Sona-Nyl of the Violet Shadows: An Interview with yukino

Welcome to ANIWIRE! This week we have an interview with yukino, translator of The House of Fata Morgana and programmer on long-awaited visual novel Sona-Nyl of the Violet Shadows. Before that, though, here’s the news from the past week.

News

• Studio WIT is animating a new series called The One Piece, which will readapt the popular manga from the beginning. I understand the commercial reasons for it, but from a creative standpoint I can't say I get it.
• In other Shonen Jump news, the staff was finally announced for the anime adaptation of Kaiju No. 8, one of the biggest titles in Shonen Jump+. The name I’m most excited about on the list is Mahiro Maeda handling creature designs; Maeda’s a wild card whose career includes designing Shin Gojira and nearly making a Mad Max anime about Furiosa. 
• HIDIVE is uploading SHIROBAKO to its streaming catalog on December 27th. This work sitcom set in the anime industry is one of my all-time favorites. Don’t miss it!
• Kono Manga ga Sugoi! (This Manga is Amazing!) announced its 2024 list of best manga series for male and female readers. What’s it going to take for folks to license Ikoku Nikki (#5 on the female readers list) in the United States?!

Bookmarks

• In honor of the recent release of classic anime Lady Georgie on Bluray, Dawn H wrote for Anime News Network about other romance series worthy of an English release.
• Colleen’s Manga Recs did a video on the rise and fall of CMX, which during its brief existence published some of the best girls comics of all time in English.
• For Comics Beat, Merve Giray reviewed Hana Chatami’s excellent short comic Give Her Back to Me.
• While not necessarily anime related, I enjoyed this piece by Chenchen Zhang about the rancid politics of Cixin Liu’s Three Body trilogy. (Curious folks might enjoy the excellent drama adaptation of the first book that aired this year. Yes, I just recommended the series despite its politics. Art is complicated.)
• Anime Feminist wrote up an Otakon panel about the present and future of Korean comics (manhwa) abroad, featuring academics Kim Hanjae and Kim Jongik.
• Jon Holt and Shige Suzuki translated an interview with Ryouichi Ikegami about his Spiderman comic. Ikegami’s other works include Crying Freeman and Mai the Psychic Girl.
• For Full Frontal, Ludovic Joyet interviewed legendary animator ryo-timo, an early master of the "web generation."
• Light novel expert Kim Morrissy defended Butareba: The Story of a Man Who Turned Into a Pig, the story of a man who turned into a pig.

What I've Been Writing

For Anime Herald, I wrote about RahXephon, an original 2002 science fiction series animated by Studio Bones.

No AMV this week! Instead, a special occasion:

This piece is safe for work, but its subject matter was originally published for adult audiences. An all-ages version is now available on Steam. Readers may use their discretion.

Sona-Nyl of the Violet Shadows was finally released in English on December 7th 2023. I’ve been waiting eagerly for this day since the project was first announced in 2016. You might ask, “what game is worth waiting seven years for?” I won’t pretend that Sona-Nyl is for everybody. But it’s just about perfect for me. Part gaslamp fantasy, part Utena riff, this is an aesthetically gorgeous and structurally ambitious visual novel. There’s a rude jaguar man, a walking suit of luggage and a version of Ernest Hemingway that’s just a big talking head.

Series writer Hikaru Sakurai has since moved on to the hugely popular phone game Fate/Grand Order. Even so, her Steampunk works remain my favorites. The poetic style, gentle melancholy and ritualistic set pieces of these games are unlike anything else in the genre. They have plenty to teach fans whose experience is limited to the likes of Umineko and Fate/Stay Night. 

To commemorate the English language release of Sona-Nyl, I reached out to freelance programmer (and translator of cult classic visual novel The House in Fata Morgana) yukino. She was kind enough to answer several of my questions about her experience working on the game. Sona Nyl’s translator koestl (who previously translated the first English language Steampunk release, Gakthun of the Golden Lightning) also pitched in for a few answers. 

How would you describe Sona-Nyl of the Violet Shadows?

yukino: Purple!

koestl: It's a game with two sides. One is an exploration of grief through a Lovecraftian lens, borrowing the concepts of cosmic horror and hostile elder gods to underscore the incomprehensible unfairness of sudden loss. The other side is an optimistic adventure starring a girl with no past who explores a bizarre underground world and finds her own sense of meaning in it. The narratives connect neatly near the end. Most of the sex scenes are kind of depressing, honestly. Also it's hard to summarize.

The version of Sona-Nyl that was translated is the "Refrain" release, originally released for the PSP/XBox 360 and ported to PC. How does the Refrain release differ from the original?

yukino: To clarify this point, both the original PC and the console Refrain versions of the story are included in the English release. For lore reasons I cannot get into here, Liar-soft considers PC and Refrain to be different iterations of the same story, rather than the latter being just a "cleaned up" version of the former.

