Enjoy some comments from Mary, the English editor of Lucky Dog 1!
I can’t tell you how excited I am for other people to read Terra’s amazing translation of Lucky Dog 1. Editing it was an absolute joy and privilege, and I did my best to let her work sing. And boy, does it ever!
The only times I did make changes to lines, it was because I knew players of the final game wouldn’t have access to something that sparkled throughout the script as I read it: Terra’s incredible dialect notes. Those notes showed me how meticulously researched all the depression-era slang, mafia terminology, and general worldbuilding vernacular was.
But… you wouldn’t have those notes, playing the game, you know? If Gian called someone a “Willy”, you wouldn’t know that was slang for a pretty boy. It was a wonderful use of period phrasing, but alas, I knew I had to cut it.
I kept in as much as I could possibly justify to myself of Terra’s beautiful translation. What she’d done with the language of the game was a true work of art, a love letter to the original that only someone who passionately cared about what they were doing could have accomplished. It may be that I kept some lines that aren’t all that comprehensible to a modern ear; hopefully context will make it obvious what Gian’s talking about in those cases!
Gian’s an interesting protagonist, with a particular type of masculinity I can’t remember seeing in many other BL visual novels (and I have played… a lot of BL visual novels). Maybe it’s that he’s American, maybe it’s that he’s Italian, maybe it’s the world he lives in or the line of work he’s fallen into. Whatever it is, it leads to a character who is both happy-go-lucky and pragmatically ruthless, who isn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty in organized crime but who has a genuine fondness for the nuns who raised him.
The way the four possible romances play out follows Gian’s characterisation in being a little different to what I’d found in BL before. These are all pretty hard-bitten men, as quirky as some of them may be, and they approach their respective potential relationships with Gian with similarly noirish attitudes to sex – those attitudes might run the full gamut from rapacious obsession to blustering homophobia, but across the whole spectrum they read as tonally perfect for a visual novel about gangsters on the lam.
What I’m saying is, it gets pretty intense sometimes. Depending on your choices, there are sex scenes outside the main romances, as well. Not every option and scene is consensual, and Gian’s not always the one being preyed upon in those scenarios. It’s absolutely possible to avoid making Gian a rapist, of course, but Luckydog1 is a pretty rare BLVN to have that content available at all.
The voice cast is incredibly good, showcasing some of the biggest names in the industry. Yura’s art is absolutely stunning, and can also be seen in MangaGamer’s four upcoming Hana Awase otome titles.
But what I’ll always remember most about Lucky Dog 1 is the translation. It’s everything you could possibly want from a localization, hours upon hours of love and care and research poured into creating the best experience possible for English-speaking players. I can’t thank Terra enough for her hard work, and MangaGamer for letting me play a role in bringing it to you.
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