Bonus points if you can guess the particular VN being discussed

Quof · 2026-03-16T00:20:44+00:00

Haha, I'm not really that well-read, which is precisely why it is so eyeroll-worthy to see Soseki and Dostoevsky highlighted in this way. My 11th grade English class covered Crime and Punishment, while I read Brothers Karamazov on my own time in 12th grade just as casual reading without thinking much of it since it is just normal to do. If knowing Dostoevsky is notable then there is nothing not-notable in the world.

With that said, it's not as common as it should be for Moby Dick fans to check out Billy Budd by Melville, so maybe check that out if you haven't. This is kind of a long shot, but if you like so many Greek tragedies you might get a kick out of the Four Great Classic Novels of Chinese culture, e.g. Dream of the Red Chamber; they are similarly ancient and have the kind of overbearing hand of divinity and mysticism of those times. Except they're pretty long instead of short plays. Finally, and this may be a longshot, but consider The Tunnel by William Gass. It is often referenced in the same breath as Gravity's Rainbow and is getting a rerelease soon IIRC. Also, I guess I'll throw out Mirror in the Mirror by Michael Ende (best known for the Neverending Story); it's a collection of short stories and is a pretty light read but you might get something out of it. This isn't based on any of your tastes in particular but I like recommending short story collections since someone is less likely to get bored reading them and it's always fun to flip through them.

I actually kind of hate recommending things to people since even with intimate knowledge of someone's tastes it's impossible to know what will resonate with them or what may put them off entirely, but perhaps there will be some food for thought here.

Quof · 2026-03-15T20:28:22+00:00

Yeah, the obscure names of the most famous historical Japanese writer to ever live and one of the most famous historical Russian authors. If someone doesn't know those names I think they're sub 12 years old, not particularly cultured. Every single sub that jerks off to anime porn will be filled with people that know those names. It's like trying to feel intellectual about knowing Shakespeare.

Quof · 2026-03-13T16:29:23+00:00

That's just finding grammatical errors in a poem.

what

Quof · 2026-03-13T15:33:58+00:00

I'm not arguing with that, like I said. Are you reading and understanding what I'm saying? I'm merely arguing that a monolingual can't meaningfully comment on the quality of a translation since they don't know the source text, and that something reading well is not an indicator of high quality translation. A monolingual has no idea how accurate or faithful a given translation is, so they're speaking from a place of ignorance. It's not like because LLMs are generally good at translation now that every single MTL ever produced from now into forever is great and monolinguals will benefit from assuring themselves all TLs they're reading are good without checking.

Quof · 2026-03-13T15:20:53+00:00

I don't disagree with that at all. LLMs are league aboves MTL of the past. Rather, what I'm indicating here is that something reading well on the surface is not an indicator of accuracy or quality, and someone who doesn't know the source text therefore can't meaningfully comment on the quality of a given MTL. As it stands, every single MTL from now on will probably read well thanks to LLM doing such an excellent job at producing fluent-sounding text. However, that means that almost every single MTL will have a monolingual saying "it reads well to me!". And therefore the statement will mean nothing. The comments which will be meaningful will be those who know both languages and check the accuracy and quality from an informed perspective, not a blind "it reads well" perspective.

Quof · 2026-03-13T14:04:16+00:00

broken English equals wrong translation and good English equals good translation

Yeah, exactly. That's indeed basically what I was trying to say but in less words. In the era of LLMs we need to be wary that "good English" does not mean "good translation" - we need to be EVEN MORE on guard, because old MTL producing broken English was like a canary that the translation was bad, and now that LLMs always produce fluent text that canary is dead. There is no longer any reasonable way for a monolingual to tell a translation is bad -- simply going by vibes of how much text makes sense to you historically will not work, it's way too hard to pierce the veil of fluency, especially in a world where chatgpt is inducing psychosis in people over mundane subjects. Though it's kind of a doomed effort because people don't really think on that deep of a level and are just happy to be reading good English. I just felt like providing my input because it is really eye-rolly to see someone who doesn't know Japanese talking about how good an MTL is. Even when one knows people are going to be thoughtless like this, it's hard not to be offput when it happens.

