Hello to everyone, I’m Bee, the once main translator of this project. It’s been a couple of years since I proudly made this website and announced the completion of the Akatsuki no Goei translation. Right after that though, some rather unfortunate events took place. Up until now I’ve voluntarily kept silent out of respect for those who were once in the team, but I feel like I need to break this silence and lay out the truth once and for all, as well as clearing some doubts people may have about the project.
First of all, I want to make clear that I never lied in anything this website claims—the moment the website was made I had a complete translation of the game (still is in my drive). There are two main reasons it hasn’t been released:
I currently work now as a professional translator for some companies. This was one of my first large-scale commitments, as well as one of my first attempts at translation in general. I can safely confirm that, after revising the entire thing now, most of the translation was, well, pure garbage—it didn’t really reflect how good the original writing is, or accurately represented the contents of the story. In my free time I am retranslating this game, since now I can confidently say that what I’m doing now truly is a good representation of the work, but I want to come out clean—my first run for this project was shaky at best, and I would’ve made a mockery of myself, my teammates, and the game itself had I released what I had two years ago.
One week after I posted this website with the full completion Sekai Project approached us with an offer to buy the translation, promising to us that they had acquired the licensing rights for the trilogy. I initially was heavily against them doing so, mainly because I’ve already had issues with Sekai Project in the past, so I demanded confirmation from them that this license had been bought as they claimed before continuing any negotiations (at this point we never signed any NDA by the way, for those who are wondering). I know it’s hard to justify such a thing without an NDA, but surprisingly they managed to have AkabeiSoft’s 3 representative contact us personally, asking for some cooperation between us and Sekai, since they were discussing the rights for a possible release. Being contacted by them made me change my mind and we agreed to work with Sekai for this release, but only after selling our work directly to Akabei themselves.
A contract was made estimating a total pay (won’t disclose) and requirements for our translation to be accepted. This contract was ultimately never signed for one main reason, that being that they required a ‘PG-13’ release, aka no H-scenes within our work and all swears were to be removed or replaced. I personally don’t give a shit about the H-scenes since they’re bad anyways, but some of them are relevant to the story (I refer to Tsuki’s route specifically). The swears part really ticked me off though; Kaito is a character that is very badmouthed, and a huge chunk of his personality revolves around being, well, a cheeky asshole. Taking out swears effectively would mean that they’d be killing not only him, but many other characters + ruining the game’s aesthetic.
We told Akabei that if they wanted to make business with us they’d have to take out the swears part, but after some back and forth with our mails, Akabei eventually stopped their communications altogether (I’m very well aware this meant they were not longer interested, but honestly it was for the best. They would’ve butchered the game otherwise). Sekai was still in touch with us, but all we got when we asked for some progress on the thing was the usual “We’re working on it, just be more patient,” aka just shut the fuck up and piss off. The long wait and lack of information ultimately killed off the team’s drive, rendering the whole effort null around a year and a half since negotiations started. At that point no one wanted to keep working on the game anymore except me.
We then reach the present day. At the moment I am currently retranslating the game in its entirety alone. The old team moved on and they’re doing their own stuff. I want to apologize for the silence, but I felt it was necessary given the situation.
I feel like this new translation is definitely something I am proud of, and would like to ask for some patience until I’m finished. Some changes I will do with this project from now on are what follows:
- I will release a prologue patch.
- I will try to be active and share project updates.
- If people ask me for proof of work I can provide it. Just ask through the mail provided on this website and I’ll be happy to oblige. I can also share video showing the full scripts in google, but most of them still belong to the old translation, which is finished, but not good as I previously stated.
- I don’t really want to involve people anymore in this project, but eventually I will need 2 QA’s. Be native and have some experience if possible and you’re in.
- I’ll also require someone to help me with text insertion. I have no clue how to do that. I can’t contact the one who extracted it for me anymore.
I think that’s everything I wanted to say. I apologize once more, and I hope things have been cleared. I wish that I and everyone who’s been waiting for this to be released in a timely manner can move forward.
