This week’s header image comes from the otome game Destiny’s Princess: A War Story, A Love Story which was released on Steam this week. Check it out here! If you get any error messages loading this page, just refresh it and they should go away! We’re still dealing with some technical issues from a major server upgrade. – Tay
Hello generous VNTS readers! If any of you are interested in helping out one of our own, Loe (of Loe TL, the guy who put out the HaraKano patch last week and is picking at other projects) has run into some health issues and is staring down some hefty medical bills. If you have a buck or two to throw his way, please do so. Here’s a link to his paypal.
Loe’s facing some big medical bills. Click here to give him a buck or two.
I don’t have any connection to Loe, nor will I get any of the money you donate. If you have questions about paypal/helping him out, you can contact him directly.
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
- A Clockwork Ley-Line: The Borderline of Dusk (Sekai Project) – Moved to the Sekai section. This was formerly the Kohaku team’s patch.
- AstralAir – TL: 72.75% > 73.24% (47521/64880); Edit: 72.75% > 73.24% (47521/64880)
- Ayakashi Gohan! – Looking for translators, re-inserter(s) or proofreaders. If interested, see this post.
- Bishoujo Mangekyou -Norowareshi Densetsu no Shoujo – TL: 358,4 kB/710 kB (50.5 %)
- Dare ka ga Koi Shita Hankagai (Sekai Project) – TL: 28.75%
- (Otome!) Destiny’s Princess: A War Story, A Love Story – Released! Get it on Steam right now!
- Dracu-Riot! – Nosebleed, Oxford Comma, and Their Ilk are going to finish the DR patch. See their post here.
- HaraKano – See my note about Loe up above
- Harumade, Kururu. – Common Route: 0% > 25%
- Hoka no Onna no Ko to H wo Shiteiru Ore wo Mite Koufun Suru Kanojo – TL: 13584 > 14319 Lines
- Irotoridori no Sekai – TL: 6% > 8% (4301/50663); Edit: 3% > 8% (4301/50663)
- KARAKARA (Sekai Project) – TL Progress: 77.22%
- Koi ga Saku Koro Sakura Doki – TLC: 48% > 82%
- Koiseyo!! Imouto Banchou – TL: 4% > 5%; Edit: 2% > 4%
- Lucid9: Inciting Incident (Sekai Project) – Releases on Steam on April 14, 2016 (this week!)
- Maitetsu (Sekai Project) – TL: 6.39%
- Majikoi A (1 + 2) – A-1 Overall: 64% > 72%; UI is done for both A-1 and A-2
- (Otome!) The Men of Yoshiwara: Ohgiya – Coming out in April 2016; Steam page is live
- Monster Girl Quest Paradox – Patch v1.21.30 released (see this post)
- (Otome!) My Secret Pets! – Coming out in May 2016; Steam page is now up
- Root Double -Before Crime * After Days- Xtend Edition (Sekai Project) – Releasing this month (April 2016). Was originally slated for March 2016.
- Sharin no Kuni, Himawari no Shoujo – Kickstarter for localization to launch 06/2016 (link)
- Sonicomi (JAST) – Voice acting is coming to the game
- Still, I Missed Her (Sekai Project) – TL: 1.29%
- Tokyo Necro – Added to the list this week; TL: Story Scripts: 2.5% (1010/39657); TL: Encyclopedia Entries: 50% (60/120); Looking for an English editor, and image editor; Fuwanovel thread (link); 1-hr video will be coming soon to showcase the project
New Releases
- (Otome!) Destiny’s Princess: A War Story, A Love Story – Released! Get it on Steam right now!
Removed from the list this week
- Dorei to no Seikatsu -Teaching Feeling- – By Spacegodzilla. Follow it there if you want. It’s been released and more will come piecemeal in the future.
All the Game Updates:
Fan Translation Projects
[wpdatatable id=102]MangaGamer (Updates)
[wpdatatable id=104]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)
- The translation of Kindred Spirits’ Drama CDs have been announced!
- Free Friends hardcopy has been put up for pre-order and is releasing May 20th!
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=105]Other
- Here’s a handy link to sort Sekai Project’s Steam releases by release date: link
Other Projects
[wpdatatable id=106]
— Commentary Section —
Zakabox™ Commentary
「I never thought I’d be this late on the commentary and still actually do it, but this is going to be a month-long streak so I can’t just stop before the finish line! Things really didn’t sync up this time is all I can say.
This week we have some nice progress on the KARAKARA translation, SakuSaku tlc has finally(?) started moving again, and Tokyo Necro has been given Verified Project status by our almighty Lord of the VNTS Decay. Oh, and Root Double will hopefully actually be out this month.
Lucid9 is a project that’s been on Fuwanovel since… 1 May 2014! It’s been a while, and it’s cool to see them release something non-demo at last. There are more installments planned after this first one (“you can consider the current release as a common route of sort”). As for whether further parts will cost dollar money, I got “Should be all free, but then again I can’t predict what will happen in the future”. Further updates will add more routes to the base game, and apparently there should eventually be a true route. True routes are one of my fetishes, so I will be looking forward to that.
