Sekai Project Gauging Interest In Localization Of Visual Novels By Key

[Student no.0]

Originally Posted by VDZ

The situation around Muv-Luv is a tad more complicated. Age (creator of Muv-Luv) has reluctantly showed interest in the Western VN market since at least 2010. However, Age is notoriously bad/incompetent/unlucky/whatever you make of it business-wise, and they've been in financial trouble more than once. (Fun fact: Muv-Luv consists of two games because their budget ran out after Unlimited.) This has to be kept in mind when considering Age's position on official localizations.

While Amaterasu was translating Muv-Luv Alternative (2010), MangaGamer was negotiating with Age about official releases of their games (they were also negotiating with Liar-soft at the time). Eventually, the decision was made to work with Amaterasu translations to use their fan translations. Amaterasu decided not to release their patches and to cooperate with MangaGamer to use their translations in the official releases. However, for a very long time after that, things were quiet on the official side of things - Amaterasu barely heard anything from MangaGamer other than that negotiations were still ongoing. Meanwhile, previous efforts to cooperate with fan translators, mainly by JAST USA, were leading to absolutely nothing. (JAST started cooperating with fan translators in July 2009, and it wasn't until May 2011 that the cooperations finally led to their first results with the release of Demonbane (of which the fan translation was near completion in 2009). Even to this day, more official cooperation fan translations remain in limbo than have been released.)

Amaterasu lost faith in the cooperation, and this happened:


Ever since then, there's been no news regarding any official localizations of Age games. Liar-soft remained interested in the Western market and it looks like the incident didn't prevent them from cooperating with MangaGamer again several years later, and an official release of Ourai no Gahkthun was announced last Anime Expo.

Man, that really is weird. But what did Amaterasu calling quits have to do with Age offering MangaGamer a different game instead of Muv-Luv?

[Tyabann]

Originally Posted by VDZ

Clannad was also planned for release in 2001. (It was eventually released in 2004.) Key games taking far longer than they planned isn't exactly a new thing.

Angel Beats being an episodic release was presumably something intended to reduce that kind of thing.
Also, note the "indefinitely delayed" part. That's bad.

Originally Posted by VDZ

To be more precise, Blick Winkel retranslated the entire thing from scratch because he was dissatisfied with his first translation, meaning none of the original work from the fan translation was left.

And then Makoto and others edited that translation even further, IIRC.

Originally Posted by VDZ

How does Kanon not matter?

It's bad, for one.

Originally Posted by Student no.0

Man, that really is weird. But what did Amaterasu calling quits have to do with Age offering MangaGamer a different game instead of Muv-Luv?

It doesn't, novelnews is/was probably speculating out of its ass.

[VDZ]

Originally Posted by Student no.0

Man, that really is weird. But what did Amaterasu calling quits have to do with Age offering MangaGamer a different game instead of Muv-Luv?

Muv-Luv is age's most important flagship title. Age wanted MangaGamer to publish KGNE and see how it did before even considering licensing the Muv-Luv series instead. With how incredibly slow licensing and official releases go, Amaterasu would be sitting on a finished Muv-Luv Alternative translation for many, many years before it would be released - assuming the best case scenario. Worst case scenario is it won't ever get released because age isn't satisfied with KGNE sales. Amaterasu wan't willing to sit on a finished patch for years upon years, so they released it.

(For comparison: Around May 2010, the Cartagra and Kara no Shoujo projects were taken down via a C&D. The people involved managed to cooperate with MangaGamer for an official release instead. At this point, Cartagra was 100% translated and was about to finish editing and other stuff. The translator for both projects had to do some stuff to even get them to release Kara no Shoujo and business-wise he was treated questionably (not sure how much of this is public information, so I won't go into the details), but eventually Kara no Shoujo got a (botched) release in June 2011. (The game had severe issues at launch, but everything's been fixed since then.) Cartagra, on the other hand, despite being practically finished in May 2010, would remain unreleased for a very long time. Eventually (a year ago or so?) it was finally announced by MangaGamer and a release is expected late 2014 or early 2015 - four and a half years after the finished translation was taken down. That's still a lot faster than JAST, which of the many projects taken down in summer 2009 have still only released two.)

[Tyabann]

Sigh.

Sumaga was never even remotely ready for release back when JAST snapped it up (it's still not) and I don't know of any other unfinished N+ projects other than Demonbane that they got ahold of.

Don't make crap up, please.

[VDZ]

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

Sigh.

Sumaga was never even remotely ready for release back when JAST snapped it up (it's still not) and I don't know of any other unfinished N+ projects other than Demonbane that they got ahold of.

Don't make crap up, please.

I'm not making crap up. In fact, I know far more about the situation than most, having been one of the TLWiki admins at the time it all happened (and having been in the very channel where JAST cooperation with fan translators stuff was discussed).

List of Nitro+ projects at the time of the JAST/Nitro+ announcement with, in order, the state they were in at that time and their current state:

Demonbane - Almost ready for release - Released by JAST in May 2011
Chaos;Head - Almost ready for release* - in limbo, Noah port project cancelled
Saya no Uta - Released - Released by JAST in May 2013
Hanachirasu - Released** - In limbo**
Kikokugai - Released - In limbo
Sumaga - 50% translated*** - In limbo
Jingai Makyou - Finished but unreleased - In limbo, likely cancelled
Dra+KoI - Starting up (by experienced staff) - Cancelled****

* Beta patches have been publicly released. However, they contain severe issues such as save corruption and parts of the game remaining untranslated.
** Originally in limbo. JAST later indicated they are not interested in unvoiced titles. As such, the project was resumed and a patch was released in 2010. However, JAST changed their mind and the patch was pulled again.
*** The translation was making good progress, but eventually it was decided the translation quality was too low for an official release, and the translation was redone from scratch.
**** A new project was started afterwards, and a patch for that project was released in 2013.