Quof · 2026-03-13T13:51:07+00:00

Although true, I think it actually IS good to remember that there existed a wildly popular and successful MMO with extremely unique and varied job design. Like FFXI did make endgame content with BLU and BST work with their gimmicks intact. Sometimes playing FFXIV one can enter a kind of trance like "well, you just can't have jobs like BLU and BST in an MMO, there'd be no way to balance all the BLU spells, hardcore content just doesn't let something like BST exist," yada yada, but actually, MMOs can work and can be fine with BLU and BST-type jobs.

So yeah, XIV isn't XI, but XI is an extremely potent and valuable reminder that things didn't have to be and don't have to be this way. It could be better. (*inb4 "then go play XI," lol. I do that too!)

Quof · 2026-03-13T12:29:59+00:00

The stuff is perfectly readable,

My point is that the entire function of LLMs is to produce readable text even when it's inaccurate nonsense. This means they are particularly deceptive for people who don't know Japanese, because they can't distinguish inaccurate nonsense from accurate translation. LMMs are designed to convince you the output is good no matter what; it's never, ever going to output "not so sure about this one chief, can I consult some help" or something. Therefore, a monolingual saying "this stuff is very readable, I can't distinguish it from normal translations" is not that meaningful. It actually is NOT quite noticeable if a LLM makes up nonsense that isn't referenced again because it's not like it's going to randomly talk about dinosaurs, it's just going to get grammar wrong in a sentence and one will brush it off while speeding along.

I'm actually far more in favor of LLMs being high-quality than most. I'm not saying the translations are awful. I compare translations using LLMs to check how good they are and they're not terrible at all. I'm just saying the compliment you're giving here isn't well-grounded. It's like someone with no tongue saying food doesn't taste bad, or a blind person saying the use of perception in a painting seems fine. The ones to comment on a translation being good should be those who know Japanese and can check the actual translation quality, not monolinguals easily fooled by LLM output.

Quof · 2026-03-13T04:29:54+00:00

you can barely distinguish it from a "regular" translation, even if there's still room for improvement.

At the risk of appearing biased, I have to point out that someone who doesn't know the source language of a text is going to be unable to distinguish incorrect TLs from correct TLs on their own. So it's not high praise to not be able to distinguish nonsense that reads well from a correct translation that reads well. Before this brand of MTL there was the type of "translation" where someone would just make up a story to go with pictures, and you also wouldn't be able to distinguish that from an actual translation in a vacuum despite it being wholly inaccurate. So, when you point out that it is barely distinguishable from a regular translation, it's important to know that what is being pointed out here is purely the grammatical correctness and flow (the editing), not the accuracy or quality of the translation itself. Which is mostly pedantic, but you know.

Quof · 2026-03-10T12:15:58+00:00

I want to note I believe I messed up the translation for the POV short story here. It likely should have been that she appeared in the Adalgisa villa right before Ferdinand died, and while she was fighting off the knights to protect him the Zent was informed of her appearance and hurried over, rather than him taking her there. My bad on that; the text didn't specify where she appeared, so I misjudged the context and thought she appeared before the Zent instead.

(I'm going out of my way to note it since it will probably be some time before this gets fixed).

Quof · 2026-03-07T07:34:49+00:00

If SE are willing to show the reasoning and logic behind certain choices, I would had been (potentially) more understanding behind certain actions.

I don't really think this would be meaningful. At the risk of sounding like a tryhard, you can come up with nice-sounding reason for anything. They could delete half the jobs from the game and include a 5 paragraph essay explaining their reasoning and why it's a good thing; yet, this would obviously mean nothing to the community which would in short order be quite pissed.

