Welcome to our Women’s History Month interview series!
For anyone who may be unfamiliar with Women’s History Month, it’s celebrated in the US, UK and Australia during the month of March to bring attention to the contributions of women in our society. So, in the spirit of Women’s History Month, we decided it’d be a good opportunity to highlight some women creators among our eroge partners and let them tell us about themselves and their work.
But, to kick things off, we thought we’d open by giving the floor to some of the women on our localization staff––bad end, Good Haro and KaitsuKai.
GH: (A big thank you to KaitsuKai for drawing these cute portraits of us!)
Why don’t we all start by introducing ourselves?
bad end: Heya, bad end here. It’s a very well-kept secret that I’ve fan translated some games in the past under another name, but I’ve been with MangaGamer since the end of 2013 and I’ve translated some three and a half-ish games with them so far (and hopefully many more in the future!).
Good Haro: Hi, I go by Good Haro and I’m a translator here at MG. I also run the Tumblr and help out with some other social media stuff. I worked on Ultimate Boob Wars, No, Thank You!!!, and I’m in the middle of Ozmafia!! right now. I’ve been fond of visual novels for probably close to half of my life now, and I’m really happy to have the opportunity to work on them in an official capacity and share games I care about with a wider audience.
KaitsuKai: Hello! I’m Kaitsu. I started working for MangaGamer in 2011 as a Beta Tester, and eventually became an image editor, hardcopy designer, and editor. I also manage the dealer’s booth and panel at Anime Boston (so feel free to come by and say hi if you’re at the con this April~). I’ve had the amazing pleasure of beta testing ten titles for MangaGamer, designing the packaging for Tick! Tack!, Eroge!, and the limited edition of ef – a fairy tale of the two, working on the UI for Hypno-Training My Mother and Sister and Princess Evangile, and I am also the editor for Bokuten – Why I Became an Angel. There’s never a dull moment.
So, to address the elephant in the room right off the bat, we’ve all had to work on nukige, huh?
bad end: Yes… I feel like I’m very disadvantaged in that area because I’m actually asexual, but (and this is gonna sound really stupid) eroge kind of normalized sex for me in college when I started getting really into them. Like, somewhere along the line due to hanging out with a bunch of people who talked about sex all the time and also playing a bunch of eroge, I went from “oh my god stop talking about sex that’s gross!!” to “please play this porn game I translated guys it’s great.”
But as a person with no real interest or experience in Sex Stuff, I sometimes feel like I shouldn’t be translating it (and then I think that there must be plenty of people in the eroge business who also aren’t interested in 3D hahaha). So I guess what I’m trying to say about the ero parts of my eroge translations is b-be gentle.
Good Haro: Well, like most of the other TLs here my first game at MG was a nukige and a pretty hefty one at that (clocking in at close to a million Japanese characters), Ultimate Boob Wars. I definitely don’t have anything against nukige––actually, I think one of the great things about 2D porn is that it allows people to explore all sorts of stuff without hurting anyone––but I’d be lying if I said I was particularly fond of Ultimate Boob Wars. It’s more the repetitiveness (and frequently rather wacky conceptions of female anatomy) that got to me than anything else. I do have to admit that I did have a lot of fun with the sillier bits of Ultimate Boob Wars though: the boob-centric mythology and grand speeches about mammary equality were actually really fun to work on. Honestly, I think it’d be kind of fun to work on one of ClockUp’s light-hearted nukige someday.
KaitsuKai: Of course! My first project with MangaGamer was beta testing We Love Master. The only visual novel I had played prior to it was ef – a fairy tale of the two, so my experience and knowledge of the medium was very limited, and I can remember being really embarrassed about the content at the time. Funny story, I accidentally left the game open on my monitor and came back to my boyfriend’s mother looking at a very interesting CG. That was uh… something! Haha.
How about we talk about some of the projects we’re particularly proud of next?
bad end: Well, if you follow my twitter you’ve probably noticed that I can’t really shut up about how good KnS2 is. I think I’ve been improving a lot with every project I do (since I’m still relatively new at this) and KnS2 is sort of the result of all of that. I think it’s gonna look real damn nice when it’s all done and it’s been a lot of fun to work on.
