This week’s header image is from Clover Day’s, featuring Tsubame and our weird, eyeless freak of a protagonist. The translation for Tsubame’s route is finished, hurrah! I can’t do “fancy” headers like Tay does, so all you get from me is a CG picked largely at random, deal with it.
Are we alive? Is anyone there? Hello?? Whew, looks like we’re good to go! Things have been touch and go for a while here at Fuwanovel, and they kind of still are. But that’s not going to stop us from delivering your weekly VNTS! The Yoast SEO wordpress plugin is a demon that destroys databases, so that’s now gone. But it seems there’s a greater evil lurking in the darkness, one we’ve yet to pin down. We have Top Men on the job so worry not, justice shall prevail!
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 – Bumped from 70.93% to 71.53%.
- Black Wolves Saga and Ken ga Kimi (otome) – Not dropped! Golden Spirit is attempting to get in touch with their team members in order to finish these off. (Link)
- ChuSinGura 46+1 – Boy, this is a weird one. ChuSinGura is a respected and Sengoku era time travel epic that has been compared to Muv-Luv Alternative, and has a real dang shoddy looking Kickstarter that just launched here. On one hand, I want this VN in English pretty badly, on the other hand, that KS page… This one crosses the line into “too suspect to back” for sure.
- Clover Day’s – Tsubame’s route has reached 100% translation! Ittaku/Conman of To Heart 2 fame tackled this route, congratulations!
- Dare ka ga Koi Shita Hankagai – TL: 15.63% > 15.72%
- HaraKano – Ren’s route is now at 6064 lines translated! We may have missed a couple updates in the interim, sorry about that.
- Hoka no Onna – Progress seems to be steady again here, going from 8917 to 9460 lines translated. Good work!
- KARAKARA – Last call on this one! They’re currently at 86% funding, and there’s just a couple days are left in the campaign. If you jump in before the campaign is over, you only pay half of the price it will be available for on release. Check out the IndieGoGo here.
- Ne no Kami – TL: 40.85% > 45.48
- Sukimazakura to Uso no Machi – TL bumped up from 26.8% to 27.7%, good work!
- World End Economica – TL: 33.03% > 36%
All the Game Updates:
Fan Translation Projects
[wpdatatable id=82]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=85]Other
- Here’s a handy link to sort Sekai Project’s Steam releases by release date: link
Other Projects
[wpdatatable id=86]
— Commentary Section —
Zakabox™ Commentary
「…」
Decay’s Musings
Things are weird in the VN scene lately. The effects Steam has had on the industry are showing in full force lately, in the most unusual of ways. Japan has taken notice and are almost literally tripping over themselves trying to find ways to exploit this opportunity. Sometimes, the methodology they’re employing is sensible and encouraging. Mangagamer’s latest translation rockstars Conjueror and Garerei were hired directly by an unnamed Japanese company to work on an unnamed VN that is purportedly highly rated and respected. They hired a competent team and are supposedly not even thinking about Kickstarter, imagine that!
But they’re an outlier. It seems that most Japanese companies can’t comprehend the rules that dictate the western market. This lack of understanding has been equal parts hilarious and cringe-worthy. Last year we saw several missteps, from FruitsJam’s bizarre (and denied) pitch for a free, all-ages Steam version of their masturbation-themed nukige Ona-Ken, to DebonosuWorks’ all-ages Steam release of Kagura Douchuuki, which seemed like a sex-heavy and gameplay-light H-RPG. Both of those endeavor’s were essentially failures. FruitsJam seemed to have already given up on the western market while DebonosuWorks is trying again, despite Kagura Douchuuki’s release selling only a few hundred copies.
The latest unintentional comedy routine comes to us via the ChuSingura Kickstarter, which launched just a few days ago. I haven’t seen a greater negative reaction to a “serious” Kickstarter in a very long time. The KS page I linked is the cleaned up version, it was even sloppier on its first day, during which it earned only $530 of its mighty $210,000 goal. Typos and grammatical errors littered the page, it demanded $100 shipping charges for any physical goods, and most hilariously, they copy and pasted the risks and rewards section from the Beastmaster and Prince Kickstarter, their previous campaign (it just failed today!). Ruining the chances for one VN wasn’t good enough, so they had to try again with CSG!
It’s hard to tell whether all of this is out of ignorance, malice, or incompetence. I think the answer is that it’s an unpalatable mixture of all three. The companies behind these projects don’t really seem to care about how it happens, just as long as they can somehow cash in on the Steam craze. But it also seems that they don’t quite know HOW to make it happen at all, nor have they exhibited the skills to necessary to execute on these plans. They’re frantically trying collect whatever morsels they can from this new and unexpected revenue stream, without trying to connect to their audience or consider long-term viability. These companies need to slow down, examine the market more thoroughly, and figure out what we truly want before over-committing. Anything less and they’re bound to be reduced to mere laughing stocks, except the joke’s really on us in the end.