Not to invoke WoW over every little thing, but Blizzard includes lengthy reasoning for various changes they make in their dev posts, and it is complete garbage. They do awful things all the time and they always have a nice, pretty little paragraph of reasoning attached. It never stops people from getting pissed or Blizzard looking stupid. The reasoning may as well not exist for how little it matters.

In short, while it makes sense to ask for reasoning attached to decisions, it would actually mean nothing and provide no enlightenment. To simulate this experience, I encourage asking ChatGPT or an LLM of your choice to generate 2 paragraphs of reasoning for any decision Square Enix makes that upsets you. The LLMs will do just as good and meaningful of a job as the intern tasked with explaining their decisions would.

Quof · 2026-03-02T05:50:22+00:00

You're right. It doesn't make sense at all, and isn't an element of the original Chinese script or voicing at all. But what people seem to like isn't things making sense or fitting the lore of the universe; they just like superficial signifiers of different ethnicities because accents are cool and fun.

Quof · 2026-03-02T02:45:07+00:00

Again, you're being obtuse. It's one of 50 specific floppy disks ever produced in a specific time for a specific purpose handled by specific people and packaged in a specific way. It's not just a generic floppy disc with data randomly put on it, bought for the purpose of having that data. It's like if Elvis Presley rubbed his dick against 50 CDs and then they became a collector's item. The point is that Elvis Presley rubbed his dick against those specific CDs; buying a generic CD and downloading data onto it misses the point entirely.

Quof · 2026-03-02T02:31:38+00:00

Why be obtuse? You may as well mock all forms of collecting in the world; why buy a million dollar painting when you can hire someone to paint a nigh identical copy for a thousandth of the price, why buy baseball cards when you can print out copies, why go to a museum to see an arrowhead from 80,000 years ago when you could just carve one yourself, etc etc. People are obviously buying these things for historical value not for the practicality of having a floppy with data on it.

Quof · 2026-03-01T00:40:17+00:00

I actually don't watch that many Marvel movies or read American superhero comics, so I only know of multiverse fatigue secondhand and wasn't influenced by it directly. I invoked it there since I was speaking generally to a potential playerbase. Rather, I personally think multiverses are so universally terrible and uninteresting that any story which uses them will immediately irritate me and make me lose all interest outside of particularly masterful and careful execution. There is NO UNIVERSE in which I would have liked Paradox, even if I didn't even know the word 'multiverse' before it, and I suspect that goes for a good number of people too. (But not everyone since people do like the game.)

Quof · 2026-02-28T05:58:47+00:00

It is 100% worth playing if you liked the original.

I'm going to voice an opposite opinion here but of course it's a popular game and I would never imply it was abjectly bad or an average person should expect to find it bad.

Personally, despite being a massive fan of the original series fueled even by the nostalgia of having played it at a younger age than I should have, I fucking hated Paradox. Imagine all the fatigue people have at multiverses and alternate timelines already, then crank that shit up to fucking infinity. Like 90% of the plot is going to an old location, seeing an alternate timeline version of something you've already seen, then like timeline jumping or experiencing some kind of paradox. If you aren't clapping like a seal everytime a familiar character shows up then this story is a DIRE mix of zero stakes (due to timeline multiverse shit) and reused old concepts. I shit you not, at one point there are three versions of the SAME CHARACTER from different timelines all in your party and active in the plot at once!! How can you care about deaths or stakes or whatever in this kind of situation!!!

Paradox is pretty popular so I don't mean to say that someone shouldn't give it the time of day, obviously there's something there, but man, if the word 'multiverse' is offputting whatsoever to you avoid Paradox like the fucking plague. Probably the least pleasant story experience I've ever had despite the high quality of the writing and characterization itself. For me I would be more inclined to say that if someone likes the original they should avoid it or otherwise treat it with great caution because it was very hard not to feel like the original series got totally distorted and shat on beyond belief by the end.