Aside from the obvious resolution differences (PC: 800x600, Refrain: 1280x720), Refrain changes somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10% of the script from PC. This includes not just replacement scenes for the adult content, but other entirely original scenes and changed lines. This is why, rather than just translating one version of the game or combining them into an "ultimate" edition of the story, we included both in a single package.

When did you first discover the Steampunk series? Which game was your first?

yukino: My first exposure to the series was with Gahkthun of the Golden Lightning at MangaGamer. I didn't work on that title personally, but Liar-soft's work has always appealed to me aesthetically, and Gahkthun was no exception. Unfortunately, I am terrible at sitting down and actually playing games that appeal to me, so I never got around to reading it.

The English translation of Sona-Nyl was first announced in 2016. What can you tell us about the challenges your team faced in making this game available for international audiences?

yukino: As I mentioned above, the English release of Sona-Nyl is effectively two games in one. The original game was initially released on PC with a resolution of 800x600. Refrain was released on PSP and Xbox 360 with a resolution of 480x272 and 1280x720 respectively. Figuring out how to combine two games of different resolutions published on different platforms running on different engines was a gargantuan task. Having to make it all work in one package was more complicated than simply porting them both separately.

Additionally, there are a number of gimmicks in the game--a newspaper minigame, a massive encyclopedia with nearly 10,000 words of entries, dialogue that differs in text and audio. Adapting all of these for an English release proved challenging in their own way.

I came to know your work via your translation of The House in Fata Morgana. What can you tell us about your experience working on that game? Would fans of Fata Morgana also enjoy Sona-Nyl?

yukino: Oh man. It's been so long. I think I started Fata Morgana in 2014? When I was first assigned to work on it, I knew absolutely nothing about the game. Before digging into it, I was under the impression it was an otome game with horror elements, and well, if you've played the game, you know just how far from the truth that is. Little did I realize I would be spending hundreds of hours researching the minutiae of European history and 17th century Japanese trade policies in the process of bringing the game to English. 

Fata Morgana was one of the most challenging--and rewarding--projects I've ever worked on, and I'm glad that after all this time it's still finding new fans and resonating with new people. Now, as for whether fans would enjoy Sona-Nyl, I'll leave that to someone who's played both.

koestl: The games are quite different in style and plot structure, but both of their stories have powerful emotional cores, and they're both a little difficult to fit neatly into any of the familiar visual novel subgenres. Both may appeal to people who are interested in exploring less typical stories in the medium.

You've done plenty of programming over the years. What unique difficulties does scripting pose versus translation? Which do you prefer?

yukino: The two honestly couldn't be more different. I love doing both programming and translation, but like a true brain-broken freak, doing too much of one thing absolutely tanks my motivation, so being able to switch between the two tasks funnily enough keeps me productive.

Programming--especially localization programming, where you're usually *starting* with a functional game--ends up being a lot of chasing down obscure bugs, abusing fonts to get around weird encoding and locale limitations, and of course a ton of math. It's finding your way around a twisted labyrinth of someone else's code, rarely with a concrete objective, just poking at whatever jumps out at you until by some strange accident you make it work.

Meanwhile, translation is much more straightforward of a process for me. I read the text, digest it, and mold it back into English, one line after another. If I get stuck on a line or can't remember the exact word I want to use, I stop there and spend hours digging until I find it. My particular collection of neuroses doesn't allow me to do the smart thing and save a problem for later, so translation ends up being significantly slower and more deliberate than more free-form programming tasks. They exercise two very different parts of my brain, which is why they work so well as mental palate cleansers for one another.

What difficulties did Sona-Nyl in particular pose in terms of scripting? Did you learn new skills working on the project?

yukino: Sona-Nyl is my third released Liar-soft project, but the first one I was assigned to, so in that sense the entire thing was a brand new experience for me. My initial work on Sona-Nyl served as the base for the Kindred Spirits on the Roof full voice re-release, which then went to power Jeanne at the Clock Tower a couple years later. And then now, in 2023, Sona-Nyl runs on a much more refined, sophisticated version of that code.

But like I mentioned above, Sona-Nyl is two games in one, and while the PC version runs on Liar-soft's in-house engine, the console version was ported to a different engine entirely. Refrain's scripts use a modified version of the Kirikiri engine, also used for titles like The House in Fata Morgana and Fate/stay night. And while I have plenty of experience with that engine, it was my first time porting Kirikiri code to Ren'Py--the engine that Sona-Nyl's English release runs on.

Kirikiri is significantly more complicated than Liar-soft's engine, which made porting it back especially difficult. It was a time-consuming process that required many hours of digging through documentation and source code and committing more coding crimes than I care to admit.

What was your most memorable experience while working on this project?

yukino: Without a doubt, the first time I successfully ran through the entire game from start to finish, including all the minigames and options, without crashing. This is usually the big turning point in any project for me, and it was doubly so with Sona-Nyl being two games. There's always a ton of work after you reach that milestone, but nothing quite beats rolling credits on something *you made*.

