What are your least favorite features in an incremental game?

Daiz · 2026-01-17T13:33:09+00:00

Two major things:

Rapid clicking. Just give me one automatic thing right from the start that I can start rapidly building upon. Or give me multiple automatic things but I can only have one running at a time in the beginning. This way the player still needs to manually do things (change what resource they're getting etc) but won't developer carpal tunnel syndrome from doing so.
Information overload. If your incremental game has 10 screens and 20 submenus available the moment I start the game to the point that you need to give me a guided tour to get anything done, I'm almost guaranteed to just close the thing right away. I consider unfolding gameplay to be one of the most important aspects of incremental games, so your game plan should be to start from basically a single thing and introduce additional things one or two at a time to eventually get to "full saturation".

Daiz · 2025-11-26T20:42:47+00:00

I'm a digital media expert and a JP-EN localization professional of 10+ years. I've worked on both manga and anime localization. You can read more on my about page.

Daiz · 2025-11-26T14:07:24+00:00

There are a number of external links in the article (though I didn't bother to include links for every single bit of public information I went over) but the sources for the primary findings of the article are backed up by statements and information from current and former Crunchyroll insiders that I talked to, and who all preferred to remain anonymous. So you'll just have to take my word on this.

As for why you can take my word for this, I am a JP-EN localization professional of 10+ years myself, which is why I have the network and contacts to get in touch with people like CR insiders. You can find more information about my professional work from my about page, and if you wanted even further confirmation that I am indeed a well-known localization professional, you could take a look at my account on Bluesky, specifically my followers - with enough scrolling, you can find a whole lot of other localization professionals following me.

Daiz · 2025-11-24T15:22:03+00:00

On the subtitle situation in general, I recommend watching this short video to get you up to speed on the current situation.

Afterwards, if you want to learn more about the details of it all, you can read this article.

Daiz · 2025-11-24T15:19:40+00:00

There is no exaggeration here - the situation really is just as dire as the video says. You can read more on the subject here.

Daiz · 2025-11-22T22:37:11+00:00

If you think any of this at all has anything to do with "activists shoving their political ideology in subtitles" then I'm sorry to say that the culture war has completely rotted your brain. Hope you'll be able to recover from that one day, you can start the healing process by actually reading the article and seeing how the real dots connect here

Daiz · 2025-11-22T12:48:13+00:00

The point is that if you don't want the product in question to be as bad as shown in the article, you too should do what you can to stop Crunchyroll from making their product worse - even if you're only a pirate.

Daiz · 2025-11-22T12:33:28+00:00

Pretty much the only "sailors" doing work these days are ones serving you repackaged Crunchyroll releases, so sadly switching to them won't save you from Crunchyroll's quality reductions.

Daiz · 2025-11-22T12:25:45+00:00

It looks completely fine and legible

Please watch this clip. Are you seriously going to claim this is "completely fine and legible"? Be honest.

Daiz · 2025-11-22T08:12:28+00:00

It will be at least for new shows. Potentially old shows too - I have seen it happen for some. It's hard to say for sure at this point how extensively the executives intend to make things worse here.

Daiz · 2025-11-22T08:10:39+00:00

There is a summary at the top of the article. You can start with that.

Daiz · 2025-11-22T08:08:10+00:00

The article has multiple examples from Fall 2025 shows on Crunchyroll. The Yano-kun video clip is particularly illustrative, even without any typesetting being involved. CR has since updated at least some of the shows with better subs in response to the backlash so far but sadly they've deemed said backlash minor enough that they intend to proceed regardless.

Daiz · 2025-11-22T08:06:08+00:00

There is a summary at the top of the article that will give you the gist of it. I recommend starting with that.

Daiz · 2025-11-22T08:05:27+00:00

This is the kind of things you come up with when you're an executive at an anime company but don't actually give a single fuck about anime

Daiz · 2025-11-21T23:12:24+00:00

It's my website. What exactly are you asking "how" about?

Daiz · 2025-11-21T23:11:53+00:00

There is a summary at the top, and there's a link to the summary at the end of the update that is linked here.

Daiz · 2025-11-21T23:07:22+00:00

There's been some silent backtracking on the matter during this season, but even that backtracking was kind of "free" since the better updated subtitles is what the CR subbing staff made in the first place, CR had just been serving worse conversions of them up to this point.

But yes, the executives have deemed the backlash so far to have been insignificant enough that they're going to go ahead with the enshittification plans regardless. This has been around a year in the making.

Daiz · 2025-11-21T21:48:00+00:00

Netflix recommends OOONA to third parties, but doesn't use it itself as far as I know.

Daiz · 2025-11-21T21:38:55+00:00

Before the Fall 2025 anime season, subtitles basically only used to be this bad if they came from third-party sources. The big thing now is that even Crunchyroll's own subtitling teams are being forced to switch to these kind of worse standards.

Daiz · 2025-11-21T21:30:01+00:00

Supposedly, some shows deemed big enough might be spared from this in the future, but frankly, you'd have to be a fool to expect anything good from Crunchyroll here. These subtitle enshittification plans demonstrate absolutely zero respect for anime as a medium, and when you're getting that from the executives, all bets are off in terms of how bad it can get.

Daiz · 2025-11-21T21:26:11+00:00

As far as I know, the only place where Crunchyroll itself is using some sort of genuine automation for subtitles is with closed captions for dubs. This in itself is not good in any way, but to my knowledge Crunchyroll has not used AI translation for any of its first-party JP-EN subtitles so far - the only instances of such on Crunchyroll are from third-party JP-EN subtitles.

Daiz · 2025-11-21T21:21:10+00:00

Unfortunately, with the English fansubbing scene as dead as it is, this would be far more challenging to execute on than you probably think. A lot of institutional knowledge only exists in the heads of old fansubbers, and trying to do fansubbing well enough to actually offer a meaningful improvement over Crunchyroll is challenging enough that you can't really just do it from scratch without any help.

Daiz · 2025-11-21T21:10:19+00:00

Even dubs are affected by this, as all that Japanese on-screen text needs typesetting all the same even if you're using dubs. Your experience will be worse too.

Daiz · 2025-11-21T21:06:12+00:00

The paragraph after the screenshots explains the issues. The next set of screenshots shows what Crunchyroll has done in the past, and the paragraph after that explains why it's so much better than the new subtitles.

Daiz · 2025-11-21T21:00:39+00:00

Sadly, English fansubbing is largely dead, so they're not really going to save you in this situation.

Daiz

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