The Past – The Present – The Future

Sadly no surprise Renna patch this week, sorry. I figured that without a ‘normal’ blog update, I’d write a bit about what we’ve done so far, and once again talk about our plans for 2018 (and beyond?)

2016

As you might or might not know, Trip and I were originally part of a (now dead) scanlation team called Red Hawk Scans. Stuff happened and we ended up working on Nisekoi. Eventually, that series ended August 6th, 2016. We both didn’t feel like committing to another ‘serious’ weekly series, because at that point in time we were also doing Nanatsu no Taizai with Jaimini’s Box, and doing the tankoubon releases for Tsurezure (sounds familliar?) Children. Eventually we couldn’t be bothered with those anymore so we gave up on that as well.

This was around the end of November, I believe. We didn’t want to stop translating stuff about cute 2D girls altogether, though. We felt we could use a change in medium, and started looking into translated VNs. (Actually, that wasn’t even the first time we tried it out. Whilst we were still working on Nisekoi, Trip and I were talking about translating VNs as well, and we very briefly talked about doing Sakura no Uta. We didn’t really do anything with it, because we were content with Nisekoi.)

I asked Trip to just browse a bit for VNs with cute girls, and he came to me with Hoshi Ori Yume Mirai. The girls were cute indeed, but the length of the VN seemed a bit daunting to me, especially for our first project. We looked into what other VNs the company had made, and as you are well aware, we settled on Hatsukoi 1/1 for our first project.

With the decision made, next was the most difficult part; figuring out all the technical stuff about translating/hacking a VN. I don’t know what benevolent god was guiding us those two weeks, but we found everything we needed with relative ease, and during the final few weeks of December 2016, we started working on Hatsukoi for real.

2017

This brings us to the beginning of 2017, on which we ‘formally’ announced our project for the world to see. On January 7th, 2017 we made our first post on this blog in half a year, and announced what we were working on, with a small prologue/teaser patch included. Things really took off then, we completed an entire VN in only 17 weeks. And although I say ‘we’, most of the work was obviously done by Triplicate. On May 6th, 2017 we released the full patch for Hatsukoi 1/1. And while Hatsukoi certainly had its flaws, I’m still very happy that we did it as our first project.

Trip and I both knew we wanted to continue translating VNs, but some seemingly impossible-to-solve technical issues prevented us from doing Hoshi Ori right after Hatsukoi. We turned to /vn/, and asked them to just throw a lot of untranslated moege at us. This was around the beginning of March, so around week 10 of our translation. Again, as you’re well aware, our next project would become Tsujidou-san no Jun’ai Road.

Work on Tsujidou ‘officially’ started on May 20th, 2017. For the rest of the year, we unfortunately had a lot of things that came in between our desire to work on the VN, and actually working on it. I still take pride in our (Trip’s) speed, but we did slow down quite a bit. That’s not to say we didn’t make any progress, because – and I am repeating myself quite a bit – as you’re well aware we completed all routes save one in 2017. Additionally, the more we worked on Tsujidou, the more it became apparent that Trip didn’t like Tsujidou-san no Jun’Ai road as much as Hatsukoi 1/1. This is explained in further detail in a blog post I made about 1.5 months ago.

2018 (and beyond?)

That brings is to our current situation. Trip’s on break – for real this time – and all that’s left for Tsujidou is Renna’s route, which I’m told is the best route of the three (four?), so here’s hoping. I once again want to talk about or plans for this year, and quite possibly 2019 as well.

tonework’s released three append discs for Hatsukoi 1/1, which we will be translating after we finish with Tsujidou. We discussed the order of the routes for a bit. We knew we wanted to do Kyou second, because we’re both pretty indifferent to her. That just left Maya and Yukino, and as you might know, Trip is a huge fan of the latter. We’re stubborn as hell, so we decided to do Yukino last (again). So, just to make it clear; the release order for the Hatsukoi 1/1 Append Discs is Maya > Kyou > Yukino. Coincidentally, that order matches the order of the Append Menu in-game:

Once we’re finished with the Hatsukoi Appends, we’ll finally move on to Hoshi Ori. This VN is long, very very long. The game has 6 heroines, and as such it will probably take us the rest of 2018 and a good part of 2019 to fully translate the game. We’ve already decided on the first girl to translate, and I hope we can release her patch this year.

As for what’s after Hoshi Ori, I have no idea. In the past, I’ve made some pretty careless promises about our future projects, and I’m not about to make the same mistake. Of course, GinHaru and tonework’s’ 4th project are on our radar, but that’s all they are right now. Small possibilities.

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Like I said, this wasn’t like a regular update, but I figured a nice overview would be a nice start to 2018. I’ll see you next week, with hopefully some decent progress in Renna’s route.