And now for some bookkeeping, there were a couple suggested projects to add to the list made in last week’s comments, we’ll look into them next week. Campus Notes is a doujin release that seems to have come out of nowhere. We’ll also add ChuSinGura next week… maybe. To be honest, I sort of wanted to wait a minute and see how that developed first. But I already went ahead and mentioned it twice, so… Anyways, that’s it from us. Let’s hope that next week the fuwa servers will be stable again and we’ll be able to deliver the VNTS on time. Until then, have a good one!
TAYsteful™ Thoughts
[Tay is… well… I don’t know where Tay is, to be honest. – Decay]
“ignorance, malice, or incompetence” – I am casting my vote on the incompetence side of things. Lots of businesses that have expanded into Japan talked with Japanese businesses who are in a similar field to learn how things work. This is the exact same thing. Talk with the companies who have put games on Steam. Talk with companies who have run a successful Kickstarter campaign. Talk with localization companies like MangaGamer. So many people and companies seem to want to be helpful and have offered free advice. To completely ignore the details of how others were successful seems like complete idiocy to me.
Thanks for the hard work, Decay – it is appreciated!
Btw, there’s a guy doing hanasaki work spring translation project. He just start it recently and post it on fuwanovel, and also on recruiting additional staff for the project, just to let you know.
I’m aware. I’ll refrain from commenting too much in the absence of concrete information, I’ll just say that the project is extremely suspicious.
Yeah, and he also said he’d work on Dies Irae and Muramasa when he gets the free time lol The guy is either a massive idiot or a massive troll. He has literally no idea what he’s doing.
Proof of said claims: http://i.imgur.com/yGfw6aj.png?1
Not to mention the fact that he doesn’t know Japanese or how to hack or anything. I have no idea what he’s even doing, if anything.
Labyrinth of Grisaia fully translated? Best birthtday present ever :,)
I wasn’t aware of japanese companies trying by themselves to localize games. Oh that’s funny,trying to sell a nukige fully censored on steam…If they want to get on the western markets at least do your homework correctly before trying, incompetence or ignorance is not an excuse when you have so many people willing to give you free advice. Your average reader can tolerate awkward english but they absolutely despise censorship. Remember the backsplash caused by ‘if my heart had wings’, “Shiny Days’ and ‘fire emblem fates’?
The deal with Ona-Ken was that they wanted to release a free version on Steam that would serve as an advertisement for their 18+ dlsite version. Steam really did not like being used as an advertising platform for porn and shot that idea down fast.
Their translation was also actual machine translation. They said they hired some Japanese college student or something to do the translation for them and I’m pretty sure this guy just took the money, ran the script through google translate, and called it a day. They were completely unaware until the community pointed it out to them. These guys got scammed because they really had no idea how to approach translation at all. Kind of unfortunate, really.
I remember the backlash caused by the butchering (in more ways than one) of IMHHW, which was of course the reason why it sold like hotcakes to Steamites unaware or uncaring of its terrible translation.
🙁
It sold like hotcakes long before it even touched Steam. IMHHW is a poor comparison to Ona Ken, since it was translated by actual people, albeit extremely poorly.
So, gloczus or whoever is doing these kickstarters took everything they “learned” from the failed Beastmaster kickstarter and just applied it to a new one without a thought. It’s pretty obvious that they’ll keep reworking failed kickstarters until they make a successful one. That’s obnoxious and shady af. There aren’t enough words to describe my absolute disgust. I’m glad they failed; their translation would have sucked balls anyway.
Sweet Jesus, Clover Day’s progress. Yes, please <3
does the translation of eternal heart is dead due to sekai project?
No, the translation is dead for a large variety of other reasons.
Clover Day’s CG picked largely at random? It’s the final scene CG… probably not a great one to choose if picking at random.
Spoilers: The protagonist hooks up with the heroine.
This is sad since ChuSingura looks like an amazing game that might even be the First VN to compete with Majikoi, but I just dont trust that Kickstarter, asking for way too much money, and cutting content while theres little more than vague promises just isnt going to happen.
it’s good to know that Golden Spirit will be continuing with the translations ^^
and also MangaGamer just opened the pre-order for Ozmafia
so there is still hope for more otome games getting translated this semester
They announced that they will redo the kickstarter for ChuSingura46+1 for multiple reasons. I hope it won’t be as shady as before.