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Silvz

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Hey people, me again!

So, I noticed that there are no new reviews for a while, being the last one for Chrono Clock. One of the best features since Fuwa changed was the creation of its own reviews, and even though I don't usually comment on the site, I used to read and appreciate all of them. Since there are so many new games being released week after week, I started to miss FuwaReviews even more, and wanted to ask if they are coming back anytime in the future. You can consider it a request, even :P

And I like a lot the Visual Novel Tracker too, so thank you all for bringing it every saturday :D

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I don't run FuwaReviews anymore (That's Palas), but as somebody who used to run it, I can at least shed a little light on what's going on, and explain why I stopped doing reviews in the first place:

So, for those who aren't aware, I work for quite a few different companies in the localization industry in various different roles. I won't provide that list here because you can find most/all of them by looking around. Some of these companies I started working for in the past couple years. Before that, I had a ton of connections with a lot of different devs, and I was able to get us signed up for review keys from something like a dozen companies/teams/groups/whatever you wanna call them. Some of those connections are still around today, while others have pulled out for various reasons (none of which were our fault—at least not that I'm aware of).

During that time, we had pretty consistent reviews, a great set of reviewers (many of whom are still on the team), and it was 20% thanks to our reviewers and 80% thanks to Flutterz (seriously, he edited everything for us and is amazing—10/10 would recommend) that we were able to be that blessed. Thanks to our connections, I was usually able to just be like "Hay [company] can I get key for x?" and then divvy out the keys to whoever wanted them.

Then, everybody started getting busy. A few reviewers, including myself, fell off the face of the Earth/peaced out/couldn't spend time playing VNs. It sucked. I put out a call for new reviewers and got basically nobody (except Decay—love you bae). I got slammed with school and life and official stuff, so I stepped down. Bats took over and tried to keep the ship afloat, but during this time we lost roughly half of our connections for various reason (not because of this swap, just bad timing). We attempted to pick up more reviewers, but nobody fit the bill.

We have a general process for our reviewers, which is why we had to turn down quite a few people. We try to remain unbiased (though, like any review site, it happens), and we write enough to justify our reasons. A lot of our posts are on the longer side, follow a pretty straightforward format, and give people a good idea of what to expect. We also anticipate that our writers have some mastery of the English language, so that we can get reviews edited in a timely manner. Not much to ask for: you spent two to 40+ hours playing a game, hopefully you'll be willing to spend thirty minutes to an hour writing a solid review.

So we were having problems finding reviewers. And while I say "We," I mean Bats.

Later, some "things" happened. At the time, we had a rule in place (mostly for me) that we cannot review any title we worked on. For the record, I never reviewed a title I directly worked on, and any titles I did work on had a disclaimer, especially when I was the one who got the key. It's the ethical thing to do. But, because that wasn't enough, we had to strengthen the rule to "We can't review games from a company we work/worked for." I understand why that rule is in place, but the number of companies I can do reviews for is fewer than the number of companies I can't do reviews for, so I was finished.

Bats left the VN scene completely shortly after this, and Palas stepped up. He's doing what he can, but there are a lot of roadblocks. The fact that a couple other reviewers also had restrictions placed on them caused a bit of a dead space that we still weren't able to fill because nobody applied and met the basic requirements to be a reviewer. We still have a strong team, but virtually all of us are involved with something (official, unofficial, or non-VN related) in one way or another, and it's difficult to make it work.

Would I love to run FuwaReviews again and get it back to the glory days? Yes, of course I would. But I can't. I'm too involved in the community for that to work out. Instead, I'll have to depend on somebody else, and I look forward to seeing if we can make it work out.

And maybe, one day, I'll do a JAST game review. Maybe.

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From my perspective as one of the current reviewers, and speaking only for myself, not for FuwaReviews at large or Palas in particular as the head, I see a combination of factors influencing the rate at which we publish reviews (which, btw, I don't think is all that slow; we've maybe had some outlier slow months recently with only one review a month, but these things are going to be cyclical):

  • Reading a VN simply takes time, and we're all busy individuals doing various things.
  • Reading a VN to review it vs. reading it for pleasure is actually a surprisingly different experience. Reading something with the intent to review it actually puts a fair bit of mental burden on me, vs. simply reading it normally, for better and worse: I spend time stepping back and assessing how I'm feeling about certain things, taking notes, constantly considering collecting screenshots, etc. All told, it's actually a fair bit less entertaining to read this way. That said, the psychological payoff of actually putting out the review and having a big public conversation with people about a game is substantial (and is the reason I do reviews).
  • It actually takes a while to write a review. Even if you're thoughtfully preparing along the way while reading it, like I mentioned, preparing the final review takes a few hours (at least for me). Basically, choosing to do a review is signing up for a fair bit of work.
  • We don't have all that many active reviewers. Looks like only 5 reviewers have posted something in the last 10 months? Palas recruited another reviewer fairly recently, and I myself only joined the team within the last year, so this isn't an area where we're completely stagnating, but finding interested and qualified people is not easy.
  • To have a review, you have to have a game that people want to review. There are a ton of VNs coming out all the time, of course, but individual reviewers have their own preferences and interests, and not much incentive or desire (hopefully understandably) to review outside of things they're already interested in. And even within the bounds of those interests, things don't always work out. As an example, the Symphonic Rain HD remaster came out recently, and I picked it up with the intent of reviewing it since I really liked it back when I read the fan TL years ago. However, a couple hours in, I realized the release was sub-par in a lot of ways (backlog didn't work correctly, lots of proofing errors, translation did a poor job of capturing characterization), and I just couldn't stand the thought of sinking 40 hours into ruining my pleasant memories of a game by playing a bad release of it at that level of elevated scrutiny, just to wind up saying, "This game I loved got a sub-standard official localization and HD remaster," even though I think that's exactly the sort of review that would be great to put out there, in that it would likely create an interesting conversation.

