Dabbled a bit into the demo, played the first scene available. The wide textbox feels weird for sure, and I noticed a couple alignment fails in transitions from day to night, but everything else was good. Can't really vouch for the TL but at least it reads okay and there was nothing out of line from what I remembered from the fan TL. But the highlight to me is the voices, especially Hanazawa as Alice. It's so good. How does she do it? A truth I am unworthy of knowing.
All in all, bodes well.
burn your dread you coward
EDIT: I'm being forced to emphasize that the below is a matter of personal opinion, and not representative of JP speakers in the community at large, if anyone were to think that. Therefore, here's a brief TLDR on what I actually think about this release:
At the end of the day, I think there are two major questions to ask about this TL:
1) Does it at a very high level capture the feeling and tone of the JP text and serve as an actual equivalent?
No, I wouldn't say it does to that high a degree, but it doesn't fall entirely flat in that regard either, it just mainly has some issues with being a bit too concise and dropping a lot of flowery language.
2) But would I be upset or disappointed in any form about the fact that most people will read this, including my friends who were the original reason I joined the HM project?
No, I won't, even though I'll be a bit sad they can't "experience nasu's prose" (whatever that means in a translation) but most everything else will be at a good enough level that I won't consider them having missed out on much that you can really only get if you do know JP.
Or, to be even more brief:
I absolutely endorse this release, but not over the future HM patch release (as it stands right now), once that's actually available.
That is my own, personal, take on this demo, and is in no way representative of what others might think in this community or outside.
---
Alright, I read it, so here are my thoughts I guess:
All in all, I'd say the translation is good, both in a technical sense (for the most part) and in a literary sense. That is to say, the text flows well (usually) and is written to a mostly professional standard. There are a few hiccups here and there, which I feel mostly stems from an attempt to adhere to JP line count (which is probably a strict requirement, just like in a fan patch almost). Stuff like typos or missed words occurred a handful of times but not enough that it really detracted from reading, and I'm sure they'll fix it later (it's a modern game after all, not a book, so they can continuously fix such issues). At the same time, it seems to mostly follow fandom accepted terms, or more correctly, it seems to follow FGO NA terminology (good thing there isn't really somewhere they can stick their void fuckup here, at least), since in the fight scene they do drop "Mystics". Still, that means they stick to most terms people are familiar with, which is good (they even do classic TM translation Capitalization for good measure).
Now, it does have some weird things, or things that stood out to me, but that might not matter as much at the end of the day. The biggest thing to me is the fact that they write Soujuurou's name as "Soujyuro" which I guess isn't too far off with americanized phonetics but damn does it look bad. Other things that I saw at all was a line where Aoko goes "Sardines... Sardines, huh... I don't like sardine pie... Not that I've ever had it." which is kinda random, but in JP it's actually a reference (it's almost a direct quote, actually) to Kiki's Delivery Service, where a character says "Grandma sent another of her crummy herring pies! [...] I hate Grandma's stupid pies."
Anyway, that's a reference lost, no biggie. The other thing that stuck out to me is a scene that's describing Alice as delicate and cute, and it says "If he could see her in this moment, Alice's father would have to admit that her name suited her perfectly", which also doesn't really make sense in English (the name Alice suits her? what does that even mean?). In JP, Alice's name is written as 有珠, where the 珠 can mean pearl or jewel etc., so really what the wordplay here is trying to do is to say that in this moment she's as precious as a gem, or something to that effect.
Still, not being able to catch all references like this or joke-wordplays being left out etc isn't a great deal to me at least, in the sense that I don't think it detracts a lot from the quality of the text, even if it's obvious the TL could be better. Doing a quick side-by-side between JP, the demo TL, and our fan TL (which I obviously can't just share here because it's HM content, not mine alone), my verdict is that the OTL reads well, has good flow (most of the time), but is maybe too concise a lot of the time, omitting words or clauses that it feels it doesn't "need" I supposed, but in general gets everything across more than well enough and is probably far above the standard for what I feel like official TM locs usually get.
Also voices are good, and HD is good (but remote playing from a ps4 in 540p is not good).
(Funniest thing is actually that when Aoko talks about tea she mentions Fortnum and Mason, which you can even hear in the voiceline, but I have to assume they couldn't get some trademark rights or something for this, because they just write "expensive british tea" in the TL, which would otherwise just be a really lazy change.)
Last edited by fumei; November 4th, 2022 at 12:23 PM. Reason: im being reverse-censored
Originally Posted by Mcjon01
As someone who didn't know the wordplay with the kanji in Alice's name, I just assumed that the line about her name suiting her meant that she was as cute as Alice from Alice in Wonderland.
I guess that also works, yeah.
Even knowing the kanji the for Alice, that would still have been my first thought.
you mean Japanese Chinese and AMERICAN cuz it seems to use Farenheit and Feet
On Amazon Mahoyo is today's number 4 best seller on Switch, and number 6 on PS4. Number 10 in video games overall. These lists also include like, gift cards and controllers and stuff.
This is genuinely surprising to me. Like, it's cool, but I didn't expect that at all.
same thing happened to Tsuki:re
considering this game has lower rate (CERO C) who knows Mahoyo could sell more.
Now that's what I call soft power.
orange girl
what a weird coincidence Touko voiced by person named Aoki which has 'Blue' in the name.
The ruri (lapis-lazuli) part is technically also blue. Aoki Ruriko is overall a less low-effort version of what the name Aozaki Aoko was trying to be.
That makes sense for the JP Amazon but it's actually the US Amazon where it's selling so high, that's why it was so surprising to me.
probably because Mahoyo is available in English.
Contemplating picking up a second hand switch just for this.
From what I've heard the main thing to go on the things are the joycon?
BEHOLD! THE SIG OF GOLDEN TRUTH! Pillaged from McJon, Tsukikan et al.
As in, what breaks first? Yeah, but Nintendo's mail-in service works.
In addition to what Raff said, the thing that usually breaks with joycons is that joysticks drift, which isn't really an issue with a VN I guess, and I'd say for most other games you'd probably want to have a pro controller to play with anyway (which is basically an actual normal controller, as opposed to two plastic cubes you swing around).
Good. Maybe if it does well we'll get Tsukihime and other stuff. Though I wonder how Re would actually do when there is a patch out already.
Nowadays, probably better than you're expecting. The average internet user is not as tech-savy as they used to be, because the internet has expanded to be used by all kinds of people instead of just nerds on computers. And not everyone will be willing to learn how to use an emulator or mod their console, and then grab a custom update file to apply to a rom. Sure, to you and me it might not seem like much of a hassle, I'd think that not to be the case for most people.
Convenience goes a long way.
burn your dread you coward
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