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INTEREST: Writer Kinoko Nasu Comments on Possible Steam Version, English Localization of Tsukihime V

I keep seeing people point out how other Nasu translations are not always perfect as a reason he's totally right. But...like...so?? What then, we have to wait 15 years to get it, or never get it, or get a fan translation people will still complain about anyway?

I keep seeing people point out how other Nasu translations are not always perfect as a reason he's totally right. But...like...so?? What then, we have to wait 15 years to get it, or never get it, or get a fan translation people will still complain about anyway?

I'm guessing a major reason is that he doesn't want to deal with all of the censorship... er... "localization" issues.

besides the thematic rapey elements kept in, the Tsukihime remake is an all-ages release with no hentai. There's no such issue to be found in that.

cookiemanstah wrote:

besides the thematic rapey elements kept in, the Tsukihime remake is an all-ages release with no hentai. There's no such issue to be found in that.

It's CERO-Z lol, what with the spoiler[17-piece dissection] and all.

I think the thing that throws me off the most is that the whole Type Moon franchise is like…obviously popular outside Japan. Almost everything except the VNs get localized and translated, with the most glaring exception (the second Fate/Extra game) being a case of bad timing. But I think the big difference is that for basically everything else in the overarching franchise, Type Moon doesn’t get final say over whether or not it gets localized.
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I think the thing that throws me off the most is that the whole Type Moon franchise is like…obviously popular outside Japan. Almost everything except the VNs get localized and translated, with the most glaring exception (the second Fate/Extra game) being a case of bad timing. But I think the big difference is that for basically everything else in the overarching franchise, Type Moon doesn’t get final say over whether or not it gets localized.

There’s very obviously a market, but Nasu talks about it like visual novels are entirely untested and prone to bomb really hard and that the only option is to do it in-house and on a tiny budget. While, as noted above, the license fees for the visual novels have historically been ridiculously high which means that even companies who want to translate them balk because they’re valued on the level of like, a major AAA franchise.

This particular thing is a recurring pattern that I’ve noticed out of Japan. “Oh, this game won’t sell outside Japan, we’re completely sure of it, we’ve done zero market research and are ignoring the several companies asking if they can translate it because we’re so sure this property is so Japanese that it will fail elsewhere.” Namco is guilty of it with big chunks of the Tales series, Square Enix did it for a while, Capcom too. Hell, it was the case with Muv Luv for a while, but the company there noticed the VN boom and decided to make the first moves themselves and it’s apparently been really profitable for them, given that they’re doing all the spinoffs now too.