AKAIITO HD REMASTER

The ORIGINAL Yuri VN. Akai Ito is a game from the storied past of the Visual Novel genre; combining elements of mystery, mythology, yuri, and horror into one utterly fantastic package. I've played the original so many times I feel confident in my approval right away, but i'll get into the Remaster some more later. First off a warning; this game is hard. Akaiito was designed like an Adventure Novel first and foremost; far more then most modern VN's, there's a ton of choices, and alot of choices lead to horrible deaths. This has been called the "Dark Souls of Yuri" for a reason, there's about 12 bad endings (and a couple are super depressing). But the system is supported by a built in flow-chart, and "seals"; to unlock certain options, you need to PLAY other routes to keep everyone alive. The game is centered on Kei; a young woman in search of inheritance after the tragic death of her mother; she learns that her family owned an estate in a very rural part of Japan. What starts as an innocent journey of discovery, turned into a nightmare when supernatural happenings begin to unfold, and Kei needs to survive with the help of her girlfriends. There's five routes in Akaiito; and roughly translates to thirty five hours of gameplay; it's lengthy VN. Happening at the same time is a light romance story; yes, the girls have romantic feelings for each other, but its "all-ages"; no eroge or h-scenes. Akaiito's greatest strength however; is it's presentation. The game is GORGEOUS, with some stellar and moody atmosphere, helped by excellent voice acting and an amazing soundtrack (composed by MANYO, of Flowers fame) The Remaster has redone the visuals and audio quality, making it even more amazing looking and sounding. Speaking of, I was very worried about the quality of the English translation when I first saw the screenshots; but playing it, it seems to be quite decent. Nothing amazing, but very readable and polished to an acceptable standard. It reads like a quality fan patch, which I'm okay with. In conclusion; play this masterpiece of Japanese Mythology and Yuri. I am so glad it finally got released to the West.

Terrible English translation that ruins the immersion, you'll end up paying more attention to the bad TL than to what's actually going on with the story.

I cannot recomend this game, the translation is bad. The display gets cropped if you dont play at 1080p. The bgm does not properly loop. The control layout is very odd, it feels like a cheap console port. Maybe if you know japanese you could buy this since you can toggle the language but keep in mind that english saves and japanese saves are separated so you have to start a new game from 0 on the language you want.

A few hours into Akai Ito and I'm really enjoying it so far. It has some issues, but nothing so bad to ruin the experience. The translation is the biggest problem. The translator clearly has a solid grasp on english and japanese, however it feels like this was just the first draft and they were under serious time pressure. It really needed a second pass and an editor. There are lines that read quite poetically, so I know they're capable. Unintelligible lines are rare. Other issues include: breaking lines leading to text boxes with a single word, sound effect bugs, wonky scrolling, and a dictionary that wasn't reconfigured for english (the terms are sorted by japanese syllable). There's not a lot of lesbian content out there, so I may be more forgiving here than if this was your dime a dozen hetero content, but I still think it's worth giving a shot if you're interested.

The translation is not good. Some lines sound very awkward and there are a lot of typos. The cheap translation explains why this VN costs only 14 bucks. I'd honestly rather pay 30-50$ for a good translation than this.

First off, there's a translation patch that makes the translation good and readable [spoiler] You can find it on VNDB [/spoiler] The first thing I want to talk about is the sheer amount of choices in Akai Ito. The amount of choices and their consequences are insane, to give you a perspective (minor spoiler) [spoiler] I decided not to cover a well along a trail. A few hours ingame and many choices later, I fall down the fucking well and get murdered because I was too lazy to cover it previously. [/spoiler] Yeah, Akai Ito isn't forgiving if you make the wrong choices and there's a [b] lot [/b] of choices to be made. Compared to VNs nowadays that maybe have like 3 or 4 choices throughout the entire VN this was refreshing and reminded me why I enjoy VNs. The story is heavily a mystery with some horror elements and mild romance elements (yuri). Each route gives you more and more insight into what's actually going on and slowly unravels any unanswered questions. Personally, while the narrative isn't anything groundbreaking, it is satisfying and I liked chipping away at the mystery throughout each of the routes. As for the endings, there's many bad endings, several neutral endings, and 5 good/true endings. I thought that the true endings were nice but also a little short. Next, the sprites in Akai Ito feel alive, character's mouths will move when they talk, they'll blink, and they have numerous expressions and poses. Even side characters who appear a couple times are still partially animated, it's impressive. In addition, Akai Ito uses both its soundtrack and background sounds to its advantage, adding to both suspenseful moments and carefree moments. I didn't play with the remake's translation but technically it seems okay. You can skip read text really fast which helps completing other routes and makes it to where you don't need tons of saves everywhere. In conclusion I'd recommend Akai Ito if you like yuri, Vns with tons of choices, Japanese mythology, mysteries, or if you just like older Vns.

