The latest eroge title from esteemed developer Nitroplus, 装甲悪鬼村正 / Soukou Akki Murasei, brings with it some unusual innovation, but quickly reminds fans of the visual novel just why relying on these companies to innovate is not necessarily a good idea (see Mahou Shoujo Ai, Cross Days, etc).
In this case, they have decided to actually support widescreen displays. However, for some reason they then decided it would be a good idea to display the text in the middle of the screen, in classical East Asian fashion.
However, this is practically unheard of on computers, which almost always display Japanese horizontally.
Fans are already complaining of how hard it looks to read, and how odd it looks. It will not enter into the consciousness of the highly insular eroge industry, but such a text layout also dooms any quick translation efforts…
The game itself is still in development, so possibly it will be changed to something more sane.
Perhaps they should stick to visually stunning, but technologically staid games like Sumaga…
But…is it 16:9 or 16:10???
Cause it makes difference…
one word: patch
This… doesn’t just fail… this PHAILS!!!
Somehow i like it!
I’d suggest that the vertical text should go on either the left or the right side of the screen, rather than squarely down the middle. This would eliminate problems with ero-scenes that others have previously pointed out in comments on this article.
Are there any screens out that show CGs?
Because if not… it’s entirely possible that they would move the text boxes to the side when a CG is displayed. (At least that’s the kind of thing I’ve seen done a few times in games with unconventional text placement.)