Comment on Witch on the Holy Night Game Gets Release on Steam on December 14

• Scraft161@iusearchlinux.fyi ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The OG Tsukihime didn’t have any DRM (aside from streaming the music from the CD which Mirror Moon patched out due to performance) the Fate/Stay Night VN also doesn’t have much in the way of DRM although it does need a patch to run (and even then a VN of this age has issues). The thing with KiriKiri is that it’s insanely extensible so you could theoretically patch in any DRM you want; but the time and effort required to do so far outweighs any benefits you’d see as a group making visual novels. Add to that that we now have things like AETools which can extract the archives kirikiri uses in no time at all and people write interpreters for the KAG scripts as hobby project so you can read the Fate/Stay Night VN in the web although it doesn’t have saving/loading and is definitely not something I’d recommend for a first read.

  Ren’Py is in a very similar boat where it’s scripts are trivial to extract (even more so because you don’t need specialized tools) and once you have it’s assets you can dump those into a new project and be done with it.

  Aniplex is the only western company publicly listed for the visual novel in the ANN post and on the Steam page, so I have to believe they’re responsible for the localization.

  I see; I don’t use ANN myself; they’ve sorta pissed me off a couple times with certain articles being inaccurate and reporting based on a mistranslated tweet from the Mushoku Tensei author (this one I only heard from and I can’t care enough to dig it up RN; but at least double check your sources and especially if they are translated from japanese with MTL as it is known to be bad at the best of times). As for the steam page I hadn’t looked myself yet because I already read it.

  That said, I’m happy to see more Western localizers who retain the original Japanese text.

  I personally don’t care much as most of the VNs I’ve read are community translated using a patch so I always had the original scripts; but it’s always good to see that we are getting options for this sorta stuff.

  It’s good to hear you thought the localization was good overall!

  I should probably mention that I might be biased in that view as I read Mahoyo right after the original Tsukihime using mirror moon’s translation which doesn’t exactly put the bar that high (sometimes it was hard to tell where the translation stopped and Nasu’s writing begun; doubly so during H-scenes where things would get laughably bad); but it was one of the first translations of any of the type moon works (I think they got beaten by the Fate translation; but at least that wasn’t a complete mess that was passed down to multiple groups before eventually being finished by mirror moon). what matters the most to me in the translations though is that they use the same terminology (which is now pretty much standardized thanks to the type moon wiki) as otherwise you might get that they are talking about something like vampires; but it makes it hard to tell whether they’re talking about true ancestors or dead apostles which are two very different things.

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  • Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Oh right, interesting stuff. Yeah, I’m kinda glad most visual novel developers are so small that DRM is often out of reach, except for digital editions (DMM makes it easy). I thought Mirror Moon required proof of ownership before you could run their patches? I haven’t read any TYPE-MOON stuff, but that was my impression.

    I don’t read ANN regularly but that was the source OP posted. And I corroborated it with several other news sources for the PS4/Switch game, as it’s the same localization. That being said…yeah, you’d expect them to have someone who knows Japanese on staff.

    While I would love to buy Japanese visual novels directly from Japanese publishers, they’re often encumbered by DRM. The digital edition usually is. With physical editions, you just don’t know (hopefully the new VNDB DRM tag will change that; it’s now in Beta). Western visual novels that retain the Japanese text are often the best way to buy visual novels in Japanese. They are always clearly labelled as containing DRM or not and they rarely do these days.

    Oh, well…even if you are biased, hey, at least it’s an improvement! One thing I’m glad about after deciding to learn Japanese is that I don’t need to worry about translation quality. Nonetheless, I’m grateful to fan translations because they were how I got into Japanese media in the first place. Even if most of them weren’t great (and filled with translation notes). I’ve yet to come across a VN writer who can write a good H-Scene…

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    • Scraft161@iusearchlinux.fyi ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I thought Mirror Moon required proof of ownership before you could run their patches?

      Not with Tsukihime; if you have the CD (or more realistically mount the ISO) the installer just works, even from within wine. That said that was for an are where you’d still be able to realistically obtain the CD, nowadays the game is considered abandonware so some people took the translation; fixed it up (and by a lot) and provided easy access to western audiences) it’s a great way to read the original with all it’s rough edges. If you do want to support Type Moon in this endeavor; the best way would be to buy their stuff (whether it is a version of mahoyo, the Tsukihime remake (which is getting an official english release come 2024), or wait on a PC release (which Nasu stated he’s interested in if it got translated)). Personally I think I’m going to wait until the full game is out and translated if I’m going to read remake; there’s some interesting stuff that changes between the two that got me curious; but reading mahoyo was already challenging enough for me (largely because I did that on a 7 year old laptop)

      you’d expect them to have someone who knows Japanese on staff.

      you would; but then this is far from their first screw up and it really makes it look bad that it would have been easier to write an article correcting the misinformation caused by the whole incident rather than doing the same as everybody else.

