Visual Novel Translation Status (14/11/2015)

Other Licensed Translations

— Commentary Section —

Zakabox™ Commentary

[Zaka… You are our only hope… Please come in, Zaka… Zaka, do you read me? Where could he be? – Tay]

「…Right behind you, Tay. *pantses victim*

Well-Taylored pants aside, we sure have some nice Chinese porn powerpoints lined up soon. Now, Deccy’s going to rave about Gahkthun below, and I’m personally kind of hyped for it myself. However that said, something even more interesting would be Clock Up’s Euphoria, which has some pretty extreme content, lots of porn, and still has some very nice story material – or so I’ve been told. I do enjoy some occasional shock value (there are many reasons to begin reading Saya no Uta), and Euphoria should provide plenty of that – though there being a lot of brown stuff could be a bit of a downer.

A trial for Clock Up’s newest effort, Maggot Baits, was released quite recently, and one of my friends has found it quite entertaining – if Euphoria turns out well, we might get that one brought over too. Whether or not the full version of Maggot Baits will actually be any good remains to be seen, of course.

Getting CLANNAD out is big; even the original rather rough fan translation conducted many a feels train, and SP’s release should only make it better. In a stroke of brilliant marketing the current screen shots use the engine’s rather poor default bad font (I’m sure y’all care about this), though this can be fixed.

Narcissu 3rd is at 88% translated; I wonder but can’t be bothered to look up if they’ll release these as they get finished. That said, I haven’t even read side 2nd – and from what Zalor told me about its themes way back when I edited his analytical piece on Narcissu 1, I’m not sure if I want to either. More publicity for the original is always good, though, since Narcissu is a p. good introduction to visual novels if you enjoy depressing stories.

I wonder what happened to the leyline translation. Considering how other translation efforts have transpired, it’s possible licensing negotiations are responsible for the delay in this case too. Or some random technical issues that are really hard to fix, or all their QA dying, or someone critical going MIA… who knows? Maybe I should try to find out, but it’s 7am and I haven’t slept yet.

For my final question, ponder this: who are these Waku Productions guys, exactly? I imagine we’ll hear more about them reasonably soon. Or in three months. Well, maybe three months is actually reasonable, I guess. I never did finish Tomoyo After; part of it was needing a walkthrough and not really engaging me in general, and the other part was that apparently the memorial edition, still in translation, had an ending more palatable than the original one.

Tay will speak of his personal reflections on the history of our VNTS posts below. For all you bored coders out there, this is the source to the c program I eventually hacked up to format the VNTS copy properly. I never did get around to removing the debug statements, which would probably have sped it up quite a bit. Thankfully Tay and Deccy’s here to do the work these days, leaving me ample time to mess around with my Zakabox and passive-aggressively correct minor consistency errors, numbers, and so forth – and introduce errors of my own, of course.

You might note that the Higurashi ch.2 links this week are all to MangaGamer’s site, though it can also be bought on Steam. I have no idea if this is intentional, but there is a point to it: if you order through MG’s site, more money goes to them than if you were to buy it through Steam – Steam takes a 30% cut. I realize that some of you might have trouble using their store, but to the rest of you: please do use their site if you can.

On an amusing note, it seems Steam is actually charging less for it in Euros (7.19, which Google converts to $7.79) than MG is charging in dollars ($7.95). I’m not sure whether this is just MG having a higher initial price overall, or an effect of region-based pricing. I’m not complaining: often something on Steam will cost the same in dollars as in euros, which ends up a not quite negligible smidgen more expensive. 」

TAYsteful™ Thoughts

Decay really deserves a shout-out for coming to the rescue last week. Some really (profoundly) crappy things happened to me without any warning last Friday, and despite me specifically telling him that I would do VNTS, when he saw that I was gone and wasn’t going to get to it, he stepped up and wrote it for y’all. I’m sure I speak for all of the thousands of VNTS readers when I say, “You’re a true hero, Decay! Thank you!”

Please notice the all-new formatting of the “Other Licensed Translations” section and compliment me on the hard work. Please. I hate HTML, and I did it for you, dear reader.

Personal Reflection time: It amazes me, sometimes, to see how many people tune into these posts each week. We’re gaining more than a hundred new recurring visitors with every post, and most of them return three out of every four weeks of a month. Heck, some of you have been coming around here since 2014 when Zaka would post a mirror of the /jp/ VNTS poster. It’s hard to believe that my new-fangled posts only began in March, and yet we’re consistently bringing in thousands of unique visitors every day of every weekend. When I started these new VNTS posts, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting two or three doom- or nay-sayers who didn’t think we could make anything of them.

And yet, here we are. And that’s pretty damn cool.

This week’s header image comes from Higurashi When They Cry Hou – Ch.2 Watanagashi to celebrate its release! Get the game here. Have a nice week, everybody!