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And what about Key?


Silvz

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I'd go with Air before Kanon if I were you. Air was one of the best for me, and the age gap between Air and Clannad is smaller than Kanon, so you'll adapt better to the older games. But sseriously, DO read both of them, they are as incredible as Clannad - and as sad

But really, don't let the art style or the "oldness" keep you away from them. AIR and KANON are unique experiences, even more since you are already a fan.

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On 10.7.2018 at 3:35 AM, Silvz said:

It's sad to see such a low number for Fatal Twelve. It one of the best VNs I've read the last few months. Maybe because it is all ages, people were not too interested on it, which is a shame.

But to LB also get those numbers........ eh, I really hope Rewrite+ sells more thant - that -

Really. I'm very interested why you think this game was any good? The choice system was atrocious and forces you to use a guide, the characters are neglectable and not built up towards the start, maybe near the end? The Transitions didn't make sense, Federico was a very weird character to make a protagonist out of. Alan was just a pointless brute and the Miharu/Rinka Romance was absolutely pointless, didn't even make sense as Miharu was super unlikeable and even Rinka said shes unlikeable.

Fatal Twelve had a good premise but it was not good by any standards and thats not even because its allages, but just because its underdeveloped and aieouKompany doesn't know how to make choice systems without artificially making them hard or trial and error (see Shizuku no Oto)

If you want to read a review of the game then check this. You might need to google Translate it though.
https://visual-novel.info/review-fatal-twelve/

Ontopic: KEY will be at animagic with a panel this year in germany. I'm gonna go and ask them for some potential info and what they think about the western market depending on who is around.

Edited by EroHataVNI
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On ‎2018‎年‎7‎月‎10‎日 at 4:23 PM, Okarin said:

Also... watching rubbish like Fault sell 100K really makes me cringe.

Fault is cheap - it's been on sale for less than $4.  On top of that, it's been in the $1 tier of bundles multiple times.  That'll pump the numbers up WAY past the actual number of people that have actually played it.

Clannad has only gotten down to $18, and Little Busters is still $25.  Both of those are above MSRP for Fault.

 

It really isn't that surprising that cheap bundle fodder has outsold good titles.

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All these complaints about Little Busters, and not one person slamming the horrible translation.

That said, I suspect people are right about the reasons it isn't selling well, and that the bad TL isn't a significant contributor to the poor sales, but for what it's worth, if it did have a nice translation, I'd be out there evangelizing it to people, because I love the daylights out of the game. Unfortunately, it doesn't, so I'm not.

Here's to hoping Rewrite gets a good translation, at least, or maybe Summer Pockets (though reception to it in Japan is lukewarm, I hear?).

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5 hours ago, Silvz said:

But really, don't let the art style or the "oldness" keep you away from them

Yeah, "oldness" itself never was a problem for me - after all I really enjoyed Sakura no Kisetsu and other old VNs from the beginning of century :) And I'm already used to the art. Actually, based on vndb screenshots alone, I like the look of Kanon more. But definitely going to read them both.

3 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

All these complaints about Little Busters, and not one person slamming the horrible translation

Was it really that horrible? Well, at least you get untranslated version in the same package, and can switch on the fly :D

Edited by adamstan
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5 hours ago, adamstan said:

Was it really that horrible?

I have read it a few hours of it and I didn't notice out of the ordinary? Actually that's the firt time that I seen anyone bring up the Little Busters translation as being an issue.

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12 minutes ago, Nier said:

I have read it a few hours of it and I didn't notice out of the ordinary?

 

Fred, being an editor, has really high standards. I also didn't find anything bothering about LB! localization. It was smooth read for me, without anything standing out and throwing me off.

Edited by adamstan
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50 minutes ago, adamstan said:

 

Fred, being an editor, has really high standards. I also didn't find anything bothering about LB! localization. It was smooth read for me, without anything standing out and throwing me off.

Well, you can't call a decent translation "horrible" regardless what position you're in. That's just taking it way too far. If he said it's lacking and some words and sentences are lost in translation then i'd believe that, but "horrible" is such an over exaggeration, especially when no one else complains about it. You always hear about bad translations.

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Yeah, for me it's an exaggeration too. IMO It's at least decent.

Probably it doesn't follow some rules that Fred considers unbreakable (Like, I vaguely remember him saying that honorifics should be banned in translations) ;) And I suppose he'd argue that we are so used to horrible TLs that we no longer notice their horribleness :P

Edited by adamstan
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Well, I think there are cases when they can be removed without any loss (especially when the setting isn't japanese), but sometimes the way characters address each other (and how it changes - last name, first name, different honorifics) is important plot device and they make great fuss about it. In such cases I don't see viable replacement - when you cut them out, some dialogues turn into nonsense*. So hard ban would be going too far.

