Scraft161

it’s cool that fans are preserving this stuff

Video game preservation is always a plus and being able to read a 20 year old VN (on linux natively) is something that Type Moon would probably never concern themselves about. Granted their main source of income today is definitely Fate/Grand Order (it's literally what made the remake possible in terms of funding) so it's hard to imagine they'd go strike down stuff like this where they'd never see money from anyways, Type Moon has also been very lax when it comes to derivative works (I probably don't need to mention that with all the fate spin-offs and doujins floating around).

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.

Mahoyo is the indirect prequel to that (get used to not having any direct sequels in the nasuverse) it's a really good introduction to the series' magic system and gives you a good introduction to all the concepts Kara no Kyoukai is built on, it's a lot slower than the Kara no Kyoukai movies and focuses a lot more on the slice of life aspects of being a magus; yet doesn't pull any punches when there's action, the battles are really diverse showcasing quite a bit of magecraft which is nicely accented by all the animations in this VN.

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

not that I know of; although I have a couple youtube channels that cover anime news really well and while they do use sources like MAL; they're often more accurate that what I've seen from ANN.
Otaku Spirit (Invidious: yewtu.be), some of the things he says can be a little confusing at times; but it's pretty solid in general.
Espiritu (Invidious: yewtu.be), also debunks a lot of rumors going around alongside the general anime news.
For me that's more than enough as I don't really need to keep up with everything going on in the anime sphere.

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).

that's already way further than I am, I want to start going about it seriously and actually get things done; but every time I start my free time gets eaten up by something else and I end up having to put it off.

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.

everybody at their on pace; if I would seriously start immersing myself I bet I could form a pretty decent understanding of Japanese in no time (I went from bare knowing a couple english words to being able to speak in ~4 months; but that was after hours and hours every day watching youtube content in english and having luck in the fact that both english and my native language are germanic languages so they share quite a lot of similarities)

I made a lot of good progress when I committed every day from 2019 to the end of 2020, and I want to do that again!

I'm in the same boat with you, I would kill to be able to spend time like that again; but as it stands now I simply don't and I don't know if I'm going to be able to do a sprint like that ever again.

I never used to be much of a reader, but things changed when I started getting into isekai web novels

Any chance you've read Mushoku Tensei? I remember devouring that like nothing else once season 1 of the anime ended because the story was that good, managed to read everything starting from volume 1 in 6 months; I never expected to be that much of a reader as I could barely finish any book before but with this I just went through them at incredible pace.

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]).

I loved the first half of season 1, anything past that was riding on the hype train for me, season 2 felt like shit when it came out so I dropped it a few episodes in.

The whole redemption arc was great and I lived it, sad it decided to keep it so short as it was the highlight for many.

That said, Mushoku Tensei does the whole redemption arc amazingly as you see Rudeus grow throughout the series and it's second season is a much appreciated slow burn where we get a good idea of his mental state while things are moving off screen.

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.

Yeah, it probably won’t even be DRM’d Let's hope so; and if it is then it'd be steam's DRM at the worst. That said I don't think the engine (which looked like kirikiri to me) supports much in terms of DRM checks after install.

I don’t see myself doing any of that myself for me it's just a curiosity of how things are put together (doubly so for this one because of it's many animations) and also as a way to have assets for emotes and such.

Sounds like it’s going to be a good release then! It’s interesting that Aniplex appears to be the localizer. I'm not entirely sure about aniplex though as I remember reading they were involved but I can't recall where, the translation is pretty good though and makes use of existing terminology but I do have a couple minor gripes with it (mainly the fact that the english version uses imperial units with no way to switch it to metric, granted I have sort of gotten familiar with them; but it'd be nice to have that option).

Ow hi, didn't expect you to show up.

Happy to see it getting a steam release. I played the game through emulation as i didn't want to hook the switch up to my desk and handheld doesn't force a good pose (and we don't talk about tabletop on first gen).

A native desktop release also makes it a lot easier to tamper with the game files (granted I could try and get the 2012 release but that hasn't been translated).
I was sort of afraid they wouldn't port the HD version to PC, but it's good type moon (and I think aniplex) are going through with it.

This is being done by the studio that did S4 of high school DxD and interspecies reviewers which were pretty solid in my book so I have hopes for this one, doubly so since I've been looking to get into the series for a bit now

Then it might be one of those scripts

Pretty sure only Rudeus and Julie spoke beast god in that room, there's a lot of context the anime skips and it has been a good sec since I read the ln but I do remember it being that way

Discord's electron still hasn't received the patch for spectre/meltdown mitigation in the browser, I doubt they will ever have to deal with manifest V3 or WEI.

Eternity sounds good to me, and there's even a fun reference in it for those who play antimatter dimensions