It looks quite nice, I do enjoy and the voice acting seems not-terrible, though the decision to go with Japanese names is going to wreck them. The project co-leader Diamon admitted his guilt to me personally though (and they weren’t exactly planning for VA from the start), so I’m going to give him a light sentence of medium-intensity scorn.
Diamon actually wrote an extensive guide to making VNs, which you can see on our blog here. If you’re planning to lead your own development team for one, it’s a good resource. Though looking over it now, I already spotted a grammatical error in the eighth paragraph. Sigh. Oh well, find it and mention it in the comments and I’ll give you an Internet and probably still not fix it because I’m too lazy.
The Destiny’s Princess release actually looks… p. decent writing-wise from the video excerpt on Steam. Not perfect, but certainly not a machine-translated horror like some other things having the translation credited to the Japanese publisher. The publisher, Dogenzaka Lab, has Zaka in its name and also put out Tokyo School Life and a few other otome VNs. Their upcoming release My Secret Pets apparently has the female protag’s pets turn into guys, consoling her after a break-up. Since I enjoyed Nekopara, I have absolutely no right to mock this setup. Damn.
The other big news this week, the Sharin Kickstarter, is something that I actually feel like having opinions about. It’s being run by Front Wing on behalf of the original developers, and the usual porn presence and translation quality questions are there. The fan translator himself says he told people his tl was unusable, but some people think Front Wing will use it anyway. It’s all very confusing, and Front Wing are telling us to wait with the questions and not believe anything they haven’t announced officially. When it comes to both these questions, I say wait and see. Sharin doesn’t really need its porn much (there’s one debateable thing in there, but it actually shows no genitalia so idk); you wouldn’t be missing anything significant there.
I’m just going to say this, besides the other potential issues: do you want Kickstarter to be the premier marketing and pre-order platform for VNs? If not, consider not backing, even if it’s Sharin no Kuni. There’s really no reason Front Wing should need Kickstarter to bring it over as far as I know; the only conclusion is that this is just becoming how you do business in the VN market. And I’m not sure if I want that to happen.
And with that, I have a long-neglected dinner to attend to. I was loud with my mother about it after she told me the third time, and I really shouldn’t have been :(」
Decay’s Musings
Greetings, I come to you from the far-flung past! For a variety of boring reasons, I’m actually writing this before a single iota of VNTS work has been done. I’ve become quite the busy bee in recent weeks, and this week I took on a rather monumental obligation. I’ve become lead editor for the Dracu-Riot completion project. We not only aim to complete the translation, but to also give the entire work all of the tender love and care that Staircase had not the time or manpower for. I’m sure the entire internet is already descending upon the newly-released partial patch like a flock of starving buzzards, but perhaps you’re all better off waiting, instead. This was a surprise release, and it’s not like we’re currently lacking in other new releases. What’s a few more months, anyway?
Aside from the brief lull this week, the steady stream of new releases continues unabated. Dangan Ronpa 2 PC, Root Double, and Ozmafia are all releasing this month. I’m especially looking forward to the first two. I really enjoyed DR1 when I played the PSP fan translation upon its release years ago. I am but a Vita-less peasant, however, and DR2 has eluded me all this time. I suspect there are a fair number of Dangan Ronpa fans just like me, who have not been afforded the opportunity to play the much-vaunted sequel. Unfortunately, with my schedule as it is, who knows when I’ll actually be able to get to it? I do plan on playing Root Double first, whenever that is released. Here’s hoping that SP doesn’t push it back another month.
And then for May, MangaGamer has The House if Fata Morgana penned in. That looks like a pretty interesting gothic horror. It looks really neat, but I’m afraid that its appeal might be so incredibly niche that it will fail to find a market. I hope I’m wrong. Beyond that, who knows? I suspect Sekai Project might have a trick or two up their sleeve, and JAST wants to at least finish Flowers in May. It’s about time for that long-awaited second entry to the Grisaia series, no? On the fan translation front, there’s still no telling when any given project will actually finish, but the latest SakuSaku update at least seems very promising.
So yeah, there’s plenty of stuff to tide you over while waiting for Dracu-Riot. If you’ve waited all this time, surely you can wait a few more months. I believe the work we’re doing to all parts of the game, not just the unfinished Miu route, to be very much worth it. But I’m afraid no one will be there anymore to appreciate it by the time it comes out. Let’s see how many of you can exhibit the patience necessary to prove me wrong.
Oh, and that Sharin no Kuni news? Boy, that’s weird, huh? Yeah, that’s all I got. What do you want outta me, I spent all day neck deep in Dracu-Riot and Tokyo Babel (review coming soon!). I’m tired, leave me alone. I’m crawling into bed now, goodnight all.