When I heard that SUCCESS was finally dusting off Akaiito and Aoishiro to give them a HD Remaster with an English language toggle, I was thrilled!! Now admittedly, as you can see from the reviews and the game page (at least the time of writing this review), the English translation is... not the best. Additionally, the remaster doesn't really add in any QoL features and is mostly a true to the original PC port with extra languages. (Hint: press ESC to get the pause menu so you can see the keyboard shortcuts for things.) I would however consider the English translation readable, and the game is wonderful in spite of the issues with the TL. I am writing this review at the time of completing one route (6 endings): Uzuki's route. And I am absolutely loving the game so far! As someone who played Aoishiro with the fan TL patch from way back, I'd always been interested in Aoishiro's predecessor, and Akaiito does not disappoint. The wonderful soundtrack (thank you, MANYO. I love you). The full voice acting. The Japanese mythology heavy story. The hot blooded action moments. The well executed staging and transitions. The cute art and the plethora of CGs- seriously, there is a lot of art and it looks great. And the yuri, which feeds my yuri soul to full satisfaction. Only through one route, I've completely fallen in love with the AkaAo world and stories once more. (Of course, I'll continue playing through the whole visual novel soon enough.) If you're a fan of yuri, I recommend this. If you're a fan of hot blooded action, I recommend this. If you're a fan of Aoishiro, I don't even need to recommend this because you should already be interested. However, if you're a stickler for good English TLs, I'd put the game off for now. I'm hoping that SUCCESS will update it with a better TL (sorry, SUCCESS, I don't really have many expectations for you), but right now it's about the quality of a mediocre fan TL where maybe a member or two of the fan TL team used MTL. Readable, but not great. However, in spite of the translation quality, Akaiito still gives a wonderful, hot blooded, exciting experience! Maybe that's a testament to how good the story is?

I have now played a few hours and can safely say the translation is serviceable. The story is interesting and the art beautiful. Don't be discouraged to give this a try. With steams refund policy you should at least take a look for yourself before judging. The price seems especially fair. Just my two cents ,)

※ review as of 9 Jun 2023 (tl;dr: while the game is quite rich in terms story and endings, it might not be worth it until the EN translation errors and typos are fixed but ymmv. A little disappointing considering this is supposed to be an officially translated game. But if you can overlook them or you can read JP, then by all means.) To caveat, I have reached all the normal and true endings and only a few bad ends (~22 hours), using a JP walk-through guide. Your playtime might be longer if you don't use a guide or if you have a slower reading speed. A few routes have prerequisites where you have to unlock "seals" by reaching an ending or watching certain scenes from another route. Spoiler tagged, just in case, regarding routes. [spoiler] A few "routes" are not romantic in nature though the characters obviously care about each other a lot. One of them is a literal kid. A few are kind of ambiguous as well... [/spoiler] Recommended route order: [spoiler] Uzuki > Tsuzuru > Yumei > Sakuya > Secret. Only Uzuki and Tsuzuru's routes can be played without unlocking any seals. [/spoiler] [h1] Pros [/h1] [*]Characters are voiced (in JP) [*]Five routes with multiple endings (i.e., true, normal, bad) each. Some routes have multiple normal endings and the routes are different enough to keep the story and characters interesting e.g., [spoiler] in one of Sakuya's normal ends, Kei becomes an Oni like Sakuya and becomes a badass Oni hunter. in another Sakuya normal end, both Sakuya and Kei end up taking over the current Hashira-sama [/spoiler] [*]Multiple text language options (i.e., EN, simplified CN, traditional CN, JP) [h2] Cons [/h2] [*] Translation errors and awkward translations caused the story to be slightly confusing at times. It was as if the game was translated independently, without any context to what is happening during the scene and there was no attempt at QC. For instance, pronouns are often translated wrongly e.g., "his" should be "her", "It" should be "I"; when a character is speaking to the protagonist, the name of the protagonist was translated in the character's speech, instead of using pronouns such as "you" "your". Some of the translations are literal/direct translations as well, making the sentences awkward to read. The story is mostly understandable and the situational context and JP voiceovers (for those who understand) help to form a more coherent understanding of the scene. However, it is a pity that the translation does not do the game justice, especially with the descriptive fight scenes and you would need to reinterpret the text based on the scene. This takes some enjoyment out of the story. [*]English typos: words not spelled out fully or correctly; letters that are supposed to be Capitalised are not Capitalised; spacing and punctuation errors; double typing of letters or missing letters in a word. [*]In the backlog, sentences are cut off when you scroll up. Incidentally, you would have to use the "B" keyboard to check the backlog. Scrolling up using the mouse wheel does not work. [*]Irregular volume for voice and BGM throughout the game: sometimes, the BGM or voice becomes louder all of the sudden [b][u] Final thoughts [/u][/b] I enjoyed the game sufficiently, but if the standard of translation for its sister game aoishiro is similar, I'll hold off buying aoishiro until the translation is fixed or when there is a good sale. if the translation is fixed, I will likely replay akaiito for a better experience. cheers. :)

Translation is poor right from the start and read like it was written by someone who's main language is not English.

While I haven't finished this game yet and I do enjoy it, I hesitate to recommend it. The reason being that the translation is quite shoddy. Quite likely they were rushed to complete an unreasonable deadline and didn't have the support needed to doublecheck their work, and given some of the complicated Japanese mythology and historic references they definitely needed that time. Two characters share the same name and when they show up at the same time it's not uncommon for them to be misgendered, and there's a lot of basic errors. At least near the end of the route I'm at the errors seem to have become more frequent, further hinting at a lack of time for the translator to refine their work. It's a real shame because other than the translation the game is very good, with nice art, music, voice acting, and the characters and story are interesting. I bought this because I'd played the fan translation of Aoi Shiro many years ago and loved that. It's easier to tolerate errors in a fan translation than in something that was professionally done, however. SUCCESS should have given the translator time to get this done properly, and made sure that an editor and QA team was on hand to double and triple check things. This IS something that can be fixed, despite the rarity that translation gets a second look, and if it does this would be a resounding recommendation from me. I urge the devs to go back and patch this game's translation so that people can enjoy it for what it should be, rather than lament at what it currently is.

Damn this is crazy, from PS2 to PC remastered on 2023... still feels unreal. Go buy this classic, it still holds up even after all this time.

They finally fixed the text, yay, they still haven't fix the resolution problem, booo, when they fix that I'll change it to a positive one

OMG these yuri vampires keep killing me =_=

An amazing heartfelt story

神ゲー