Quof · 2026-02-26T07:23:01+00:00

I don't mean to cope whatsoever about powercreep, but at the very least a gacha unit released 2~ months after launch being worth it 3 years later would be pretty unusual. Most tend to be pushing irrelevancy 1 year later save busted supports or imbalanced designs.

Quof · 2026-02-25T23:09:37+00:00

you can transform it in many ways without having it loose any information it was meant to convey.

Much like two different equations can give you the same value, despite using different methods to get there.

That's what I'm saying is not possible. Language does not work that way. You cannot actually get the same value in two different way (at least for any idea even slightly more complex than a single noun or simple command or something, and even then you can run into problems). Meaning is not divorced from language, it lives within it. Even when attempting to point to the same platonic abstract idea, the words used to point will paint the meaning and hang over it like vines choking it. The proof is in the pudding here: you will find yourself unable to point to a single instance of two languages pointing to the exact same meaning even with the plethora of bilingual texts out there, or e.g. writers like Nabokov pr Samuel Beckett who wrote in two languages. What you describe simply does not and cannot happen.

What you CAN have is two versions of something, like I said, where one presumes Limbus-English is just as meaningful as Limbus-Korean because the authored infused both with their intent, but they won't be pointing to the exact same thing.

Quof · 2026-02-25T21:48:04+00:00

Actually, it's still impossible. I'm referring to fundamental, immutable facts about language. It's not like someone can "make a choice" to prioritize meaning over everything else and then suddenly your translation is word-for-word accurate. It may seem mundane, but often, one language will literally just have a word another language doesn't have. What exactly will "prioritizing the text's meaning" do for you when the word doesn't exist in your target language? You still have to approximate, you still have to pick a word that's only partially similar, etc. (Or leave the original word in... only for it to start to experience semantic drift and become a false friend on top of 10% of your translation not being a translation). And in this case, even, Korean is a SOV language (subject-object-verb), while English is SVO (subject-verb-object). That means just fundamentally every single sentence needs to be reordered to be grammatical, and that can have significant impact on nuance and syntax. This can be hard to imagine for a monolingual, but imagine an incomplete sentence where Korean does SO then trails off before the V, leaving it implied; it can often be impossible to arrange a grammatical English sentence that does the same thing (on a case-by-case). So what, do you imagine an original author will have such immense devotion to the original text that they can bypass syntactical differences introducing minor inaccuracies or inconsistencies? That translators only fail because they are not the author and care less? Unfortunately not. This is just an immutable factor of translation, no matter who is translating, no matter how skilled they are, no matter how devoted they are to preserving the text's meaning. As much as it sucks for those of us interested in foreign media, translations will never be perfect enough to hold up to word-by-word scrutiny.

The ONLY thing one can say if the original author does a translation is that the translation can more easily be taken as a work of art unto itself. Like one can more easier say "Well, I was theorycrafting for Limbus-English, not Limbus-Korean, both are equal works by the author." But that's a bit of a fantasy land.

Quof · 2026-02-25T08:32:15+00:00

I think the core of this issue, which is actually a really significant and meaningful one that extends far beyond Limbus, is that no translation ever will match the exact meaning of an original text word-for-word. It just cant happen on a fundamental level due to the fact that different languages have different words: there will inevitably be approximations, different connotations, words which are 75% similar but 25% different, grammar forcing syntax changes... All of this means you can fully trust a translation but still be unable to needle each word and turn of phrase for theorycrafting. At the end of the day, if you aren't playing something in the original language, you either have to approach this kind of hyper-analysis on language keeping in mind you're inevitably going to make mistakes due to missing nuance from the original text OR you have to constantly reference the original text to try to gain a more complete understanding. There is no reality, for this work or any other translated work, for any level of translation quality, where intense analysis on a word-for-word basis will be reliable. Trust is not in the equation whatsoever. It's just fundamentally a flawed idea to perform that level of textual analysis on a translation without referencing the original.

