Ready for the BETA?
July 3, 2015 at 11:24 pm Micchi 12 comments
Very exciting news for Muv-luv fans coming from AX this year. Degica is starting a Kickstarter campaign for a Muv-luv and Muv-luv Alternative localization in late August. It is planned for a PC/Steam release. No further info on tiers and stretch goals. Muv-luv Alternative is one of the most well known eroge, both in Japan and among English-speaking fans, so there’s no doubt that this should be very heavily backed.
Erika topped the Mousou Complete! chara poll, followed by Mia and Mari.
The Eroge! & Ero Manga! art works will be out on September 30th for ￥2,778., while the Sanoba Witch will be available on August 28th for ￥3,000. The Sanoba Witch OST also comes out on August 28th for ￥2,500. There’s also a Shimotsuki Haruka 10th anniversary best album scheduled to be hitting the shelves on August 5th, also for ￥3,000. It has 16 tracks of anime, console and arcade songs.
sprite’s high flying title Aokana is getting a PSV adaptation in 2016!
alphamax’s 1/7 scale figure of Shining Hearts‘ Kaguya swimsuit ver. takes pre-orders until August 20th. It will ship in November at a price of ￥12,800.
Dakimakura are available for preorder for Monobeno‘s Natsuha (medium size) and Hyakugojuunenme no Mahoutsukai‘s Nadeshiko.
Twitter had begun suspending many accounts which featured pornography, including some artists and eroge companies, notably Lose. No problem, they’ve got a new account up already.
Busy working this week. I’ll be busy again next week too.
Entry filed under: Weekly News. Tags: Champing at the bit.
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Hau~ Omochikaeri~! 
1.
moebuta | July 4, 2015 at 8:15 am
Not that I care about English releases, but why don’t they translate something that doesn’t have an English release yet? Something like Muramasa or Baldr.
Guess they’d rather work on cleaning up and distributing fan translations.
2.
Ika | July 4, 2015 at 4:34 pm
The reason I’ve heard seems to be about creating a proper atmosphere for eastern companies by going with “sure things” at first. These first titles really need to sell well if they’re going to send a message that licensing this stuff is really going to work. Another thing is being able to license them in the first place. I don’t think any current localisation company could license something like Baldr right now. It would likely be prohibitively expensive if the company even had any interest to license it out at all.
Muv-luv is so ridiculously popular to western readers that it’s really no surprise why they want to localize it officially. I am honestly amazed it took them this long in the first place.
Going with things that have already been translated does create less work, but they can also be reasonably sure that if they do localize it, it will have a better chance at being appealing to western readers than going for a random title.
Looks like they are starting to move into new territory though. I’m just glad I don’t need to rely on localisations.
3.
joyjason | July 4, 2015 at 7:22 pm
For me, I observe that official localizations often kill the jokes and many story elements (such as foreshadowing) that the original tries to convey, effectively killing the story and the “novel” portion of the game.
Fan translations often avoid this problem because they actually check their translations before releasing it, and even utilize western humor and phrases. The officials can’t seem to do that.
4.
mushi | July 5, 2015 at 12:33 am
I think that there’s just as good offical localizations as there is bad fan-translations. Many official translators also do some fan-translation on the side, so…*shrugs*
But yeah, some companies really need some quality control…mangagamer’s earlier localizations were completely horrible (or so I heard) but really pulled themselves together in the past few years.
5.
joyjason | July 5, 2015 at 7:53 pm
That’s news for me. When I started playing eroge, MG was pretty much my source for them, and I do believe “Shuffle” translated by them was my first one, and its translations suck now that I look at it 5 years later.
I’ll just take your word for it, considering how it’s been over 4 years since I last touched an English-localized game; I really have no idea how effectively official groups can localize.
Despite this, I’m sure you can agree that a lot of the jokes, puns, and double entendre that’s made in Japanese titles are essentially impossible to localize, making the accuracy and integrity of the translation plummet.
6.
Nonnon | July 6, 2015 at 9:37 pm
Yeah, your impression is completely out of date. It was as of about two years ago.
