An announcement by The Witch Hunt's UsagiTenpura regarding Umineko's upcoming Steam release

07th News Blog Discussion
#1

An announcement by The Witch Hunt's UsagiTenpura regarding Umineko's upcoming Steam release

On the forum, valued community member, member of The Witch Hunt and one of the faces behind the upcoming Steam release of the Umineko question arcs, UsagiTenpura, has prepared an announcement from The Witch Hunt to everybody interested in reading Umineko on Steam. With her permission, I will have posted the announcement here on the blog, as written by her.

The Witch Hunt translation of Umineko is solvable.

Considering all the time fans from across the world put into it, there's nothing I'd rather say. Unfortunately, I'd have to stretch the definition of solvable a bit to do so.

True, the puzzles as a whole can be answered with our first translation, but in Ryuukishi's own words, there are "treasure chests" hidden throughout the series for people paying attention. Many of these treasure chests end up being at least as important as the main story, and we ended up crushing several of them. A few were outright translation errors, though most probably couldn't have been translated without guessing an answer first.

The end result is that no one in the English community has ever experienced Umineko in full, except for a few lucky people with access to Japanese knowledge. Even the excellent manga renditions couldn't possibly have told Umineko in quite the same way as a Visual Novel. (Though this is not one of those manga adaptations that you're allowed to skip if you’re a fan of the original. Read them.)

To rectify this, the Witch Hunt has put in more hours this past year than any previous one in the history of our team. Building this Steam version involved editing more than 75% of the lines in the original translation (almost 90% in EP1) and well over 3,000 images for HD support. And that's even before the Mangagamer pass that included drastic improvements to every chapter. Nearly all of the text changes were to bring our paranoid, hyper-literal translation more in line with what we had in Rose Guns Days, getting the scenes to actually read well instead of worrying about every conceivable loophole that might be hiding a clue we didn't know about. Unfortunately, if nearly every line doesn't sound quite right, the chances of you noticing something that's supposed to sound strange are pretty darn small. Also, we've had some practice since then.

In the end though, what really matters are those scenes strewn throughout the series that will finally make sense, especially if you've never reread EP1-4. Umineko is a VN built to be read multiple times, and I guarantee you that using Steam as an excuse to try it again will turn it into an entirely different game.

This should hopefully address some concerns people have over the quality of the new translation. Rest assured that the Steam release of Umineko will be the best translation of Umineko available anywhere in the world. Let us know what you think of this announcement and the upcoming release in the discussion below!

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://rokkenjima.org/an-announcement-by-the-witch-hunts-usagitenpura-regarding-uminekos-upcoming-steam-release/
4 Likes
#2

This is very exciting. It’s quite a bold claim to make that “Nobody reading The Witch Hunt patch experienced Umineko in full”. I’m especially interested in these ‘treasure chests’ you’ve mentioned, are they really that significant to the story?

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#3

From my pov they definitively are. As a replay value I’d say things may look a lot more obvious then they would, and some things that don’t get a full explanation may be easier to solve. Some themes and thoughts meant to be communicated through the story should also appear a lot more clearly.

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#4

If it’s anything like my experience reading the Manga - Oh they’re being a lot clearer about this than in the VN! - Then I’m sure it’ll be great to behold.

But I guess what I’m wondering is, will there be things that people completely missed the first time through, or is it more to add confirmation to what is already accepted?

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#5

I feel like even with the manga and the original WH patch there are already hundreds of things nearly everyone misses on… So it’s a bit hard to answer that question sincerely.

If anything you may realize how some things that are already accepted were more clearly hinted then it was originally thought to be, and if you want to dig deeper then that then there are better possibilities to do so.

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#6

If it’s that much of a change, I’m quite excited to re-read it with the new translation, maybe I’ll make the effort to take notes and try to see as much of the hidden stuff as I can.

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#7

Hmmm this is very interesting.

I already started my reread with a friend who hadn’t read Umineko, but this makes me consider telling them to hold off.

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#8

That actually gets me pretty hyped to reread Umineko 1-4 as soon as it comes out. Awesome work!

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#9

Oh I have a question… Has the Epitaph been adapted to be solvable in English?

#10

I will answer by saying we joked around by saying “It used not to be solvable and you needed to speak Japanese and now it’s simply not solvable…”

… because seriously, even if you can read English, Japanese and Chinese it’s a far stretch to say it was really humanly solvable in the first place…

It did have a new translation which had this aspect in mind (and a sort of trick wordplay that could technically help with a part of it…) but I’m personally not very confident that it’s really solvable. It does sound cooler tho.

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Expectations for Umineko Answer Arcs
#11

As someone who has read 1-4 3 times already this has me quite excited. At the same time I’m wondering what these ‘treasure boxes’ might be. There were so many little things that I noticed on a second or third read already, that I’m curious how much more there still is hidden in there.

#12

I trucked through my first read of Umineko, taking everything at face value, not trying to “solve” it at all, so this is great news for me. Even the little I saw of Umineko’s depth is utterly incredible in every sense, so I hope that I will be able to give Umineko the attention and thought it utterly deserves this time around.

So hyped, especially since I’ve been looking for something to bury myself into the way I did with Umineko back in 2013 (IIRC) and found practically nothing save for Persona and Higurashi (which is killing me because I’m following the steam releases and they are SLOOOOOW).

#13

Wow, I’ve only read the edited version (and the Japanese version), so I didn’t realize it was so different from the original translation!

#14

This makes me wonder if the people pushing the whole “Umineko is solvable from Episode 1 alone” was only referring to the Japanese version :stuck_out_tongue: Perhaps this new updated english version will make it actually solvable for English readers.

But hey, where’s the fun in that?