Now, all that said, I can personally say that I'm planning to pick up WagaHigh on release date and review it, since for whatever combination of reasons, it's caught my eye. I don't know how long it will take—my time is always limited—but you have my word there will be a review of it before too long after release.

I also want to add one important request, as a reviewer. If you want to support FuwaReviews, from my perspective, the best thing you can do is to make sure to comment on the reviews, in whichever venue you prefer: the tweets (retweets are always appreciated), the FuwaReviews blog posts themselves, associated forum threads, the Facebook post I guess (I've never even looked at those to see if there are comments... I probably should...). Doing reviews, for me, is an extension of why I'm on Fuwanovel in the first place: I like VNs, and I want to talk to people about them. The payoff of all that time spent reviewing a game is all in that subsequent conversation a review sparks.

Edited by Fred the Barber
grammar
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Guys, thank you for your answers! I completely understand you having to step aside because of life matters, as I already did something similar before. It saddens me to have few reviews, but at the same time I got happy knowing Ryechu is getting more opportunities to work, so congrats :D

Fred, about Symphonic Rain, that is exacly the kind of review that I would like to read before buying the game. I also have read it before, and would not want to buy it to have a bad experience.

Wouldn't be interesting to have user reviews on the website? Whenever a game was released, users could send their reviews and after analysis have them posted. Just an idea.

1 hour ago, Fred the Barber said:

I also want to add one important request, as a reviewer. If you want to support FuwaReviews, from my perspective, the best thing you can do is to make sure to comment on the reviews, in whichever venue you prefer: the tweets (retweets are always appreciated), the FuwaReviews blog posts themselves, associated forum threads, the Facebook post I guess (I've never even looked at those to see if there are comments... I probably should...). Doing reviews, for me, is an extension of why I'm on Fuwanovel in the first place: I like VNs, and I want to talk to people about them. The payoff of all that time spent reviewing a game is all in that subsequent conversation a review sparks.

I usually don't comment on the website, but I do here on the forums. I remember even doing that on a recent review you posted here (though I don't recall which one, maybe Chrono Clock). I have also read pretty much all available reviews until now

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Quote

Wouldn't be interesting to have user reviews on the website? Whenever a game was released, users could send their reviews and after analysis have them posted. Just an idea.

We tossed this idea around for a while, but the problem is that the content and format of these user-submitted reviews was so inconsistent that editing them to at least match the straightforward format we use would have been a nightmare that I would never wish upon anybody. When I asked for reviews/reviewers a couple years ago, I got a bunch of 1-2 sentence "reviews." There were one or two reviews at most that nearly met our requirements, but we ended up scrapping those as well because they still required more information to fulfill our requirements and Tay and I agreed that trying to get those up and running was more work than what we wanted to do.

Quote

If you want to support FuwaReviews, from my perspective, the best thing you can do is to make sure to comment on the reviews, in whichever venue you prefer: the tweets (retweets are always appreciated), the FuwaReviews blog posts themselves, associated forum threads, the Facebook post I guess (I've never even looked at those to see if there are comments... I probably should...).

This is also huge for us. We want to create conversation using our reviews, and knowing that people actually take the time to read our reviews is an incredible feeling.

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I haven't actually finished a VN since Chrono Clock, and I chose not to review that in the end because of the ongoing negotiations I was party to with its publisher. Before that, last finished Himawari in January. And then Supipara last August. Ouch.

I don't have as much time as I used to for frivolously playing VNs, true, but to be honest, I also don't have quite as much drive as I used to. I still love VNs and enjoy reading them, but working on VN translation makes me want to do other shit after I mentally exhaust myself for the day.

I'm halfway through Dies Irae and I plan on finishing that eventually. Hopefully sometime this month, but maybe next month instead. I'll review it once I'm done. After that, who knows. I don't want to quit reviewing but if I'm not finishing any new releases then I'll never have anything to review. Maybe once I finish Dracu-Riot I'll binge on a few games.

Edited by Decay
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I would just like to thank everyone who has in the past, and who currently works with Fuwareviews. For something that is purely done out of the love of this hobby, it looks like a lot of hard work. The kind of hard work that some people even get paid to do, and yet you guys all do it for free. I really do respect and admire that.

I've always felt bad myself for never applying for a position as a reviewer. But I know myself well enough to know that it is work I can not do. I have very particular taste and standards for stories, and if those standards are not met I simply just drop what I am reading. If I love a story, I can write tons about it and analyze its minute details. But if I hold no passion for a story, finishing it, no less writing about it is something I can't see myself being able to do. And as a reviewer, you have to read and write about whatever is given to you, whether you like it or not. This is work I can not do, and so I really do respect the people who can. 

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