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Visual Novel Translation Status (03/05/2016)

This week’s header image is from (left) “Atom Grrrl!!” (VNDB); (Center) “Sunrider: Liberation Day” (VNDB); and (right) “Beat Blades Haruka(VNDB). All of which were released this week.

Lots of updates this week! It’s not often we get three releases, movement on DC III and Grisaia, AND multiple projects hitting 100%, but hey — this week is one of those weeks, and we should enjoy it while it lasts. Oh, and before I end this little entry paragraph, I’d like to make a call to the Otome universe for help in rescuing an Otome kickstarter which is in dire peril. I speak, of course, of Beastmaster and Prince which only has 7 days left in its campaign. More details below.

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

New Releases

Removed from the List This Week

 

All the Game Updates:

Fan Translation Projects

Fan Translation Projects

[wpdatatable id=77]
JAST USA Projects

JAST USA (Updates; Archive)

[wpdatatable id=78]
Other
  • Starless – Script check 10%, added new mosaic to fix list.
  • Shiny Days – Tweaks ongoing
MangaGamer Projects

MangaGamer (Updates)

[wpdatatable id=79]
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)
Sekai Project Projects

Sekai Project (Update Page)

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=80]
Other
  • Here’s a handy link to sort Sekai Project’s Steam releases by release date: link
Misc. Projects

Other Projects

[wpdatatable id=81]

 

The Zakabox

— Commentary Section —

Zakabox™ Commentary

「Here in cold, dark Sweden (my apologies for it being in Swedish, but hopefully at least some of you will understand) the empty light of dawn is shining through my window, snowflakes drifting downward much too fast to lend any dignity to the scene. Just looking outside makes a nasty chill spread throughout my body. Suffering through this pale mockery of morning has sapped my will… and, uhh, I should probably start writing my actual commentary now.

Akerou has been working zealously on checking sakusaku’s scripts while also working on iroseka, which he considers by far the most entertaining of the two jobs. Very much a Pretty Cool Guy.

Atom Grrrl, a “tarantinoesque yuri comedy”, seems to have gotten a lukewarm start saleswise. Sad, since it looks to be quite the thing. If it gets decent sales, we might see localizations of Cosmillica’s other yuri titles, of which I’m interested in Love, Guitars And Blue Skies (video NSFW). I can’t vouch for either game’s quality myself as I haven’t read any of it, but do check it out if it tickles your fancy.

For once, JAST delaying something might actually be a relief rather than a disappointment. I am of course talking about Flowers’ demo, which had some serious issues in both the translation accuracy and editing department. They claim to have put quite the team to work on it. As Decay mentions below this might cause some problems, but we can always hope.

The Beastmaster And Uhh Long Title I Think Kickstarter faltering isn’t that surprising to me; the goal is set even higher than the ambitious goal MiKandi Japan used for the Libra localization, and there’s been far less marketing outreach as far as I can tell. I also do think the female demographic might be somewhat smaller than the male one, especially when it comes to Japanese-translated visual novels. That said, NTY’s good sales prove that BL visual novels, which would usually be aimed at women, can do quite well. We’ll see, I guess.

Tokyo Babel is actually interesting since it’s completely ero free and will be released uncut on Steam as far as MG has indicated. Our resident Chuuni lover Clephas talked to me about wanting to translate it from time to time, so hopefully he’ll be happy with the job rockstar-translators-without-actually-having-released-a-full-translation Conjueror and Gare did.

It’s actually stopped snowing outside now. Good time to end this commentary and go to bed, lest I be lured into actually enjoying life or something.」

Decay’s Musings

Greetings, friends. After my whole spiel about Flowers last week, I’m glad it’s going to be delayed and that they’re working on making much-needed improvements. The more cynical side of me says that those improvements may not be enough, since they’re still working off of the extremely flawed original script, but we can hope it will be at least readable and accurate, and that they’ll hire someone else to do a better job for the next game. The main thing I’m afraid of now is that after being written by someone who is obviously very poor at English and after being touched by a ton of different TLCers, editors, and QCers, the script will come off as overly stiff and inconsistent. Well, if those are the least of its problems, it’s worlds better than how the demo was.

In other yuri news, Atom Grrrl came out this week. I enjoy Tarantino’s films, but I cringe a little whenever I see something describe itself as being “Tarantino-esque.” I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything described that way resemble Tarantino’s work in any way but the most superficially possible. And I’m also unsure if it’s a quality other works should aspire to be, Tarantino has a unique style and attempting to emulate it only results in a poor imitation. It’s especially ludicrous when you see it on what looks like an otherwise cutesy yuri title. I’m really not sure what to think about it. One thing’s for sure, it’s kind of bombing on Steam right now. I hope it’s doing a little better on Denpasoft, because its situation is currently pretty dire.

