Baldr Sky (P5 only)

Ugh, this is turning into he said she said...but I've tried downloading the game to play myself, and it isn't working, so no other choice.

So I just have one last question: Can someone other than Handler confirm whether or not the questionable girls are referred to in-game as looking like children? If the answer is no, its not an automatic pass.

I'm leaning very strongly towards devil head. The characters in the linked images look very young.

Something tells me you're going to live up to your username.

...While I might not necessarily agree with you, considering how unfortunately it's a reality that a good portion of the people passively coming to this site will not bother to separate what we trope and what we "endorse"...I genuinely admire your ability to have the time and patience to write all that out.

But that's irrelevant.

So...definitive answer on Baldr Sky having underage sex in it or not?

edited 17th May '12 5:31:52 PM by Raidouthe21st

It has characters who look like children having sex in it.

Okay.

But are they actually underage?

Yep. They're legally adults and apparently act like it, but apart from a couple really specific situations that I personally doubt are in play I don't think that's enough. Even then it'd be questionable.

^ No.

edited 17th May '12 5:48:41 PM by Arha

It's a damn hentai game...I think it's porn anyway.

Thank you.

Well,if they aren't actually treated consistently as adults in the narrative, I guess they'd still be the equivalent of children, just with longer lifespans, soooooooo...

edited 17th May '12 5:55:17 PM by Raidouthe21st

Cuttable for pedo content, yes. Pornography? I don't think so. People don't spend years translating a single work of pornography.

^ They apparently act like and are treated as adults, but again, that's probably not enough.

edited 17th May '12 5:55:50 PM by Arha

Really? People spent however long it takes to translate all the works of Ignacio Noe. Probably not years, but it's not his fault he speaks an easy language like Spanish.

Well, personally, if the story works out the same regardless of the way the chars are drawn, I think it does. That's why I asked if the narrative treats them like adults.

But then again, I'm not calling the shots. And there's probably some angle I overlooked, like "The story notes she looks 12 in these scenes here" or "Seen as just a little girl to this romantic love interest character here".

edited 17th May '12 6:05:23 PM by Raidouthe21st

^^ Japanese is really difficult and there are projects still going after three years of translation that will probably need at least one or two more. People aren't getting paid for their work either. Anything anyone translates is something they feel is actually worth reading: Anyone who wants it for the porn can probably just google it.

It doesn't really matter since we'll probably be getting rid of this, but I don't want to let the amount of time and effort they put into this kind of thing be dismissed. Anyway, I'll just stop here. I don't want to start a derail.

^ From what I can gather of some of the screenshots of translated text, people are kept at certain ages for whatever reason and cannot physically develop past that point. However, they act their ages. On the other hand, they apparently do end up having sex, so despite not acting like children it would be easy to argue that that's not really important.

edited 17th May '12 6:07:18 PM by Arha

Just to avoid being thumped for spoilers. Makoto is specifically noted in the narrative to have problems with having children due to her size. Chinatsu(pinkish-haired girl) is turned into a child in one of her endings, and it's noted that she has sex with the protagonist in that form daily.

This isn't just a case of artistic style, there are both older and younger looking women.

Nah, I'm gonna keep going with this, and I don't even think it's really a derail.

Dude, people translate hentai, and by that I mean straight-up comic book porn hentai. They don't get paid for it either, as far as I know. Not a good argument.

Unfortunately visual novels are much more work than translating regular doujin comic books. Visual novels need translators, editors, people who can hack the game scripts and tons of quality checking before they can put out a good quality translation. No one wants to put effort into a game people would only masturbate to; it's just not worth the time and effort put into it.

That's different. Translating a doujin is usually translating about twenty pages of content. Scanlation groups can do that plus editing in a day, so the amount of time invested is on a vastly different scale. Saying that someone spent years to translate something that people only masturbate to is kind of insulting. I'm aware that you define things as porn more easily than I do, but at the very least the people who translate projects like this don't believe they're doing it so other people have some new porn to keep them busy.

What's this conversation have to do with the deletion of the Baldr Sky page? Regardless of "merit", the plain and simple fact is that there are multiple characters who look like children and at least two act like them.

edited 17th May '12 6:19:50 PM by Handlerofjustice

I apparently can't edit my post.

Besides, sex scene dialogue is terrible to read and even worse to translate. No one likes to read through scenes which amount to stupid dialogue like "My hips are moving on their own!"

Wait, where'd you get "act like them"? I didn't see that mentioned anywhere.

Also a good point. I'd be willing to bet that the percentage of players who actually play the game for the sex scenes is extremely small.

edited 17th May '12 6:23:34 PM by TheFoxsCloak

Okay, now it's starting to get off topic, since the intent of all these saints spending hours of blood, sweat, and other bodily fluids on these projects really doesn't matter at all.

Anyway, I've seen enough. This is getting a devil vote for the pedobait alone.

edited 17th May '12 6:25:21 PM by Martello

I'm just going to point out that Baldr Sky, along with many other works in the VN medium, has over 4MB worth of pure text, clocks in at over fifty hours worth of gameplay (containing both text and actual top down mecha action gameplay), has a fully fleshed out story exploring themes such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, cybernetic implants and the nature of reality, with a complete and diverse cast all with their own personalities, motives and agendas. Out of this, there is at best perhaps five to ten minutes of H in total, isolated to certain points in the story, and are by no means the main objective of the game. It is not fair to dismiss an entire game as being porn based on the equivalent of the obligatory movie sex scene.

I've already expressed my view that the heroines are explicitly adults and are treated as adults by the narrative, outside of flashbacks to when they were in highschool, where H-scenes do not take place. Not that it apparently holds any water when you just take the HC Gs in isolation, in which case you get into subjective discussions about how old a drawn character looks to different people.

edited 17th May '12 6:34:07 PM by SilverBeta

A visual novel is an order of magnitude different from a Manga though.

Arha knows his stuff. Certain visual novels would get translated for different reasons but largely people only put effort into the good ones.

This makes it sound like particular translators' stances would be relevant.

It's not like it matters - it's 2 to 1 right now and the page will probably end up staying.