I likely won't post in this thread anymore, whatever little discussion that was here has died down and I'm not very interested in spoonfeeding barely literate ESLs. I guess the gist of my thoughts on the situation is as follows:
1. Critical Bliss is an awful publisher, Mirthal swears they've been very helpful with translation and QA but none of these take precedence over actually releasing the fucking game and marketing it, two publisher's duties on which they've massively dropped the ball.
2. If you scroll back a couple dozen pages, you'll see Mirthal's posts from back when he used to post here. You'll see fairly easily from his style of communication that he's quite full of himself. He's not exactly a complete idiot, but clearly he thinks himself way smarter than he actually is. Personally I choose to believe that these delusions of grandeur are what created this whole situation.
3. I don't actually think Mirthal's doing this on purpose, even though it looks sus af. He signed a contract so now he has no choice but to abide by it; if he chooses to do right by his supporters and release the game elsewhere before he does so on Steam, Critical Bliss is gonna fuck him ragged. Again, I don't think it's orchestrated, even though the timing looks very suspicious: I feel like the key problem is Mirthal getting a publisher when he didn't actually need one. He could have done a Steam release on his own, and there would have been fan translations had he asked the community for help. He's just not very smart, that's all.
4. I took a gander at their Discord and there's no signs of riot, on the contrary, the place seems full of clueless paypigs. No, it's not censorship, they're just fucking stupid, one guy over there struggles to find an .apk of the game of version more recent that 21.5(that's from almost 4 years ago lol) and not a single soul(3k online) suggests Kemono or F95.
5. Given how a) Mirthal's got a loyal following; b) there's almost no public interest outside of that; c) his next game is years from now so any and all reputation damage will be forgotten - I don't think this situation is damaging to him in any way whatsoever. Walnuss moving on, however? Minigames are nice, but the art carried this game HARD. Coom games live and die by coom, and without a good artist there's no good coom. I feel like Mirthal's best bet is to transition out of coom games entirely and just do old school CRPGs. He almost assuredly won't do that though, so I'm just gonna go ahead and say that his next game is gonna suck balls, no matter what it looks like.
I've been following this game from early 2020 - almost five years now! I was fully ready to replay the full release one last time, say "phew, what a ride" and promptly forget it, but I guess this is fine too. Hope the game releases by the time it pops up in my memory again. Thanks for the shitshow, Mirthal.
