天下制覇

Not really a wall of boobs, I'm aware.

As expected, it was another episode of hand-wringing and faffing around. The first half's seasoning was "Teachers don't get us teens" while the whole thing thing wallowed in mopey flashbacks and even more boring interrogations in a room that gives me a headache just looking at the wallpaper. The big cliffhanger coming at the very, very end of the episode? The guy they captured last week escapes literally the first moment they try to transport him anywhere, and wouldn't you know it, but he stumbles over Mopey and guess who's the damsel in distress again? So I am lancing this overdue boil now and just moving on to… I have no idea what, probably on Wednesday next week instead of Thursday for the last few weeks of the season just to space things out a little more. In the meantime, here's some pixelly girls because I fell asleep early last night and am throwing this together past the last second this morning during a meeting.

Unfortunately, I don't have a whole lot to talk about otherwise. Translation on the behemoth mystery project continues apace, although I'm pretty disappointed in myself so far this year (and last) for how slow that pace has been. It's largely because I still don't have a great deal of enthusiasm for the project itself and that's further crushed by a neverending stream of issues. The editing on this thing is, without any hyperbole, abysmal. Even Seinarukana had fewer editing problems and misused references/terminology less. I spend an extremely nontrivial amount of time just fixing their editing problems so they don't become a part of mine, which just makes the bitterness grow and grow.

Also not helping is that technical assistance has dried up back to 2014 and 2015 levels in recent months, which is to say that I ask questions like "How's that fix coming?" or "Did you fix that thing you broke?" or "Are you going to communicate with me on this at all?" and the answer I get back in all cases is a great big loud "…" But hey, asking privately for weeks on end hasn't worked, so maybe a Festivus-in-June airing of the grievances will. I doubt it though. Nobody reads what I write. The most severe of the technical issues are fixed, but that still leaves problems like "Some English is text displayed like a refrigerator magnets because individual letter alignment is busted."

I did hit another major milestone recently, so that's nice. Which means that the next major translation work in it is a mountain of unpleasantness, pornography, and particularly unpleasant pornography, so… whoopie doo. I certainly could release something, in an ugly, piecemeal fashion because the interface is still largely incomplete, some (English) editing style and presentation stuff in the early chapters needs to be redone to be made consistent with later work, and its in-game manual is comically terrible. That last part needs to be redone from scratch regardless due to being entirely images of text, so there's a very real chance I scrap much of it and write something a little less imbecilic that doesn't do things like describe the concept of money. I'm working right now on trying to fix that and get it to a state where I could pull the trigger on a partial patch like I've done many a time in the past any moment I felt like it if I get sufficiently fed up with the non-help, but it's absolutely not ready for show time, and even when all that window dressing stuff is done, again, there's still a mountain of yuck to get through before the finish line.

Otherwise, life goes on. Odin Sphere's remaster remains as gorgeous as the original, and I'm looking forward to Grand Kingdom at the end of the month as well. Not much on the pornographic game front that I really care about though. Softhouse Chara's A-team is chugging away at Planet Dragon, due out at the end of the month, which I've mentioned a couple times and just went master up, apparently. Still not entirely clear what it actually is. My best guess is "Space truckin' simulator." With space mermaids. Not sure how dragons fit into anything, if at all. Vegetables didn't end up fitting into Out Vegetables either.

I'll give Baldr Heart a cursory glance at the end of July, but when its OP is touting just how much it's going to be about high school kids with some hilarious and awesome situations like the protagonist tripping over and falling upon a heroine, oh how far away does Tohru and his quest for revenge from inside the belly of the beast seem. Besides that unpleasantness, I by and large expect it to, like Sky, slightly repackage various plot elements from the previous game(s) and add a few more attacks to the gameplay portion. I also can't read its tagline of "Doubt your eyes, trust your heart," without rolling my eyes, and yes I took some liberties with that translation because the literal is astonishingly even worse get off my case, man. At least it seems to be Team Baldrhead's first single-release game since 2002 with Baldr Force… assuming you believe them. I wouldn't. Expect a Baldr Heart Ignition or Baldr Heart Justice in a year that has the real ending when everyone is pissed off about being shoehorned into a heroine that they all despise. Because that's Team Baldrhead's thing.

Anyway, that's all she wrote for now. Back to the grind. And by grind, I mean literally thousands upon thousands of lines of metatext. Because why not fill an interface with metatext designed specifically for Japanese so formatting and space requirements kill any hope for accuracy? The struggle is eternal.