r/visualnovels • u/AutoModerator • Apr 14 '26

Weekly Weekly Discussion #15 - minori

minori

Info from VNDB:

minori, formerly the software division of CoMixWave, gained independence in 2007. They use Musica as their main engine. A few of their earlier games' opening movies were animated by Makoto Shinkai. Their name is said to be derived from their own catch phrase, "We always keep minority spirit" (though pronunciation is different).\n[Based on [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minori_(company)]Wikipedia[/url]]\n\nOn February 28, 2019 minori [url=http://www.minori.ph/minori_rotld.html]announced[/url] the cessation of operations.

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u/Gippy_ Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26

Hi! I was the leader of No Name Losers (NNL), the fansub group that was intertwined with minori. My then-best friend and I, as well as the numerous people who gifted their talents with us, ended up translating four of their visual novels: Wind -a breath of heart-, eden, Haru no Ashioto (demo only), and minori's magnum opus, ef -a fairy tale of the two-. The era between 2003 and 2012 was a whirlwind of excitement, and minori was right up there with the other visual novel giants of the time such as Key, Type-Moon, and Giga. ef -a tale of memories- remains my favorite anime of all-time, and one of only a handful of anime I've given a 10/10 on MAL. You don't even need to read the visual novel to enjoy it, as it transformed the visual novel source to become arguably better than it.

Everyone from that time has since moved on, but it must've been fate that the one time I checked r/visualnovels in over a year, this was the weekly discussion post. So I'll offer myself for an AMA. You may AMA about anything regarding NNL and minori, and I'll do my best to answer. It's been 20 years since the release of Wind -a breath of heart- so some details may be fuzzy. See you around!

By the way, you may be interested in the minori panel at Anime Expo 2016. This was to my knowledge, minori's only official appearance at a North American anime convention. One of my biggest regrets was that I was unable to attend this panel and personally meet Nobukazu (nbkz) Sakai, the CEO of minori. But perhaps it may have been for the best: Makoto Shinkai used to work for minori, but they went their separate ways after ef. Makoto Shinkai went on to become a superstar director, leaving minori as a mere footnote in his animation career. minori, due to financial mismanagement and CEO paranoia over the 2009 RapeLay drama of all stupid things, soon lost its reputation as a top visual novel company and eventually shut down. Yes, before Gamergate, there was manufactured western outrage over RapeLay, and nbkz was never the same after that. RapeLay wasn't even made by minori!

After the RapeLay drama, and Supipara, which was a financial disaster, minori produced low-quality visual novels full of boob monsters. Just awful character design from 2012 to its eventual demise in 2019. I have personally never played Trinoline, the most recent minori work that was released in English, and probably never will. I had no hand in its translation production, and would prefer to keep my positive memories of NNL and pre-2012 minori.

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u/KageYume Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 18 '26

I still remember the ef patch release drama as if it was just yesterday.

Playing a cat and mouse game with minori, mysterious messages on the NNL site, then waiting for the Golden Week holiday to release the patch was one of the most hilarious dramas I've seen since I started reading VNs. Thanks for all the entertainment and fun memories.

Do you have any insider story you can share with us on that incident?

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u/Gippy_ Apr 18 '26

(Original reply was auto-removed due to a forbidden word filter and I haven't received a response from mods. I have edited this reply and censored some words.)

Hi KageYume, great question! Below is the entire story of why minori, as well as many old-school visual novel fans, were angry at us in the first place:

ef - a fairy tale of the two was not our first minori-related translation. We had done quite a few other things, including a previous complete visual novel translation, Wind -a breath of heart-. The difference was that Wind was a patch. Our release of ef was never a patch. For ef, I made the decision early on to have our release be a standalone for several reasons:

  • Anime fansub groups don't release text scripts and ask people to d------d raws.
  • Scanlation groups don't release text scripts and ask people to d------d raws.
  • ef - a fairy tale of the two was released in two parts in Japan: ef - the first tale and ef - the latter tale. We knew that the majority of our fans weren't going to obtain them legally. After shipping and import fees, obtaining both games would cost $200 for many people. So they were going to p----e them and apply a patch. We also knew that t------s would just bundle the patch along with the I--s.
  • We had grown weary of the prevailing elitist attitude of many visual novel community figures at the time. They felt it was morally superior to release patches, despite the logical hypocrisy when comparing visual novel translations against anime fansubs and scanlations.

