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NEWS: Angel Beats Game's 1st Volume Slated for Next Spring

Looks like this game is going to be SUPER long too.

For more information about the game, here's some translated information from Dengeki G's.

-As a “visual novel by Maeda Jun”, this can be considered his posthumous work.

I do have to admit this got a chuckle out of me. Oh Maeda, you're such a tsundere about writing scenarios for VNs.

Given that Key put out an official English release of Planetarian for iOS a few years back, I'm going to hold out the tiniest sliver of hope that the Angel Beats! VN will get a Western release. It is arguably their best-known and best-loved title among anime fandom here (i.e., plenty of people who hate Clannad actually like Angel Beats!).

That said, if Planetarian was meant to "test the waters", then it's possible the any-price-is-too-high crowd that refuses to pay for apps — to say nothing of the well-organized VN translation and patching crowd — may have already inadvertently proved that that an official AB! release would be a non-starter.

-Clannad had several minor scene branches, but AB! will take that even further.
We don’t like choices that have no meaning (no effect on the story branching), so every choice will result in some sort of branch or scene variation.

Given that Key put out an official English release of Planetarian for iOS a few years back, I'm going to hold out the tiniest sliver of hope that the Angel Beats! VN will get a Western release. It is arguably their best-known and best-loved title among anime fandom here (i.e., plenty of people who hate Clannad actually like Angel Beats!).

That said, if Planetarian was meant to "test the waters", then it's possible the any-price-is-too-high crowd that refuses to pay for apps — to say nothing of the well-organized VN translation and patching crowd — may have already inadvertently proved that that an official AB! release would be a non-starter.

Probably because Angel Beats! had guns. Not even kidding. That's how sad our audiences are here. Short attention spans could be another reason.

If Planetarian was meant to test the waters, they did a pretty terrible job of it. Don't get me wrong, the translation was surprisingly great and I loved it, but I didn't even know about the English release until a couple months ago. I think most KEY fans who would otherwise love to play it are unaware the translation exists (Doesn't help that many KEY fans are unaware the game itself even exists!)

My hopes were that they would actually "test the waters" with Kanon or Air, which are similarly on IOS (though in Japanese only) for pretty cheap, and they're in much higher demand.

Regardless it'll be interesting to see if anything comes of the KEY novels in English. But unless it's one of the older games on IOS, I get the feeling that if KEY does release their catalog in English... we're going to be paying the same prices for them as the Japanese, and I'm not sure how people who are used to getting them for free would react.

Angel Beats is one of my top 5 anime of all time, so I would certainly pay a couple hundred dollars for all the volumes. But like you said, I doubt many others over here would... especially with how easy pirating is. That seems to be the biggest issue with these localized VNs, they just seem to get pirated so much given that the market they are aiming towards are people who just pirate anime like its second nature.