But there’s more yuri yet! I’ve been playing a lot of Kindred Spirits over the last few days. It’s cute and charming without being overbearingly so. It tells some fun, light-hearted romance stories. It weaves in some of the concerns and internal conflicts homosexuals face without dropping its light and cheery tone. And it manages all of this without being excessively pandering or exploitative, unlike most yuri fiction I’ve encountered. It’s basically my new favorite yuri VN, not that this was a particularly high bar to pass since I’ve never been a big fan of yuri in the past. Your enjoyment may depend on what you want out of yuri. One of the things I like most about it, its lack of fanservice and pandering, may unfortunately be a turn-off for a lot of the regular yuri fans. This ain’t no Sakura Trick, that’s for sure.

Aside from all of this yuri nonsense, I’m glad to see the SakuSaku team make so much progress. An interesting and hopefully productive merger of projects has happened, and it seems like the SakuSaku translation is finally nearing completion. And Tokyo Babel, coming out this month? It’s kind of crazy that it’s releasing before Himawari, even though the same duo of translators finished Himawari first. Combined with Root Double’s impending release sometime in the next few weeks, this is looking to be a crazy busy month! My backlog is growing at an alarming rate, something that hasn’t happened since I started reading VNs. That’s pretty exciting! I hope you all enjoy the VNs to come, have a good week everyone!

TAYsteful™ Thoughts

Alright. So. In case you missed the three rallying cries I raised in this post, let me say this again: ATTENTION OTOME FANS: The Beastmaster and Prince kickstarter is in big trouble. If it’s going to be successful, we have to rally a lot of people, so please tweet about it, get on your favorite otome tumblr or blog and post about it, and raise a ruckus.

One of my worst habits is writing updates about Fuwanovel here in the VNTS posts and failing to copy it over to the forums. Well, the habit strikes again (tho I’ll try and remember to post there, too, tomorrow). A few people have messaged me about the missing feedback surveys, wondering where they are and what I’ve done with them. I’m happy to inform you that the surveys are, in fact, going on right now, and they have been non-stop since we finished the VNTS survey. A friend from college volunteered to help me put together a few randomized user groups trials and A-B tests, and we’ve done at least one a week since early February. The big, public feedback surveys will go out soon, and then, ideally, I’ll just put them all out in public (maybe a blog post) for the numbers nerds in our midst.

In case you didn’t notice it on the sidebar, we voted to name “Kindred Spirits on the Roof” as our March 2016 game of the month. It’s always risky (and usually foolish) to comment about a game you haven’t personally played, but after talking to a few friends (including a few gay friends), I’ve heard a lot of positive things about the game. So, yeah, while I haven’t picked up the game (all my moneh is going towards bids for redoing Fuwanovel’s main site), I’m hearing that it manages to shake off a lot of “yuri” stereotypes and presents an even-handed lesbian love story. If that’s the case, awesome, and I’ll gladly throw some money at the dev. We need more games like that.

Oh, for our loyal VNTS readers: I should have a new section of our VNTS posts for tracking all the games that have been released or dropped in 2016. I think this’ll be a big help for many readers. Right now I’m thinking it’ll be a Google doc I edit each week, but depending on when I hear from Nayleen about a project he’s doing for me, I may just create a MySQL table to track it and display it in the posts like the other game tables.

Aaaaaand that’s it! I’m exhausted, so I’m off to bed. Which is actually pretty exciting, since I’m re-reading the Earthsea books in bed and I’m always blown away by how GOOD they are. I finished the Tombs of Atuan two nights ago, and I immediately started it again because I love it so much. I identify so strongly with the little priestess in The Place, having lived a good chunk of my life in a similar situation, and Ursula le Guin is just a master at naming and putting words to complex and deep experiences.

What are the rest of you reading these days? Anything good?

Have a good week, everybody.

Tay

I'm the Fuwanovel community admin and a big fan of Visual Novels. The easiest way to get a hold of me is via a PM on the Fuwanovel Forums, by twitter (@ArchmageTay), or by email.

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littleshogun
littleshogun
8 years ago

Some of my comment about this week

1. AstralAir + SakuSaku – Congratulations for the new site, and good progress as usual. Oh for SakuSaku hopefully the QC could be quick after doing some TLC. For AstralAir, since you promised us that the summer we would see some very good progress, could you make us sure that the summer will be Japan or Australia lol. For serious side, looks like the editing will be going along with the translating, so it’s good.

2. Irotoridori – I’d knew that was almost translated at 85% before the translator (Tokidan) decided to ‘evaluate’ it, and suddenly there’s no progress anymore (Tokidan was either brutally killed, died by fatal sickness, or still alive I didn’t knew. Sorry). Hopefully this time akerou could fully translate this. About Irotoridori, I’d heard that it need many release in term of side story because the main game was made our MC had very stupid decision or so I’d heard. One more thing, the OP was good with eufonius singing.

3. Tatarigoroshi – Called Satoko chapter by fans. Actually since old translation was readable, I didn’t look forward for translation. What I’d look forward was of how the new translation would be easily patched. Not for graphic since there were also graphic patch out there, but voice patch. Oh, Watanagashi also had voice patch recently, and I would also hope that Tatarigoroshi will also had voice patch. One more thing about Tatarigoroshi, back in VNDB there were some SJW fighting for Satoko new sprite and naked thing, which come from this game. Please don’t discuss it here, but if you want to see the discussion back at VNDB, here’s the link https://vndb.org/t6397/1. Oh, don’t be fooled by OP said that he was fan of Higurashi. The OP was the SJW I’d talk about.

