Japanese Visual Novel Studio Minori Lifts “Dirty Foreigners” Ban

Anyone recall this little debacle? It was all the rage after a group of feminists managed to band together in order to take down Illusionsoft’s “rape-sim” game last year. A little more than one year later, and not only has the company taken down their condescending remarks regarding freedom of speech while setting up a foreign access page in the process, but they’ve even decided to work together with a group that they were previously threatening to sue earlier this year. In other words, be sure to say a prayer, grab your children, and batten down the hatches folks. The apocalypse is right around the corner. Perhaps as early as tomorrow.

Short story short though, it was beginning to get leaked around mid-summer this year that Minori had openly invited the fansub group ‘No Name Losers to talk openly about the possibility of localizing one of their games after their original cease and desist order. Of course, given the natural progression of things, and how Minori publicly denounced all foreigners as a threat to their creativity, people probably thought that there would be a better chance of seeing two unicorns mating in broad daylight than this ever happening, but it’s here so we’ll gladly deal with it. “Contrary to what Gemot Encubed may (have) reported, our e-mail to minori was responded to in under 24 hours, and for the next week, they focused their efforts on nothing but trying to come up with a solution.” That solution? A collaboration between both the CEO of Minori, and Bamboo, the CEO of Overdrive along with No Name Losers in order to bring this once far-fetched idea into reality.

Famous for their works such as Wind –a Breath of Heart-, Ef: A Fairy Tale of the Two and Eden: They Were Only Two, On the Planet, Minori was one of the few remaining prominent visual novel studios not to have been working on providing any sort of official English releases much to the dismay of their overseas fans. While NNL is currently only contracted for a one-shot deal, contingent on the success of sales, this new collaboration will be bringing Ef – the First Tale and Ef- the Latter as their first official release. For those of you who don’t know, these two games were the basis of two popular anime Ef: a Tales of Memories (2007) and Ef: A Tales of Melodies (2008.) Minori has promised that if the game does well enough we will see more of their titles available in the future.

In order to accommodate a Western release, many changes were required from the fansub group’s original English patch:

-ef will be split into the original “first tale” and “latter tale” versions. It was our desire to keep the versions merged, but minori requested this.

-Translation has to step up to professional grade, so we can’t throw in any more junk text blocks. As a result, localization will be tighter: no more Iraqi journalists or SUPAHs! Hurrah!

-Our previous honorific guideline was confusing for many people. To correct this, honorific usage will be streamlined instead of having exceptions for Chihiro and Mizuki. Idiosyncrasies of characters, such as Yuuko’s weird mannerisms (she uses -masu form to the point of annoyance), will be retained.

-Certain terminology and vocabulary will be changed to comply with western laws. All characters are 18 or over!

-Bad end 5, the fake ending that was included for humor, must sadly be removed. Here is the script, free of charge! Special thanks to tester zerokirby15 for providing such wonderful fan fiction.

-Now that we have minori’s support, the technical issues we encountered will hopefully be fixed. Memories (flashback) and configuration will completely work!

[Source: No Name Losers]