Anonymous asked:

Would you say Alice is boring to translate so far?

Not really. It has a semi-interesting universe, which, in typical Lilith fashion, they build up but don't explore enough. Most of the scenes range from fine to good.

Anonymous asked:

any thoughts about VISA and other credit card companies blocking many japanese adult sites from using its services?

Not really, at this point. I think the topic has been talked about enough. I'm obviously against it, but if it gets taken too far, then there is a small chance that it will drive people to find an alternative means of payment and make it viable.

Anonymous asked:

Do you think eroge will be more normalized in the future?

I kind of hope not. A lot of the things that used to be niche or alternative have become more mainstream now, and the result is always those things being ruined. Just look at VNs in general, which in the West used to appeal solely to weebs and their sensibilities, but then got adopted by talentless hipsters.

Anonymous asked:

Do you ever miss using old anime forums? They were cringe, but I always liked the aspect of being able to carry on a conversation without an algorithm constantly trying to kill any thread that's over a day old.

Also wanna give a shoutout to the sakurahana forum, gone but not forgotten

I never did use those, unless Hongfire qualifies. But even then, I was using it for its eroge discussion and mod repositories, and I don't think I ever went into the anime section.

Anonymous asked:

Would you be willing to translate the ExS-TIA series?

Possibly, although I wouldn't be shocked if it were officially picked up by someone before I could get to it.

Anonymous asked:

What was that about the "Diot" thing you mentioned in your RPGX update post? I haven't played much of Taimanin games, so I don't know what that is, just you calling it "a genius bit of localization" made me really curious.

In RPGX, Fuuma ninja have eye-related powers. The shonen protagonist doesn't, because one of his eyes is sealed shut. His clan insult him by calling him 目抜け, which basically means "missing an eye", but is also a pun based on 間抜け, meaning idiot. So the localizers decided to translate this as Diot, which is idiot with only one I.

I praised it because the stars really have to align, to have a word in a completely different language which perfectly conveys the double meaning of a pun. Personally, if it were up to me, I would probably have approached it so literally that I missed the pun entirely. For comparison, see the Asagi and Sakura scene I did for RPGX, where "sexual techniques" was used as a homophone for "justice", and the closest I could think of was "slut-stice".

Anonymous asked:

Why some characters like sakura and asagi doesn't have names written with kanji

While others like murasaki (yatsu) have.

Thank for all your heroic work.

I think it's just a matter of style. Murasaki has also been spelled with katakana very occasionally, such as in the title of her own game.

Anonymous asked:

Why? Why are you translating VNs and now on top of that, RPGX?

I mean, you said it yourself multiple times, you don't have a lot of free time. Neither do I, and I spend the free time I have doing things I like to do and just relax, like watching TV or playing games. But you just impose more work to yourself! And you don't even like some of the content you are translating and are just doing it for us peasants who don't read Japanese.

Is it because you just love translating things so much? You want to learn Japanese more and that's a good way to learn? You don't have any other hobby? You're just that nice of a person? You have hidden subliminal messages into your work and that's how you will ultimately take control of the world?

I am genuinely curious.

I think I just got to the point where I had reorganized my life so much around translating that there's nothing else to do. If you don't focus on the work, it doesn't get done. So, you hold back on your other activities more and more and more, and eventually, they're just not things you do anymore.

Also, RPGX shouldn't be too much of a problem. It's just a side thing, so that I can have more frequent releases. I can drop it if it gets in the way too much. I also feel a mild obligation to do something about it, as I spent years denying requests for scenes on the basis that there would be a localization someday.

RPGX Situation Update

PLEASE DO NOT LINK TO THIS BLOG POST. INSTEAD USE THE RENTRY LINK PROVIDED AT THE BOTTOM. THANK YOU.

So it's finally happened: Global RPGX is dead. Dibs on its stuff. It might come back in the form of scenes dumped into something else, like that stupid shovelware matching game, but I'm not anticipating anything. So, failing some kind of content recycling, that leaves it up to someone else to fill the void. I deeply wish I weren't retarded enough to be that guy, but here we are.

Anyway, I think I've just about worked out how I'm going to handle the situation. Here's my current line of thinking:

Project Management

First of all, I don't want to simply switch over to it and ignore the VNs that have been requested. But, I also know that there's a large amount of gacha content that people have been waiting a long time for. My plan is to try and juggle between VNs and gacha. Essentially, I'm going to block off RPGX content into "seasons" (1/4 of a year), and treat a number of seasons as if they were, themselves, one big VN translation project. When that's done, I'll switch to another VN, and then back to RPGX afterwards, and so on.

While I'm doing VNs (like right now), I'll still work on some gacha content, but it will come out less often than when I'm focusing on it. I'll be trying to work according to a ratio of lines—say, maybe 1 RPGX line for every 3 VN lines. I don't know for sure what proportion will make sense to do yet, but VNs will still be the top priority. These releases will just keep the blog a little more active.

