There hasn't been as much H-game content on here lately. I think the Echidna Wars DX piece I blogged yesterday might have been the first for a while. This is partly because Monster Girl Quest set the bar so high that there's only so many "generic RPG Maker clone with ten short vanilla H-scenes" games you can play before the novelty factor wears off.
A bigger problem has been the slow and steady degradation of the tech I use to extract and translate the Japanese text into something close enough to English to be able to follow what's going on. If you don't know how it's done, I found this handy guide on hongfire to be very helpful when I was setting up things on my machine(s). How it works in general is you create a shortcut for the game, go into properties and redirect the link to start AGTH first, AGTH copies the text to the clipboard, Translator Aggregator picks up whatever is in the clipboard and sends it off to various web sources to be machine translated. What comes back isn't always that accurate of a translation, but it's usually close enough to be able to roughly follow what's going on (This was how I was able to create the enormous Let's Play series of Monmusu Quest: Paradox last year).
Unfortunately, time passes, software gets upgraded, compatibility problems arise, and trusty tools start to degrade. Translator Aggregator used to link to multiple web sources such as Google, and between four or five sources it was usually possible to get a good translation of a passage. Over time those web sources started blocking TA until currently there's only one, or maybe two of the sources still working. It's still possible to 'read' whats going on, but it's fiddlier and some of the more complex RPGs such as the ROBF series become very difficult to play as the detailed instructions the player needs to follow in order to advance the plot end up being literally lost in translation.
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| Couldn't read it... :( |
This is a relatively minor problem when compared to the games that use oddball engines where text hooking slides off. Dieselmine's Monmusu! Reverse R*pe Academy looked interesting despite being a more standard visual novel than a game, but nope, AGTH couldn't hook in. I could hook Succubus Rhapsodia, but that game suffers from a similar problem to the old Succubus Quest games - the combat spams so many lines of text to the clipboard that digging out the juicy stuff becomes a chore and the game loses its charm. A shame as the artwork - especially the various succubus designs - looks fucking lush. One I wouldn't mind seeing an English translation of, but I'm not sure whether the gameplay holds up well enough for there to be the demand to get someone to do this (as happened for the original MGQ and Violated Hero games).
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| Looks gorgeous, but too damn fiddly to really enjoy... :( |
These are dark times indeed for monster girl hentai games enthusiasts...
To be honest, I've been bumbling around with the same translation setup for a while and it's inevitable it would reach the end of its natural life cycle. The question is, what next? I'm going to do some digging, but I thought I'd throw the question out on the off chance some of you might have already encountered and solved some of these problems. Please chime in with useful advice and links in the comments below.
I suppose I could always get off my lazy ass and actually learn to read Japanese.
(remembers how bad he was in school at French and other languages. weeps.)