Good Haro: I guess I haven’t worked on all that many games yet, so this is probably an obvious answer, but I’m pretty proud of No, Thank You!!!. I ended up doing a lot of extra stuff (like building the landing site––with a little help from Doddler with the javascript I should note) because I wanted to make sure the game had every opportunity to succeed and reach its potential market, and I had a lot of fun in the process too. Launch weekend was pretty great––it was really cool to see other people finally getting the chance to enjoy the game, and even the Japanese fans seemed really excited about the release too (I keep seeing a lot of them saying they wish they’d studied English harder so they could talk to all these new NTY!!! fans!).
KaitsuKai: I’ve enjoyed all of the projects I’ve worked on in some form or fashion, but I’m going to be a bit biased by saying that my favorite thing was working on the ef LE. Hours of love and labor were poured into its design, both inside and out. Obviously a good chunk of that was spent figuring out what content to put into the artbook itself, how to make the packaging stand out (and be unique), yet still be faithful to the original Japanese version. I still have the artbook proofs and approval disks from the printers sitting around! I’ll never get rid of those~
Hopes for the future?
bad end: WELL! I’m really excited about a lot of things! Things that I can’t say anything about! But to give a more legitimate response I guess I’d say that I know it’s impossible to please everyone, but I think MG is starting to get to the point where we have something for ALMOST everyone, so I’m really hoping people enjoy all of the stuff we’ve got coming up!
Good Haro: As far as hopes for the future go… as a member of the fujoshi illumi––I mean, as an upstanding fan of the BL genre, I’d like to be able to bring more of it over in the future (and more otome games too). But, perhaps more generally, I think it’d be nice if we could have the opportunity to do more projects like this in the future so English-speaking fans can have the opportunity to get to know the Japanese creators a little better.
KaitsuKai: I honestly just want to see more amazing projects and opportunities come our way, as a company and to the individuals involved on both sides. It’s always so exciting to bring our customers something new and exciting, and I cannot help but feel giddy when new possibilities are put on the table. I can only hope that the wonderful acquisitions we’re planning will be received well. Soon™ all will be revealed!
Well, that’s a wrap from us. Check back next week for our first creator interview with the very talented Shigeo Hamashima!
Fun read. 😀 From a marketing standpoint, I would think these kinds “meet the team” snapshots are one of the better methods to provide your company face. There’s a notable gap, which I’m sure you’re aware of, between organizations and their customers. Making that gap smaller is imperative to ensure a fluent line of communication. The result is better business.
For example, I could tell you right now some of the popular trends I’ve noticed in my blogging, ie. cat girl pictures/comics seem to be more popular than anything. Another trend that might be relevant is tentacles; after posting my review of Lapis Gunner, I gained 19 new followers the same day (which could possibly be unrelated as well).
I like your company because I’ve noticed how receptive you are to feedback. Allowing user reviews on your site is another thing that’s really cool and really raises your stock in my eyes – Steam does this worse than you guys!
I just wanna say, keep going down this route and I’ll keep blabbering about your games on my blog. 🙂
~ Cheers
Liked the entry a lot!!! it’s always fun being able to know some of the people who makes my dreams true (which consists of playing vns and eroges xD), hope we can see more posts like this.
thanks for the hard work girls!!! happy month for u all!!!
PD: bad end i luv u!!!
Pd2: Sorry for the bad grammar, not very good with english c:
I actually relate to bad end a LOT. Part of that is because I identify as asexual myself and went through a similar experience. I am happy to see stuff like this and look forward to seeing more stuff from all of you. also I am so on the KnS2 hype train.
Very nice interviews. You should make a monthly MangaGamer team soap with those character portraits. They are hilarious… 🙂
I’d be game for that. Hehe. 😛
I really enjoyed the interviews. I like getting to know more about the people working on the games.
The art is great! I would love to see more from Kaitsu.
If you ever run out of games like KnS2 for her to work on, I would love to see what bad end could do with a comedic script. Her writing style is humorous and makes me smile.
These interviews were a pretty fun and informative read! It’s nice to hear from the women working in what’s really commonly seen as a man’s industry/interest zone. (And as a woman who’s sorta considering getting involved in translation projects myself.)
Thank you for all the hard work!
I am very surprised :O I mean I love eroge and all