What Did I Do In 2025?
Some… stuff.
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My site has an RSS feed with basically everything I’ve done back to 2020, so I'll mainly be going over things from that.
In January, Kenshi Yonezu released Plazma for Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX and BOW AND ARROW for Medalist. (Natalie.mu interview, Tsuruma Ikada interview)
I spent a good amount of the following months translating and then beta-testing Absented Age 2: Ghostbound, the sequel to terunon's Absented Age: Squarebound from several years ago, which ultimately came out in August. It's a good game! Of course, what's also a good game is Blue Prince, Void Stranger, Deltarune, Fantasy Life i, Donkey Kong Bananza, Squeakross, Silksong, uhhh…
Right, IRIS OUT in September! And of course, JANE DOE too! (Interview) Then in October, there was 1991 for the live-action 5 Centimeters Per Second. (Interview, interview about all three)
Then I made a cat for Ring Racers. Then later I got obsessed with Iyowa's Obstacles to Strolling (AKA "Everything") and eventually wrote singable lyrics for it. Which is, I guess my first proper Vocaloid translation in several years.
…Hmm. Doesn't look like all that much, does it? Absented Age was a big project, but it can only really account for about 2 months of time focused on it at most, with the bulk of the work being in January and February. I did work on a few smaller paid projects not mentioned here. I drew a number of pictures when I felt like it. And I posted Vocaloid Highlights every month like usual. But a lot of my time did simply go into playing a lot of games both new and old, with some taking a lot of time. Uh, including From Software's whole Soulsborne catalog. You can read about that here.
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Two (non-age) absences to discuss: First, the paid version of Witch's Heart Wilardo's Conclusion with added content. As much as it pains me to say it… you can pretty much specifically blame Silksong for me not having done that yet. (But it's really good, so don't…) I hadn't been keeping up with what IZ was doing, and I had all but forgotten about them mentioning their plans for a paid version, so I only heard about it when it came out just days before Silksong, and I knew I wouldn't be able to squeeze it in before then. Even now that I'm free of Pharloom's grip, I've had a hard time working up the motivation to sit down and start; the unique situation of "having to manage a separate paid version and send IZ the files and figure out the details of all that" doesn't help. But I should get to it eventually… (both meanings of "should")
And of course, Your Turn To Die is not being finished in 2025 after all. Even as the official translator, I'm not much more privy to the state of its progress than the rest of you. While my struggles to put out much public translation work this year may invite pessimism, I can at least say that it's not "done and awaiting translation" or anything. So it's not me holding it up… uh, unless there's been some kind of horrible miscommunication.
While it's hard to know what future games might come out and consume all my time again, at least at the moment, I feel like I might finally be able to start focusing on other work next year. Which is seeming more likely to be my original games than free translations, because man I want at least one of these to be a real released thing. Like, people don't even know I have a nearly-complete soundtrack for… or a really catchy theme for… or the story themes of… man, you don't even know…
