MangaGamer, as you may know, sprung onto the scene about a year and a half ago, offering a variety of poorly-translated hentai-style novel games. You may remember that I was less than impressed at the time, but I had hope that, with time and the support of fans like me, they would improve.

They got worse.

I should point out that I have continued to support MangaGamer with my money. After Da Capo (which I played the grand total of one-and-a-half playthroughs of), I purchased Kira☆Kira (which held my interest for several sessions of several hours before I started playing something else) and Shuffle! (I only got as far as this screen before closing it in disgust). If you’ve had a conversation with me in the past few months, you can probably tell where I’m going with this post.

One of MangaGamer’s translators updated their staff blog a month or two ago, responding to concerns about their translation quality. In their words:

…we are taking much more time in editing and proofreading than we did before. Because our resources are limited right now, we are putting more emphasis where it’s needed, but changes are steadily being made.

This is all well and good, you may think. They’re clearly making an effort. Why get so upset over the odd spelling mistake here or there? While the presence of spelling mistakes in media in this day and age of digital spell checkers warrants a blog post of its own, this isn’t why I hate MangaGamer’s translations.

In order to better explain this, let’s look at a counter-example; another visual novel lucky enough to be translated into English. Ever17: [The] Out of Infinity, now sadly out of print, is a seminal title that any fan of the medium should try.

Sora is the one on the right.

Unfortunately, the English release suffers immensely from lack of quality control. Words are misspelled, dashes and other characters are replaced with question marks, some of the sentences have awkward phrasing, the English interface is inconsistent. There are parts of the script that one can tell were the victims of an overzealous find-and-replace job — it’s annoyingly obvious that the Kid was going to be called the Youth at some point in the translation process.

And yet the translation of Ever17 is far superior to any MangaGamer title.

Take another look at that screenshot. The player character, Takeshi Kuranari, is referred to by Sora as Takeshi. Not Kuranari-san. Not even just Kuranari. Takeshi. Because this is how we greet people in English. We use first names. The people translating this understood this fact. They understood that calling someone Lastname-san in this context is equivalent to calling someone by their first name in English. It’s familiarity. It’s simple. When he is called Mr. Kuranari in the script, it’s in the context that an English-speaker would refer to someone in that way. It’s natural. It never feels awkward.

MangaGamer doesn’t follow this school of thought. Instead, it leaves all of the Japanese honourifics intact. Characters are called by their last names with the suffix of -san, -kun, -chan or -whatever. Playful nicknames are left alone without explanation of why they’re playful. Characters with meaningful names are robbed of their meaning. But it’s not all doom and gloom; if ever you see a term that you don’t recognise, all that you need to do is shatter the verisimilitude and alt+tab over to the handy dandy translation notes, free with selected purchases!

It’s not just names. Occasionally, you’ll see words like, ooh, say, ‘mangaka’ (comics artist) inexplicably left to float without a life jacket in a sea of mostly English words. It’s bad enough that there are few translators out there who have the integrity to translate character names. In the context of MangaGamer, the Shuffle! translation notes have some really silly examples. ‘Sempai’. ‘Sensei’. ‘Nekomimi’. Sure, one could argue that the average Shuffle! player would already be familiar with these terms, but what’s really ridiculous about this is that some of these ‘translation notes’ just list the English word next to them. Example: “Otoh-sama: Father; Otoh-san: Dad”. See, what you’ve done there is explain that there are perfectly good English equivalents for the Japanese terms! Why didn’t you just use them? Your current method is pointless!

The defenders of this practice (yes, there are people out there who deem this to be acceptable) say that removing the honourifics also removes the mood/feel/emotion of the work, and that their inclusion helps the end user better understand the character’s relationships/motives/social standings. But it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. Here’s why.

To properly understand the significance of honourifics in the Japanese language, you have to be a Japanese person. You have to have been immersed in the language from a young age. You need experience. You need fluency. A sheet of translation notes isn’t going to help you truly understand the meaning behind these terms; you need to speak the language, meet the people, know the culture. Even if you’re a student of the Japanese language (or have watched enough subtitled anime episodes to convince yourself that you are), Japanese honourifics in an English work or an English translation are out of place. They have no context. Japanese is a highly context-sensitive language. By removing the context, you’re removing the point — the significance — of the honourifics. A visual novel isn’t a lesson in Japanese, nor (in the case of MangaGamer’s titles) should it be. Translations exist so that one doesn’t have to learn a foreign language to appreciate a work of art. Yes, there is no one correct way to translate. This, however, is an incorrect way.

