Sorry for not posting this earlier. I’ve wanted to say this for a while now.
There will be no game download links provided on Fuwanovel.com anywhere. Sorry I’ve been traumatized and very upset past few days and that has prevented me from doing so.
For the attacks I issued at JAST USA I withdraw those now. Sorry.
I was angry at JAST USA’s official stance on fan translation.
A business only speaks in the interest of a business and sometimes it can be awfully rigid. While fan translations might make Japanese companies hesitant, I don’t believe that they one-sidedly work against the industry. They also induct new fans. Therefore I cannot comply to JAST USA’s view that we should not promote fan translation at all.
Fuwanovel promotes and celebrates fan translation.
It is a repository that links to download patches and extensively assist those who are uneasy about difficult installations. I.e. it is a VNDB sorted list but catered to the needs of the casuals and the first-timers. There will be a method to submit user reviews however you must provide it as a link to your original blog post or website. (Need some more feedback here) This is so that users have access to what other users thought about the games so it helps them decide what to play.
Fuwanovel is intended to recreate the community!
The point of Fuwanovel is to create a place where we can talk and that people don’t get so angry at each other that they never talk again. The way I see it is that the current community is really really bad. Forums.fuwanovel.com is built on love and encouragement. If I ever moderate you, it has nothing to do with what you said but how you said it.
Fuwanovel will start an Otome-ge translation scene!
This will happen. I will personally make it happen. I think there are still quite a number of good otome-ge on the PC.
@Ixrec: I still can’t find the quote where I wrote Amaterasu supports this project. Amaterasu does NOT support this project! That banner in the screenshots is placeholder, not their real banner! It was probably part of a draft I was writing. If I find it I will delete it immediately.
Fuwanovel
Hau~ Omochikaeri~!
…except for freeware.
Fuwanovel has been fixed! It’s so awesome now!
Btw they decided on using Drupal for the website
Thank you very much for changing your mind.
I do have to apologise for the way I argued against Fuwanovel… I care strongly for the visual novel community, and therefore I was actually slightly upset by your proposal. Well, no bad feelings, eh? :-)
Okay, if Fuwanovel is not going to provide game downloads, then I fully support what you’re doing. With Fuwanovel, we can make it easier for people to play visual novels using legitimate methods, and we can hopefully expand and bring the community closer together.
Again, many thanks!! (^_^)
P.S. If there’s any way at all I can help you with Fuwanovel, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Yes thank you guys for all the people that contributed. (no thanks to the people that talk to me like dogshit, I’ve been very depressed I couldn’t even go online. thanks to those ppl)
Thank you for the feedback your views have reached me!
Also I am not un-reasonable. You don’t have to swear at me or belittle me to get your message across. This is exactly the reason why fuwanovel needs to exist.
I noticed that a number of people were being quite horrible towards you. That’s disgusting behaviour. You may not agree with someone, but that doesn’t mean you should be disrespectful towards them. I do think I was being slightly too harsh at times, but I hope you didn’t take it personally.
Anyway, I’m happy you considered your views. I really do hope that Fuwanovel will be used to discuss and ideas for the benefit of our community. We do need more of these types of discussion. :-)
@Yirba: welcome to the internet. That’s why I keep saying that C.G. Jung would have a field day with Anon or whatever.
So you write a post blatantly raging against JAST and MG, contradict yourself constantly and present your arguments with little to no thought process, and then get surprised and even upset that people argued back with the same passion and maturity you showed? Those comments were just as uncalled for as your own post.
At any rate, it’s reassuring to see you’ve stepped back and taken feedback, however hard that may have been. I hope this site helps establish the peaceful and open community you envision and that you get enough people to help code and bring it together.
That’s more like it. Glad you took our requests to avoid piracy seriously.
Just a question: do you intend to host the patches on fuwanovel itself or give links to the various translation groups’ websites that agree with your project? And what would be your policy towards foreign language (i.e. not English) translations?
not sure about the first. second question is, they will be supported, just not initially. , ill have to discuss with the website development ppl to ask them whats the best way to do it. i want there to be a way to switch the entire interface into a different language.
Those are great news indeed! I’m also glad you’ve changed your mind. Everyone makes mistakes – there’s nothing wrong in that; it’s admiting to them publicly, which takes the most courage and is worthy of a praise. You have my ongoing support as well!
As for the otome-ge, you might try to lurk a bit within the LSF community. There is a bunch of fans/devs (mostly gals like you), who would be highly pleased of your initiative, and might even support you in this particular case. I’d highly recommend trying to get in touch with them. If you need more info, I might mail you with some interesting stuff.
It would be also great to see more love towards japanese dojin scene – there’s plenty of great visual novel titles, which are worth of attention. If fuwanovels would try to build a bridge towards them, it might even led to a more loosen relationship with professional softhouses. I think it’s worthy of a try.
Glad you’re still continuing your efforts and that you’re gonna also add otome games to your list! I would recommend translating the all ages ones like Tokyo Yamanote Boys, Bloody Call, Love Revo, Kago no Naka no Alicis or Starry Sky series. The R-18 ones are really crappy and unpopular with the English fandom as far as I know. I hope my reviews provide you some insight on what you decide to pick up. Good luck with everything!
Now this is lookin good. Looks very community-friendly.
I’ll still say though: it’s hard to fix a Broken Base. But I think I’ll support you. Let’s see where this goes!
Good luck with it, and cheers.
Ah, this was a pretty smart move. Most of your detractors seem to have been fan translators who were ticked off about piracy. Now that you’ve changed tack, they can’t really argue about how you’re distributing their “totally free for the community with no strings attached” patches.
