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Visual Novel Translation Status (02/06/2016)

This week’s header image is from Sacrament of the Zodiac, Denpasoft/Sekai Project’s newly released yuri title.

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Thank you to everyone who answered last week’s survey, there were over 3,000 of you! Your feedback was greatly helpful and will make Fuwanovel and our weekly VNTS posts a better place. We may not be able to apply all relevant feedback to this week’s post, but we’ll be making a couple small changes for now.

In the meantime, there’s an active survey out for the reviews section of our site here. If you ever visit that part, give that survey a go, it seriously only takes a few minutes. This week, we don’t have many fan translation updates, but we have loads of MangaGamer and Sekai Project updates!

Anyway! Welcome to our weekly VNTS (Visual Novel Translation Status) series, in which we track visual novel translation updates in-house (we don’t rely on /jp/ posts on 4ch, for example) and post it for your enlightenment and enjoyment each Saturday. If you find any errors, or you think a project is missing from this list, please let me know in the comments. 

The Short Version:
Only the New Stuff

  • AstralAir – TL at 68.25%. Their steady progress continues to be impressive, keep it up!
  • HaraKano – Ren’s route up to 4021 lines translated. I’m not really sure what a “line” means in this game, but I wonder if it’s different from how VNs usually measure lines.
  • Koiken Otome – It’s alive! Barely! QC was boosted by a couple percent, up to 83.87%
  • Bokuten – TL at 79%, editing at 50%.
  • Da Capo 3 – TL at 76.8%, editing at 74.8%.
  • Fata Morgana – Editing at 48%, Ritobito is making fantastic progress here.
  • Kindred Spirits on the Roof – Demo now available, get it here!
  • Kuroinu – TL at 22.5%
  • OZMAFIA (otome) – TL at 97.5%, editing at 56%.
  • Princess Evangile W Happiness – TL at 19.18%, editing at 10%.
  • Shadows of Pygmalion – TL at 20.82%.
  • Tokyo Babel – Now 100% edited! We may have missed this one last week, sorry!
  • Darekoi – Newly added to the list, it’s at 6.81% translated.
  • Mayoi Hitsuji no Kajuen – Another newcomer, this one is already over half translated, at 58.33%!
  • NekoPara Vol. 2 – 100% translated. This VN is releasing in just two weeks, February 20th!
  • Root Double – The kickstarter finished at $152,414. After a shaky first half, Sekai Project managed to turn things around, so expect this VN from the creator of Ever17 some time next month!
  • Sunrider: Liberation Day – The release date has been announced for March 4th.
  • The Kittens of Our House – Is basically fully translated, at 99.91%.
  • World End Economica – TL at 13.38%. Progress at last, rejoice!
  • Wish Tale – TL at 51.53%.

New Releases

 

All the Game Updates:

Fan Translation Projects

Fan Translation Projects

[wpdatatable id=57]
JAST USA Projects

JAST USA (Updates; Archive)

[wpdatatable id=58]
Other
  • Starless – Script check 10%, added new mosaic to fix list.
MangaGamer Projects

MangaGamer (Updates)

[wpdatatable id=59]
Other
  • Rance 5D, Rance VI, and Rance Quest fan translations on hold in anticipation of potential official release by MangaGamer.
  • Magical Eyes – Red is for Anguish – Pre-Order is up! (Link)
  • No One But You – Released on MangaGamer’s store and Steam! (Buy it here!) Will be removed from the list on 13 February
Sekai Project Projects

Sekai Project (Update Page)

 

The tracker is back, hurrah!

Important note: These percentages should be seen as vague indicators of progress, and are not entirely accurate due to a variety of reasons.

[wpdatatable id=60]
Other
  • Here’s a handy link to sort Sekai Project’s Steam releases by release date: link
Misc. Projects

Other Projects

[wpdatatable id=61]

 

The Zakabox

— Commentary Section —

Zakabox™ Commentary

「’lo. Given the whole survey thing getting a lot of responses and all, I guess I’ll talk about that for a bit. If you’re uninterested in such frippery, just skip to after the picture of girls kissing.

The people have spoken, and apparently… I should try to write these more often. There wasn’t that much more to it, apart from substance vs style (I don’t think I want to change that, though you’ll see more irrelevant info when I’m phoning it in all zombie-like) and more calculus (my apologies for not feeling like diving into my old uni textbooks from when I was not yet a dropout; a simple programming assignment would be more entertaining if that’s something you’d be interested in).

Part of the problem with getting more regular is that my preferred way of doing things – looking at what’s progressed this week and commenting on it – is hard to do before the post is finalized, and that’s usually done at a time when I’m either very sleepy or just plain asleep. Today things are a bit better, mostly because I woke up at ~2am. As you might understand, that schedule is probably not one I will maintain for long.

