I disagree with his statement as well. Sure I'd go for a manual translation any day of the year, but there's so many games that have been playable with an MTL that never, ever got any kind of manual translation support.
There just ain't that many translators out there doing this kinda thing.
Also, the Kagura's of the world ... they also only have limited capacity to do anything ya know. So if you end up having to always wait for them ... yeah, kind of an issue.
It's also never guaranteed they'll pick up just that particular game that tickles your fancy, so you might end up waiting forever. SO ... you might as well just MTL it and generally you'll get a general grasp of what needs to be understood to play the game.
Sure, I would agree that for a VN (where the only gameplay IS the text) an MTL isn't likely to be enjoyable. But for these types of RPG's I've managed to have fun with many of them despite the MTL.
Though to be fair, I've experienced some that were so broken, I couldn't even follow the story at all, also killing enjoyment, but I have a high tolerance in that regard depending on the game.
Basically ... they have their place in this space and it's unthinkable they'll ever go away for those reasons.
Heck ... For RPGM/Wolf you got MTool which auto-MTL's it for you, so you don't even need to go through TL++.
I've played a few games that way which I ended up enjoying nonetheless.
I suspect the people complaining about "MTL means no human translation" never translate these games before. It is pretty hard work and time consuming just for free.
If their reason is that MTL prevents people who are willing to manually translate from trying to translate themselves, it seems to be a weak reason as if the translator is passionate enough and considering the amount of MTL hate, anyone who did a manual translation, even on a game that already has MTL, will earn alot of likes and admiration. Yet I only see a few passionate individual who actually manually translate a game that already have MTL. So if there only a few passionate individual who might even only be passionate to a few certain games they personally like, what about all the other games or even games that are badly
I understand their reason of MTL being a last resort as in: When someone request for a translation, there should be a period of time of waiting for someone to translate it. If after a while, there is no volunteers, then MTL would be allowed. However, it makes no difference I will explain by reusing the soup example:
- We are all hungry people who need to eat a certain type of soup. They want everyone to wait for a cook to arrive and to spent time making it first.
-If there are no cook, then they are willing to let the starving people eat dick flavoured soup.
-But that is just selfish, not only to the cook but also to the people who dont care and just want to eat.
-It also makes no difference is the people are served dick flavoured soup, be sastisfied and leave, while they wait for their cook to come.
Their arguement is also under the situation where there is a competition between MTL and Manual translation and that MTL is cucking manual translation, when in actuality, the situation is where there is MTL vs no translation. There are literally some game request that has waited for more than 1 year and there is no manual translation, not even MTL! I can even provide some proof.
If you shit on people making MTL, make sure that you are someone who pay and support translator or actual put in effort for the community to try to translate some games/the specified game yourself FIRST. Else, you are actually more worthless in helping the untranslated japanese game and the community compared to people who translate the game with MTL.