TYPE-MOON’s Mahōtsukai no Yoru (Witch on the Holy Night) visual novel is getting a release on Steam on December 14. The release will support Japanese, English, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese text.
It’s now on my wishlist! I’ve been thinking about buying this title for quite some time, since Scraft161 mentioned it to me. Happy to see it retains the Japanese script.
Ow hi, didn’t expect you to show up.
Happy to see it getting a steam release. I played the game through emulation as i didn’t want to hook the switch up to my desk and handheld doesn’t force a good pose (and we don’t talk about tabletop on first gen).
A native desktop release also makes it a lot easier to tamper with the game files (granted I could try and get the 2012 release but that hasn’t been translated).
I was sort of afraid they wouldn’t port the HD version to PC, but it’s good type moon (and I think aniplex) are going through with it.I’m always on the lookout for cool new visual novels 😎
A native desktop release also makes it a lot easier to tamper with the game files
Yeah, it probably won’t even be DRM’d, with any luck. I don’t see myself doing any of that myself, but I’m happy about the Steam release!
I was sort of afraid they wouldn’t port the HD version to PC, but it’s good type moon (and I think aniplex) are going through with it.
Sounds like it’s going to be a good release then! It’s interesting that Aniplex appears to be the localizer. This is only the second game they’ve ever published on Steam, and I don’t think they’ve localized VNs before. But hey, it’s not Moenovel, and they’re retaining the Japanese script, so I can’t complain.
Yeah, it probably won’t even be DRM’d Let’s hope so; and if it is then it’d be steam’s DRM at the worst. That said I don’t think the engine (which looked like kirikiri to me) supports much in terms of DRM checks after install.
I don’t see myself doing any of that myself for me it’s just a curiosity of how things are put together (doubly so for this one because of it’s many animations) and also as a way to have assets for emotes and such.
Sounds like it’s going to be a good release then! It’s interesting that Aniplex appears to be the localizer. I’m not entirely sure about aniplex though as I remember reading they were involved but I can’t recall where, the translation is pretty good though and makes use of existing terminology but I do have a couple minor gripes with it (mainly the fact that the english version uses imperial units with no way to switch it to metric, granted I have sort of gotten familiar with them; but it’d be nice to have that option).
Oh, good to hear the KiriKiri2 engine has limited support for DRM. I’ve got DRACU-RIOT here with plaintext archives, so that might be part of the reason why they’re plaintext. I wonder if Ren’Py supports DRM very well…I don’t think I know of a Ren’Py game encumbered with DRM.
I don’t use emotes enough to go to that effort, but yeah, that’s definitely a good way to get them.
Aniplex is the only western company publicly listed for the visual novel in the ANN post and on the Steam page, so I have to believe they’re responsible for the localization. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the Japanese company just publish their own localization? That’s something that’s been happening more and more lately; Japanese companies directly publishing their games without going through a middle-man. Good and bad, I think. Western companies are far less likely to ship a game with DRM these days, but Japanese developers tend to have no such compunctions with digital releases.
That said, I’m happy to see more Western localizers who retain the original Japanese text. If Moenovel did that, I would buy their localizations…
It’s good to hear you thought the localization was good overall! I tend to hear bad things about localizations lately, though I don’t read them myself.
The OG Tsukihime didn’t have any DRM (aside from streaming the music from the CD which Mirror Moon patched out due to performance) the Fate/Stay Night VN also doesn’t have much in the way of DRM although it does need a patch to run (and even then a VN of this age has issues). The thing with KiriKiri is that it’s insanely extensible so you could theoretically patch in any DRM you want; but the time and effort required to do so far outweighs any benefits you’d see as a group making visual novels. Add to that that we now have things like AETools which can extract the archives kirikiri uses in no time at all and people write interpreters for the KAG scripts as hobby project so you can read the Fate/Stay Night VN in the web although it doesn’t have saving/loading and is definitely not something I’d recommend for a first read.
Ren’Py is in a very similar boat where it’s scripts are trivial to extract (even more so because you don’t need specialized tools) and once you have it’s assets you can dump those into a new project and be done with it.
Aniplex is the only western company publicly listed for the visual novel in the ANN post and on the Steam page, so I have to believe they’re responsible for the localization.
I see; I don’t use ANN myself; they’ve sorta pissed me off a couple times with certain articles being inaccurate and reporting based on a mistranslated tweet from the Mushoku Tensei author (this one I only heard from and I can’t care enough to dig it up RN; but at least double check your sources and especially if they are translated from japanese with MTL as it is known to be bad at the best of times). As for the steam page I hadn’t looked myself yet because I already read it.
