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AX 2019 Schedule and Announcements


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56 minutes ago, Infernoplex said:

I think SolP may be having some financial difficulties if they really intend to pump out 4-5 big titles in a span of just a couple of months.

I'm absolutely sure that Sol is having some financial difficulties but at the same time "one release in a month" is a fairly normal practice, it's not something extraordinary by itself. That's what MangaGamer is doing (or at least consistently tries to if there are no unexpected troubles) for the last couple of years.

56 minutes ago, Infernoplex said:

and Sekai (Maybe? They said Majokoi should be out soon)

Sekai's Majokoi, 9-nine- ep. 2, Nanairo Reincarnation, Baldr Sky and Ley Line 2-3 are all currently set to release in the second half of 2019  :makina:

While I did say that "one release in a month" is nothing extraordinary by itself, if everyone on the market were to suddenly use this schedule for half a year, it would surely look spectacular. But nah, I'm sure we have nothing to worry about. :wahaha:

56 minutes ago, Infernoplex said:

The VN market didn't suddenly grow bigger to support so many VN releases in such a short time period. At least I don't think it did. ... They are just gonna cannibalize each other, sale-wise.

I'm not an expert on the market but I don't believe it will collapse or anything. Sure, some will titles will probably underperform (they always do) but this market is so niche and passionate that I doubt that they will go deep under the red line plus steam will help to add sales over time, steam sales are often not front-loaded at all. Honestly, western eroge market is very weird, inconsistent and at times almost too random for analysis. You can have a big hit and then fail miserably with its sequel or a similar project. A lot rides on whether you can suddenly get under the spotlight (not even necessarily during the initial release) and saddle that wave to the good sales. Most titles don't and underperform from what I can gather, besides it's almost impossible to amass actually good sales without steam which is, again, not even necessarily a front-loaded platfrorm. I'm not sure if the success rate is going to be any different when we have a few times more VNs than usual, I'd argue that the overall ratio probably won't change much, those crumbs the industry mostly survives on will likely remain the same crumbs.

Not to mention that I fully expect half of the releases to peacefully migrate into the 2020 as usual.

Edited by novurdim
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Regarding Sol Press planned release dates I am skeptical. My impression is that most title only get a release date after they are almost done and even then problems can happen. (Example 1 would be Nanairo Reincarnation...) So right now I don't believe they can fulfill that plan, but I am open to be pleasantly surprised as long as it doesn't compromise on translation quality. Nukitashi for example isn't a small game and four and a half month isn't that long.

As for the amount of releases I could see that the market is capable of absorbing more releases but only if they aren't to similar. I could see a nukige, a moege , a BL title and chuunige releasing the same month without cannibalizing each other all that much. But with three title with same target audience I could definitely see it as a problem. Right now Mangagamer is the only one consistently putting out one VN per month, but if all of companies would start to do the same I could see that the market is to small for 5 VNs a month or something like that.

 

 

 

In conclusion AX was a pretty big disappointment for me. Not that was entirely unexpected:

On 24.6.2019 at 5:08 PM, Formlose Gestalt said:

I am looking forward to the AX announcements this year.

At the Sekai Project panel there are supposed to be news about Baldr Sky (18+ version pls).

Mangagamer has a project being worked on by @Conjueror & Gare, for that I have high hopes.

And for JAST there is this project that Makoto and Moogy work on, for that I have an unreasonable high expectation. (because of rumors)

 

In short I am ready to get all my hopes crushed. :wahaha:

And that's what happened.

We got Baldr Sky news, but no information about the 18+ version makes me expect the worst.

Conjueror & Gare title was not announced (as far I know) and the Makoto & Moogy title was also not announced (as far as I know).

Sumaga returned from the dead but I would have rather seen Django return.

