VN Others Completed Renai X Royale - Love's a Battle [Final] [ASa Project]

[PeteHanson]

The literal backbone of the profession is how much you're getting paid.

Btw you guys go ahead and do your thing, it's not uninteresting to read.
But I just wanted to take this one out. Because I do not agree at all with it. It should always be the quality of the work you do which is the standard. And while I can see your pov here, which seems to take a "you get what you pay for" stance. I have to say I do think having the highest standard and professionalism to your work like Harbin seems to think sounds like the far better way of putting out a decent product.

That this is not being the case is pretty damn obvious with recent translations, however. And I'm not talking about NN alone here...

 

[zwere]

Phenomenal work Let me guess this is another case of ship it now and patch it later? Honestly, you would think a VN consisting only of text do not need patches, but recent years proofed that rule of thumb to be "outdated". -.-

I'd assume they don't show up in the backlog of the japanese version either, since instead of text boxes its just text on an image. They're not meant to show up in the backlog.

 

[PeteHanson]

The number of instances tells you nothing, except for the fact that in the script that one character is addressed as ''Inkya'' 115 times total.

Inkya doesn't even mean loner, anyone who isn't part of the ''cool kids club'' would be considered inkya, whereas loner is specifically bocchi, a subset of inkya.

If you don't mind, would you give some other examples for how this word could be translated? I tried the basic way of putting the kanji into Google Translate, and what came back spelled as "shadow" so my assumption was it might depend entirely on the context and is not per se meant as a descriptor for a person alone?

But I don't think 115 instances is negligible, either. vndb currently has the game sitting at around 30 hours playtime. How many repetitions of this single word would have to be in the og script to justify that? I'm not even saying the change of that to "incel" is the biggest problem. It sure as hell the most obvious one, but I can hardly imagine the script didn't give them leeway to at least have half of these 115 instances replaced with something similar every so often? It's all around making this translation look terribly unprofessional.

 

[PeteHanson]

I'd assume they don't show up in the backlog of the japanese version either, since instead of text boxes its just text on an image. They're not meant to show up in the backlog.

Doesn't this still point to image editing mistakes, though? The guys doing these have to had known how they would look in game, or is this not how they work? One would hope somebody in the QA team would at least look at these screens once in the final build and tell someone else to fix these right before the product people are supposed to pay for gets put out.

 

[zwere]

If you don't mind, would you give some other examples for how this word could be translated? I tried the basic way of putting the kanji into Google Translate, and what came back spelled as "shadow" so my assumption was it might depend entirely on the context and is not per se meant as a descriptor for a person alone?

But I don't think 115 instances is negligible, either. vndb currently has the game sitting at around 30 hours playtime. How many repetitions of this single word would have to be in the og script to justify that? I'm not even saying the change of that to "incel" is the biggest problem. It sure as hell the most obvious one, but I can hardly imagine the srcipt didn't give them leeway to at least have half of these 115 instances replaced with something similar every so often? It's all around making this translation look terribly unprofessional.

Inkya comes from the japanese word for shadow that means shadow as in darkness/gloom, and kya is a shorthand for character. So basically it describes a person from the lower social circle in school. The opposite would be Youkya, the first part comes from the word for sun/sunglight and describes someone who'd be considered popular.
See, the thing is, both of those words describe people with social circles. Something a loner doesn't belong to, they're a separate category (bocchi) so I don't see it as a proper translation choice.

As far as an example for how to translate it, it gets tricky because they use that word as a nickname for the character so it has to be a word that can work as a nickname. A safe or neutral choice would be calling him Gloom, Gloomy or something like that but the translation already uses gloomy to describe him so they went with something more fitting for his other defining characteristic which is him being chick repellent. It also kinda barely sounds like Inkya, though I'd be speculating by saying they factored that in. So yeah, something related to being gloomy, drab would work. Maybe you could call him emo? He kinda looks like an emo.

 

[Harbin238]

I just take issue with comparing the translation choices made for a world famous novel in comparison to a porn game with lots of goofy writing in it.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt because I still think you might be misunderstanding me, but I'm telling you I literally only used that example because it's the most elementary case study you could get in terms of fundamental qualities in a translation. And I never said anything about literal translations or telling you that those are the only way of translating anything.

As a translator, you would really have to consciously break those fundamentals on purpose if you were to get the same results NN did in this title. I'm not arguing about the comparisons between a classic and a porn game, I'm arguing the fundamentals of actually translating things professionally. There's nothing pretentious about that. Do you understand?

Your own qualms about this VN's translation stem from the very thing I've been pointing out to begin with.

I have to say I do think having the highest standard and professionalism to your work like Harbin seems to think sounds like the far better way of putting out a decent product.

Thank you! Jesus, I appreciate it. And yeah NN's work really wasn't like this as you've mentioned and it just makes me feel bad thinking that this might be the trajectory they're taking. Hell, I'd be happy if they simply maintained the standards they started with. At least then you'd have a sense of reliability.

 

[PeteHanson]

Btw, i'm going to break this off a bit, but still related to Neko Nyan. Does anybody know or has played Hello Lady Complete Edition? (base game and FD bundled together) That is currently the single NN product I do want to play, but it's also pretty recently done by them, so after all of this i'm more hesitant than I would be if I never saw this going down.

 

[zwere]

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt because I still think you might be misunderstanding me, but I'm telling you I literally only used that example because it's the most elementary case study you could get in terms of fundamental qualities in a translation. And I never said anything about literal translations or telling you that those are the only way of translating anything.

As a translator, you would really have to consciously break those fundamentals on purpose if you were to get the same results NN did in this title. I'm not arguing about the comparisons between a classic and a porn game, I'm arguing the fundamentals of actually translating things professionally. There's nothing pretentious about that. Do you understand?