That said, I’m happy to see more Western localizers who retain the original Japanese text.
I personally don’t care much as most of the VNs I’ve read are community translated using a patch so I always had the original scripts; but it’s always good to see that we are getting options for this sorta stuff.
It’s good to hear you thought the localization was good overall!
I should probably mention that I might be biased in that view as I read Mahoyo right after the original Tsukihime using mirror moon’s translation which doesn’t exactly put the bar that high (sometimes it was hard to tell where the translation stopped and Nasu’s writing begun; doubly so during H-scenes where things would get laughably bad); but it was one of the first translations of any of the type moon works (I think they got beaten by the Fate translation; but at least that wasn’t a complete mess that was passed down to multiple groups before eventually being finished by mirror moon). what matters the most to me in the translations though is that they use the same terminology (which is now pretty much standardized thanks to the type moon wiki) as otherwise you might get that they are talking about something like vampires; but it makes it hard to tell whether they’re talking about true ancestors or dead apostles which are two very different things.
Oh right, interesting stuff. Yeah, I’m kinda glad most visual novel developers are so small that DRM is often out of reach, except for digital editions (DMM makes it easy). I thought Mirror Moon required proof of ownership before you could run their patches? I haven’t read any TYPE-MOON stuff, but that was my impression.
I don’t read ANN regularly but that was the source OP posted. And I corroborated it with several other news sources for the PS4/Switch game, as it’s the same localization. That being said…yeah, you’d expect them to have someone who knows Japanese on staff.
While I would love to buy Japanese visual novels directly from Japanese publishers, they’re often encumbered by DRM. The digital edition usually is. With physical editions, you just don’t know (hopefully the new VNDB DRM tag will change that; it’s now in Beta). Western visual novels that retain the Japanese text are often the best way to buy visual novels in Japanese. They are always clearly labelled as containing DRM or not and they rarely do these days.
Oh, well…even if you are biased, hey, at least it’s an improvement! One thing I’m glad about after deciding to learn Japanese is that I don’t need to worry about translation quality. Nonetheless, I’m grateful to fan translations because they were how I got into Japanese media in the first place. Even if most of them weren’t great (and filled with translation notes). I’ve yet to come across a VN writer who can write a good H-Scene…
I thought Mirror Moon required proof of ownership before you could run their patches?
Not with Tsukihime; if you have the CD (or more realistically mount the ISO) the installer just works, even from within wine. That said that was for an are where you’d still be able to realistically obtain the CD, nowadays the game is considered abandonware so some people took the translation; fixed it up (and by a lot) and provided easy access to western audiences) it’s a great way to read the original with all it’s rough edges. If you do want to support Type Moon in this endeavor; the best way would be to buy their stuff (whether it is a version of mahoyo, the Tsukihime remake (which is getting an official english release come 2024), or wait on a PC release (which Nasu stated he’s interested in if it got translated)). Personally I think I’m going to wait until the full game is out and translated if I’m going to read remake; there’s some interesting stuff that changes between the two that got me curious; but reading mahoyo was already challenging enough for me (largely because I did that on a 7 year old laptop)
you’d expect them to have someone who knows Japanese on staff.
you would; but then this is far from their first screw up and it really makes it look bad that it would have been easier to write an article correcting the misinformation caused by the whole incident rather than doing the same as everybody else.
One thing I’m glad about after deciding to learn Japanese is that I don’t need to worry about translation quality.
Good luck learning a language is hard (I know because english isn’t my first), know that it’s a long road but I can share a few tips:
- listen to japanese as much as you can; whether it’s movies, anime, music, … if it is made by japanese people for native speakers then you’re good (you can always get other material besides it; but it usually not as good for building an intuitive understanding of the language)
- try to avoid speaking/writing in japanese unless you feel comfortable forming sentences, premature output leads to you using broken japanese as reference for the language which builds accents, these are extremely hard to get rid of.
- kanji is a beast; but it’s not all irrational, most words are built by tying concepts together; what kanji don’t do is represent the way they’re supposed to sound.
- don’t use duolingo (this applies to any language) it’s method of learning is slow, it’s questions trivially simple, and it does not mesh well with the more flexible sentence structure in japanese leading to it telling you that a sentence normal people might use is wrong, it also forces premature output which goes against point 2.
I’ve yet to come across a VN writer who can write a good H-Scene…
same here; but I’ve read very few visual novels, I’m not really a reader and the things I have read are because either I knew it would be good (tsukihime, mahoyo) or where I just craved for more after loving it’s adaptation (Fate, Mushoku Tensei [Light Novel]).
It’s always good to see more titles coming out, thanks for the heads up!