4. Himawari + Meikyuu – Looks like Frontwing want to maximize profit first in regard of Himawari and delayed scripting for Mangagamer, so the released was pushed. Of course naturally since it was Japanese company, Frontwing want to release the PC version to Japan first (I’d had slightly doubt about Root Double will be released in March now, but I’d still hpe that it will be released in March of course. Only if Sekai didn’t manage to do it, well it’s no surprise I guess).

About Meikyu, I slightly disagree with sequel idea, since Kajitsu story was complete enough imo, only Fujisaki actually could add some of Yuuji background story and how he will recover with the girl that he choose for each route imo. Or I think actually Fujisaki could just wrote Grisaia all alone instead of said divided it into 3 writer. Although my dislike may come from jealousy it was untranslated though, but I think Kajitsu actually could add some end scene for next sequel if they considered it from the first place, instead of making long common route.

They make Yuuji solved 5 heroines with very heavy problem in Meikyuu was what I could said as lazy writing. Why? Because if they want it I think they could make Kajitsu linear from very start, and for the ending let’s just said the staff could add the choice either live with the heroine or try to get other girl (Live with heroine lead to good ending obviously, well Sharin did that I think. Some people said that Grisaia like Sharin anyway). And a little epilogue with cliff hanger could be added at Kajitsu for continuation at Meikyuu. Oh, Meikyuu had major cliffhanger, so if you want to played it, I’d suggest waiting until Rakuen translated imo (Which would be long way). The OP was actually better than Kajitsu OP.

5. Tokyo Babel – Now this is the biggest announcement at this week. I mean according to clephas it was very good game, and the opening quite rock imo. Oh also we had many good seiyuu who had some role in anime (Hiroshi Kamiya as MC, Kanae Itou, Hanakana, and Miyuki Sawashiro as heroine, and so more. On unrelated note, some of seiyuu had role in PreCure franchise). To Decay, see you later at discussion page of this game later (I’ll definitely will make the thread about this game at the forum).

I think that’s all for now, and good update as usual.

Voc
Voc
8 years ago

(Holds up hand) Did you guys change the format of the progress lists? Because the search engine doesn’t work for me when I go looking for Seinarukana on the JAST category. In fact, the only two entries it shows is for Starless and Shiny Days despite it saying there are nine entries on it. So, yeah, not sure if that’s just me or what.

The Flowers delay is entertaining, and I use that term deliberately because I truly wonder if JAST know how to gauge their own progress. First they said they would make the needed changes by the release date, and now it’s joining Seinarukana in the “will be done ‘soon'” lists despite them knowing how much of a difference there was between the original translation and what we have now. Here’s to hoping that their QA testing and re-translation don’t take too long.

mochisato
mochisato
8 years ago

can’t wait for the fact beastmaster and prince kickstarter don’t make it and companies start with the ‘well ppl don’t show interest for this type of game so we are not gonna waste time localizing any of this lol’ bs all over again and take forever to localize any otome game ever again :DDD
at this point it rll seems ozmafia will be the only official release of an otome game this year (and even maybe the only one since this aren’t looking good for fan translation)

Katie
Katie
Reply to  mochisato
8 years ago

Yeah. I’m pretty salty at how poorly the kickstarter was handled.

mochisato
mochisato
Reply to  Katie
8 years ago

i just hope beastmaster gets another chance and don’t get left aside as the ‘the game didn’t make it so they don’t care about this one so let’s just move on to another title’ and never get localized ever cuz it’s a really nice game and now there is that new otomate game that is on the same world and some ppl have a theory that the main girl is tiana’s child

TrickZZter
TrickZZter
8 years ago

These new categories aren’t working for me 🙁

And looks like you’re missing two new projects:
Campus Notes – forget me not. http://store.steampowered.com/app/435360/
Sora o Aogite Kumo Takaku http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=635910942

Decay
Reply to  TrickZZter
8 years ago

Campus Notes is an unaffiliated OELVN. We don’t have a concrete policy on OELVNs but there are a lot of them, too many to track, and this is mainly a translation update post. So we tend to only highlight those that are affiliated with one of the major companies we already track.

Sora o Aogite Kumo Takaku – Is that even a VN? I see it’s on VNDB, but… really? It doesn’t look like one to me at first glance.

TrickZZter
TrickZZter
Reply to  Decay
8 years ago

Campus Notes is a Japanese VN developed by Japanese company 4th cluster.
http://4th-cluster.com/

mochisato
mochisato
8 years ago

also NISA announced they are localizing the psycho pass game https://vndb.org/v17099
http://nisamerica.com/games/psycho-pass/

Decay
8 years ago

Some kind of catastrophic database failure happened to Fuwanovel overnight. The tables here became corrupt. I’ll work on trying to fix them, I’m sorry all for the inconvenience and only being able to do something about it now.

edit: Or Tay is working on fixing it right now. Apparently it’s a much more complicated fix than having to reupload the tables…