Hey there, guys. Translator of the first episode in the Nine series by PALETTE here, just wanting to share a few words from behind the scenes. So, what is Nine exactly? Nine follows the story of Kakeru Niimi and Miyako Kujo as they try to unravel a mystery that’s unfolding in their sleepy town of Shiromitsugawa. There’s people with superhuman abilities, bizarre murders and talking plushies—what else could you ask for?

When I played through the first hour of the game, I was pretty into it. And as I worked on the game, I tried to make sure to capture the nuance of the colorful cast of characters. There’s a lot of deadpan humor in the protagonist, rigidness with Miyako and bubbly mischievousness with Sora, all of which I wanted to carry over. My editor on Nine was a really big fan himself, so he was very much eager to shape things the way a fan of the game would like to see it. We wanted to make sure that the English-speaking visual novel fans would get the most enjoyment out of this game, and in order to do so we both had plenty of hands-on discussion—from lore to nicknames.

For example, I mentioned Sora before. She’s the protagonist’s little sister and often calls him a cute offshoot of “nii-chan” over the course of the game, but my editor took it a step above. He actually took the time to give each instance of her using these three or maybe four offshoot nicknames their own unique nickname or made it suit the dialogue in a way that matched her personality. He turned me on to the idea, so it ended up being in the final translation—an idea I’m happy we went through with, in retrospect. In addition to that, some of the dialogue crafting he came up with was really inventive and ensured things read smoothly in English, which is something I’m truly grateful for. (A helping factor, as well, was that he was more familiar with the lore of the sequel games than I was.) It’s really hard to talk about this game without going to far into spoiler territory, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll just wish that you’ll all enjoy the game—from beginning to end!

David Evelyn

Twitter: @shinhoroko

Right now you can pick up 9-nine- Episode 1 on our website or on Steam for $19.99 with a 10% discount making it $17.99 at this time. We offer a free 18+ DLC upgrade for users who purchase the Steam version and you can pick that up here.