Content Selection

To reiterate the above, I want to avoid making people wait years and years for the content they've already been waiting for. To some extent, this is governed by the story, as some scenes require that the narrative progress to a certain point for context. A few, like the Asagi bride scene, actually tie directly into an event's story.

I plan to cover both story and scenes, on an event-by-event basis. Events and chapters will be translated in chronological order, but I will prioritize heavily-requested future scenes where applicable. (See Voting for the full details.) So I'll be trying to move the story along, but other scenes can be fast tracked, in the same way that the official localizers fast tracked certain other characters, like Shikanosuke or the Shiranui beach scene.

That said, I cannot commit to keeping the established pace of one event every two weeks. I'm very busy (especially at the moment), and I don't have time to do everything. This means that some content will have to be skipped, although ideally I don't intend to leave it undone forever. Skipped content can be requested, just like future content.

Distribution

Hearing about the recent situation with Vimm's Lair (which was subject to mass-takedowns after too many people publicized it) made me realize something important: I do not want to be the guy who draws too much attention to something and ruins it for everyone. As such, I am going to have my own custom viewer, configured to contain only the scenes and stories that have been translated. The translation files should still work if copied on their own, but anyone using them will also want to take note of the custom files that I've either added or modified. Basically, if you already have one, just reapply scenes.js, sceneData.js and storyData.js over my versions. I think it should be fine.

Patches will not be distributed here, but I will probably link to updates when they arrive.

Style

This section is long and boring, so if you don't care, skip it. You're missing nothing.

I'm planning to meet the official localization style halfway, minus the parts of it that I really can't stand. For instance, I don't remember if Hestia ever comes back, but if she does, I am not going to have her say stupid shit like "I'm gonner wrassle up sum varmints, yeeee-haaawww!!!" or whatever. Even with me trying to play up to the localizers' sensibilities instead of my own, I can't bring myself to deviate from the script that badly.

In spite of Lilith's recent canonization of it in merchandise, I'm not keeping "Devildom"; it's going to be Demon World or Hell (so that you can still have Hell Knights, and so forth). Unfortunately, I'm forced to keep Diot, because although it sounds really stupid, it's actually a genius bit of localization. I certainly would never have thought of it, and I can't come up with anything better to replace it, so we're stuck with it.

I usually transliterate terms (mazoku instead of demon, etc.), in an attempt to avoid some of the problems that translation causes. If mazoku are demons, then how do you differentiate between demons, in the sense of fantasy creatures, and demons, in the sense of actual demons? If you translate inma as incubus or succubus, what happens when you have a situation like in Onmyou Kishi Towako, where Byron is an inma from the Incubus tribe? It's not dissimilar to removing honourifics, and then later discovering that you have to translate a line where somebody gets chastised for leaving -san off a name.

In this case, the official translation is very inconsistent about everything (Arts or Jutsu? Ki or qi or energy?), so I'm going to be using that as an excuse to do whatever I want, basically. I do know that transliteration will be important sometimes. Offhand, I remember that one semantic plot point of Torajiro's first appearance is that Kyoudai has an alternate reading. So on that basis, I think most common terms will get localized, but forms of address will be transliterated. In case this gets too obnoxious for the casual user, I might start to include a simple glossary file to explain these things. It would sure help if the viewer did hyperlinks.

Also, be forewarned, updating the translations through patches will probably cause issues of inconsistency when it comes to translated terms. If I change my mind on how to handle something, it could mean that a term completely changes between one patch and another.

I'm still going to just transliterate sound effects, but the viewer gives me the option to italicize them, which should hopefully make dialogue easier to read at times. Also, as with Taimaseiko Alice, I've added some custom sound files, which have been sourced both from the Internet and from TA0.

Finally, character names are mostly going to match whatever official Lilith transliterations I can find, as opposed to other official localizations. For example, Mercy instead of Merci or Mershey. (There will be exceptions, like Kurakuru.) Otherwise, I'm going to have to blindly defer to the Taimanin wiki. If I end up doing this long-term, I am going to need copies of the Character Visual Books pretty badly. If you've got any of them, then for God's sake, tell me what all the official spellings are.

Pop Culture

I am very much not hip with the kids, let alone the Japanese kids. As such, I may skip over certain events, particularly ones which involve other properties that I'm not familiar with—for example, the Black Lagoon crossover or the April Fools Kimetsu no Yaiba parody. I probably won't skip the Super Sonico event, because I don't remember it needing any extra context, and also the public deserves to see how stupid it is.

Just from doing a couple preliminary test translations, I've already determined that Sonoda Masaki likes putting in references to 1960s manga series. That's the kind of stuff that RPGX is full of, and I will get it wrong at times, because it will go right over my head.

Voting

Since we'll be prioritizing popular content, there will be a voting system to determine which scenes get translated first. Voting will be handled through Google Forms; anything else will be considered merely a request.