Barry Bee
Sounds like a lot of work doing the translation from scratch again. A real shame Akabei soft only wanted a ‘sanitized’ release. They deal primarily in eroge, I don’t know why they’re so against it for the west. But, it’s exciting to see the wheels moving again after all these years, even if it’s gonna be another multi-year wait. Are you worried about a c&d from sp/akabei since they’re aware of you? Also, really dig your profile pic! Best of luck!
Hey there! Thanks for your words of support! About the question, I don’t really care at this point if I get a Cease and Desist letter. To be honest, had I received it two or three years ago I probably would’ve given up, but after all that happened I don’t really care anymore. This project will come out no matter what happens.
The fact that its even alive is nice lol, always wanted to play these sort of games
Thanks for all your efforts and letting people know instead of disappearing
PS: Also, my profile pic is from one of the games of Honoo no haramakase, if you’re wondering!
good to know stuff that happened behind curtains,
great to see you working on it!
Thank you for the support, friend!
Not sure what the idea would be with the no-swearing, really! I mean sure, removing H-content is often valuable in terms of what audiences you can sell to, but no eroge, even sanitised, is going to be seen as appropriate for small children or pearl-clutching housewives, and who else cares about a couple of swear words?
Even the intense level of censorship made infamous in If My Heart Had Wings did not actually produce a story that would be seen as “appropriate” outside anime fan circles.
gay
I respect your decision to refuse to sign the contract due to the swearing clause. It shows a good sense for writing and characterization, plus a commitment to values – respecting the game over just pumping out a shit TL. Good on you friend.
Thank you for the words of support, friend. Here’s hoping my retranslation will make this game proper justice.
I remember me doing weekly check at the vndb page of AkaGoei to see if there was a new update on the translation. Never thought that someday it would come back tho. Good luck with the new translation, Alejandro!
Thank you for your support! I’m always glad to see people interested in this game after so many years! Truly a joyous thing to see.
[…] thanks to my #connections, but I guess the translator had a change of heart. It really is bizarre how akabei memed him. Anyway it extremely requires that retranslation you’re seeing. It might take a while, but […]
People like you are the true heroes of the VN community. Been waiting for a TL of Akagoei for ages through multiple dropped projects. Finally I can get hyped for this. Your dedication to translating this series and doing it justice is amazing, respect and thanks man. Glad to be looking forward to progress again and happy to wait for a quality TL. Good luck brother!
You flatter me, friend. Thanks for the support and look forward to more stuff!
Man, I was randomly browsing vndb on a whim and stumbled upon Reminiscence Re:Collect and remembered there was a whole series I was interested in but never got to see translated. I hadn’t checked AkaGoei’s process for what was probably months or maybe a year or more, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a link to this message.
I remember finding the whole series a long time ago and being super hyped just by reading the novel descriptions and the tags, yet being super bummed out by the lack of any sign of the translation being actualized, but this gives me hope. I never followed your site nor this project (or any project after fuwanovel went down some years ago, really), but I think I’ll keep in touch with this one as I’m just REALLY intrigued by the novel itself.
I don’t even remember what I was so hyped about, but it got to the point that I’ve been considering learning japanese just so I can play this and other novels that seem amazing but haven’t gotten a translation (or a proper one, at that). I’m this close to actually getting my ass up to learn the language because the amount of good novels that are ignored is obscene. In hindsight, I’m so lucky novels like the Grisaia series or Majikoi ever got translated, lol. I still remember fondly the times where I was anxiously checking for a ton of novels’ TL progress in fuwanovel.
Thanks for this, I’ll try to keep an eye on your translation, and let me add a comment of appreciation for your work ethic; being willing to redo a whole work over because you can now offer much better quality so as to make justice to the original work. You seem like my absolute favorite kind of translator.
Well this was the series that made me want to learn the language, so by all means I encourage you to do so. Thanks for the support too!