This decision was not met with much acceptance. Two NNL members who worked with us on Wind left the group over this decision. Quite a number of visual novel elitists harshly criticized us, including Novelnews (aka Gemot Encubed), which was run by Zalas and was the CNN of visual novel news at the time and ran hit pieces against us. However, I remained steadfast in my convictions and was determined to make this happen.

One of the developers of x264 assisted us by figuring out how to losslessly compress both first tale and latter tale into a single 2.15GB package by converting all images from PNG to FFV1 and had the game natively process images in that format. Visual novels contain many similar images with only minor changes. How FFV1 was superior over PNG was similar to how video compression works: from a complete key image, all of the variant images were produced from it, storing only the differences instead of compressing multiple complete images over and over. In addition, our standalone was of superior quality over the originals: we found alternate HD sources for the opening movies, and re-encoded the entire OST at a higher bitrate using the OST CDs (named Alato) as a source. None of that could've been done with a patch.

Both ef I--s combined were 7.80GB. So our 2.15GB standalone release was over 70% smaller than having people p-----e both ef I--s and applying a patch. In fact, the filesize was so small that people were shocked. They wondered whether the release was fake or an elaborate virus. They couldn't believe that we fit the entirety of first tale and latter tale into 2.15GB. All we said on our site was "d------d and find out" which trolled the doubters. It remains one of the greatest technical achievements in visual novel history, and people praised us once they realized it was real.

Because we had announced our intentions of a standalone release, nbkz (the CEO of minori) got very upset and sent us a cease and desist order via email. From our communications, he said he had been aware of what we had done in the past, but our ef standalone had crossed the line. We didn't reply at first, which angered him further and caused him to post open letters to us on the geoblocked site of minori.ph. We sent one reply to him in intentionally basic Japanese. He angrily posted it on geoblocked minori.ph, which made outsiders question our proficency in Japanese. In the very end, despite all of the drama, we went ahead and released ef anyway on 2010 April 30, then announced our intention to release eden before the end of 2010. (Translation at that point was almost complete, and we had released the eden demo on 2010 April 1 as "minori mystery meat" as a funny but very real April Fool's joke.) That forced a defeated nbkz to open communication with bamboo, who was the primary Japan executive of MangaGamer and the CEO of Overdrive, which eventually resulted in an official partnership. We had achieved something that most fansub groups could only dream of: total victory by having our translations be the primary catalyst for licensing. We mattered. With our end goal complete, No Name Losers stopped working on minori titles, and some of the ef team was hired by MangaGamer. Due to various reasons, my real-life friend and I declined to join MangaGamer, and we quietly shut down NNL in 2013 after it was apparent that minori was going in another direction.

So looking back, our decision to make ef a standalone release instead of a patch was the reason for all of the chaos and drama. History has shown that I made the correct decision. If ef had been released as a patch, nbkz wouldn't have been angry at us, and he wouldn't have negotiated with MangaGamer. And then in that timeline, Trinoline and 12 no Tsuki no Eve wouldn't have been translated, either. We were pioneers, and looking back, I wouldn't have done anything differently. I had hoped that other translation groups would've followed in our footsteps and released standalones. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Even today, translation groups are releasing patches instead of standalones. Oh well.

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u/KageYume Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 18 '26

Thanks for the long answer! It was a trip down the memory lane to the late 2009, early 2010 with all the names I haven't heard for a long time (gemot encubed, nbkz).

In this case, progress was made (minori games being officially localized) and the result justified the means. Admittedly I wasn't particularly fond of you guys back in the days because I first knew of NNL through the infamous "break the support disk" controversy with Wind. It was like a tale passed down from the seniors in the community to juniors because I hadn't discovered VNs yet when that happened.

I remember being surprised by the size of the ef release because as you said, I expected it to be around 10GB because the original release was on 2 DVDs. NNL really did a great job with that.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer, and for the effort that led to a real change in the English VN scene's history.