TAYsteful™ Thoughts
I’ve been up for, like, two days straight working on Fuwa stuff. The server upgrade broke some stuff and consequently making this post was a nightmare that took all day. I’m tired, I’m grumpy, and I just want to go home.
If you can spare a buck or two, please give Loe (of Loe TL, the guy who put out the HaraKano patch last week and is picking at other projects) a hand with some medical bills. Glad to hear you’re feeling better, man. Much < 3.
Have a good week, everybody!
You forgot about Campus Notes…
http://store.steampowered.com/app/435360/
And no, it’s not OELVN, it’s a genuine Japanese VN from the Japanese company 4th cluster http://4th-cluster.com/
Aw, crap. I must’ve only sorted by Dogenzaka Lab as a developer, not a publisher, and never saw it. I’ll make room for it next week. Thank you!
Really? PC ports of mobile games? I think I’m slightly insulted. What about the original vita games? Are we not good enough for even a PC port of those?
i wouldn’t be surprised if there won’t be any pc port of the current released vita otome games due to the entire problem with amnesia (you know hacked and pirated on the first week even tho otome its a niche genre and need LOT support so we can actually get more stuff localized)
Could it be an issue with the Vita’s firmware being hard to port from? I’ve heard one of the challenges of Vita development is it’s kind of like the PS3 was back in the day: wildly different architecture than the x86 in PCs. (This is just what I’ve heard, could easily be wrong)
not really i mean if you can port dangan ronpa, mind zero and other games that have strong gameplay from vita to pc you can totally port any visual novel, like amnesia did and even the crappy beastmaster and prince kickstarter was going just to port a vita game for pc and not even had the option of localizing the game in it’s original platform
Missing update on Koiken Otome~
Website stated 100% TLC since 28th March~
Overall:
Total TL Percentage: 100.00%
–40710 / 40710 Lines
Total TLC Percentage: 100.00%
– 40710/ 40710 Lines
Total Edit Percentage: 88.90%
– 36194 / 40710 Lines
Total QC Percentage: 86.39%
–35169 / 40710 Lines
Saw that TLC was done on the site, but was told otherwise. I’ll contact the team this week to get it straight.
Posting my thought here http://forums.fuwanovel.net/blogs/entry/1152-hanbei-on-girls-lap-review/.
Once again not much interesting this week, but thanks for the update though.
I don’t really mind Kickstarter being used as a promotional tool. What I DO mind is Kickstarter being used to fund eroge localization without a commitment to release the original adult version. In addition, the publisher Frontwing has a record of being obstructive and ignoring quality concerns, while the developer Akabei Soft2 may have blocked an adult release of G-senjou no Maou in English (if they did they’re certainly not telling). It’s a perfect storm of bad karma that almost guarantees my apathy for / opposition to this campaign. When this all boils down to is that I don’t like either of these companies.
A second concern here is what English backers will get in return for their support. In the case of Muv Luv, we got a formal relationship with Age and a commitment to the release of further untranslated games from them. But what about Akabei Soft 2? They release G-senjou no Maou on Steam–a game that had already been translated by others–and then launch a Kickstarter of yet another already translated game? What value do they intend to actually provide their backers? When will the English audience actually get a new translation of a game fans want that hasn’t been translated? Will a game that hasn’t been translated actually be released? Or is this just an excuse to sell merchandise to us?
@Decay
Don’t worry I am sure there will be fair number of people are going to wait for at least first patch.
The problem is that there are many people who will only wait for the first patch, thus making future polishing efforts largely pointless. I wonder how many people would riot if we suddenly reneged on our 2 month promise. :p
(to be clear, I’m almost certain there will be a miu route patch in two months’ time, so please don’t riot)
Erm, guys, shouldn’t you add Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness and Root Letter? You are always profoundly ignoring console releases for no apparent reason.
Well, problem number one is that I literally never heard of Root Letter. Problem number 2 is that I heard about Mandatory Happiness, planned on adding it to the list, and then suddenly forgot when it came time to do so, and have completely forgotten about it until now.
That’s a shit excuse, I know. The thing is, we aren’t willfully ignoring these releases, and nor does this happen for no reason. The reason is that they often don’t fall within our spheres of interest, end up not occupying our mind space, and some releases end up creeping up on us completely unawares. It’s not just console games (Psycho Pass will even have a PC release), official titles from misc publishers are the most liable to be missed by us, because they’re often marketed at different crowds than the typical VN readers.
Now that we have been made aware of these releases, they will be added to the list next week. As we mention at the top of every post, every week, we are fallible beings and may miss updates or entire VNs at times, so we accept any and all feedback. If you wanted these two VNs added earlier, you should have (politely) informed us earlier, and we would have happily done so back then, as well.
Sure. At the same time that was just an observation (I do appreciate your work) and it was never my intention to offend anyone. Though you should really have someone look at the console announcements from time to time.