 

When it comes to new announcements Dei Gratia no Rashinban was probably my favorite news, followed by Amatsutsumi and maybe the Robotics;Notes announcements. I guess my taste isn't too similar with what is popular right now or sells, so there is not much I can complain about. Maybe there will be good news at Otakon later this month. If not it would be 2 years without an announcement from Mangagamer that is of interest to me. =/

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15 minutes ago, Formlose Gestalt said:

When it comes to new announcements Dei Gratia no Rashinban was probably my favorite news, followed by Amatsutsumi and maybe the Robotics;Notes announcements. I guess my taste isn't too similar with what is popular right now or sells, so there is not much I can complain about.

Dunno, I'd say most everyone votes for Dei Gratia, Amatsutsumi and Robotics;Notes, at least on forums. And then the silent majority comes out and buys up all copies of kuroinu and bigtit fantasy, further sending MG on a downwards spiral  :wahaha:

If we use Winterfury's scale, I'd say that Amatsutsumi is a "sure purchase at launch" while NG (bought Death Mark on vita but still didn't play so I'm not sure of the general quality), Dei Gratia (looks a bit too doujin-y and short for my liking, I've seen people on vndb say that it can be completed in 6 hours and that there are no CGs or voiceover so it's like a... base higurashi chapter experience of sorts?), Robotics;Notes (anime was honestly underwhelming) and maybe Windmill's HHG and Witch are under the "moderate interest". So yeah, it's probably the weakest AX in my memory.

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22 minutes ago, novurdim said:

Dunno, I'd say most everyone votes for Dei Gratia, Amatsutsumi and Robotics;Notes, at least on forums. And then the silent majority comes out and buys up all copies of kuroinu and bigtit fantasy, further sending MG on a downwards spiral  :wahaha:

. So yeah, it's probably the weakest AX in my memory.

pretty sure that´s the case, like weren´t those titles almost always sitting on top of their sales, despite people whining about their announcements (me included).

also i don´t get why mg even still anounces them older rance entries at the bigger cons, when all new & awesome ones are already in the works, especially the 1-2 bundle could´ve been done earlier this year. well at the very least there´s no ammolite trash so far. though i somewhat fear for them to turn mugen renkan´s atmosphere into obscurity due to weird editing a la murican porn slang....

btw what´s even become out of sol press´s so called "project hyourin" - did it get stalled, is it still in development, or abandoned altogether?

Edited by SaintOfVoid
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19 minutes ago, Dreamysyu said:

:leecher: Well, Robotic Notes is pretty much the only announcement this year that I consider worth waiting for. And if I remember correctly AX last year was also pretty weak. I feel like I'm starting to understand "Learn Japanese!" crowd.

the main selling point in learning another language is that ur no longer subject to questionable trends/ common hype and can freely choose what to read. no longer the need of cursing publishers for releasing stuff that does no interest u just because it sells.

edit: seems there´s one more thing that´s going to be announced by solpress today, whatever it is

Edited by SaintOfVoid
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I was never disappointed by any of AX convention announcements so far. Maybe because I am a type of reader who enjoys reading everything (except BL and Bara I guess). From every publisher, I have at least one title to get hyped about. Amatsutsumi is definitely the biggest announcement from Sekai. And they somehow got Feng (although they didn't pick up the titles I want from them). I'd argue that Eiyuu Senki Gold is a fine announcement from JAST (I didn't play the first one yet, but I intend to play it at some point). MG announcing more Waffle nukige is great, and I am quite hype about Mugen Renkan (darkge, give me more quality darkgeee!!!). And Sol Press didn't disappoint me either. They got 3 Windmill titles. All medium to long sized. I don't know much about the titles themselves, but I don't think they are bad at all.

In short, I am not disappointed at all.

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2 hours ago, SaintOfVoid said:

pretty sure that´s the case, like weren´t those titles almost always sitting on top of their sales, despite people whining about their announcements (me included).