Using Japanese honourifics in English translations doesn’t “make the experience more authentic” or “maintain the proper atmosphere of gameplay”. All that it shows is a lack of care, understanding and respect on the part of the translator.

In short: The problem is not the quality control (or lack thereof). It’s the translation policies that MangaGamer have put in place. No amount of proofreading can fix a broken script if you ignore the very reason that it’s broken.

But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that it’s not MangaGamer’s fault.

Back in 2008, a representative posted a forum poll on behalf of MangaGamer asking fans whether or not their releases should ignore Japanese honourifics.

The results were horrifying.

There aren’t that many things in this world that I care about. When it comes to politics, there’s not a lot that gets on my nerves. The results of this poll, however, make me truly angry. This poll implies that there are more people out there who would rather spend good money on an inferior product than those who favour quality, accuracy and appreciation for the work in question.

These misguided ‘fans’, desperate to protect their prized franchises from redaction, are instead pushing them towards an equally catastrophic opposite extreme.

Forget the parliamentary election. This is where we need radical change. ㋼

I feel violated. ㋼

This year, the city of Leeds was lucky enough to host the Northern arm of the Eurogamer Expo 2009. As Leeds is conveniently located inside the jurisdiction of the provider of my bus pass, attendance was a no-brainer. I’m not what you would call a hardcore gamer, but my interests in video game theory and technology more than qualify me to leave the house for this.

Now, I’m particularly interested in the idea of the video game as a storytelling medium. (Which explains why I spend so much time and money on visual novels. The attractive female characters are just a bonus.) At the expo, I got the opportunity to play a wide variety of games, two of which caught my fancy in regards to the use of story.

One game that I was lucky enough to have a go on was the upcoming Heavy Rain on the PlayStation 3, a cinematic “game noir” (if you don’t mind me coining a phrase). Many attempts have been made in the past to give one the experience of playing through a motion picture, and, by watching the following videos, it would seem like Heavy Rain, with its high-definition film-grain effect and meticulously motion-captured cast fresh from the uncanny valley, is the closest we’ve ever seen.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4C4GK91nr0

Unfortunately, Heavy Rain works much better when someone else is playing it than it does when one plays it for onesself. The control scheme, in particular, is a large point of contention. The character is controlled by the right trigger; pulling the trigger makes him walk/run/tiptoe, and steering is accomplished via the left thumbstick. As you can see in the above video, this takes quite a bit of getting used to.

Sometimes, little icons appear on screen, corresponding to the PlayStation controller’s bizarre, unintuitive circle, square, ecks and triangle buttons or gestures to be performed by the right thumbstick. In itself, this isn’t particularly innovative: these little actions have become known as “Quick Time Events” (no relation to Apple’s QuickTime technology), and they formed the basis of early “interactive movies” such as Dragon’s Lair (a game which Heavy Rain director David Cage has downplayed similarities to). Perhaps a more apt comparison would be the Shenmue series; heavily story-driven games with a plot that develops through both interactive cutscenes and event flags scattered throughout the world. Of course, Heavy Rain’s “sets” (read: levels) are on a much smaller scale than Shenmue’s wide, open explorable environments, but that’s entirely the point: the intent is to give the player the full movie experience but still be in control.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ_A2Tpz2UM

But what really impressed me about this game was the potential for plot branches. These two videos show only one direction for the story to take. As I watched others experience the demo, I saw many other possibilities. And these are more than just changes in dialogue; in this one scene, the developers programmed many different possible ways to distract the robber, calm him down and reach the scene’s conclusion. In my playthrough, I accidentally knocked a bottle off of a nearby shelf. According to another report that I read after the event, it’s possible to pick up this bottle and knock the robber out.

In the video you see above, our hero talks to the robber, eventually convincing him to leave (I love how the shakiness of the options represents the character’s inner nervousness), but this was not one of the outcomes I saw at Eurogamer. If you can’t get him to calm down, the player must attempt to wrestle the gun from him. I managed to get shot in the shoulder, but my character seemed fine and the outcome was the same in the above video (only with a slightly broken shoulder). But if the shopkeeper is shot, a similar but significantly different scene plays out as Scott is given the vital clues with the shopkeeper’s final breath. Same outcome, but more dramatic. And though I may complain about the controls, one can’t argue that they don’t feature some interesting idiosyncrasies; in the above scene, the player must continuously hold down both shoulder buttons to keep their hands up. (If you don’t manage to keep them up, you still get the “shot in the shoulder” ending.)

