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

• Sacrament of the Zodiac – Buy it here!

 

All the Game Updates:

 

— 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.

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…」

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.