Just a reminder for those who read the news several months ago and for anyone who is just joining us, our MediaFire account was suspended in January, and Eroyume was left with a lot of dead links to files that are no longer available. They’ve been getting a lot of clicks recently, and it appears that many of those hits are coming from Fuwanovel. I am working on replacing these with links to the Mega file host, but since there are close to 600 videos, it is a slow process.

Until everything has been fixed, I will grant all visitors of this blog read-only access to Eroyume’s download folder which contains every video I’ve ever encoded, and I will keep this post pinned on the front page so you can’t miss it. To get started, click the Mega image below. Once loaded, you can double-click to download a file, or you can hold down the ctrl key to select multiple files in the directory and then right-click to download. You can even choose to download the entire folder (it’s approximately 25 GBs total) by right-clicking it in the left panel, but with such a large number of files, doing so may lock up your browser, so proceed with caution.

MediaFire recently went through lots of changes, and coincidentally, a bunch of accounts went with it. I’m assuming there was some sort of an amendment to their terms of service, maybe a three strikes policy. Anyway, some of Eroyume’s files have been under attack by Funimation in the past, and that is likely what led to the suspension. This, of course, is unintentional. They have bots that automatically sniff out specific titles, and they often mistake these as being videos from anime they’ve licensed for distribution in the United States. They don’t hold the publishing rights to any visual novels, and to my knowledge, no visual novel publisher has ever filed any formal complaints. And why would they? They provide the vast majority of these for free on the internet, and I just bring them down to size. Now, I could counter some of these DMCA requests, but it could only be on their behalf. Rather than go through that kind of trouble, I will just switch to a more secure file host, and that brings us to…

MEGA. This is Kim Dotcom’s new business venture set to succeed MegaUpload. Download speeds are reasonably fast. It lacks features as it’s still in beta testing, but one nice thing it has that MediaFire does not is support for 32 languages, including Japanese. I’ve already uploaded all of Eroyume’s files to the service, but it is going to take me some time to replace all of the links at the website.

As for the lack of updates, and I know some of you were wondering, January has always been a notoriously slow month for VNs. There just haven’t been any new videos to add, and I haven’t had the time to upload any older ones with my job being so demanding. Things will be back into full swing very soon. Thanks for your patience.

2012 has been a very busy year. We saw the relaunch of Eroyume in January after a 2-year long hiatus. Fuwanovel had its grand opening. VNTLS made great strides in informing the community on the progress of translated VNs. The industry, despite what some veterans of the hobby might say, is quite bustling. Among the games released this year, there were more than 165 opening videos made available for viewing (a new record?). Today I will attempt to narrow this down to a Top 10. The two criteria I look for in a contender is a quality song and good CG/animation. If they use only CG images and portraits, it’s important they do so with some originality. I try not to take overall game quality into consideration, although I may comment on it at times. So without further ado, here are my picks for this year’s best OPs. Continue Reading

TinFoil, administrator of the VNTL Status Tracker, along with Moogy, owner of TLWiki and translator of several visual novels, recorded the site’s first audio podcast during a livestream on Monday. This coincides with TinFoil’s efforts to expand the website by including a News/Blog section that is “like Encubed, but for long writeups and developer posts.”

Initially, I went into the podcast expecting to be trolled, but instead I actually found it quite informative. The two are working closely with JAST USA to bring over official releases in English, so you get a lot of insight as to how things are progressing on that front. Lots of fan translations were also discussed, with some nice endorsements for the Grisaia no Kajitsu and Aiyoku no Eustia projects (both of which are favorites of mine). They did have some unflattering things to say about Fuwanovel, but that’s not too surprising. You don’t hear Microsoft praising Google, either.

As I understand it, more recordings are being planned after the pilot episode, with the possibility of other guest translators appearing on the show. Whether this will be done weekly or monthly isn’t revealed. If you have any interest in English-translated visual novels, this 1 hour and 30 minutes is time well spent.

Note: The audio player above links directly to the mp3 at the VNTLS page. Hopefully they don’t mind it being streamed here. I thought it would make things easier.

Questions, comments, concerns? Send them over to vntls@tindabox.net

As tweeted and blogged by Aaeru earlier today, a sneak preview of the English translated visual novel repository, Fuwanovel.org, is now available for viewing. Eroyume and lots of other websites play a very specific role in bringing visual novels to the English-speaking community, and all of them are vital in their own way but none are quite as cohesive, intuitive and visually appealing as this. I believe it’ll serve as a great entry point into the fandom and make English patches and games more accessible to more people. This is something that is needed for the spreading of the medium in the west, and that is why I support it. You can help by testing out the pages and sending feedback to aaeru@fastmail.fm.

Of course, I will continue to do my part by providing videos. You’ll notice that I’ve placed a high emphasis on titles with translations for the past two weeks, and there are far more than I had anticipated. The translation scene exploded after I went MIA in 2009, and I completely lost track of it, but I’m slowly getting up to speed. TinFoil at VNTL is currently listing 270 titles (Kurukuru Fanatic was the latest addition this week), and there are many more he hasn’t added yet. I’m not sure of the exact number, but I am looking into it. I’ve encoded and uploaded OP videos for 89 of them, so I still have a ways to go.

There has never been a better time to get into the fandom. There are more visual novels being licensed out to big publishers and receiving official English releases than ever before (just recently, JAST announced Trample on Schatten at Anime Expo). There are also more fan translators working tirelessly to make these games playable in English than ever before. Despite all of the cease and desist letters and DMCA takedown notices, things are more active in the community now than they were two years ago. It hasn’t quite reached the level of maturation we’ve seen from anime fansubs, but it’s made great strides, so a lack of knowledge in the Japanese language is no longer a good excuse. There are plenty of options available to you.

