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Visual Novel Translation Status (05/28/2016)

This week’s header image comes from Homeless School Girl, the fan TL patch of which was released this week (get it here)

Decay has, once again, proven his heroics: in addition to doing almost all of the tables for this week’s VNTS post, he’s spent a lot (lot!) of time working on a very special blog piece we hope to post this weekend. I’d like to give him a special shout out for all of this hard work, and I hope you will, too, down in the comments. Much < 3, Decay.

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 This Week

All the Game Updates:

Fan Translation Projects

Fan Translation Projects

[wpdatatable id=137]
JAST USA Projects

JAST USA (Updates; Archive)

[wpdatatable id=138]
Other
  • Starless – Script check 10%, added new mosaic to fix list.
MangaGamer Projects

MangaGamer (Updates)

[wpdatatable id=139]
Other
  • Rance 5D, Rance VI, and Rance Quest fan translations on hold in anticipation of potential official release by MangaGamer.
  • Free Friends hardcopy has been put up for pre-order and is releasing May 20th!
Sekai Project Projects

Sekai Project (Update Page)

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

[wpdatatable id=140]
Other
  • Here’s a handy link to sort Sekai Project’s Steam releases by release date: link
Misc. Projects

Other Projects

[wpdatatable id=141]

The Zakabox

— Commentary Section —

Zakabox™ Commentary

「Uhh, okay, so, things happened last week. Damn it Verde, how do you even manage to stream otomege for 9 hours straight? Damn it fuwanovel skype karaoke, how dare thee ensnare me? …Well, whatever. I’m here now. Good thing, considering nobody else wrote much!

To begin with, allow me to shill for a an untranslated visual novel (alright, fine, you can skip the paragraph now). I’ve been reading Watashi no Real wa Juujitsu Shisugiteiru. Man, last night I read it for over 5 hours straight. Anyway, it’s an otomege where our protag-chan is simultaneously a high-status model student and a closet otaku who plays otomege herself. The boys are cute, it’s amusing, it’s surprisingly pretty, it’s free, and you really should give it a whirl already assuming you can into moonrunes. I say this as a guy.

While we didn’t have a lot of releases this week, the launches of the Corona Blossom and Ne no Kami Indiegogo campaigns certainly count as events. Both of them are using flexible funding, so I guess the trend of using IGG as a preorder system is still going strong. I’m still not sure how to feel about that all, but I suppose at least IGG won’t take away muh porn. I wonder if individual sales through IGG are actually more profitable than through Steam – Steam’s cut is 30%, while IGG takes around maybe, 10%? Not sure how much payment processors and whatever will strip from that. Admittedly running a crowdfunding campaign takes money in and of itself, but you kind of want to have some PR for your product in the first place.

As far as I can tell setting up your own shop takes a lot of work, especially if you’re going to be selling adult content. All in all, there certainly seem to be a lot of advantages to “crowdfunding preorders” so to speak. I think we’ll probably see more of these going forward, depending on how Corona Blossom and Ne no Kami do.

Angel Beats not only being announced for translation by VisualArt’s but also at 50% done is p. cool, though it did kinda kill the fan translation project. I actually read some of it myself and it’s been fun so far, plus the angel is totes cute (kek). Sekai Project’s Love, Guitars, and the Nashville Skyline is the Love, Guitars and Blue Skies I’ve written about a… few times earlier. It’s by the same company that made Atom Grrrl, though it doesn’t exactly look like it’s going for the same aesthetic. The only question now is which yuri road trip VN will be better – Highway Blossoms (our preview here), or KoiGuitar? Ganbatte, Raithfyre.

Other than that, Pygmalion hit 100% translated and Koiken Otome 100% QC’d. I’ve heard KoiOto that it’s kind of crappy and more or less all of its budget went into the art, but we’ll see how it’s received over here. Pygmalion… well, 100% translated is just another milestone really. We’ll see.

The one release this week, Homeless Joshi Gakusei, is actually quite interesting if perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea. A sad, brutal “visual poem” about a homeless schoolgirl’s life, eh? I know /I’m/ up for having my soul crushed any day. I was actually planning to read it in Japanese at some point before the project was announced. Random protip: you might be able to get a prettier font for it.

Anime Expo, also known as the E3 of visual novels, is coming up on the 1st of June. The announcements recently haven’t exactly taken the world by storm, so it’s all up to you to save us from despair now AX-kun! MG is teasing 3 new partners; presumably light, GIGA and eushully. Okay, so one’s probably chuable soft, but anyway. Sekai Project is… probably going to announce stuffsies as well and I probably should know more about that, and JAST is JAST. Maybe I should mention Aksys et al as well, but I don’t own any consoles, which kind of dampens my interest in them.

In closing, I recently stumbled upon the first VN Kickstarter by a Swedish team I’ve seen. It’s actually funding in SEK, which looks kind of funny on KS because we don’t write it as “kr7”, the crowns go after the number you damn American bastards. 48,000 SEK may look like a lot, but it’s actually “only” ~5.7k dollars. I honestly never got to reading the demo despite downloading it, but at least the concept doesn’t look too bad. Consider this mention an act of supreme Swedish Viking benevolence… or something.