While you did not translate Sona-Nyl, do you have any insights into the game's translation process? The translator can also chime in here if they like.

yukino: koestl, the translator, was very particular about the presentation of the English script and requested I put together a prototype for him to see the text in-game as he worked. Usually, programming on a title doesn't begin until translation is nearly complete, so having a build this early in the process is very rare. But I try to do what I can to make the localization team's lives as easy as possible, so I put together a very, very rough build with live recompilation that allowed him to quickly see exactly what a line would look like on screen as he translated.

koestl: I translated another game in the Steampunk series (Gahkthun) a few years before working on this project, so I had some experience working with the challenging prose style Sakurai employs in it. The writing in these games demands some real creativity from both translators and editors due to a heavy use of repetition and poetic rhythm. I think ten different translators would probably produce ten very different takes on a script like this, but I tried my best to develop consistent voices for the characters and capture the distinctive flow of the narration.

Which of your games that you've worked on do you believe deserves greater attention?

yukino: Ooh, that's a tough one. Since I mostly focus on programming, the venn diagram of "games I've worked on" and "games I've played" has surprisingly little overlap. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the two Propeller titles I assisted with at MangaGamer--Tokyo Babel and The Shadows of Pygmalion. Tokyo Babel was written by Higashide Yuuichirou, one of the main scenario writers for Fate/Grand Order, and is a great little romp through the end of the world via Christian mythos.

And if I'm allowed to mention games from other companies, I'd love to see more people experience Trample on Schatten!! (with two exclamation points). Despite coming out after Fata Morgana, it was technically my first freelance translation gig. It's half colorful tokusatsu hero show, half deep dive into the works of Sigmund Freud and classical Chinese philosophical texts. It's a very weird, dense, and hotblooded adventure with some absolutely beautiful, incredibly expressive art to accompany it.

What would you recommend to folks who enjoy Sona Nyl and are looking for more by Liar-soft or Hikaru Sakurai?

yukino: Personally, I'm mostly familiar with Sakurai's work in Fate/Grand Order (it always comes back to FGO, huh), and as much as I love what she's done in that universe, I realize it's a tough sell to anyone who's not already deep in those weeds.

koestl: I have a personal soft spot for Gahkthun, a game set in the same world as Sona-Nyl. It's a (considerably more upbeat) love story starring a grouchy superhero Nicola Tesla and his live-in housekeeper Neon. In general, though, I've enjoyed every game in the Steampunk series. On the Fate series note, I'll add a shoutout to Fate/Samurai Remnant, a musou type game released in 2023 with a surprisingly strong story - Sakurai contributed to the scenario.

Is there another game that you'd like to translate in the future? A particular game you'd love to program for?

yukino: My personal pipe dream is to translate something written by either Kodaka Kazutaka or Uchikoshi Koutarou. And if I can't do that, I'm always available to work on a little title called Re:LieF ~Shin'ainaru Anata e~ and its sequel, a couple back-pocket favorites of mine that have somehow evaded localization for all these years.

As for programming, I don't have a specific title I'd like to work on, but I would love to be involved in development on more console releases. That's a whole separate skill set to the kind of programming I usually do, and I would jump at the opportunity to learn more about how those machines work.

Do you have a favorite character in Sona Nyl? A favorite musical track?

yukino: I'm incredibly weak to piano tracks, so there were weeks working on the game I was just endlessly looping that part of the soundtrack. I'm far from knowledgeable about music and hesitate to compare it to other things and make myself look like a fool, but I've archived Sona-Nyl's OST somewhere between NieR:Automata's exploration/downtime tracks and Hotel Dusk.

koestl: I'm a fan of the mean catgirl, Mao. She mostly just pops up out of nowhere, calls Lily a moron, refuses to elaborate, and leaves.

Have you been watching the currently airing 16bit Sensation: Another Layer? What does it get right (or wrong) about the visual novel industry?

yukino: Yep, I am watching (and greatly enjoying)! Localization, which is what I primarily do, is a whole different beast from making a game from the ground up, so I can't say too much on how accurate that aspect is. But on a whole I'd say it seems to strike on that 90s eroge nostalgia in a way that really resonates with viewers (myself included) without digging too deep into the nitty-gritty of the field.

A couple things that stood out to me--mostly as amusing observations and not actual critiques. One is Konoha complaining about her job coloring the backs of faceless dudes for her company's half-price MILF hypnosis eroge. I struggle to think of any titles in that price range where that would create more than a couple days' worth of work--and maybe that's how she managed to put so much time into fleshing out her OC's backstory. Another is the pronounced lack of mention of the huge modern doujin eroge scene. Konoha has a very rose-tinted myopia about the eroge industry, so it makes sense she might not be aware of what's happening outside the professional sphere, but it's worth noting she's not the most reliable narrator!

Any last words for our readers?

yukino: If you do end up playing Sona-Nyl, I hope you can appreciate how much work went into making this release happen. Enjoy the game, and I pray you don't run into any game-breaking bugs. (Should you find any, hit us up at support@mangagamer.com with the details so I can get it fixed up as quickly as possible.)