I want to make others more aware of this at Eroyume. To start with, I’m adding the VNTLS logo in the bottom right of a post for any title that’s fully playable in English or has an English translation patch in the works. When clicked, it’ll take you to the status page. Here’s an example. On the Master List (which is still currently empty, btw, but I’m working on it), you’ll be able to sort by titles that are translated.

As far as other recent changes made, well… there are many. Explore the home page and see what you find. -_^

In an effort to have more consistency across all posts on this site, I will be going back and redoing any page that was added on or before December 2009. I would like them to conform to the current template that is being used, and that means links to bittorrent, a streaming audio player, and new file names with the [Eroyume] tag. I’ve also given careful consideration into redoing the older video encodes to 10-bit. However, this presents a few problems. The first is that it would take quite a while to tweak and filter 130+ videos. I spent many hours trying to get them to perfect, almost-transparent quality. Secondly, I lost the original, raw files in a hard drive crash, and some of them would be difficult to obtain again. In the end, I chose to leave them as is, since I felt it would be too much effort for what amounts to very little gains. The only advantage I can think of would be smaller file sizes and possibly less color banding. You’ll know it’s an old encode when you spot the [H264] tag, by the way.

This will require a bit of work, but rest assured, it won’t cut into my upload time for new releases, and I will continue to add at least one new video every day from here on out. This is similar to say the Twelve Days of Christmas deal that some Japanese music artists like to do. Except with me, it’ll be all-year long. ^_^

Some other things I’m working on:

- I’ve added a bunch of new links to the sidebar. A couple of new blogs have popped up in the past year or two. I’m especially pleased with Amaenbou Dane~ and The Monologues of a Bored Man. At the same time, some of the veteran blogs seem to have died down quite a bit or aren’t being updated at all. Kind of sad to see, but it’d be hypocritical of me to judge, ya know?

- Da Master List! Everyone will bow to it, and it will be holy. No, but seriously, it’s on the way. The site has over 200 uploads now. It’s becoming a database. We need ways to sort through it. lol

- The “About Eroyume” page. “Who is your daddy, and what does he do?”

- “The Music” page. This needs an update badly. I’ll post the date and changes made at the top of that page, so you’ll know when it’s been done.

- New banners. A slogan or catchphrase would be nice, I think.

Until next time, happy ero-ing!

That about covers the new and upcoming releases.

What I’ll need to do now is go through the painstaking process of obtaining everything I missed during my hiatus, starting from January 2010. That would be right around the time I stopped uploading. Under the assumption that each publisher puts out one visual novel per year, we’re realistically looking at about 200 videos, possibly more. It’s a very tall order, but it’s something I’ve accomplished before.

Sometimes the bigger companies, such as Key and Leaf, will decide that sharing isn’t caring. In those cases, I’m forced to rip videos directly from their games (and Rewrite will have to be one of those). If they really hate me, they’ll use weird compression schemes on the disc so that I have to use hack tools like Crass. I don’t like that part of the process, but at times there isn’t much choice.

Some other bits of news…

- You’ll notice that I’ve replaced Megaupload with Bittorrent distribution. I’m using NyaaTorrents as the main tracker, and I’m also adding them to the Tokyo Toshokan index. Although direct downloads over HTTP will always be a superior way to obtain files, I believe introducing the Eroyume tag into the torrent ecosystem will prove to be most beneficial and should draw in lots of new viewers. As far as the blogosphere is concerned, we are barely a blip on the radar, but I expect that to change soon.

- I’m working on a Master List. It should give you a better look at what’s been uploaded, so you’re not flipping through page after page. I haven’t yet decided on the format in which this will be presented.

- Aaeru, author of Visual Novel Aer, unveiled plans for a new unified community last week, with a grand opening set for 2012. It can be found at Fuwanovel.com. Lots of drama has been involved over the details, but I believe something very positive will come of it in the end, so long as Aaeru stays the course. Ultimately, she has the same goals that I did (and still do) when I started this project, so I can’t help but give my nod of approval. Show your support, and drop a message or two.

It’s been a long time coming, fellas. Hard to believe 2 years have already passed.

There’s a few notable changes I want to discuss.

1.) The blog has its own domain and branding. Eroyume.com You will be redirected to this URL from now on.

2.) A site storage upgrade has been added. In addition, I’ll be able to stream audio directly instead of going through OpenDrive.

3.) All of my video encoding is now done using a custom-built PC with an i7-2600K overclocked to 4.5 GHz. Efficiency is key here if I’m going to make up for lost time, and a PC with this much power will help me get there.

4.) A major advancement has been made in x264 encoding while I was gone. We now have 10-bit depth output or what is commonly referred to as Hi10P. In a nutshell, it allows for higher quality at smaller file sizes but at the loss of compatibility. Anime fansubbers quickly adopted this profile some time around May or June of last year. I will be doing the same for all future eroge OP. I would suggest updating VLC, MPlayer, or CCCP if you haven’t done so in a while, or you risk problems with playback.

5.) Megaupload has just been shut down by the US Department of Justice on several charges. You’ll see this if you click one of the broken links. I will be looking for a new back-up host, but until then, MediaFire will be the go-to place.

For those who have stuck with me through thick and thin for 3+ years, thank you. It means a lot. For anyone new to Eroyume, welcome and enjoy your stay.