Either way, they don't bother me at all when they're present, and IMHO it's "safer" to have them, at least in most high-school romances ;) .

 

* As an example, take one of early scenes in Princess Evangile, where one of the girls explains to Masaya how you should address various people, using various honorifics (or none, in case of younger ones). With honorifics removed, whole scene is pointless, and it is brought up in different parts of the story too.

Edited by adamstan
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2 hours ago, Stormwolf said:

Well, you can't call a decent translation "horrible" regardless what position you're in. That's just taking it way too far. If he said it's lacking and some words and sentences are lost in translation then i'd believe that, but "horrible" is such an over exaggeration, especially when no one else complains about it.

Nearly every line sounds awkward. It's bad enough that you can easily find examples even from the screenshots they elected to put up on the game's Steam page that sound like ass:

ss_99b0cd7faa8c4ffd80598602811f74beb08ae

Or that are just bad English:

ss_8045b6c72929dd9a654c1470275674f3e28d1

There was also a fair bit of obvious mistranslation in the short part I could bring myself to read, but it's been a long time ago since I tried, and I no longer have the pile of cringe-worthy screenshots I took (also, uploading screenshots is kind of a pain anyway...).

2 hours ago, Stormwolf said:

You always hear about bad translations.

This is, unfortunately, not true. It's pretty rare for anybody who is both capable of criticizing and willing to criticize translation quality to read a bad translation, and it's even rarer for them to actually go talk about it. It's also worth mentioning that the opposite happens: you'll sometimes see a lot of noise raised about perceived bad translations in games that are, generally, at least solidly mediocre, because someone picks up on one thing and manages to make it snowball. Most releases have some problems, so it's honestly pretty easy to make nearly anything look bad, if you're dedicated. So teasing out the consistently bad works from the ones that are generally fine is pretty hard, if you're just following along with the discourse and not judging these things for yourself. But the general VN discussion seems to often pillory things that simply occasionally make a mistake, but happen to make an obvious one, or even just do something that annoys the community because of certain predilections, like, say, the ever popular hate for cursing in translation even though cursing is an everyday thing in English.

2 hours ago, Stormwolf said:

Well, you can't call a decent translation "horrible" regardless what position you're in.

This sentiment I agree with, but it implies the Little Busters! translation is decent, which is, unfortunately, also not true (at least by my lights).

Just to draw a controversial comparison: I would say that Chrono Clock has a vastly better translation, both from an accuracy perspective and a readability perspective, than Little Busters. CC has more than its share of problems, of course, but it has actually good moments, which Little Busters does not; Little Busters just consistently (as in, nearly every line) sounds like it was written by somebody who has no idea how you should write English, whereas Chrono Clock only sounds like that somewhat infrequently. Little Busters is consistently awkward and unnatural and translation-y, whereas an ideal translation shouldn't sound like a translation; it should just sound like written English. Chrono Clock also frequently sounds like the editor was trying way too hard, and as a result also sounds unnatural, but in a slightly different way than people are used to, which I'm sure is why people complain about it so much. My personal preference is that I'd rather have what CC delivers than the bland, undertranslated, mistranslated, and just generally botched Little Busters translation, but I can understand why that's not a common view.

I dunno. Like other people have said, I do have high standards, and I do complain a lot, so you obviously you have to take my complaints with a grain of salt. But I don't make them lightly, and I don't make them without foundation. Reading Little Busters was such a bad experience for me that I had to drop it after about an hour, even though I was initially excited and was planning on reviewing it; I honestly could not handle reading something that read so poorly. After that I read Karakara 2, and the difference was night and day. The Karakara games have marvelous translations, and I loved every minute of reading that one. It's a shame that work of that quality is so rare, and even more a shame that it's even more rarely recognized...

Anyway, sorry for the wild tangent here. FWIW, though, I do think the bad translations for Key games (specifically for Harmonia and Little Busters, that I'm aware of; Clannad was fine IIRC, and I don't know anything about the others) are probably keeping them from having broader appeal, but I agree with what others have said, that the only reason Clannad did so well was a combination of the KyoAni anime and the resulting popularity of the Kickstarter getting out to a bigger audience than VNs usually see.

