During my travels to Anime Expo 2009, I suddenly hung a sharp left into IndustryLand, that famed place where normal anime fans become suck-up brown-nosing pimps, ready to do corporate bidding. Well, that was the sort of shameful feeling I got when considering how much I was suddenly interested in some of the companies that were at AX. I feel like it’s a good thing to support their efforts though, as I do believe in a lot of what they do.

One such example is MangaGamer, that one company famous for licensing a few Circus games and then promptly cocking up the translation worse than girls in eroge (that are now banned) get cocked up. In the butt.

Well, that was their reputation anyway, and they’ve taken to try to turning it around naturally. As a whole I’m impressed, although more than a bit worried for them.

If you want a comprehensive summary of MangaGamer at AX, you can read the excellent encubed article here, if you want more sarcasm and fangasming, continue on.

So yeah, all I remember of MangaGamer is that their games are expensive and their translation was bad. But hopefully that has changed! To prove that they turned over a new leaf (…although I don’t think they have any Leaf games), I checked out the free CD they were handing out like candy at their booth.

On the CD were trials for Da Capo, Suika, and Kira Kira, and I decided to try out the game that convinced me, if even just once, to like a character that was a catgirl maid. The C.D. is a bit clunky but it’s readable and it insists that I “get a kick out of Moe in English”, so I approve. Let’s see how the game plays.

The opening video looks a bit low quality to start, although I can’t say whether this is the fault of compressing 3 VN demos onto a CD, the age of Da Capo, or something else, so let’s move on.

I read the prologue of Da Capo very quickly, and didn’t spot any huge glaring errors. Or any errors, really. It’s a very workable translation (although I do not know the original material), and the game is still Japanese-voiced. I’ll call it ‘well done’. Even Sankaku beat me to the punch of reporting how Mangagamer fixed its original translation problems, so that’s one non-issue.

The other famous issue is that while the eroge on Mangagamer.com retail for the typical price of 49.95 (or at least Da Capo does), the units of currency is different … Euros. This places the price of an eroge painfully near Japanese levels, at about 80-90 dollars.

To alleviate this pain, at the Mangagamer Bishoujo games panel at AX, they announced that they were holding a buy-1-get-1-free sale as a response to fans’ complaints about pricing. Those who picked up CDs earlier in the con may have noticed codes on the back which enabled such a sale; those who didn’t go to AX may be more out of luck.

(However, I do have an extra CD and thus an extra code, so if you want to buy some Mangagamer goods, let me know.)

So that’s two complaints voiced by fans, two complaints answered by Mangagamer. Looking promising so far. Now let’s look at what games they announced at Anime Expo:

1) Higurashi no Naku Koro ni
2) Shuffle!
3) Da Capo II

I know I’m not sitting down while typing this. It’s an incredible line-up for visual novel fans, who should find something to like among these three titles or among the ones already released by Mangagamer.

They are a company with ambition to bring moe and popular visual novels to the English community, and they are so damn ambitious they want to translate frickin’ aisp@ce.

Yes. THAT aisp@ce. Is there an English market for it? My money’s on ‘hell no’, but I really like Mangagamer’s spirit.

This spirit was out in force during AX, as Mangagamer seemed to pull no stops at the convention. From the free CDs and fans they were handing out, to the full-page ad on the back of the convention guide, to all the Japanese personalities they brought over …

Well, more on that. The Bishoujo Games panel they hosted contained a lot of big names from Circus and other Japanese companies; tororo-danchou, the head of Circus; Yuka Kayura, a Circus artist; Shinji Katakura, ninja and OVERDRIVE artist; and singers such as yozuca*, miru of Cy-Rim revolution, and Aina Kase.

Yeah, yozuca*. I thought that was pretty nifty … or I thought ‘hey, that’s someone whose work I recognize’. Indeed, all the singers would later converge on the Mangagamer booth to hold a mini-live performance, so idol fans defintiely got their money’s worth at AX.

Oh, and they were giving away goods like you wouldn’t believe at the panel. I kind of feel sorry for the two ‘lucky’ people who won the dakimakura covers as I somehow doubt they made it out of the panel alive (the people in the crowd were educated but a bit immature, although nowhere near as bad as the JAST panel).

So yeah, I’m guessing this is some sort of interesting business strategy by the Mangagamer people, which almost feels a bit desperate in tone; they had the guts enough to say flat out in the panel “we’re in the red”, which honestly doesn’t surprise me given how 1) visual novels are a niche industry within a niche industry, and 2) their initial bad reputation.

It’ll be difficult for them to turn it around; they are licensing a lot of interesting titles, but they might be spreading themselves too thin with attempts at games like aisp@ce; they might be reaching for more than they can grab at the moment, which is good in premise but bad when everything falls down like a stack of cards.

It’s the business model I’ve seen one too many times on game creation forums, where someone has a bunch of ideas and wants to make the next 3D Pokemon MMORPG, which is great but not when you don’t have enough experience to program Pong. Here, the limiting factor is the market and the money.

What Mangagamer can do to solve this, other than continually shout at people to buy their stuff and offer more incentives like the 2-for-1 deal, I don’t know.

Personally, I am a collector-type consumer and I would rather have boxed copies of Da Capo, Shuffle, etc, then the digital downloads Mangagamer offer. Certainly boxed copies might help them hook up with other retailers such as Rightstuf or J-List, who seem to have less trouble selling VNs (relatively, anyway).

But aside from that, and maybe focusing on more popular titles (if Higurashi doesn’t pull up their bottom line, I don’t know what will), I feel like we’re just counting down the minutes until Mangagamer expires. I don’t mean to be alarmist, I just mean to be realistic. Hirameki had some good times too, but in the end the English market just wasn’t enough.

It’s a tough industry and Mangagamer is going for some tough goals. My entirely selfish goal for them is to have them live until they release Higurashi. If they can adapt and survive in this climate, all the better for them. But how ready is the English market for visual novels?

Well, they got a panelful (800+) of people at AX who all knew bishoujo games (at least 80% of the hands were up in the room when they asked “who knows what a bishoujo game is”), and were possibly willing to play them. Willing to pay for them? That’s a mystery, as I don’t know how much people want to buy and I don’t know how much Mangagamer needs to sell.

It’s one of the mysteries that feeds the paranoia in the anime industry, that tension between companies and fans. They know that fansubs are not going to go anywhere. They don’t know how much sales are being sapped by fansubs and they don’t know how much we will support alternatives. Fansubs steal sales away from DVDs and fansubs sell DVDs, yet neither is even close to a 1-to-1 correlation.

It’s that opaqueness in the industry that causes people like me to babble on paragraph after paragraph with really no idea what they are talking about; yet if we knew actual numbers, would that make it any better? Or would it just make the heated war worse, kind of like knowing just how much Haruhi is trashing the field in ISML?

Well, in situations like this I can only think for myself. I don’t want to use terms such as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ as I don’t think this situation is describable in such a term nor do I think I would be capable of doing stuff. Buying stuff is ‘right’, buying stuff for the wrong price is ‘wrong’, maybe, so what can I say when I’m not even sure what is the right price for me to pick up Da Capo?

I can say I believe in what Mangagamer is doing. I like their products. I like the persistence they have in bringing visual novels to niche fans. Their business model? I can’t say the least on that.

But until then, I can wish on a sakura tree for their well-being… and continue this introspection, this analysis, and this non-directional ranting next time, in this feature about the niche industry at Anime Expo…

-CCY