日本語訳の進捗について

=> http://katawashoujo-ja.blogspot.com/2009/10/blog-post_4758.html

Update on Japanese Translation

This is a progress update from KS Japanese translation team.

We have 4 stages in the translation process.

1. Initial translation
2. Translation check (to correct translation errors)
3. Editing (to make the translated text look more natural)
4. Proofreading (to correct spelling and other errors)

The translated scripts will be submitted to the development team after proofreading is done.

We have recently completed the initial translation of entire Act1 script after 4 months of its release. We think this is our first major milestone.

In the meanwhile, we are performing translation checks on already translated scripts. 20% completed, 60% in progress, and the remaining 20% are still to be examined.

We are still not able to give a concrete schedule, but we will keep you posted on this blog.

-hir

A View from the Gallery (Season 5, Episode 4)

Because the whole dev team is currently living the big life in the glamorous OELVN jet set and all the cocaine snorted off the breasts of high-class hookers has severely addled our brains, we find ourselves unable to come up with good blog posts at the moment. This is why I decided to give the word to one of our more persistent IRC lurkers, name redacted:

Oh no you don't, this blog post sucked. Enjoy your Shizune, who does not suck, courtesy of Weee.




— Name redacted (Mood: quixotic, now playing: Peter Gabriel - Big Time)

I Am Cooler Than Climatic

This blog has been getting too preachy lately, so today, I'm going to talk about how I am cooler than Climatic. We were having a debate about this the other day, when I said that he was not cool. He countered with the claim that I am far less cool than him.

buckingham> I have drawn since then anyway
buckingham> it's not my fault
NicolArmarfi> upload some
buckingham> if you don't remember
buckingham> no
NicolArmarfi> why not?
buckingham> I am too lazy to upload something
buckingham> just to satisfy your weird compulsion
NicolArmarfi> oh i see, so you didn't draw
buckingham> you are free to believe it
NicolArmarfi> what happened to you, man
NicolArmarfi> you used to be cool
buckingham> you are the one
buckingham> who became uncool
NicolArmarfi> explain
buckingham> why don't you ask a psychiatrist
buckingham> why you are uncool
buckingham> the problem is probably in your head
NicolArmarfi> they would just say i am as cool as i believe i am
buckingham> how cool is that
NicolArmarfi> somewhat cool
NicolArmarfi> but not really
NicolArmarfi> cooler than you though
buckingham> terrible
buckingham> what
buckingham> no way
buckingham> you play videogames
NicolArmarfi> yeah i'll ask weee
NicolArmarfi> which one of us is cooler
NicolArmarfi> just admit i am cooler
buckingham> no
buckingham> you are not
buckingham> maybe you should make a poll
NicolArmarfi> g4 video game awards were today
NicolArmarfi> best strategy game = halo wars
buckingham> don't care
buckingham> see
buckingham> this is why you are uncool
buckingham> you care about shit like this
NicolArmarfi> i am not saying i care
NicolArmarfi> it's just weird
buckingham> so did you ask weee
buckingham> who is cooler
buckingham> so did weee tell you who is cooler
buckingham> sup dawg?
NicolArmarfi> i asked her again on MSN
NicolArmarfi> and she dodged the subject and went away
buckingham> [04:03] a22 is cooler
NicolArmarfi> yessssssssssssssssss
NicolArmarfi> how does it feel nigga?
NicolArmarfi> suck it down
buckingham> I don't mind
buckingham> it is cooler not to worry about this stuff
NicolArmarfi> bullshit
NicolArmarfi> you cared

Some might say that this is not conclusive enough to decide who is cooler, so I have taken the liberty of compiling a list of other reasons why I am cooler than Climatic:

1) He eats quiche. Not even just Lorraine quiche either, but artisan quiche with goat cheese and fruit marmalades. wtf?

2) He wears a brown sweater. Seriously, a brown sweater? It's unacceptable to wear a brown sweater unless you're in elementary school.

3) Climatic does not know where da hood is at.

4) I am a baseball fan, and there is nothing cooler or more American than a game where 18 men run in a diamond on artificial grass. All Climatic has is the lowly cricket, a game that was only cool in the smash Bollywood hit "Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India." In contrast there are many more great baseball films... like Major League.

5) He does not like hypotheticals. Hypothetical questions are the high point of human cultural advancement. This shows that he is a plebe.


- A22

Concerning Self Satisfaction

Having ventured through various depths of the sick, depraved amateur video game making crowd on the internet, I've come to realize something. Now, one might assume that it is a good event when he puts out the final product of a days or weeks, or months labor. This is total bullshit.

