Rewrite+ and Angel Beats! -1st beat- planned for Western Localisation!

@invalidname I want to report on it but it’s hard without any concrete info or a quote of what was said, heh.

I’m still hoping that there will be limited editions releases for these because the goodies that come with special editions are great.

Just one question, who finds this info and where does he find it from? I keep seing Release announcements all over the forum, is it like Kazamatsuri has KEY scavengers and hackers stalking every KEY social media and conference at any given time?

Still, I’m pretty happy about this since Angel Beats! First Beat wasn’t the same as other KEY’s visual novels using machine translators. TBH though, I don’t think these English releases will be a complete exit if they sell them at 50$ or 60$. This way, the only ones getting them will be KEY fans and they won’t probably attract any more public than the one they already have…

That was explained in the article.

Now, Im a relatively new Key fan compared to lots of others here, but the only Key VN I know of thats had a machine TL-level translation was the latter part of CLANNAD. I’ve read all the other ones and they’ve all been decent.

That doesnt make any sense. No matter what, being officially released to the English-speaking market is going to get more people see it than it would if it had to be imported and is in a foreign language.

It was more a retorical question than anything. What I actually wanted to say is that I am surprised that people are capable of finding information from everywhere and it looks almost like they are stalking them. Sorry if it was badly expressed.

Sure, machine translations might be decent, but a lot of the meaning is lost and jokes are difficult to catch on the fly. What I mean is that it will be by far a better experience to have a fanmade translation or an official one over a machine tranlation.

I see your point, still, even though the fact that the price will be 50$ or 60$ is pure speculation, such pricing might become a huge barrier at first. I don’t know much about their KEY’s internal economy, but I’d aim for a lower price at first, perhaps 30-40$ for a realease or two and then rise the price tags for their next projects. This way, they’ll get an allmighty popularity boost as soon as they release both Rewrite and Angel Beats! First Beat.

Of course, with time my bet is that they’ll succeed in the western market after some time. It’s just that I think they might be going a bit too aggressive on the pricing, just like @Pepe said.

No, you do not understand. They were not machine translations.

And machine TLs are not decent. They are barely understandable.

I can’t wait to throw my money at Rewrite+.

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What I wanted to say is that I read Angel Beats! First Beat with a machine translator and, that compared to the other KEY visual novel I read, which did have oficial or fanmade translations, Angel Beats!, wasn’t as good to the machine translator I used with Angel Beats!

Sorry for the missunderstanding caused.

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Well, we do pride ourselves in bringing the latest Key news to the fanbase. That being the case, we gotta be vigilant at all times, ya know! :masgrin:

After reading all your posts again, I think what you mean to say is “After reading numerous Key works, all of which with Machine TLs, Angel Beats makes the least sense with the Machine TLs”. I hope this helps… kinda :yukismil:

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Oh man, I ago l should really my English skills. What I try to say is:

After reading other KEY VNs with oficial translations or fanmade translations, the fact that I read Angel Beats with a Machine Translator may have ruined the experienced a bit.

To clarify it: I read AB with machine translations. I read LB and a partir of Kanon with fanmade translations. I read CLANNAD with an oficial translations.

I really hope I managed to expresa myself correctly this time.

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Sorry for the confusion Mogaoscar! If it helps I managed to catch your meaning pretty quickly :stuck_out_tongue:

Hahaha, I’ll take this as a compliment. Half of it is having connections to news sources, the other is our dedication to it. We are the biggest English-speaking Key-focused news blog in the world, so we have a reputation to keep! In this case it involved keeping in regular contact with people attending the event, mostly over Twitter. Twitter is your best source for information like this, people live-tweeting from events and such. But we had to do a lot of fact-checking to make sure all of the details were correct, which took me going around asking lots of people online who were there exactly what happened!

I’m no expert, but the way I see it is the issue with Key under-selling the game is that it would devalue their product in Japan. The game is still new, and it sells for around $80 in Japan. Selling it for $50 internationally would be a steal, going even lower could be very damaging.

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Yes, totally true. However, a price tag of higher than 50$ wouldn’t be welcomed happily in the western market. Therefore, pricing will be tricky and no matter how much KEY tries to satisfy both markets, some market will be dissatisfied with the outcome.

This will be only appliable to the first part of the western expansion, since I think that once they gain some popularity, they’ll be able to set the price just as they wish.

Also, there is the piracy thing. I don’t know if piracy is broadly extended in Japan, but if they plan on releasing digital versions only (which I don’t think they will), piracy might hold them back. As for physical versions, I guess they can price them as they want. Their value is in the box and the extra stuff that they includes.

Outstanding work. You guys are the real MVPs. :clap:

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Sorry for the misunderstanding @Mogaoscar! To be honest, your English is so good I wouldnt have even thought that could have been the problem. I understand what you are trying to say, and indeed, I am also very glad we will be getting an English translation, as I hope official English VNs will continue to become more prominent. Although, I am still worried about what the quality of this translation will be… :sunohii:

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Why is that? CLANNAD was good, why wouldn’t the new ones be as CLANNAD or even better?

We don’t know who is working on AB!. Different translators give very different results.

Yay! I wasn’t expecting this so soon! But I guess they are going to be released on steam? Next step would be a retail version for every officially translated key VN. Please key.

Basically what Helios said. From what it seems, Angel Beats!, like Harmonia, is probably being translated by a mysterious VisualArt’s in-house group. Not only does that make me skeptical in and of itself, what we saw from the Harmonia screenshots on Steam didnt look the best.

So Angel Beats is being done by a mysterious in house translator? Has anything by Key ever been translated by this kind of group? Or are we completely in the dark as to how the quality may be?

Harmonia is also being translated by an in-house translator, like Yerian stated above. We’re basically left in the dark on how good/bad the translation is, if the AB VN is also translated by a in-house translator.

Hopefully during that time that Harmonia was delayed, they fixed the errors in the English text from what we saw at least.

planetarian on iOS was also translated in-house, and was received very poorly.

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