Little Busters Trial (English Patch)

[Richard 23]

Did everyone else notice that an English patched Little Busters Demo was released this weekend? The group who did it did do a nice job of translating all the in game settings and status windows. Nice job there.

I haven't finished it yet, but I couldn't help wondering if I was actually playing a Key game. The music was fast paced, a bit overbearing a bit, well, repeaty. After a few loops, I had to bump it down a few notches. But I guess that's because I've been stuck somewhere in the middle of a story already in progress and this must be leading up to one of the "action" sequences.

I've also wondered after the first few minutes into it if it was veering of in the direction of a boy love game. So far all of the characters have been male, which isn't really a problem I guess. But I think I've seen more male characters in the first few minutes of this demo than in any of the other Key titles I've played into!

And don't let my intermittent chants of "go lolis!" fool you, I'm actually very mature about this.

So far the backgrounds are about what I've come to expect from Key. Even in a mundane setting, they're nicely detailed and look pretty sharp. But what seemed odd and forced me to finally hit Prt Scrn was the discomfortingly odd character designs. And I don't mean Key odd, I mean odd odd, as in slightly unpleasant.

It's nothing quite as shocking as Koei's Kanontastic chin of doom they provided Yuuichi, but... hey I'll let you judge for yourselves.



A bit of an odd sense of perspective, the most obvious distortion being the size of his head. Is he wearing a Talking Heads big suit or something?

That's the work of Itaru Hinoue or Na-Ga? Really? But then I haven't seen any of the female characters yet, and maybe the art directors are trying to boost the girls' moe factor to omega kawaii by making the male characters look like circus freaks and mega bakas.

The demo is a 200mb download and 140mb of that is an mpg.

Well, time to go back to the demo. My first impression could be way off, and it will be interesting to see what surprise they throw in there to reel me in. What's the hook? I'm sure it's there and they're just trying to get me disoriented before they hit me with the good stuff.

I can't imagine being forced to demand a Rewrite. But we'll see.

P-pork cutlet!

[EchoMateria]

TANK: Okay. Store's open. What do you need?

NEO: Girls. Lots of girls.


-Little Busters!-


-Little Busters! Ecstasy-

Jokes aside, the games theme is friendship, and its quite natural for a guy to have a few male friends, contrary to what we see in these games most of the time :)

I don't know... apparently Little Busters! does a bit better job keeping the male/female ratio fairly balanced... for an galge/eroge. The main character has 3-4 male buddies (who are supposedly more than just generic 'best-friend comic-relief' types) But there are still at least twice as many girls. And yeah, I've heard it's very different and unorthodox compared to most Key games (though the gut-wrenching twists are still there)

[jyuichi]

The trial is not a good trial really XP It doesn't go in to the plot at all, it does not show most of the girls (this is a bishojo game, we need to see them). It provides, a view of the optional battle system and background information on how Riki knows all these guys.

It's the beginning of the game, yes, but just adding in the scene where Kyousuke announces they are going to start a baseball team (and need to gather members which is where all the girls come from XP) would give this trial more significance.

Course none of this is the translators fault, though the script needs a bit of proofreading imo.

[Suzuran]

I wish my translation for LB wouldn't have gone in vain... By the way, noticing from the screen shot, "ok" should be written either as okay or OK. Good job folks, keep it up.