Your own qualms about this VN's translation stem from the very thing I've been pointing out to begin with.

Maybe I got stunlocked by the example you gave. Usually when people give such stark examples its just to bash on the aforementioned work while comparing it to something in a completely different league of its own and I take issue with that. I assumed you wanted a literal translation based on the whole self insert argument and I was trying to point out that the original writing is very stupid when it comes to the jokes, so whether the translator borrowed their slang from twitter or being american or wherever it doesn't really matter when the original humor is so lowbrow it hurts.

If I had to harp on the translation it'd be from the perspective of incosistency which you'd probably agree with. Certain choices feel like they've been made by different people in terms of what was localized and what wasn't. As far as agendas go, I don't think there's anything deep going on here. From what I've read so far there isn't anything that egregious. It can just be chalked up to Nekonyan not running a tight enough ship to ensure maximum quality but you can levy the same criticism at all official localizers. I haven't read it yet but AFAIK Sekai Project's last release Amatsusumi didn't even get edited.

 

[zwere]

Btw, i'm going to break this off a bit, but still related to Neko Nyan. Does anybody know or has played Hello Lady Complete Edition? (base game and FD bundled together) That is currently the single NN product I do want to play, but it's also pretty recently done by them, so after all of this i'm more hesitant than I would be if I never saw this going down.

I read all of the base game around a week after it came out and off the top my only real complaint with the translation was that characters had their names in reversed order (western name order) which made it a bit of a headache to read. The translation also omits honorifics. I personally don't care about that nowadays but those two things are probably the main things that might annoy you depending on your preferences. Also the ending of the main heroine route gets a lot of flak, just to warn you.

 

[PeteHanson]

I read Comyu, the devs previous work, which we do have in english at the beginning of the year. I kinda expect them to do some leaps in logic in favor of plot... But I still hope "Hello Lady" is better than Comyu was... granted, not talking about translation now but the quality of the writing itself. I still think this "take philosophical ideas and ideals for each character in the story and pit them against each other" concept was the most well executed in Muramasa, but it's still pretty cool of an idea, so I get drawn to works which try it again and again.

The omission of honorifics and swapping of names is a gripe of mine I'm not sure about if I'm beyond caring with or if I still should get angry at, thanks for letting me know at least.

 

[Harbin238]

Maybe I got stunlocked by the example you gave.

I was thinking the same thing so I'm glad we're on the same page and yeah, I get how it might have sounded like. Apologies if I insinuated you liked garbage, that's not really how I felt.

Either way, I'm sure I let my own biases show since my industry is more on the technical side and I doubt anyone would let things like this pass through our floor, but I really hope NN runs things tighter as you've said.

Don't get me wrong, I totally understand that it doesn't have to be insanely provocative or even academic in approach and that's not what I actually expect; it's really just that consistency in quality and approach I have issue with and those things always lead to more problems down the line. Especially if you've got more than a handful of translators with their own styles. That's the stuff that's always been leaking into the script even in past titles.

 

[Casttyler08881]

hello I ve been playing the game and at common route 7 my load file cannot be opened and the game hangs,
the system says .ksd cipherg mode not working or something
what do I do

 

[kidlat020]

hello I ve been playing the game and at common route 7 my load file cannot be opened and the game hangs,
the system says .ksd cipherg mode not working or something
what do I do

failing hard disk. some file in the game folder got corrupted (and usually cannot be deleted until you use chkdsk)

just got myself past the opening and I gotta agree with vndb reviewers of this game. this game can't be consistent with the mc. is he a chad or a virgin? they rightly identified the problem and that is the characters are just going along with whatever the setting is. destroying the characters in the process. Shione is probably the only consistent one so far. I really want to like the game. maybe i should drop it.

edit: as for the incel thing, you do realize that this still means involuntary celibate right? you're not an incel if you have 100 bucks to pay for a hooker. I'm sorry. you are choosing to be celibate if you have 100 bucks and not get a hooker. you are a volcel at that point. I have no idea how the term became so bastardized like this and honestly I don't wanna know.

 

[Harbin238]

.ksd

Did you use the save earlier in this thread to unlock the the gallery? That messed up my entire game folder and wouldn't let me load or save so I had to restore the original .ksd file.

 

[PeteHanson]

hello I ve been playing the game and at common route 7 my load file cannot be opened and the game hangs,
the system says .ksd cipherg mode not working or something
what do I do

PC gaming and modding told me one very useful lesson. Always, always... back up your file in the folder, or vanilla files. I, for one, change the files into literally being named ".vanilla" but you can do whatever suits your fancy, most of the time the only thing windows cares about is the file extension itself anyway. In any case, if you still have the downloaded archive go and look if there was the same file in that as well, otherwise delete the current one and restart the game for it to create a new one.

 

[zwere]

I'm curious about one thing. Looking at the uncensored cg gallery for this game, there's an H-scene with Ai. Is that part of the imouto route?

 

[weirddude94]

Weird game. Best girl is the one where you just say fuck it and hang out with the girl you spent no time with. Everyone else is either way too pushy, toxic, selfish, etc. Not to mention the MC doesn't have any chemistry with any of the main girls and all they do is argue about the same things over and over.

Noticed the comments so far, is this because of the original writing or the quirky haha translator?

 

[Bucketbot89]

Anybody know how to get the sex scene with the redhead? Do you have to be on the blonde's route?

 

[wyldstrykr]

cutoff is one thing but untranslated teXt?

 

[zwere]

cutoff is one thing but untranslated teXt?

That untranslated text doesn't show up for everyone. I've heard it might have to do with using old savefiles or something.