It’s plain to see that an enourmous amount of work has gone into Heavy Rain. I just wonder if it’s all really worth it. Yes, it just may be a true interactive movie, with engaging characters and a plot (based on what little we know of it) that seems decent enough. But the demo that I played had significant problems that may not be fixed by release date. I speak, of course, of the controls. Even if you have full control over your character, there’s not much point if you’re going to be limited by control scheme and set (again, level) design. From a gameplay perspective, it may as well be a string of choices and dexterity tests for all the difference it makes. I’m hoping that I’ll be proved wrong, but it seems like Heavy Rain will soon join the ranks of Fable Ⅱ, Shenmue Ⅱ and every Telltale Game ever made as an experience that sacrifices gameplay in favour of its story.

Which brings me to an example on the other side of the technological scale — and, unlike Heavy Rain (with its tentative February 2010 release date and PS3 exclusivity), one that you can play right now. You see, in the building opposite the show floor, they had set up a nice little indie section, featuring developer talks, 3D gaming demos and a selection of expensive-looking computers running Flash games.

One such Flash game was Ergon Logos.

An extreme counterpoint to Heavy Rain’s high-definition three-dimensional graphics, Ergon Logos is entirely text based. (And no, it’s not what you think.) Reading through its first act, Ergon Logos clearly sets out to be a Braid-esque deconstruction of the classic Super Mario story (princess kidnapped, hero saves her) told through the medium of interactive kinetic prose, but, as creator Paolo Pedercini says, ”it fails miserably and becomes a piece of non-linear kinetic visual poetry written by a teenager obsessed with post-structuralist French philosophy. I don’t,” Pedercini adds, “know exactly what I was thinking.”

Regardless of original intent, what has been created here is, accidentally or not, a deconstruction — an interactive critique, if you like — of the visual novel medium. Let’s put aside the story and look at the delivery. The narrative is presented in a line. The line has various twists, turns, right-angles and about-faces and, every so often, the player is given a choice between two or three directions in which the story can take. All the while, the story is moving at a constant, linear pace, unbroken by pauses or mini-games of any kind. Remind you of anything?

This, I argue, is a novel game in its purest form. Along the way, the player (reader?) is given glimpses of other possibilities for the story, whether the option has already passed or has yet to be. I am reminded of Ever17 (which I admit I have yet to reach the true ending of) and its tendency to show the player shadows of the results of other plot choices within its narrative. In some cases, it is possible to get stuck in an infinite loop, and, while none of its eventualities can be considered a “true ending”, one may feel as if one has hit a dead end at times. At one point early on in the second act, you are given the same option twice at once, going in opposite directions. Just what is one to do? Only through replaying the experience can one see all that there is to see, but Ergon Logos is not designed to be “completed”. It is designed to be read, experienced and to challenge your idea of what makes a game. Even if it ends up doing something completely different.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you play it for yourself a few times. Ergon Logos is free, Flash-based and should work in most major web browsers. I recommend, however, that you close everything else and start a new browser session, if for no other reason than [SPOILERS AHEAD] one of the game’s many endings will deliberately make it (and possibly your computer) crash. But it’s art. So that’s okay. ㋼

That title up there should probably say “Kanon Turned 10”. I started writing this post in May.

But it’s still 2009, and this year marks the 10th anniversary of the release of one of Japan’s most beloved visual novels.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qiQcqCpLB8

Kanon takes place in Winter. There is a main character and some other characters as well. Some of the other characters are more important story-wise than others, and the main character has to talk to them for the story to happen. (That’s what one does in a visual novel, after all.) Hopefully, I’ve managed to describe it to you without spoiling anything. Please don’t stop reading here.

Kanon is notable for being the first work produced by Key, who would later go on do create Air and Clannad (which you may have heard of), as well as Tomoyo After, Planetarian and Little Busters!.¹ (Which you may not’ve heard of. Don’t read too far into any of those Wikipedia articles if you don’t like spoilers.)

Nayuki is my favourite character. This is a picture of her.

Evidently, some people (i.e. Toei Animation) thought that Kanon was worth adapting into an animated series. So they did. It wasn’t very good.² A few years later, after the exceedingly poorly paced Air TV series somehow became liked by folk, anime megahouse Kyoto Animation made another one. And it was good. So good that they eventually brought it over to North America, translated it into English American³ and released it on DVD, which, due to issues, quickly went out of print. Until it was re-released in a horrible boxset that tries to cram the whole series on four discs and typesets the subtitles in a highly annoying font.

At the time, one could've expected to pay this much for one of these. That's four episodes, y'hear? Well, I suppose that it's better to get 24 episodes for £30 than 4 of those episodes for £200. Even if the subtitles are harder to read.

