Sceptic said:
Do any of the more original stuff get fan translations at all? I thought the ROM translation scene was doing quite well a few years ago, or did they all move on?
It depends. Most of the stuff that gets translations are Visual Novels, on one hand, and crazy popular stuff, on the other. So, if you are into Touhou, sure, every new touhou game, or touhou fangame with a reasonable amount of text, will be translated in about two weeks or something, and every now and then some random lonely fan with a lot of time on their hands will translate some game light on text, like it happened to some STGs, but outside of that not much happens, and even cool and interesting games from the NES and SNES, let alone the PS and PS2 one, era are either not being translated at all or a project is started and everyone then moves to something more popular and with a more numerous following after some frustration, usually stupid silly porn games and dating sims. So stuff like Hungry Ghosts, Shadow Tower Abyss, LSD, or even something relatively well known as Echo Night II are kind of not going to happen. And when a group decides to bring something, either as a new full blown fan translation or as an official one, they go for stuff that's easy to translate and either mostly humorous/random or games that really don't need text, like STGs.
Even the doujin and indie fans seems to be getting dead lazy as of late, as even crazy popular stuff like Corpse Party and Demonophobia have gone without a real translation for a long time, though Corpse Party got a lesser version translated on the PSP and, right, no one bought it. And while japanese Doujin and Indie developers are some pretty creative people if they aren't Touhou or Umineko they aren't getting translated either, or at least not for a long time. If you check Doujinstyle and the like you'll see every now and then a new ARPG, dungeon crawler, puzzle game, or strategic/tactical JRPG come out, sometimes even from recognizable names and companies, and they never get translated.
This is particularly depressing if you like horror games, too, and that goes without mentioning japan only consoles and japan only arcade games, if you are into that kind of stuff. Even a lot of PSP and DS stuff goes without translation because it is seen as lacking a market in the west, though many times it is actually something no one cares about (gothic lolita fashion games? Ok, that sounds kind of cool but, really, no market in the west). It's a good time to be learning japanese, I guess. Or to learn to use one of those software combinations that take text dumps of the game as it goes and then translate it for you to read in another window. I suck at technical stuff and that doesn't work in all cases, so I'll keep trying to decode the little runes and playing with a dictionary.
Edit: Ah, yes, and stuff that's seen as
too girly, like most of the Atelier games with a female lead character, are neither translated, so if we aren't going to get even the Atelier games you can see how high our chances of getting Hungry Ghosts actually are.
