Umineko Gold Edition

[DasMeister]

url blocked!

Official English Dub of the games with PS3 sprites, will launch on Kickstarter.

[vit9696]

As lovers of the Umineko games, we feel very pleased that the universe still gets so much attention more than 10 years later. We are rooting for the best experience of each user according to their preferences, and this new Umineko game may certainly provide a great experience for some people, if published.

However, with current information, Umineko Gold Edition raises by far more questions than it gives answers, and we are concerned that it may even be a threat for the end user. The worrying aspects involve:

• The amount of voiced content. Umineko has over a million words, and approximately half of it is narration, which they seemingly plan to voice. For the comparison, a standard animated TV series will hardly reach 100 000.
• Suspicious visuals. The trailer contains various mastered media visuals ripped from the PlayStation game by ps3umi.exe (thus the open lips), Manga Gamer release, anime, and fan art. This makes it clear that the authors apparently have no access to Alchemist's internal graphic files, which would be extremely unusual for a project like this.
• No programming backend shown. With all these effects in place, implementing anything close to this on the scale of an entire game will be a serious programming endeavor, yet the visuals shown on the trailer are clearly hand-made.
• No information from any trustworthy sources about the claimed partnerships. Obtaining the licenses would be seriously difficult (Alchemist is bankrupt and 07th Expansion does not solely own even the music). All we know for certain is that the actors were hired to voice the trailer. Additionally, the studio website does not have many completed projects, and those that are there are of a significantly lesser scale.
• Unreliable geo filtering of the website. It appears that you can open their website only from certain areas, which makes no sense for legal activities.

All in all, we would suggest to patiently wait for news and be wary of things that look too good to be true. We advise not to spread this until there is some more confirmed information. Umineko Gold Edition could be anything from an incredibly ambitious project to a total farce that does not intend to deliver anything beyond the trailer.

[JinHamazura]

I've read one mod doubts about Umineko gold, if at last the project is not a kickstarter scam and launch succesfully on steam will this project continue?

I hope so because even if they release that version, I don't like english dub and at least on trailer they don't have some things like lip sync, this version seems a lot more polished that at least the trailer they released.

[numberonefan]

Vit's doubts are, in my opinion, well-founded, but even if Umineko Gold Edition turns out to be a success, it will not influence the future of this project.

[Ridleyfire]

I assume the actual game would not have the same type of graphics as they showed in the trailer, which is probably just handmade to create hype for the Kickstarter. I think it's more likely to be something along the lines of what this project is doing if it comes to fruition. I don't think it's a complete scam or anything, but you're probably right about this being an extremely ambitious project.

They claim that "a fully voiced, dramatized audiobook of the novel, called 'Voices of Rokkenjima,' will be released as a free podcast series on iTunes." but I honestly don't understand why they would make that completely free. I guess it could be considered something to hook listeners into buying the game which has graphics.

I'm not sure if they're actually going to voice all the narration. My guess is the audiobook is abridged and they might fully narrate that, but not the actual game. They say "full in-game voice acting" but they don't actually say anything about the narration. In fact, they specifically state that the proof of concept is an extract from the audiobook, not the game. So that tells me the graphics we see are not part of the game, they're only to make the trailer more aesthetically pleasing. And the narration is probably only voice acted in the audiobook version (which as I said is likely to be abridged).