I can always edit in my commentary later – I’m not sure how many people read the posts just as they arrive vs. late enough that they’d actually see it. Anyway, hopefully you’ll understand my predicament here.

vnts-06-02-15-insert
MadoHomu <3

This week there’s a depressing dearth of fan translation progress; fortunately the licensing companies have quite a few updates to compensate.

First of all, fuck yeah Kindred Spirits demo – it’s not long til its release on the 12th now. I do wonder if there’ll be more of the OH MY GOD DISGUSTING PORN ON STEAM EVERYONE GET OUTRAGED RIGHT NOW I HAVE DONE ABSOLUTELY NO RESEARCH ON THE SUBJECT ALSO DID YOU KNOW FUWANOVEL IS PART OF BIG EROGE etc we saw when MG announced it would reach Steam uncut. I will admit that I’m unlikely to try the demo out – my no-partial policy is the real deal, apart from that time when I randomly read the Lamune partial. No judge pls.

Still on the yuri track, we have (iirc) the first Denpasoft release in a while, Sacrament of the Zodiac. Until just about now it was known as “Sacrament Sheep”, but I guess this title was better. Though frankly, neither feels very alluring to me.

Fata Morgana’s actually getting edited with some speed now, which is good considering how slow to nonexistent progress was as the translation numbers kept creeping upwards. Ritobito’s a p. cool guy, so we should get a nice result in the end. Fata Morgana is actually really highly rated, so although it might not be very known in the west, I hope it’ll do decently on word of mouth alone. As a non-porn title, it could potentially get a decent few sales on Steam assuming MG can get some press for it.

OZMAFIA’s allllmost fully translated. Its actual release should be a bit into the future; it’ll be interesting to see how it does – as far as I know their first BL title No, Thank You!!! sold well, so another female-oriented title might be quite successful. That said, they seem to be quite different in terms of content as OZMAFIA is significantly more fluffy.

In the end, Root Double pulled through. I’m happy it did, likely thanks to Sekai Project getting some better reward tiers up. While it’s very tempting to blame SP for the awkward initial tiers, it’s not that unlikely that the initial tiers were forced upon them by the Regista / Yeti, who later saw reason as the campaign went in a rather… not quite south, but maybe an alarmingly easternly direction.

Other than that, we have Tokyo Babel and The Kittens of Our House about fully translated. Tokyo Babel is a Propeller (Ayakashibito, Sukumizakura) chuuni genre VN, whilst Kittens is about raising kittens or something. So basically both might be really cute.

As a final life lesson, don’t queue Zoo into the 2am-5am GMT+1 crowd on eu. So many bad matchups, so many t5 patron waves. I wish I were good at midrange druid…」

Decay’s Musings

Thanks again for your feedback. This week we’ve added VNDB links to the short section and bolded the game names. Apparently me, Zaka, and Tay were the only people in the world who didn’t consider VNDB links. They’re in the table, but we forget that many people just glance at the short version and may end up confused and have to scrounge around the post to find VNDB links. It’s one of those things you lose perspective on when you already know what all of these VNs are. Also, hopefully the short section is overall more readable, which was another common feedback. We’ll also be separating new releases again. Let us know what you think!

I’m interested in showing progress differences (e.g. +2%) but we’ll consider that later. The tables are going to more or less stay as they are for the time being. One of the issues we are most empathetic over is the lack of ability to just open up the page and ctrl+f your favored projects. But the most of you are happy with the collapsed tables and we personally believe the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

Anyways, visual novels! I’ve started playing Aviary Attorney this week. It’s cool, and fun, and funny, and you should definitely give it a shot if you want a very comical take on the Phoenix Wright formula. The writing is clever and while the art is rather unorthodox, I found it fitting for that game’s overall style. But I also sort of bounced off of it. It may have more to do with my current state of mind than the VN itself. If you’re looking for something with deep/well developed characters, you won’t find much of that here. The characters are largely delivery vehicles for the punchlines. It’s still an awfully charming game, though, so give it a shot!

Sacrament Sheep… err, I mean Sacrament of the Zodiac released this week. When did Sekai Project change the name on that one? I’ve been calling it Sacrament Sheep all this time and now I feel silly. Well, admittedly, I’ve only been calling it that in my own mind, because nobody is talking about this thing. I wonder if it’s any good? I’m not really big on yuri. I find most yuri titles to be shallow and uninteresting, only existing to pander to the typical yuri fanbase. Which is good if you’re part of that fanbase, but as someone on the outside, they often fail to produce the kinds of stories I like with the level of depth I appreciate. And I like moeblob nonsense. I’m willing to give any yuri game that bucks the trend a shot, though. Between this, Kindred Spirits, and Atom Grrrl, hopefully one of this month’s three yuri releases will grab me.