Here's how it works:

1. For every event, there are typically four scenes (R, HR, SR, Event SR). I will translate an event, plus one scene. Voting will determine which of the four event-related scenes gets picked.
2. There will also be an option for "Other". If this option wins, then I will pick, at my own discretion, one of the more highly-requested characters or scenes. This may include scenes from the future as long as they do not require any additional context, or might include scenes that were passed over from previous events. During the voting process, voters will have the option to make requests for one specific character or scene, which will be factored into the decision making.
3. "Other" will be the default winner for story chapters, as they do not typically come with scenes.
4. For reasons of context, a character's scenes must be translated in order of release. If there is an event scene for a character whose previous scene has not been completed, that previous scene will be the candidate to vote for, rather than the one appropriate for the event. Also, scenes which require significant story context will probably not be done until that point in the story is reached. (For example, no Future Yukikaze until the future universe is introduced as a concept.)

With all that said, I am still not going to officially commit to going far into the game. We'll see how it goes. If it proves to be too much work for too little benefit, I may reduce the workload or drop it altogether.

Here is the link for this project. I will post here when there are updates to it. Also, you do not need to download the base viewer that I provide if you have one of your own, but patches will overwrite certain essential files. You'll have to reapply the latest Japanese patch to fix this.

Rentry

Anonymous asked:

Do we have enough hentai in the world?

We should by this point. I mean, if millions of images and videos isn't enough, you have a stronger libido than I do.

Rattanmancocksleve asked:

So you dont read manga... and played very few visual novels

So why did you learn japanese?

Also +1 to seigin no henshin heroin pretty please

I originally just wanted to know when subtitles were lying to me. I did intend to get into anime and VNs more, but I simply never got around to it.

Anonymous asked:

Would you be willing to try to translate the gyacushuu series?

Possibly.

Anonymous asked:

A while back you wanted to add nipple bulges to some RPGX characters that don't have them. Can you please tell me how to do it? I want to try doing it myself.

Basically, you just get any old instance of Stable Diffusion (local, web-hosted, Novel AI fork), then inpaint the appropriate spots on the breasts. In theory, it should help to add things like the artist's name in the prompt. You have to explain to the computer exactly what you want, but if you're very selective in what parts you inpaint, you can get it to take cues from everything around it—hence the appropriately shiny texture of the nipple bulges I got. For faster results, either find a higher-quality image or use AI to enlarge a section, and only feed the computer a close-up shot.

Remember to take into account the shape of the breasts, which would normally be affected by gravity instead of being perfectly round, and might therefore need more inpainting around the edges. This is me remembering vs. not remembering that:

Personally, I couldn't get the AI to output anything other than way too subtle or way too explicit. I like the final version on the left, but the fact that you can clearly tell the nipple shape makes it look like she's aroused, whereas the whole thing is meant to be so casual that the characters don't even think about it.

My logic for why this makes sense is that: (a) in some scenes, characters like Hebiko are shown to have nipple bulges that their standing CGs (which are shared with the SFW RPG version) can't have; and (b) in the Zero Sakura and Asagi scene, Sakura has her Sakura Lady outfit straight out of TA0, complete with see-through nipples, and supposedly, in-universe, she has only changed her colour scheme and put on a mask. So my interpretation of this is that the nipple bulges are still there, displayed as casually as ever, but we, the player, can't see them because of the SFW version's assets. (As further proof, there are certain sprites from the VNs where they accidentally overlooked nipples, Asuka's cameltoe, etc.)

I think I saw that someone had trained a Taimanin suit-specific LORA or checkpoint or whatever the terminology is, so try and look into that if you want. If you can get good results that are anything like the way that nipple bulges look in TA0, I may put them in future releases as an optional extra. Just don't bother with default Shikanosuke, or CGs that are straight out of the VNs, because I've got them covered already. Also keep in mind that it only really makes any sense for certain characters, who happen to have that kind of material over exactly that spot.

P.S. I'm really glad you brought this up, because I had just finished zipping an English-only viewer, and it reminded me that I still had that old Hebiko in there as a test image, overwriting h_t002e. If I hadn't removed it, she would get spontaneously aroused every time something angers her.

Anonymous asked:

What do you think of agent rei and fuuko? I really liked the pregnancy meter mechanic and the entire plot point of being forced to choose what would happen to rei/fuuko. The afterstory was also surprisingly well thought out. I think it's kind of a shame that lilith seems to have completely dropped these mechanics/story points.

I haven't played that one, so I can't really comment. Arguably the best and worst thing that happened to Lilith was finding their go-to story template, and cranking out content based on it. In the early days, they were trying a number of gimmicks, like basic puzzles, or scenes the player can direct (IZM 02, Murasaki, etc.). They largely stopped doing this stuff once their format was set in stone. Even basic things about the narrative were less predictable: If they did TA1 now, Asagi would be TA0 age, and obviously a pure virgin who had never even thought about masturbating before.