated English from people who can't even construct a proper sentence.

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1 hour ago, voidpointer said:

I hate to play devil's advocate here, but if people are so hard-boiled about English translations and are gonna be super picky, why not just learn Japanese so you can read the original content? I know that seems like an asshole thing to say and I'm not trying to be. However, while it is a slight distraction to see some of the bad translations that Decay pointed out, they don't seem to ruin the enjoyment of the VN as it was intended. When you look at VNs that have tens of thousands of lines of text, and you pick maybe 10 out that are bad, isn't that a bit much?

I've played VNs that have bad translations in them and, while distracting, it didn't really ruin the overall enjoyment factor. I think the frustrating part for me is that it takes a LOT of time to get an English translation and games normally don't get a second translation, so the fact that we have English to read at all should be appreciated. However by that same logic, I also appreciate the counter-argument that it should be done right in the first place.

Note I'm not making excuses for bad translations nor am I saying it's acceptable. I guess I'm just saying we should all calm down a little bit and maybe appreciate that the translation is provided in the first place.

This may be passable for a fan translation (it's free, after all, and free has by definition no warranty), but not for a TL that has been kickstarted, or paid with dear money like in the case of IMHHW.

If you pay for something you're pretty much expecting a professional outcome. If you don't get it, your confidence in that company from that point on sinks. And with all reason.

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