Duh, if you open steam's official MG publisher page, you'll see that even the "current" top sellers list consists of:

Spoiler

 

1) Evenicle

2) Funbag Fantasy

3) Funbag Fantasy: Sideboob

4) Umineko Question Arcs

5) Umineko Answer Arcs

6) Ozmafia

7) Kindred Spirits

8 ) Fata Morgana

9) Kara no Shojo 

10) Steam Prison

 

When you exclude "unique" games like Fata Morgana and KnS, pretty much all MG announcements of the last 2 years are basically built around this list. They may have abandoned fans of plotge but it's not like their announcements don't make almost too much sense if you look at them from the business perspective, they are straightforwardly acquiring only the things that should certainly sell. It doesn't make me like MG more but it's hard to blame them when you consider the status of our poor poor industry.

Maybe someday they'll try to license something like Ouka Sabaki or Shinsou Noise which could fall into the KnS territory and do well on steam...

Edited by novurdim
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Praise the Lord for more Rance announcements! I don't mind waiting (as long as it doesn't reach Sumaga levels of waiting), so news like this always excite me! Can't believe we'd be at this point where most of the titles have translations. Arunaru and Maria really were the saviors!

...Might give Funbag Fantasy a try, just because the artist commented on how it could be the next Rance or something. It better be that good, because my only experience prior to reading the visual novels related to it is its H-OVA. :makina:

All the other announcements, I'll read someday... When I get a stable source of income....

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1 hour ago, Kosakyun said:

Praise the Lord for more Rance announcements! I don't mind waiting (as long as it doesn't reach Sumaga levels of waiting), so news like this always excite me! Can't believe we'd be at this point where most of the titles have translations. Arunaru and Maria really were the saviors!

...Might give Funbag Fantasy a try, just because the artist commented on how it could be the next Rance or something. It better be that good, because my only experience prior to reading the visual novels related to it is its H-OVA. :makina:

All the other announcements, I'll read someday... When I get a stable source of income....

Funbag Fantasy's surprisingly good. I can see the ways it's similar to Rance, mostly the ridiculousness of how the plot progresses (for the first game, it only starts really being that way halfway through, on the true(?) route).

Yeah. There's four Rance games officially translated now. Here's to getting one a year (starting this year) hopefully...

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On 7/5/2019 at 5:05 AM, Infernoplex said:

Anyway... Amatsutsumi and now feng got snatched by Sekai. Damn. Can they stop picking up the good stuff, pleaseeeeeeeeee...

Why? MG fucked up the Hapymaher translation worse than Sekai fucked up the Chrono Clock translation, and at least Sekai knows that Chrono Clock had issues, whereas nobody but me seems to be bitching at MG for their absolute butchery of Hapymaher. I know the people slated to do Amatsutsumi and I have every confidence it's going to come out great; meanwhile, it would've been the same team from Hapymaher butchering Amatsutsumi on the MG side. SP getting it is great news.

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I am very pleased with these cool announcements! :Chocola:  My favorite panels with the vns I was interested the most as well as updates on the current ones are Sekai Project which the biggest highlight was that Purple Software announcement and it was the one that I really want to read the most. My other favorite vn panels were Jast, because I am so excited that we got a Kimikoi release date and I might try out Saya No Uta on Steam, and then my 3rd favorite was Sol Press and their biggest highlight was their new partnership with Windmill vns. One of the Windmill vns that I am interested in the most is Witch's Garden My honorable mention goes to Spike Chunsoft announcing Robotic Notes. 

9/10

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34 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:

Why? MG fucked up the Hapymaher translation worse than Sekai fucked up the Chrono Clock translation, and at least Sekai knows that Chrono Clock had issues, whereas nobody but me seems to be bitching at MG for their absolute butchery of Hapymaher. I know the people slated to do Amatsutsumi and I have every confidence it's going to come out great; meanwhile, it would've been the same team from Hapymaher butchering Amatsutsumi on the MG side. SP getting it is great news.