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46 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:

Just to draw a controversial comparison: I would say that Chrono Clock has a vastly better translation, both from an accuracy perspective and a readability perspective, than Little Busters. CC has more than its share of problems, of course, but it has actually good moments, which Little Busters does not; Little Busters just consistently (as in, nearly every line) sounds like it was written by somebody who has no idea how you should write English, whereas Chrono Clock only sounds like that somewhat infrequently. Little Busters is consistently awkward and unnatural and translation-y, whereas an ideal translation shouldn't sound like a translation; it should just sound like written English. Chrono Clock also frequently sounds like the editor was trying way too hard, and as a result also sounds unnatural, but in a slightly different way than people are used to, which I'm sure is why people complain about it so much. My personal preference is that I'd rather have what CC delivers than the bland, undertranslated, mistranslated, and just generally botched Little Busters translation, but I can understand why that's not a common view.

Sad thing is also that many people still keep saying how CC is bad based on the first release (one that is available for pirates) when it has got at least 8 updates to the editing later quite close to the release.

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Your comment actually prompted me to buy CC - I got really curious how it changed compared to that initial release that got pirated.

I don't think it was bad - I actually enjoyed it, even if I felt that editor went a little overboard ;)

Edited by adamstan
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Let me add one more thought about the translations. I'm currently reading Clannad, and it indeed is fine. However, I didn't perceive LB! to be substantially worse than it. I started to wonder why :yumiko:, and it's probably due to English not being my first language. Thanks to that, many things that feel bad or unnatural for native speakers don't hit me directly. I'd probably be similarly critical about translations into my native language as Fred is about english ones. And if presented with not-too-good translations into PL and EN - I'd probably choose english one, because errors in it wouldn't be as glaring and disturbing for me.

Edited by adamstan
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6 hours ago, Kiriririri said:

They should be tbh

They really shouldn't though at least in the case of the setting of the VN being Japan its part of the culture and should be kept accurate its kind of the same reason most Japanese dubs of English media dont add honorifics to English names.

Personally when I see translations go out of there way to avoid using them or try to use not fitting English words it just makes the quality of the translation look lower even if that is not truly the case.

 

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3 hours ago, adamstan said:

I'd probably be similarly critical about translations into my native language as Fred is about english ones.

Well, confession: even though there's a decent amount of VNs fan-translated to my native language, I always read them in English for exactly the same reason.

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1 hour ago, KT89 said:

They really shouldn't though at least in the case of the setting of the VN being Japan its part of the culture and should be kept accurate its kind of the same reason most Japanese dubs of English media dont add honorifics to English names.

Personally when I see translations go out of there way to avoid using them or try to use not fitting English words it just makes the quality of the translation look lower even if that is not truly the case.

 

If you very hard believe in that maybe you can find a meaning for -san in your head.

Honorifics alone are in no way part of the culture but different levels of polite language are. If one needs to keep honorifics in the text to express the level of politeness used maybe that person should not be a translator. 

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30 minutes ago, Kiriririri said:

If you very hard believe in that maybe you can find a meaning for -san in your head.

Honorifics alone are in no way part of the culture but different levels of polite language are. If one needs to keep honorifics in the text to express the level of politeness used maybe that person should not be a translator. 

Why can't you use the correct honorific and keep the meaning of the text?

It seems that you want translators to go out of their way to ignore honorifics but your argument doesn't hold much weight especially when the characters are still speaking Japanese and using them.

There are many scenes that specifically reference honorifics and to avoid them completely means having to completely rewrite a scene which causes it to be completely different from the original, the scene in MLA between Takeru and Sumika is an example of the top of my head that fully relies on the honorific being understood between the two characters. 

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No, you can even skip it - as all other mini games too. With them turned off you can still complete the game.

There is only one exception - it seems that to get one of Saya's alternate endings ("School revolution") you need to have shooting minigame enabled. I followed walkthtrough, but with minigame disabled, and couldn't get it - as some conditions for this ending are directly connected to the minigame.

(All of the above is for the official release - LB! English Edition)

However, I really enjoyed baseball minigame - at first I also missed all the balls, but when I got little better at it, it got funny :) Those chibi sprites used during the minigame are so cuuute :Chocola:

Tip: use mouse for controlling Riki - with keyboard it would indeed be nearly impossible. AFAIR I kept button pressed to move him with the mouse, and released it to hit the ball.

Edited by adamstan
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19 hours ago, adamstan said:

Probably it doesn't follow some rules that Fred considers unbreakable (Like, I vaguely remember him saying that honorifics should be banned in translations)

They shouldn't, it's pretty simple if it's a VN that takes place in Japan about japanese people, honorifics have no reason to be removed, honorifics is part of japanese communication paterns, it doesn't make any sense to remove them.

On the other hand if it's a VN that doesn't take place in Japan about non-japanese people such as Sharnoth or Ghakthun, then yeah honorifics should definitly be removed.

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