The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

[guigui]

Thanks for the infos steven.
Maybe what you should tell Sugina Miki is that you are willing to translate his games in English, how about that ?

[Steven]

lol I don't think so. These games are written in very specific styles that are literally impossible to translate while maintaining the same nuance that is there in Japanese, and that's before you get into things like that one time in Flowers where Ichigo is like "lol you said 何回 and 難解 in the same sentence" or whatever it was, and figuring out what to do for stuff like that is always awkward. You can definitely translate these games, and they did, but a lot of it will be lost simply because there are no non-Japanese equivalents to many things.

Despite what one might expect, the Flowers scripts are way, WAY harder than the Kara no Shoujo scripts. Kara no Shoujo is actually very straightforward and quite easy as long as you know some pretty basic police/crime/etc. vocabulary and remember that the protagonist's 己 is supposed to be read as おれ and not おのれ (and then once you're done with all of them you have to revert to having your brain default to thinking of 己 as おのれ again instead of おれ), but Flowers can be mentally exhausting because like every other sentence has some obscure or unusual kanji that nobody uses. I've heard that even Japanese people sometimes have difficulty reading the Flowers scripts. It's not the hardest I've played, though. That would be Akai Ito.

[cj iwakura]

428 might be getting a sequel(threequel?), finally, though the details make me sad:

https://www.gematsu.com/2025/04/jiro-is ... nture-game

In a message, Ishii said that 428: Shibuya Scramble was created as a successor to the live-action adventure game Machi: Unmei no Kousaten, with the goal of surpassing it. He expected that a game would eventually come along to surpass 428: Shibuya Scramble as well. But over 20 years later, no such title has emerged. At one point, Ishii approached various game companies about a follow-up project, but those discussions fell apart, as many were more concerned with marketing and business than the core of the project. For a time, he even distanced himself from such projects. Ultimately, Ishii and his team decided to develop the new title independently.

Did 428 really do that poorly? That's a crying shame if so, the localization was phenomenal, and it's an all-timer for me.

[Steven]

Well, today is the 20th anniversary of the release of Cartagra, so I finally ordered the remake from Amazon, as Sugina-sensei implied the other day that they weren't going to make any more copies of it and I don't want it to become unobtainable. It will be here on Wednesday, which is great because I don't have work then. Impressions when I am done, I guess, but I'm expecting the typical Innocent Grey gorefest where everyone gets brutally tortured to death.