Having written soundtracks for several visual novels (very, very few of which I enjoyed), it astonishes me that I ever allowed myself to release those tunes which have been haunting me for months, and even years. Only on looking back to I realize the great flaws of my work; the cause of this is spending an amount of time writing something out from start to finish, believing that the end was the end, when in reality it was just the beginning of a long phase of kicking myself in the ass.

When writing any sort of story, music or drawing any picture, it is important to realize that it is not only your initial perception of your art that matters, but the opinions of others, as well. Before releasing anything, one must pass it off to several others and edit it according to their respective opinions, combining them with your own outlook on it. After that is put together, you must edit it even more, tempering it into the most solid, unbreakable alloy within your abilities.

This process can take a while. Depending on the volume of work your putting out, it could take months, years, or so long that you no longer give a shit and pass it off to someone else. But in the end, it must be done, and this is where I, and many of my contemporaries, failed.

This is not the case with Katawa Shoujo. This game appears to be taking an incredibly long time, putting out very little active content and etc., but in reality it is being taken at that careful, calculated pace that few others have the balls to work at. I left the project in the beginning of this year, and things that appeared to have been done then are still, months later, being fervently edited and discussed. Not to mention, the testing stage for the demo alone: the first act itself was subject to several edits, and entire rewrites, before going through another few months of extensive editing, by a team specifically assigned to this task. I find this quite admirable; it gives me the utmost confidence that KS will be a universally enjoyable game of the ballinest degree, and it should for you, too.

Unless you're a dick. Now, I'm going to go finish watching The Debt Collector.

-Nicol Armarfi

Contexts

When you submerge into the viscous, milky translucent ocean of cripple porn for a year or two, the question of social acceptability tends to fade away. "Cripple porn" (I really like that phrase) raises eyebrows even amongst people accustomed to the trends and oddities of modern Japanese or Japan-derived media, but in a context where showing 13 year old school girl's panties is actually not a standard practice, the concept of KS (when put in crudest possible terms, like I did) seems like an equivalent to shock image sites or something. That's why it's cool when people who are almost completely outside of the anime/manga subculture meet Katawa Shoujo.

So the thing I've been wondering about is how a person with practically no exposure to our subculture would receive KS. The odd thing here is that it even happens, but the explosive popularity of Act 1 almost guarantees that it actually does happen (a mindboggling thing in itself). In fact, I even know of one case, because one of the devs gave Act 1 to his father so he could see what his son's been up to lately. I haven't heard back what dad thought about it yet though, so maybe he is now disowned or something. As for the rest, I think almost everyone on the planet is aware of Japan's reputation as some kind of a horn of plenty of weird and creepy things. Similarly, a lot of people on the internet are aware of 4chan's reputation as some kind of a horn of plenty of depravity and mindless comedy. So when "people from 4chan" make a "japanese style porn game" about disabled people, the ingredients for a catastrophe seem to have been thrown in one pot. What does it taste like to you, normal person?

What made me write something about this was a bunch of (in this context) normal people meeting KS, in other words a quick post about KS on contexts.org (an American sociology publication) "sociological images" blog. From what I gather, people stick labels on KS very quickly (having not played the game, obviously), though do not condemn it at all or anything like that. Still it hit me that the labels and preconceptions are almost solely negative, or at least cautious. "4chan", "fetisistic", "exploitative", "ridiculing" and so on. It's sad that KS does have a glass ceiling that it will never be able to break through because of what it is, but that is the road we chose. Anyway, the big question is whether KS is abusive of disabled people or not. Unsurprisingly, the question arises from the fact that the game focuses on portraying disabled people, and that there is graphic sex in the (full) game with said disabled people.

The portrayal of disabled people and their sexuality is a tough nut to crack. Apart from Hanako, the KS girls don't really pander to the "protect me" -moeblob category and are hopefully a bit more than just their disabilities. As for the sex, expectations vary wildly. KS is expected to be both a fetisistic porn fantasy game, and a story that feels true, with romantic feelings and tender, if a tad awkward teenager sex. Can't both have the cake and eat it too, so we have to place ourselves somewhere in the rainbow of the sex-spectrum between these two extremities. It's quite well known that we are gravitating away from the "porn" angle, and KS never was a true fetish project (as in, abusing the disabilities in a sexual way). The reasons for that are weird and tangled, but basically what can be said is that porn is terribly bland, boring and out of place in your average visual novel. Thus, not obliged by a sales department, we are free to try to do things in a way that feels more natural to us. Mind, being exposed to visual novels probably has brainwashed us at least partially to abide by the convetions of the medium, even without realising it. Still I do think we at the very least keep from abusing the disability aspect in the sexual scenes.

