Just a general discussion topic for any commentary regarding our glorious senpai Sekai Project, newly appointed publishers of Key’s works in the western world. Enjoy!
So I just noticed this post on tumblr where a fan sent them candy and thanked them for their localisation of CLANNAD with a poorly-drawn image of Masato and Kengo fighting. I certainly got a laugh out of it.
Hilarious indeed! “Merry Christmas ya filthy animal”
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Oh, I know this art style!
It’s a special version of crappy drawn, taking the style of ‘Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff’ , which is like a mini comic series inside the webcomic called Homestuck
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mfw I’m playing LB! Refrain and I come across this on the forums XD
I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE EEL PIES, BRO
IT KEEPS HAPPENING
(hi offtopic thread)
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So I have a habit with my friends of always playing the Devil’s Advocate. I’m gonna go ahead and do that right now.
Recently I’ve been reading about Nekopara (haven’t actually read it yet because no time until next month), and while the reviews on Steam are hilarious, other people don’t seem to be too pleased with the translation quality. First info is right on their forums: https://forums.sekaiproject.com/t/very-concerned-about-nekopara-translation/195. Second info is, as expected, from /jp/ http://boards.4chan.org/jp/thread/12861424/steam-sale-on-vns-since-i-decided-to-get-nekopara. Please note that 4chan is terrible and any information from there should be taken with a grain of salt.
I chose to compare it to Nekopara because it is, so far, Sekai Project’s biggest release that they themselves had to oversee the translation for. Planetarian was already translated by insani beforehand and Grisaia by koestl on TLWiki. If the translation for Nekopara does indeed suffer from this lack of quality, it makes me worry about how they plan to handle the release of Clannad.
While they are using a totally different team for the translation of Clannad, their current release does say something about how they manage the quality of their releases. Ergo, if they are satisfied with releasing this quality for Nekopara, will they be similarly satisfied for Clannad? Slight sidenote, but they’ve announced that they are planning to hire the team that translated Attack on Titan’s manga and LN (most likely the people from Kodansha Comics USA). Has anybody read these and can vouch for their quality?
Now, sitting here complaining about it like what /jp/ does obviously isn’t going to get us anywhere 
So my biggest question is how do we, as probably the only organized English-speaking Key community, help ensure that Clannad will be released as a quality work?
Yeah, I read some lines back when the demo release was put out, and the meaning of a lot of lines were altered slightly, or just wrong. A lot of it can be chalked up to “localization” but I think some is just preference on the tler’s/writers’ parts.
I read the first arc or so of AoT last year and I don’t remember having many complaints… but it’s hard to tell. Look further ahead in the manga once it becomes more political and the quality should be noticeable.
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To be fair, CLANNAD has a professional TL team and limitless amounts of expectations.
True, which is also why I ask about the previous works of said team and if those are reliable
The team working on it now are ok But I feel with how big Clannad is they will work well on it and im sure Sekai Project will try to make it as good as they can make it. After all this is one of there Bigger projects so I guess we can only hope they put there all in it but I have a good feeling they will do well with it.
I have to think they will make double sure to release a quality product with Clannad, it is by far their biggest project to date and after seeing that reddit post of the Q&A with Visual Arts and Key I would think doubly so.
In case you missed it VA/Key agreed to answer the top 10 upvoted posts on Reddit and one of them asked about their thoughts on maybe making a western branch that could possibly lead to naturally ported games if not simul-releases and their response was they want to see how well the Clannad kickstarter campaign was gonna go so I’m sure Sekai knows they have some big names watching this prjoect closely.
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If anything I’m more curious about what Sekai plan to do with the… $541,000 that they have for Clannad. I’m gonna go ahead and assume that it will not cost NEARLY that much to translate and release the game ($140k initial goal, while a team had already been working on a fan translation for $0). Kickstarter rewards are gonna be a chunk out of that, as is licensing and the stretch goals, but that’s gotta leave at least a couple hundred thousand dollars left over. With a budget like this I’m expecting a pretty much perfect translation at the very least.
(also giant official dango plushie pls)
Well they’ll definitely have to pay for the large amount of content that they have to distribute… The rest if profit.
Really, I think that the way this kickstarter (among others) works is they kind of get an advance on the sales. So instead of shouldering the fees during development and reaping the profit after the game is released, they do it the other way around, sell the game and get the profit before it’s released and use that money for the development. The rest of the money goes into the same place as it would had they used the traditional means: business profit.
Oh yeah… Kickstarter confuses me with how backwards it is. How big is Sekai Project’s team anyway? They have multiple titles going at once so it can’t be that small.
They temporarily hire teams of translators for most of their different projects IIRC.
is there an official date for the clannad releasing?
I’m 100 percent ok with SP turning a good profit off something like this. Its my thought that maybe…just maybe the JP game devs will see there is not just a market but a ripe market for VN’s in the west and maybe we won’t have to wait years to see new games released, cause the wait for Angel Beats and Chaos Child will kill me.
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There’s a deadline. It will most certainly come out before or in October.