While I wouldn't put the Hapymaher TL on the level of "absolute butchery" it does feel subpar, and I do think that Chrono Clock's TL is better. I've been hoping that if the Hapymaher FD gets an ENG release, it doesn't get the same treatment as the original.


Anyway, both companies use several different translators and editors, and have released TLs of variying quality. The MG or SP name does not guarantee "shit" or good TL in my eyes, so SP picking it up doesn't make me more worried about the TL quality.

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Hapymaher FD won't get a translation because I bought the license to stop it from happening

 

Very interesting to see how they handle some parts of the Amatsutsumi translation. It has some parts that are probably very hard to keep in the translation.

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3 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

Why? MG fucked up the Hapymaher translation worse than Sekai fucked up the Chrono Clock translation, and at least Sekai knows that Chrono Clock had issues, whereas nobody but me seems to be bitching at MG for their absolute butchery of Hapymaher. I know the people slated to do Amatsutsumi and I have every confidence it's going to come out great; meanwhile, it would've been the same team from Hapymaher butchering Amatsutsumi on the MG side. SP getting it is great news.

Fred, I don't have insight on people that Sekai is hiring like you do. So of course I'd get worried, not knowing who's working on a great title such as Amatsutsumi. But if you vouch for their skills, then I guess I have nothing to worry about. I wish them good luck ^^

As for Hapymaher... never read it myself, but I didn't hear many people complaining about its translation (to my knowledge, only you and Virgin said it was bad). Between Sekai and MG, I am more inclinied to trust MG on quality translations even though MG can also screw up a translation sometimes, and maybe Hapymaher falls into that category. I heard Magical Marriage Lunatics was a bad translation... but I don't often hear about MG doing a shoddy work (nowadays at least). For Sekai, on the other hand, I often hear complaints about censorship, bad/lazy translations, etc. Heck, if I recall correctly, you also criticized them pretty hard for their work on Hoshizora no Memoria.

Anyway, this is all just hear-say. I never really read any work by them so far. It's unfair of me to judge them based on just what I heard about their translations, so I'll give you a benefit of the doubt that they may have gotten better lately and that I can trust them to do a better job on localization. However it turns out, I am still hype for more Purple Soft VNs localization ^_^

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1 hour ago, ArgentstR said:

While I wouldn't put the Hapymaher TL on the level of "absolute butchery" it does feel subpar, and I do think that Chrono Clock's TL is better. I've been hoping that if the Hapymaher FD gets an ENG release, it doesn't get the same treatment as the original.

let´s not forget that hapymahers jp-version wasn´t much different in this regard. while the story been (arguably) great, linguistically it was definitely not, and without me excusing lazy editing, had they gone all out, means turning it into a real pleasure to read then quite some people would´ve called the tl an abomination, or fanfiction for sure.

Edited by SaintOfVoid
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5 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

Why? MG fucked up the Hapymaher translation worse than Sekai fucked up the Chrono Clock translation, and at least Sekai knows that Chrono Clock had issues, whereas nobody but me seems to be bitching at MG for their absolute butchery of Hapymaher. I know the people slated to do Amatsutsumi and I have every confidence it's going to come out great; meanwhile, it would've been the same team from Hapymaher butchering Amatsutsumi on the MG side. SP getting it is great news.

yeah so they can release it in the year 2030

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1 hour ago, Infernoplex said:

As for Hapymaher... never read it myself, but I didn't hear many people complaining about its translation (to my knowledge, only you and Virgin said it was bad).

Well, I'm the last person to trust about translation quality in general, but I did feel kind of messy. It felt like I was reading a fan-translated VN rather than an official translation. I still wonder, does  this sentence look okay to a fluent English speaker? I personally cannot understand how exactly you're supposed to laugh in English or in any other language. :michiru:

Oh, and there also some very obvious mistranslations in the in-game menu. I just cannot understand how they didn't catch them during the testing. You can see them in that screenshot: pressing 'disable text skip' or 'disable auto-mod' actually enables them. I don't know, maybe they updated the game after that (I downloaded it on the first day after the release). Does MG send any notifications when they update their products? I've never got any, at least, but my library on their site isn't that big.