      One thing I’m glad about after deciding to learn Japanese is that I don’t need to worry about translation quality.

      Good luck learning a language is hard (I know because english isn’t my first), know that it’s a long road but I can share a few tips:

      1. listen to japanese as much as you can; whether it’s movies, anime, music, … if it is made by japanese people for native speakers then you’re good (you can always get other material besides it; but it usually not as good for building an intuitive understanding of the language)
      2. try to avoid speaking/writing in japanese unless you feel comfortable forming sentences, premature output leads to you using broken japanese as reference for the language which builds accents, these are extremely hard to get rid of.
      3. kanji is a beast; but it’s not all irrational, most words are built by tying concepts together; what kanji don’t do is represent the way they’re supposed to sound.
      4. don’t use duolingo (this applies to any language) it’s method of learning is slow, it’s questions trivially simple, and it does not mesh well with the more flexible sentence structure in japanese leading to it telling you that a sentence normal people might use is wrong, it also forces premature output which goes against point 2.

      I’ve yet to come across a VN writer who can write a good H-Scene…

      same here; but I’ve read very few visual novels, I’m not really a reader and the things I have read are because either I knew it would be good (tsukihime, mahoyo) or where I just craved for more after loving it’s adaptation (Fate, Mushoku Tensei [Light Novel]).

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      • Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Ah, so Mirror Moon themselves haven’t dropped that requirement, but another fan group intervened. I’m probably just going to wait until the 2024 version is out since I have such a big backlog anyway, but it’s cool that fans are preserving this stuff, putting copyright law aside. I could probably argue about this particular aspect of copyright law for hours, but I’m sure nobody is interested in that :P

        I’ll definitely be reading Witch on the Holy Night first, though. I’ve been wanting to read it since watching Garden of the Sinners, which was years ago now.

        Counter-point, though: is there anyone better at Japanese media reporting than ANN?

        Thanks for the advice on learning Japanese! I’ve actually been at for about a decade now, though not consistently. I only started getting serious about it ~3 years ago (and I’ve been far too busy this year to give it the attention it deserves). I’ve got a decent understanding of the language now and can approach most media with a dictionary (and watch a lot of anime without). And yeah, production was never a priority for me. I don’t think there’s an easier language to immerse in. There are so many great options, and there are so many tools out there by all these different people you won’t see for other languages.

        I’ve never had trouble with Kanji. I just learn words and get a feel for the Kanji as a byproduct. It’s not difficult to remember Kanji after you’ve seen them a few times, especially if you know radicals. One thing I need to properly learn, though, is pitch accent. I’ve been very lazy about not learning it, but it’s pretty important to do so as early as you can, or you end up needing to correct a lot of misunderstandings about pronunciation, as you say.

        And I have actually used the Duolingo Japanese course! It’s pretty bad. I’ve also tried Wanikani, Jalup, Tae Kim, Imabi, Sakubi, iKnow, FluentU, Lingualift, KKLC, Genki, Tobira, various Memrise and Anki vocabulary decks, japaneseclass.jp, and Maggie-Sensei (this list is not exhaustive). Some of it helped; some of it not, but all of that adds up to still not enough to purchase Rosetta Stone. After all of this, I think the best way is:

        1. Learn Kana
        2. Read Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide (or Sakubi if you can handle it)
        3. Do a Core 1-2k deck while immersing
        4. Mine new words from native material

        Everything else is unnecessary or inefficient.

        I already know enough grammar to immerse nowadays (I guess I’m around N3?) so I only learn new words from native material. I consider this a general success because I’ve read lots of great stuff (my favourite is Munou na Nana) in Japanese and felt I had a better experience than I would have reading the localization.

        Yeah, I definitely should not be this bad at Japanese after so long, but that’s what happens when you leave it for a year or two at a time. Key to learning anything is consistency, and every day, it gets easier. If I wasn’t so easily distracted, I’m sure I’d be almost fluent by now. My biggest regret is not committing harder and sooner.

        I haven’t read too many visual novels either! I also still have lots of kamige to read, and I’m glad for it. I never used to be much of a reader, but things changed when I started getting into isekai web novels, haha.

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