Some thoughts on the fan TL vs MTL debate -
A couple years ago, there were some MTL'd hentai games, and they were universally regarded as being kind of shit. The translation was bad, the english was bad, and overall it was nonsensical and illegible. More recently with DeepL and other such programs, machines got much better at "reading" and "writing" to produce passable text on a large scale, and very quickly.
When I started SNK2 I was curious about how much demand there was for it and other Bishop games, because the only one that'd gotten a translation was Sansha Mendan. I found some old 4chan boards where people were discussing all these games like they'd played them. I was like wtf? How? There's no way all these weebs have enough Japanese to understand things like character traits, plot, etc. It turns out that when it comes to hentai games, your expectations for quality of writing have almost nothing to do with prose, which is the primary advantage of a proper translation. If you use textractor and DeepL, you can kind of sort of understand what the girls' names are, what they're like, and how you end up having sex with them, and you can fap to that. Good prose is great, and you can dodge awkward sentences like "MC: 'I'm drinking my cum in my pussy!'" But most people are capable of blocking out or otherwise forgiving such grievances with MTL'd games.
I'm gonna give examples of two games with interesting translations: Eden's Ritter and Dohna Dohna.
Eden's Ritter is interesting because it's in a medieval dark fantasy setting, and the art style really leans into that aesthetic. I never read it in Japanese but the translators decided to write in a style that wasn't full medieval but also definitely not modern English. It felt a lot like the drama within the text made a lot of sex scenes unfappable because I was too distracted (which is kinda funny because you hear a lot about the opposite happening, where there's something dramatic going on but you don't notice because of the huge pair of tits on the screen). It was an excellent translation, but I feel like at some point, it failed its purpose as a t/l of an h-game.
Dohna Dohna is a good-ass game and you should buy it. Anyways, most of the story happens through dialogue, without much narration (at most they'll describe the setting really quick). It was imperative that the translators get the dialogue right because it's a strongly personality-driven JRPG. That said, I'll be surprised if more than a quarter of the text had anything to do with sex, as opposed to a nukige like SNK2 where about 15-25% of the text is dedicated to non-sex scenes. Dohna Dohna, at its core, is a JRPG that happens to have some sex scenes in it. The best part about the sex scenes was that they had characters that you became interested in through the story. The actual writing probably had minimal impact on the reader's experience. In fact I'm pretty sure that a certain minimalist, description-focused style is more effective at making sex scenes more fappable, as a general principle.
tl;dr Even if there's always going to be a demand for quality jp>en translations, most people find mtl to be good enough for h-games
. It's absolutely not always the case as sometimes you get infighting, or people just taking to long with their part and there's always those who just ghost.... but yeah... it DOES happen.
