Hoping to break into (or rather, create) the English (or at least something approximating it) language market for bishoujo games/hentai games/eroge is new entrant MangaGamer (replete with a poorly designed Engrish site), with their site set to open for business on July 10th, offering digital download editions of a variety of less well known titles, to start with at least.
Looking at their efforts, they do at least seem to have the original Japanese dubs intact (they did however take the incomprehensible step of removing all mention of the title in Japanese or romanised Japanese – how do they expect to get search engine traffic without using the proper names? And what of those awful titles?). This is probably the main thing they’ve done right, although I have my doubts as to whether it is because of knowledge of the target audience, or mere cheapskatery.
However, their slim catalogue of distinctly old and third tier eroge (Edelweiss and Da Capo are the best they can offer at present) is less than impressive, though they have only just launched so this can be forgiven I suppose.
The DRM encrusted files are also less than appealing, but again in their defence this is pretty much the industry standard.
Additionally, and rather unforgivably, it does not look as if they have taken the step of situating their business overseas so as to be able to offer uncensored visuals – not trying very hard, are they?
Pricewise, they seem reasonable enough (given that the price of eroge tend not to drop much over time), though whether that will be enough to lure people into their subpar site remains to be seen; at least they appear to have gone to the trouble of accepting credit card payment.
My major concern is that they had the same people who wrote their sloppy Engrish copy translate their games (and you just know they did) – there is really no excuse for not translating commercial and artistic products such as these properly, and I do not think it wise to support any such half-baked efforts.
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Where the hell do I buy these games!?
There were a couple companies hiring people to translate and dub eroge early last year.
A couple of my Japanese-speaking friends applied and were sent lines of dialogue to test their skills one of them said they felt so ridiculous trying to translate things like paizuri/tittyfuck that I think she gave up.
I expect this might have been the company in question.
Sadly anyone involved in J-E translation knows that it is imperative only to use natives for this direction (the same as for any other language in fact).
I was also sent the scripts, but they did not want to pay. It is not as hard as everyone might think. I guess you get what you pay for. Also I keep hearing that they want help from the end user to help proofreading the translated english. Wonder what the end user gets in return. I guess manga gamer does not want to pay.
Yup, Engrish indeed it is. I'd rather sharpen my skill in Japanese.
It was the DRM that killed it for me.
"We at MangaGamer.com have decided not to charge the supporters who purchased our titles before 7/31, due to the poor quality of the translation, which has been corrected by the patch file from 7/24 onwards. We are working hard to improve the quality of our translation. Please keep supporting MangaGamer.com as the gateway of Japanese Animation games to the world.", they say.
Anyway, good translations or not, the idea of DRM protected games sucks.
"The activation expires if
* OS is re-installed
* any file which is related to the game is deleted
* any file which is related to the game is moved
* the hardware configuration is changed"
You have to be either crazy or desperate to "buy" that.-
Thanks for the update. I think they damage is already done now, to say nothing of the DRM...