(Projected) site design is snazzy. Keep it up.
It’s commendable to straight up admit you were wrong, most of the people that talked all that shit to you wouldn’t do that. Hopefully you learned a valuable lesson about the internet (and anonymous people) from that post.
The right path. This idea sounds much more solid and all around better. As one who buys visual novels from Japan and greatly support fan translations, I hope this project will succeed.
Greetings Aaeru and associates. I am an occasional reader of VNs and of this blog.
Regarding the desire for a flourishing Anglosphere VN market, what place do you see for original English language (OEL) titles? Are they of any interest to you? Will your site have anything to do with them? Discussing, promoting, perhaps developing?
Yes I am interested. but because I am so so far away from that area of the internet I don;t have a clue where to start nor what that community needs. I will need to talk to Raide a bit more about it. Also it would most likely need to be a sister site to fuwanovel
You might also want to look into http://www.vnsnow.com since there’s a guy there trying to get casual gamers into OELVNs.
I’m curious – why would it need to be a sister site? If your ultimate aim is to spread visual novels to the Western world, featuring some well-made (key term) OELVNs on the site seems like it would be a good way to bring people in. For people interested in making OELVNs, they could then use this site as a resource both for examples of well-made OELVNs and well-made Japanese VNs, which would presumably up the quality of their work. It would certainly require a little research, but that’s probably actually a good thing. Just some thoughts.
I thought this site was about Japanese visual novels and making them accessible to the west. If your going to cover OELVNs then it should go on a sister site, otherwise this is nothing more than an imitation of VNDB.
Are you sure you want games like these on the front page of your site?
http://vndb.org/v3366
http://vndb.org/v9227
http://vndb.org/v9292
http://vndb.org/v5401
I ask that you do not lose sight of your original goal and end up adding anything and everything on your site.
Again, You should take a look at LSF. If you plan to support OELVN (seriously, this term should become defunct) as well, it’s the first and last place you should check out. If you need help with that, just give me a go and I may introduce you to some people; heck, part of them is most propably already reading this, and I’m sure they will support you, as long as you’ll be willing to support them and their work.
Also, you should try to drop the term OELVN and just use “western” or “english” visual novels instead; OELVN is a bloated term coined by some of the creators from LSF community, more often identified with poorly made fan games than anything worth taking a look at.
I dunno, I think adding western visual novels to the main Fuwanovel site would be a bad idea. A sister site for it would be fine. The gap in quality/style is just too large.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to be racist or anything, but most western VNs are … well … crap. There are gems, of course, like Katawa Shoujo. But, hell, just using the plural for gem in the previous sentence kinda makes me uneasy. Is there even another western VN that comes close to KS’ quality?
All of the offerings I’ve seen so far have been rather … lacking. I get that most RenPy devs are just hobbyists and don’t have the resources to produce commercial quality works, but still … I mean, Umineko and Higurashi look like a dog puked, ate it up, and then shat it all over the pavement, but they made up for their mediocre visuals by having quality music and fantastic plots. Whereas a lot of western VNs are terrible at visuals, music AND story.
I know that’s a gross generalization, but until someone else can come up with something equivalent to Katawa Shoujo in quality, I’m sticking to that opinion.
I support keeping this to Japanese visual novels. If western visual novels are covered at all, they should be either in a sister site as you propose, or clearly categorized in a separate section.
I’m glad you found a solution that seems to be working very well judging from the reactions here. I hope you’re feeling better now due to this. I guess I’m out of a job now :P?
Did you get paid in lolis? :3
I was hoping I would be. I’m gonna have to get my own lolis now.
How would we get our pirated games without Fuwanovel now?!?!
Just order them online though you have to crack the executable file in the disc if its region locked which is a hassle.
>2012
>paying to pirate
>getting a pirated copy that doesn’t come with a 1-click crack
ISHYGDDT
Good to see you returned after some harsh attacks in the internet, moving in the right direction, and admitted your mistakes. Stay strong and I hope your ambition succeed…I know that deep down in many ppl’s hearts, they want to see things that they like to be appreciated :)
So glad you changed the one thing I disliked about your wonderful idea! Are you planning on adding purchasing tutorials? People who want to legally purchase but still read fan-translated VNs have it pretty tough, especially if they were released a long time ago (even the easy-to-use AmiAmi tends to not offer backorders too far after the release date, and some games sell out completely during the pre-order stage at that site). A good guide on how to use proxy services/which ones are the cheapest/DLsite/etc. would be great, not to mention that it may help to make us Western fans look less like a big lot of pirates to anybody who stumbles upon Fuwanovel. Making English/non-Japanese language VNs available and offering free VNs/demos for download also sound like great ideas. Best of luck :)!
Yes. definitely~
guides to purchasing is a must
well sadly VNs are banned in some countries… but doesnt DLsit JP need JP credit cards for you to buy games from it? unless DLsite in english has the same database that of the Japanese counterpart
not the same. some titles in the JP DLsite don’t appear in the Eng DLsite
Seems to me you’re quite fine now Aaeru^^ Good to see that ;D
I can’t access Fuwanovel forums on my computer, I get this error message:
[#2000] You are not allowed to visit this community.
Do you know how to fix this problem? I don’t think I have been banned for a reason.
Weird.
i’ll look into it now. asap. hang on one sec.
can you email me aaeru3@gmail.com i’ll talk to you there
For some reason I found your IP in the Ban Filters. That is really really weird. Maybe the automated spam-prevention mechanism put you there.
Thanks, I can get back now! Should have asked earlier…