On that note, I’m kind of tired and some Midsomer Murders episode I’ve probably seen already just started airing. I’m a bit tempted to watch… as good a time as any to end a post, I guess :P」

Decay’s Musings

[Decay has worked an insane amount of hours this week on blog content, including the tables for this week’s VNTS, and is (hopefully) getting some much-deserved rest. Look forward to his commentary next week, and please leave him some lovin’ comments for all his hard work! – Tay]

 

TAYsteful™ Thoughts

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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fufster
fufster
7 years ago

:3

Dan
Dan
7 years ago

That Root Letter game also had its 4-th trailer this week (english subtitles are in CC)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3cytDNMBpg

Dan
Dan
7 years ago

Ah, and yeah, looks like you’ve missed or forgot all about a S;G 0 announcement
http://gematsu.com/2016/05/steinsgate-0-coming-west-ps4-ps-vita-2016

Arcadeotic
7 years ago

Well, this week’s update wasn’t shown in this week’s VNTS, but long story short, no progression in the editing/QC front, and the translation of the last script file is now at 4,7%

You-kun
You-kun
7 years ago

Umm… about Koiken Otome their site says Total QC Percentage: 87.51% am I missing something or you guys have some kind of source of information? Isn’t QC last step? If it hit %100 it should be released.

ACF
ACF
Reply to  Tay
7 years ago

KKO is NOT at 100% QC. The only place you’ll ever see our progress is on our own site.

Dude
Dude
7 years ago

Zaka, I think you mean 1st of June rather than 1st of May.

Zakamutt
Reply to  Dude
7 years ago

dates are hard, let’s go shopping instead (fixed)

Katie
Katie
7 years ago

This new company called E2 is trying to get the translation process started for the Taisho Alice games. https://www.facebook.com/e2gaming/?fref=ts

Zakamutt
Reply to  Katie
7 years ago

For what it’s worth, I believe we knew about this but nobody of us really wanted to touch on it as E2 seems very, very shady and there’s general weirdness all around. From what I hear from some of my friends in the otome sphere they’ve gotten worse PR-wise rather than better over time, and they didn’t seem very competent to begin with.

Katie
Katie
Reply to  Zakamutt
7 years ago

Really? Damn it

Decay
Reply to  Katie
7 years ago

They’ve had some real problems on the onset, with a website with stolen translations and a community manager who was very abrasive towards anyone who criticized them for this. That community manager was just fired earlier today though and an apology was issued. Things seem kinda messed up with it, but I also think it’s actually legitimate, just poorly run. Hopefully things turn around with it now that they fired that CM and promised to redo the site, without stolen translations this time.

Katie
Katie
Reply to  Decay
7 years ago

That’s promising, though if they’re planning on doing crowd funding I’m worried their poor first impression will come back to bite them in ass :

littleshogun
littleshogun
7 years ago

My VNTS Review for this week. Usual week if I said ie only usual progress and no big release compared to April.

http://forums.fuwanovel.net/blogs/entry/1242-ultimate-homeless-girl-review/

ValerianHD
ValerianHD
7 years ago

“I’ve heard KoiOto that it’s kind of crappy and more or less all of its budget went into the art, but we’ll see how it’s received over here.”
There is a partial patch for over a year, so with minimum effort you could check if it was “crappy”. But no, it’s better to call it “crappy” without even checking the scores it gets.

tdl
tdl
Reply to  ValerianHD
7 years ago

I think he meant that the VN was not well received in Japan. To my knowledge, the partial patch only released the prologue and you should not really judge the entire story by just that.

Decay
Reply to  ValerianHD
7 years ago

The partial patch is both very short and of incredibly bad translation quality so I’m not sure that’s how you want us judging the game. All we can go by is what other people who have actually read it have to say, and apparently it’s nothing particularly special. I’m still looking forward to it, I like dumb stories like it.

ValerianHD
ValerianHD
Reply to  Decay
7 years ago

You said you only “heard” it’s crappy and now you say it is? On what basis?

ValerianHD
ValerianHD
Reply to  Decay
7 years ago

Also the parital patch was done more than 2 years ago. And the whole common route was revised (some parts retranslated). The team spend years on the game translation and you bash them without checking out the final patch. It’s like you are rating a game based on three screenshots took durning the beta phase.

So again, I only ask you to wait to play the final patch – then rate it honestly. Don’t discourage ppl from waiting for it!

Decay
Reply to  ValerianHD
7 years ago

I understand that. I’m sure the final product will be of a much higher quality than the old partial patch. I’m just saying if you want us to try the game for ourselves, that admittedly poor partial patch is probably not a great way to do so. I personally don’t want my judgement of the game clouded by doing so, so I’m waiting.

I think Zakamutt’s statement about the quality of the VN itself was very fair. It has not received glowing praise on the internet, there has been several people saying it’s not very good. It’s okay to talk about that. People will make their own judgements once the patch is released.