Meanwhile in the deep end of the pool, what if all sexual themes would be dropped from KS? Would it still be fetisistic, ridiculing or exploitative? Some people say that the mere fact that KS focuses on disabled people, spotlighting them as "others" can be interpreted as fetisistic and disabled people as subjects to ridicule. Sure, there might've been ways to deal with the disability theme better and lift it into central role through something else than a cripple school, twist threads of sharpest social critique inside the text and all that jazz. But you know, we are really making a romance game here, a story about a guy and few girls and their emotions and happiness and sadness during one summer of their life. For a long time now, I've thought it doesn't matter one bit whether they are disabled or not.

-Aura, art by Doomfest

Something Missing

Boys in visual novels are boring.

Writers tend to overshadow these beings with their main star – the love interests. The female always gets the attention in order to doll her up to make her appealing to the audience, while the protagonist, his best friend and any other form of testosterone gets the short end of character development.

If a male just so happens to get some personality, it is always a gimmick or some other cop-out.

Perhaps this is so that the player can imagine himself as the main character, but why do this when everything else is essentially spoon-fed.

Take our Hisao and Kenji. Hisao has been long defined as the generic male protagonist only with a kick with his heart and defined only as well as the audience wants him to be. There have been discussions to make him something more, but ultimately little was done in the long run.

Kenji was originally supposed to be the basic loser who dreams of a girl to sweep him off his feet. In hopes of breathing life into the boy and flesh him out, I wanted to write a Kenji path, but was shot down due to technical issues. Soon, though, the other members saw some potential in what to do with him.

Perhaps Kenji could become something more than the best friend who gives moral support. Instead of using a concept of making him serious or giving him real plot relevance, he turned into a joke character just like many other men before him.

Males can have much more potential in visual novels without sacrificing the properties or interaction with the girls. However, doing that requires craft on writer and an open-mind on the audience. Perhaps one day, visual novels will see the value of strong male characters who could breathe a little life into the industry.




- Losstarot (Guest Art by Kamifish)

No Bullshit

I find myself pleased in belatedly realizing that during Katawa Shoujo's development, we managed to completely avoid bullshit so far.

...Well now, let me clarify that before my fellow devs, random strangers from the Web and probably people off the street that happen to be walking by me all start pointing and laughing, with good reason too.

KS doesn't contain any entirely fictional element in its makeup. Oh sure, there are some amazing coincidences in there, but we don't have bridge trolls, little green men from Mars, psychic powers, anthropomorphs, ghosts, intelligent self-aware computers, talking animals, drop bears, therianthropes, FTL engines... the list can go on and on.
Considering our chosen setting that might look like a given, but I think it's really not. It's a very large trend in VNs to introduce one or more elements wholly born of the writer's or of humanity's imagination, and to worldbuild around those, exploring the "what if". No points for guessing whether I'm talking about your favorite author, software house, or title - odds overwhelmingly favor that I am, nowadays.
So is that a bad thing, or a good one? Neither, really, as long as it's done well. We're all writing fiction, not documentary - as long as the tale gets its point across, is enjoyable, and keeps the reader engrossed until the end, I'm not going to sneer at "fairytale hacks" or "unimaginative slicey bores". I reserve the right to quibble about the category a piece belongs in, but that's another story.
I do, however, draw the line at bullshitting the reader out of nowhere. When the author pulls out what is politely called "deus ex machina", or more commonly "plothax", it's time to raise eyebrows. And with completely made-up story elements, there is a constant temptation to just up the ante, up the stakes, step on the pedal, and call it a day.

"Because I made up my mind that reality worked that way, and since it's my fantasy, nobody can say otherwise."
I mean, who'd complain, or even notice, right?

If the response to KS is anything to go by, YOU would. The amount of details in the demo that got reported to us as feeling odd, pushing hard on coincidence, or being just plain wrong was staggering. Some of those we knew about and couldn't/wouldn't correct (the dreaded "artistic license"), some of them were false positives, but some made me facepalm and wonder why I never thought of THAT before.
Which brings me to the flip side of the coin: having to do your homework. If you can just decide how things work, you save yourself a whole lot of trouble, because you don't have to check if your idea is actually possible in the day and age you set your story in.
Like raspberry flavoured popsicles in Japan. No, I'm not kidding. But that's a story for next time.



-SilentCook