Out of the 8 projects:
- 2 were released, both of which were already finished or practically finished. In practice, they were delayed by two and four years respectively.
- 2 others were already released, but their patches have become unavailable.
- 3 projects were killed without any plans for release. (One of them has since been fan translated despite the license.)
- 1 project is still going on at JAST. (It has been more than five years since the project went official.)

To JAST's credit, they have announced Django and hinted at Muramasa which had no projects (though the fan-translator-turned-JAST-employee Makoto was planning to translate Muramasa either way). However, with how slow JAST is with releasing Nitro+ games, how busy Makoto is with JAST work, and the way the Muramasa translation is stalled until Django is finished, they remain unfulfilled promises that I don't expect to be fulfilled for many years.

[Tyabann]

Patches distributed over the Internet never "become unavailable", VDZ.
Sumaga's translation progress was also an utter lie, and was likely never going to be released without JAST's intervention in the first place.

[VDZ]

Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon

Patches distributed over the Internet never "become unavailable", VDZ.

But do they become damn hard to find. The Words Worth translation disappeared entirely from the internet after 2005, and only resurfaced in 2009. The patches for the other 3 Fun Translations titles still have yet to be found by the visual novel community.

Anything that has been released somewhat recently can still be found for now. However, I expect that when, at some inevitable point in the future, ErogeDownload goes down, the more obscure titles will become very hard to find as well. For example, when I google for 'kira snowdrop', ED is the only site that still has it (at least in the first two Google pages). Similarly, for Chaos;Head there is only a nearly dead torrent at Nyaa and the ED link. Kikokugai is also only on ED and a site that links to ED's download.

[Thany]

Originally Posted by VDZ

Out of the 8 projects:
- 2 were released, both of which were already finished or practically finished. In practice, they were delayed by two and four years respectively.
- 2 others were already released, but their patches have become unavailable.
- 3 projects were killed without any plans for release. (One of them has since been fan translated despite the license.)
- 1 project is still going on at JAST. (It has been more than five years since the project went official.)

To JAST's credit, they have announced Django and hinted at Muramasa which had no projects (though the fan-translator-turned-JAST-employee Makoto was planning to translate Muramasa either way). However, with how slow JAST is with releasing Nitro+ games, how busy Makoto is with JAST work, and the way the Muramasa translation is stalled until Django is finished, they remain unfulfilled promises that I don't expect to be fulfilled for many years.

Looking at this I guess Little Witch Romanesque won't be out before 2020 at least. Hopefully I'll still be alive for it.

[VDZ]

Originally Posted by Thany

Looking at this I guess Little Witch Romanesque won't be out before 2020 at least. Hopefully I'll still be alive for it.

Different situation. The listed titles were removed in a blanket takedown for anything Nitro+ and they are all Nitro+ titles; it makes sense for Nitro+ to want titles released one at a time, and it makes sense for them to not really be interested in releasing certain titles.

That said, JAST is slow and Aroduc (translator) is busy. It's definitely not getting released in 2014, and I wouldn't put my money on 2015 either. 2016 or later is plausible.

[RRW]

http://www.siliconera.com/2014/08/23...steam-release/

[MCAL]

Even to people who don't like Key, this is pretty big news IMHO.

[Frontier]

Happy to see Clannad is getting an official release in the west via Steam, hopefully with a better translation to go along with it .

[Student no.0]

Originally Posted by MCAL

Even to people who don't like Key, this is pretty big news IMHO.

Looks like that survey payed off really well. If this and planetarian(which I'd like to try out in the future) have great results, I can just sit back and wait for promising Angel Beats to get localized in the future too. Who knows? Maybe if these titles help Sekai to grow to the point where they can have physical releases, even better!

[Mahou]

This might be the only reason for me to get/use Steam for which I haven't had any use or interest yet. In retrospec, I also loved Clannad, BUT some dramas in some(!) routes felt really too long/dragged and/or too heavy

[Dextro]

This is some amazing news. Clannad is actually one of the very few visual novels that I've actually played all the way through.

[Mcfart]

Doubt Clannad will get many sales since most people who are interested watched the anime.

[Student no.0]

Originally Posted by Mcfart

Doubt Clannad will get many sales since most people who are interested watched the anime.

JAST's Steins;Gate Limited Edition release sold out completely on Rightstuf long before the game was even physically released, and the majority who bought it likely watched the anime before anyway too. If that's any indication, I think Clannad will do fine.

[Mcfart]

Originally Posted by Student no.0

JAST's Steins;Gate Limited Edition release sold out completely on Rightstuf long before the game was even physically released, and the majority who bought it likely watched the anime before anyway too. If that's any indication, I think Clannad will do fine.

Well yeah if there's only 50 copies of the limited edition, of course they'd sell to hardcore fans...

[Student no.0]

Originally Posted by Mcfart

Well yeah if there's only 50 copies of the limited edition, of course they'd sell to hardcore fans...

Were there really only 50 copies? I do recall that even the Standard editions ran out temporarily on RightStuf too the day it released even when I pre-ordered it a month ahead, proabably a few more times after I got my copy.

[FlareKnight]

Originally Posted by Mcfart

Doubt Clannad will get many sales since most people who are interested watched the anime.

Not so sure there. I mean the anime was great, but if anyone wants to actually see the routes for the girls the game is still the best way to go. Plus being the full voice version it's not like they are going to lose out on the audio side of things.

Sure there won't be a lot of surprises, but still see people going for it.