First Impressions: Da Capo and MangaGamer

Well, that didn’t last long.

Less than 24 hours into my period of cutting back on anime expenditures, I managed to spend €49.95 on a single visual novel. It’s a good one, though. At least, it had better be for £44.

For those of you not in the know (and feel free to skip this paragraph if you are), visual novels are like choose-your-own-adventure books, only played on a computer (or a games console, or occasionally a mobile phone) and with illustrations, music and voice acting. Many Japanese visual novels feature a large cast of girls that are nicer and more friendly towards the male lead character than real girls would be to the player, so titles within this popular sub-section of the visual novel market became known as dating simulations, or simply just “dating sim” (or bishōjo game/gal-game in Japan). A shocking amount of these dating sims, in fact, contain pornographic content—nothing that I’d ever be interested in or engage in, you understand. *shifts eyes, clears throat* If a visual novel becomes popular enough, it’ll often get turned into an anime series—popular examples include Air, Higurashi – When They Cry, Fate/stay night and Da Capo.

From the top… The opening video arrived in a noticeably compressed format; what you see here is the actual level of quality. The rest of the game's graphics don't suffer from this.

They had a bunch of visual novels on their website, featuring such memorable titles as “Which Girl Should I Choose”, “Shera, My Witch” and “Tasty Shafts”. (I don’t think I really want to know what the heck a tasty Shaft is.) It’s clear to see which audience they’re catering to. Me being me, I took the coward’s option and went for the most mainstream (and most expensive) title that they had available. Da Capo (the original version, not the “Plus Communication” edition or any of the enhanced re-releases) arrived in the form of a 799 megabyte zip file. I tried extracting and re-compressing with 7-Zip, but I got an archive of about 764 megabytes—only slightly too large to fit on a standard CD-R. Still, they could’ve presented it better. The zip file contained just the data files, the opening movie (played automatically upon launch) and a seemingly unrelated “BGI.exe” file that turned out to be the program executable. I had to create a new folder and everything; they didn’t even provide a readme file, let alone a fancy self-extractor.

Who are “they”, I do not hear you ask? Why, they are MangaGamer, a new startup dedicated to translating visual novels into English and releasing them for a fee. Unlike fan translations, they actually give you a copy of the game, pre-translated, so there aren’t any patches to apply and no messages telling us that we are all sons of bitches for not downloading a copy without the copyright holder’s consent.

“But wait,” I do not hear you interrupt. “These MangaGamer translations are professionally produced officially licensed products. Why are you comparing them to lowly fan translations?” Well, the reason is very simple. Now, I don’t claim to have played many visual novels, but the ones that I have experienced are all freely-downloadable fan-translated editions (although many of these were also officially licensed, but, again, that’s another post entirely). And from my first impressions of the English-language Da Capo, MangaGamer’s professional translations do not stand up to the quality of fan translations.

Don’t believe me? Let’s see.

First up: words like “niichan” and “sempai” are left untranslated. This, quite frankly, baffles me—why charge $63 if you’re going to leave bits of it untranslated?—but it’s apparently what the fans want, so I’ll blame the forum denizens instead. MangaGamer’s translation is not, however, exempt from the responsibilities of a major flaw in this department – they didn’t even use the correct terms.

Remember, kids, incest is illegal in some jurisdictions. Check your local public library for more information.

Example: At the beginning of the game, one of the girls refers to our hero as “onii-chan”, as is apparent from the voice acting (which, as with many Japanese games, was left untouched for the international release). MangaGamer’s script, on the other hand, reckons she’s saying “niisan” (as seen in the above image). I don’t have a copy of the Japanese script to hand (and I admit that I wouldn’t be able to understand it if I did), but assuming that the voice script echoes the Japanese text character-for-character, MangaGamer’s translators must’ve made some fundamental errors during the localisation.

At this point, I could go into a rant about how translations should not simply involve going through the script with a dictionary; how it’s about understanding the significance and subtleties behind the text, choosing the correct terminology and conveying the same feelings that a native speaker of the original’s language would feel, showing a master proficiency in both languages and cultures. But I won’t. Consider yourselves lucky.

I was also disappointed at the presence of spelling errors, which, in this day and age of spell-checkers, shouldn’t exist. However, I didn’t really notice any past the first couple of scenes. (At the time of writing, I’m about 20 minutes into the game.) Despite the inconsistent quality, I reckon I’ve had a better experience than early adopters of MangaGamer’s older releases. I am still disappointed that I was charged ¥6130 for what is, in my opinion, an incomplete translation, but I guess it could’ve been worse.

Let’s just hope that they were able to keep it up for the rest of the game.

Thanks to encubed for continuing to be a valuable resource for news on visual novel translations.