To further appease the English-speaking fans, an unofficial fan translation of the original visual novel had been in the works for many years; before the story was animated, in fact. After much work by many hands, it was finally released earlier this year for anyone who owns a copy of Kanon Standard Edition, the slightly enhanced re-release.

Haeleth (who I believe started the project) mentioned on his website that HimeyaShop was a good place to get visual novels and the like. So I did. What I didn’t know is that since Haeleth’s now out-of-date page on Kanon was posted, all of the 18+ rated visual novels that they sell have been moved to a separate website, so I ended up with the “all ages” version.⁴

Now, Japanese programmers do things slightly differently to the way us Englishmen are used to. I’m no hacker (heck, I barely know any HTML), but one can tell from looking at the way that the game installs itself that the Japanese are used to a much different computing experience than us. (Do they not have the Program Files folder in Japan?) Perhaps the biggest cultural difference is that Mac users are generally left in the cold when it comes to visual novels, with most pretty much all of the major releases being Windows-only. This is a problem for me, as I have been a Mac user for nearly three years now.⁵ With barely any hard drive space remaining on the ol’ MacBook and Brother choosing to use his computer most of the time, there was only one way I’d be able to play Kanon.

I bought a MacBook Pro.

I wanted to take a photo that showed off the anti-glare display because I couldn't find any photos of the anti-glare display when I looked for them when I was thinking of getting a MacBook Pro with an anti-glare display.

I suppose that you could tell from my brief description up at the top that I haven’t yet finished Kanon in any of its forms. But just you wait. The moment Windows 7 is released (and my beautifully cheaper-than-half-price pre-order copy shows up), I’ll shove a Boot Camp installation onto that glorious solid-state drive and have Kanon running better than anyone could’ve imagined. (No, I did not write this post just to show off the new computer. I haven’t even turned it on yet.)

But soft. If you’re running Windows 2000 or XP or so (and have a working DVD drive), you too can experience the story of Kanon — regardless of your knowledge of Japanese.⁶ As mentioned before, Kanon Standard Edition For All Ages (to give it its full title) can be purchased at HimeyaShop.com. They post internationally! (But they don’t bother to fill out the Customs declaration, so be prepared for extra charges once it reaches your nation’s borders.) If you want the full version with the added nature sequences (which you might as well get, seeing as it’s the same price and the fan translation allows one to disable the sex sections if one wishes), you’ll have to go through ErogeShop.com (direct link provided so that you don’t have to look at the more trashy selections). The English update can be found up here (the link is buried at the end of the second sentence from the top of their section on Kanon). Use 7-Zip or something to extract everything in the “Patch files” folder to wherever you installed Kanon, and that should be it.

Finally, I will mention that at the time of starting this post, there was an ongoing online thing called the Key 10th Anniversary Letter Project, which attempted to collect fan submissions of thanks and congratulations to Key on reaching their decennial year. That date has now been and gone, and I’m not sure what the status of the project is, but it looks like they need help more than ever. If you can lend a hand with managing the project (or want to contribute a letter of your own), please give them a moment of your time. Who knows where it’ll end up?

When I first experienced Planetarian, I was moved to the point of giving a care — not something that comes easily for me. When I finished the Clannad anime series, I felt a similar way. Let’s hope that Kanon does the same.

Additionally, Japanator tells me that today is Moé Day. So this post isn’t so irrelevant after all! Hooray! ㋼

1. No relation.
2. Or so I have heard.
3. Nayuki sounds like a man. Still, they got the drowsiness down; in the Japanese version, she just sounds like a duck.
4. Many Japanese visual novels, particularly the kind where there’s one guy and more than one girl, contain sex scenes. (Hence the nickname “erotic game”, or “erogé”.) Having sex isn’t necessarily the goal of the story; these scenes range from being tightly integrated into the storyline to just thrown in there to tick the box. (“Game’s not selling well? Add the obligatory sex scene and watch the copies fly off the shelves!” --The Thought Process of the Common Erogé Producer) Kanon falls into the latter category, and versions with the naughty bits removed completely were released without any major changes to the storyline. Incidentally, neither of the animated adaptations feature such scenes.
5. My excuse: They don’t make Logic for Windows anymore.
6. Not that it’s a brilliant translation; the names are written backwards, with the first name last and vice-versa (for what I can only assume are unavoidable technical issues), honourifics are bizarrely ignored & transcribed without any explanation and certain words and phrases are left untranslated and highlighted in purple. If you click on them, it tells you what they mean and why they decided that it was a good idea to not translate them. They might’ve fixed all of this in the latest patch, though.

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.