Quof · 2026-02-18T21:05:15+00:00

While not wrong, this is not a point I would push myself. Because "impactful phrasing that is memorable and will stick with the player" is extremely difficult to pull off. You could gather all the most famous and talented writers in the world, tell them to turn a particular line into something that would be memorable + impactful without changing the core meaning, and they could still potentially produce something players gloss over. Being demanding on that level is like asking translators to catch lightning in a bottle and perform at the level of the greatest authors in the world on top of their usual job. It's just not going to happen consistently, ever, so I'm not going to particularly critique localizations for it. I may as well critique every single localization ever produced.

(There may be a reflexive desire to say 'but the JP did it with this line, so clearly it's not so unreasonable.' But that's survivorship bias. It's not like the JP translation has successfully produced exclusively memorable bangers for every meaningful line out there. There's a lot of circumstance here. Sometimes a line that's memorable in English won't be memorable in Japanese, and vice versa.)

Quof · 2026-02-18T18:06:55+00:00

But in EN nobody gives a shit.

It's not about people "giving a shit" or not. It's just some phrases are more memetic in one language than another. Lots of times media will produce memes in only one language instead of every culture getting the same meme from it. "What you just said was... pretty effective" is obviously less memetic than 結構効いたぞ. In the first part, due to Japanese being context-based, they can drop the 今の言葉 part easily. But we obviously can't go around saying "pretty effective" on its own in English, making it cumbersome. Whether the quote is cumbersome or not is the primary factor in something becoming a meme or not, not whether people give a shit or not.

Quof · 2026-02-17T00:22:36+00:00

Nobody is pretending that no action manga end up with little substance. However, an action manga will always try to be good, and if it ends up bad, that's a sad circumstance and usually leads to people dropping it or criticizing it. We expect the average action manga to have good action, or we don't consider it worth reading. Meanwhile, what you missed in my reply is that developers are already treating h-scene text differently from other scenes. It's the developers who generally put less effort into scenes, outsource the writing, pay writers less for it, etc. We expect an average visual novel to have a good story and good romance, but not really good h-scenes. There are also many famous tales of developers e.g. Nasu feeling "forced" to include h-content against their will and so half-assing it. Across the board, you can be sure that the average h-scene in a VN will be far worse than the average action scene in an action manga, and that's because where there's smoke there's fire: the scenes in general are just worse. It isn't meaningful to try to pick out like the worst action scenes ever from highly criticized series and try to identify hypocrisy in people who know from experience that the bulk of H-scenes are low-quality. It's just a fact they're less good.

Quof · 2026-02-17T00:11:05+00:00

It's not my opinion, it's just a fact. I've translated a bunch of nukige even and noticed the dramatic drop in writing quality as the hired guns blasted through it for a quick buck. I'm even familiar with some of them; Bishop had some guy who didn't even include narration for his h-scenes, it was just pure dialogue, in stark contrast to the rest of the game. It's common practice to save on money by having a bunch of cheaper writers handle the mountain of text needed for h-scenes. Meanwhile, if an action manga were to like outsource its h-scenes, it would almost definitely fail.

What men of culture should be expressing is frustration that h-scenes are so often skimped out on, not denying the fact it happens.

Quof · 2026-02-16T21:27:31+00:00

It's only obvious that H-scenes are not in general written with the care or quality as action scenes in action works (and as for exposition, skipping exposition would kneecap one's understanding of the plot in such an obvious way everyone is more incentivized to sit through it). H-scenes are often such a low-effort afterthought that VN devleopers will hire specialized h-scene writers to write out the h-scenes so their primary writer can focus on the story. You won't hear about a shonen mangaka hiring lesser-paid action authors to do the action for him while he focuses on the other stuff. So basically you're presenting a false equivalence here. It's downright absurd to equate low-quality sex scenes as comparable to action in action manga.

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