Angel Beats! - Visual Novel Details & Ongoing Speculation

Well, the main writer did have a heart attack and is still in no condition to write apparently. All we can do is wait. I imagine it’s going to be a long time before we’ll have all six Beats.

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any news on the English translation, or if there is a fan on at all? i haven’t heard anything in forever.

No news yet… VisualArt’s are very secretive about the development of their localisations.

All I can say is, don’t expect it any time soon. I’m gonna take a stab in the dark and say 2018. Late 2017 if we’re especially lucky.

I don’t see it happening until 2019 at least. Weren’t they going to localize Rewrite first?

No guarantee. It’s all pretty vague and mostly based on information that slipped out at that one convention. But there’s no reason they can’t have different groups working on the games at the same time.

Is jun maeda still hospitalized ? I don’t understand how VN companies like key works, but why did they start a new project (summer pockets) while the angel beats VN project is having a hard time?

He’s out of the hospital now. The reason why they couldn’t do that is because AB is totally Maeda’s control, and it’s kind of a bad business decision to have staff in, say, the music or the art department to sit around doing nothing while waiting for the story to be written. So they spread out and got totally different writers for Summer Pockets instead.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, as they say

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Oh, I’m glad to hear that. I was worried!

I do love that (true? made up?) story of how Maeda just threw an idea out there during a group meeting (after fruitless deliberation) and boom! everyone loves it, and you have your Summer Pockets plot.

I don’t remember where I heard this story, so maybe it’s false. But it does fit my all too high expectations for his plot writing capabilities.

The truth is that VisualArts held a competition among it’s staff for anybody to come up with a great concept for a Key game, and well, Maeda won ^^;

Makes me wonder what all the non-maeda submissions would’ve been like…

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could it be possible they’re working on all of the beats right now, so they can release them with a proper schedule, instead of working one at a time.

and on the chance we do actually get a continuation, do you guys think we’d get more additions to the common route?

I hardly doubt that is the case… even if it were true I doubt another beat of Angel Beats will come out for a very long time…

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Heh maybe key will release 2nd beat when half life 3 comes out. On the bright side, there’s a new manga coming; maybe that’ll be a substitute to the VN. It really sucks, what would’ve been 6 months until the next beat is now 2 years and we’re still counting :frowning:

I hope at least 1st beat gets translated, the arts are amazing. Maybe we’ll get Charlotte as well at some point, who knows?

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there’s already a russian patch, you could play the game while translating it with google translate its actually pretty understandable. as for the game you can buy it on amazone for around 70 usd. Charlotte wasted a lot of potential and i would LOVE to see a vn to cover all the flaws. but like you said who knows? it all depends on maeda.

…Or they could just, you know, play the Japanese version and use a text hooker to translate it so that they won’t lose more meaning than there was already lost in the Russian patch? :yahaha:

I can’t russian and I don’t want to machine translate it pfft
It feels like it’s gonna ruin my experience of the game, like that time I played Katawa Shoujo in french and never understood why it was so liked.

true true, i just Want to (1st beat spoilers) romance iwasawa and learn matsushita backstory with cohesive words before i have grand children y’know?

Makes sense

You see, I wouldn’t mind believing that the Angel Beats! “Beat Series” was over and done with for good, but the issue is the staff from Angel Beats! and Summer Pockets are signalling something else.

Angel Beats! is Na-Ga design-wise, with help from other illustrators for CG’s and extra cast, and if the Angel Beats! Beat Series was done with, then it wouldn’t make sense that Na-Ga was sharing a position with 2 other people when he could do all of the designs. But then you could say that they’re using the 2 designers because Hinoue left Key, and they may need to build up more designers just in case if anything happens with Na-Ga, or if Na-Ga alone can’t do all the work. That is possible definitely, but it could also easily mean that Na-Ga is busy with the Beats!, to the point where he can only help design 2 of the 4 main heroines (along with him being Key’s now-main illustrator). Na-Ga has to be in this visual novel for marketing reasons in a mainstream title.

However, the problem lies in the fact that people think the project is done with, now that Maeda seems to be working on other things (such as albums and the new Last Operation manga), along with his current health, but people don’t understand that Maeda doesn’t need to be involved with the beats for them to be released. Leo Kashida was a part of the project, and he doesn’t have anything announced yet for future visual novels. This could signify that he’s working on the next beats, seeing as though he planned routes with Maeda.

There’s also the fact that they have 5 composers so far for Summer Pockets listen for the VNDB page. Don’t you think that’s a bit much for a story that seems around the same length as Kanon ? Now it could just be instances where people are listed and they only contribute to the OP/ED, such as Maeda for Rewrite, however, even so, I don’t think they’d need that many people, especially if Maeda is technically done with all the albums and has no major writing to do, meaning he’d have time for the soundtrack along with Shinji, but if they are working on tracks for Angel Beats! also, then that can logically explain the need for 5 composers. Though it could just be 4, since 1 of those composers seems to do mainly OP/ED tracks only.

Then we have the interview they did about it’s release. They didn’t avoid the question and said that they didn’t want to only release Angel Beats! Key would have announced something if plans changed. Instead of doing a big game, Summer Pockets seems to be on a lower scale similar to Kanon, even signifying that they’re not dedicating all their time on this project.

It’s only logical that the project isn’t dead just yet. I’m pretty sure the only problem was not knowing what to do once Maeda’s health kicked in. With Leo and Kai easily being able to work on the project, along with Na-Ga still doing CG’s, it makes sense. I also don’t think people realize how long it takes to make CG’s out of everything else. They had so many CG’s in the first release, and I don’t think they would want future releases to have less CG’s, or else it’d be awkward.

The big problem with the CG’s is that the first beat had the anime to base the CG’s off of, but from now until the 6th beat/final release, everything will be original content. They’ll need a lot of imagination to think about how the CG’s will look like, along with writing itself, and that’ll be a lot considering the quantity of the first release. Not to mention we know how many times the visual novel had been delayed beforehand. Key never manages to have enough CG’s, so it’s clear that if they’re going for the same quantity and quality of the first one in writing and CG’s, that it’ll take longer than the original 6 month plan.

This is all just analyzing the staff given and working on each project, so I could just be wrong and the project is actually dead. But I can’t accept people thinking that the project is dead because of Maeda doing his own things, nor the existence of the new Last Operation, or even Summer Pockets coming out when it’s only natural they wouldn’t fully focus all their time on Angel Beats!

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There hasn’t been any news for English angel beats since the “baba said 50% news” right?