Have a good weekend, friends. I’ll spend it playing XCOM 2 and obsessing over the last few puzzles in The Witness. And maybe I’ll finally play Koichoco? Who knows! See you all next week.

TAYsteful™ Thoughts

Last week’s feedback survey was a big success – we got well over 3,000 responses, and the data has been crunched and put into a little report. I plan on publishing it publicly later this week, so please check back when that pops up. I think there’s a lot of interesting data for both casual and hardcore VNTS nerds, alike.

Speaking of hardcore: Decay put this post together with very little notice and had to dig through the weeds to figure out a bunch of technical garbage to make today’s post happen. You may not know this, but it’s largely Decay’s iron insistence that we try to never miss a week that drives these posts on days like today. Please give him a big “thank you!” for all of his hard work. He wrote this post when he thought I wasn’t going to make it. It’s not the first time something like this has happened, and so we all need to pool our gratitude together so as to not give the impression we take his dedication for granted.

The survey results (yes, I’m going back to that) are pretty interesting. There were a lot of good suggestions, and you can see up above that Decay has already implemented the #1 most-requested feature: VNDB links to game titles in the “Short Version” section. Yay! If you like this change, PLEASE say so in the comments!

I’m not really sure what the best format for the VNTS feedback results post will be. I type these things up in reports and export them as PDFs, but I’m not sure if that would make for a good blog post. We’ll have to see. If nothing else, we could post the PDFs and get some commentary from Decay/Zaka/me as well. That might work.

Well, I’m off to go fix some stuff on the forums (#blamenosebleed) and reviews hub (#taypls). Thank you for reading this week’s VNTS. Have a nice week, everybody.

Decay

Hello, I'm Decay, an avid fan of visual novels and a regular poster on Fuwanovel. Also, I now review and write about VNs officially for Fuwanovel? Yeah, that started happening at some point. You may also see me on VNDB as dk382.

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Mykorrhiza
Mykorrhiza
8 years ago

Thank you Decay!
Besides the important updates on translation progress I’m always looking forward to the commentary section so thank you, too, Tay and Zaka. 😀

Artix
8 years ago

Oh golly, Better order a set of new tissues for this one! Keep it up guys~ !

You-kun
You-kun
8 years ago

Header image of this week is from …?

Zakamutt
Reply to  You-kun
8 years ago

Looks like Sacrament Shee…. Sacrament of the Zodiac. I’m honestly too lazy to check properly.

Lizeth
Lizeth
8 years ago

Thanks, thanks, thanks!!!
You saved me a lot of time with that otome parentheses!

JJ
JJ
8 years ago

I like the changes you guys have been making with the translation status updates, including the collapsible tables, the New column, and the vndb links. Thanks for the hard work.

I don’t get why Sekai bothers to have a separate Denpasoft area if they don’t even bother releasing uncensored titles. Sacrament of the Zodiac would have been such an easy purchase for me. But they refuse to release it uncensored, so no reason to even get it.

LazyShd
LazyShd
8 years ago

VNDB links in the Short Version. Yay!

And “Bokuten – TL at 79%, editing at 50%”, VNDB link to the wrong game.

Palas
Palas
8 years ago

thank mr skeltal decay

Fox
Fox
8 years ago

I ended up being a couple days late to the last post and didn’t get to fill in the survey but the VNDB links are certainly quite convenient. At the same time I’d just like to say thank you very much to all the people involved in these posts, they’re very helpful and a great addition to the site.

sheepBro
sheepBro
8 years ago

Hey Decay,

if you don’t mind can you add “ready to play (100% patch)” list as well?

your short list and detailed update is all awesome but it would be really helpful if there is an extra list of full TL and ready to play where there is no unfinished TL merged with it.

Thanks

sheepBro
sheepBro
Reply to  Decay
8 years ago

Oh sorry for not being clear,

what i meant is like your team old fuwanovel

http://fuwanovel.net/novels?sort=translatedDate

in list form instead of image.

i really love that clean sort but since its not updated its too bad.

N
N
8 years ago

Any idea when we’ll know if Black Wolves Saga will be officially cancelled or continue? It’s just a shame since they were almost done…

mayumin
mayumin
Reply to  N
8 years ago

its on semi-hiatus

CvkHawk1547
CvkHawk1547
8 years ago

Are lovely x cation still ongoing ???

mayumin
mayumin
8 years ago

so if possible in the next update talk about the beastmaster and prince (https://vndb.org/v4540) localization kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/688648305/beastmaster-and-prince-flower-and-snow?ref=project_link) many otome fans might enjoy the idea
it’s a rll old game from the famous Otomate campany, it came out for ps2 in 2010 but it rll good and famous and later got port for psp and vita, i personally love this game specially the main protagonist ^^