MangaGamer has hired a bunch of translators (some of whom I never heard of in the world fan translation) who have done a great job on scenario-heavy titles, and of course they bought the work and services of the ef fan translators. They’re also getting the Grisaia translator to do a project (who’s now exclusively working on commercial projects).
JAST’s hired some good translators from the fan community, and of course when they licensed Steins;Gate they used the existing, good translation.
Sekai Project is also generally using decent translators, though Nekopara was a bit…iffy, if only because it read like what most people would call a decent fan translation. I don’t think that team is doing any of their big titles, though. Hopefully they’re not doing Chrono Clock, or the extra time after that game’s Japanese release was to give them more time to edit properly. (Clearly it had been licensed before the game was released in Japan)
Moenovel? Their KonoSora translation was actually based off of standards plenty of fan translators explicitly use, and that’s half of why the translation was so bad. (The other half was hiring non-native English speaking translators)
The good fan translations have ALWAYS been exceptions to the rule, and that most of the good fan translators have been hired and the rest are being ignored when there’s a need for more good ones is a sign of that. Just look at any “I want to translate X” thread where the OP has managed to get text into the engine. Not pretty.
Not to mention the CLANNAD fan translation, which had many levels of editing and process and still ended up reading like crap. Sekai Project refused to use the existing translation and for good reason.
Also, I wouldn’t call the existing ML/MLA translation anything more than “subpar”.
That poll Degica released about the translation of a certain term doesn’t fully inspire confidence that they’ll eventually produce something better, but if they’re anything like the other companies as of late, they’re shooting for higher standards than most fan translations achieve.
7.
Micchi | July 5, 2015 at 5:19 pm
I think that’s just it. It’s easier and quicker to distribute titles which already have fan translations and is popular among the Western fanbase. It also serves to whet the appetite for newer titles.
With regards to the quality of the localizations, keep in mind that many of the staff come from the fan translation world themselves. They just probably have less personal control over the end product beyond what they are working on directly.
I was quite surprised with the recent announcement for Chrono Clock. While it’s not an amazing story, it was unexpected that it will be brought over so soon. Here’s hoping that it’ll keep going in the right direction.
8.
Deady | July 6, 2015 at 1:27 pm
I saw it coming. When I saw the complaints about the H-scenes being only available at the end I had a hunch it was to easily set up for a localization to cash in on Steam users who are easy with their money.
I don’t particularly like the direction localizations are taking though, for example there are a lot of errors in Nekopara. A lot of the incredibly major ones were fixed, but many of them were left in the script and never even bothered with. It’s rather inconsequential for Nekopara but it made an example of how nobody actually cares about how well something is translated, as well as it doesn’t bode well for Sekai Project’s new translations. It seems like localization companies just care about vomiting a new translation as quick as possible without caring about the quality so they can cash in on Steam users who buy anything from Japan without hesitation.
9.
Nonnon | July 6, 2015 at 9:41 pm
Sekai’s other projects aren’t aiming for a simultaneous release, though, and Grisaia is using the exact same team/a similar timeline as the fan TL.
CLANNAD’s got a completely different team working on it and has been realistic about the deadline, so I’m not worried about that one. Then again, anything would be better than the fan TL…
It sounds like there was a time crunch with Nekopara to get a simultaneous release more than anything – I think abandoning the idea of a simultaneous release in the future or being quicker about proposing the idea might solve the problem, even with the same translator.
10.
Ika | July 7, 2015 at 1:22 am
I was really surprised about Chrono Clock too. From what I understand, it was the studio themselves who seemed interested in bringing it to the west. I wonder if that had something to do with their decision to tack on the ero scenes as merely extra content the way they did, since that makes an all-ages steam release that much easier, not having to worry about story elements getting mixed in.
I really hope it does well for the sake of future western localisations. More people should be able to read these things.
11.
Nonnon | July 6, 2015 at 9:42 pm
They’re actually completely retranslating ML and MLA, from what I understand.
12.
yade | July 6, 2015 at 4:05 pm
I wonder if they will clean up MLA’s adorable Engrish
English eat shit