Edit. And here's a bit more obvious mistake.

2018-07-28-17-08-50.png

I'm pretty sure there should be 'flora' instead of 'fauna' here. It's been a while, but I don't think there were any animals there...

Edited by Dreamysyu
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@Dreamysyu - Yeah, I've seen pics of issues like these in Hapymaher popping around. I think there's some of it on Fred's twitter account too. It's a small sample, but yeah, it does indeed look like MG didn't do a great job on Hapymaher, which is a shame. But... even with all of this said, I'm not for raising pitchforks at MG. The truth is - this industry is driven by amateur freelancers for the most part. And of course, from time to time, some lower quality TLers/editors slip in and do a poorer quality work. It happens to all loc companies. So yeah, I was unfair to Sekai earlier. All these companies are hiring from the same pool of freelancers. The quality of a localization at the end mostly depends on who got to work on the said titles. And in this very amateur-driven industry, I guess we shouldn't expect absolute perfections from any localized titles. Granted, some localizations turn out worse than the others, but that's the kind of industry this is. As long as it's not a complete machine translation, I won't complain. Maybe I am giving these companies too much slack, but I am not really sure if there's a good solution to fix this problem.

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1 hour ago, Infernoplex said:

@Dreamysyu - Yeah, I've seen pics of issues like these in Hapymaher popping around. I think there's some of it on Fred's twitter account too. It's a small sample, but yeah, it does indeed look like MG didn't do a great job on Hapymaher, which is a shame. But... even with all of this said, I'm not for raising pitchforks at MG. The truth is - this industry is driven by amateur freelancers for the most part. And of course, from time to time, some lower quality TLers/editors slip in and do a poorer quality work. It happens to all loc companies. So yeah, I was unfair to Sekai earlier. All these companies are hiring from the same pool of freelancers. The quality of a localization at the end mostly depends on who got to work on the said titles. And in this very amateur-driven industry, I guess we shouldn't expect absolute perfections from any localized titles. Granted, some localizations turn out worse than the others, but that's the kind of industry this is. As long as it's not a complete machine translation, I won't complain. Maybe I am giving these companies too much slack, but I am not really sure if there's a good solution to fix this problem.

You don't need to be so pessimistic tbh. Amateur people usually get kusoge. 

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2 hours ago, Freestyle80 said:

yeah so they can release it in the year 2030

It always feels a bit jarring to me when people try to make fun of Sekai while comparing them to MG. Sekai may have huge issues of their own too but man, at least compare them to Nekonyan or smth.

They have released Chrono Clock in about 1.5 y. after the announcement and in general MG aren't any faster. Like MG have worked on Hapymaher for 2 years between the announcement and release lol

I prefer to be optimistic and expect Amatsutsumi closer to the end of Q4 2020.

Edited by novurdim
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2 hours ago, Dreamysyu said:

I'm pretty sure there should be 'flora' instead of 'fauna' here. It's been a while, but I don't think there were any animals there...

Haha, this one is kinda funny:

Spoiler

0HNLpLD.jpg

Something like: "We couldn't really tell with Keiko's dad, he was really on guard." was TLed into "Keiko somehow got ill."

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6 hours ago, novurdim said:

It always feels a bit jarring to me when people try to make fun of Sekai while comparing them to MG. Sekai may have huge issues of their own too but man, at least compare them to Nekonyan or smth.

They have released Chrono Clock in about 1.5 y. after the announcement and in general MG aren't any faster. Like MG have worked on Hapymaher for 2 years between the announcement and release lol

I prefer to be optimistic and expect Amatsutsumi closer to the end of Q4 2020.

Difference seems to be that mangogamer seems to put their games on hold after being completed "in testing" for ages and ages, just so not too many games are released at once.

Sekai? Who knows what those clowns are up to? 

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