A picture of Yuuko giving the V sign currently adorns minori’s overseas facing website along with a caption of “Hello!! minori’s overseas expansion has started.” Below it was an image that featured the logos of the three parties involved with cross marks between them. Clicking on this logo brought the visitor to the MangaGamer post about the collaboration.

According to the MangaGamer post, the first two games tackled will be the two parts of ef – a fairy tale of the two, which spawned several other derivative properties including the two animated adaptations ef – a tale of memories and ef – a tale of melodies. The game itself is essentially a modern fairy tale told in five chapters. Things that set this apart from many other games include using full frame images instead of character sprites and having different protagonists for each arc. The game featured writer mikage and illustrator Naru Nanao, who happened to have also worked on CIRCUS’s Da Capo and Suika, both of which currently have been released by MangaGamer. The videos in the game were created under the direction of Makoto Shinkai, also well known for his animated features Voices of a Distant Star, The Place Promised in Our Early Days and 5 Centimeters Per Second. Any other games from minori are currently a possibility, but nothing is solid yet. The mention of eden* in the press release (replicated below) has now been confirmed to be an error by MangaGamer staff.

The website for No Name Losers has a more comprehensive description of the upcoming release, including details about how this differs from their previously released “fansubbed version.” Essentially, the game will be split up again into two parts, esoteric references used by NNL in the translation will be removed, honorifics use will not have exceptions for Chihiro and Mizuki, wording will be changed to impart that all characters are over 18 and the extra bad ending added by the group will be removed. For those curious, the full script of that ending is now available in a link from the website. Lastly, because engineering for the engine is no longer a big hurdle, some of the things missing in their original release such as the feature to replay scenes/movies and the configuration screen will now be added back in.

The official press release was as follows:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: John Pickett, Head Translator/Marketing Manager, john@mangagamer.com

---

TOKYO, Japan, 27 September 2010 – Visual novel licensor and distributor MangaGamer.com is proud to announce a new partnership with studio and developer Minori, Inc. and No Name Losers (NNL) to officially distribute Minori’s titles in English.

This deal will see Minori’s titles on sale in their original, unedited form for the first time via MangaGamer.com with translation provided by No Name Losers. All releases will be use Minori’s original game engine. The first titles to be released under this partnership will be ef-The First Tale, and ef-The Latter Tale, which provided the basis for the the two anime ef – A Tale of Memories (2007) and ef – A Tale of Melodies (2008), as well as Eden*, one of minori’s other releases.

In addition to its elaborate story, the ef series features astounding visuals with a vast array beautiful CGs created by Naru Nanao, the illustrator for the original Da Capo, as well as animation by Makoto Shinkai.

ABOUT minori:
Formed as the software division of CoMixWave in 2001 and independent since April 2007, Minori has created a series of stunning and engaging set of visual novels including the highly popular Ef: A Fairy Tale of the Two series. Their catch phrase, “We keep minority spirit”, reflects the studio’s independent mindset and creative desires.

ABOUT No Name Losers:
Originally created as a fansubbing outlet, No Name Losers are now working together with minori alongside MangaGamer for the purpose of officially translating and localizing minori’s games into English.

ABOUT MANGAGAMER.COM
MangaGamer.com is the world’s first legal download site for English translated visual novels, sometimes also known as bishojo games. Since its launch in July 2008, MangaGamer.com has offered services where fans can download and enjoy popular games, often with anime spin-offs, such as CIRCUS’s Da Capo, 07th Expansion’s Higurashi: When They Cry, and NAVEL’s Shuffle!. Our parent companies are some of the biggest names in visual novels, including CIRCUS, NAVEL, NEXTON (including the BASESON and LIQUID sub-labels), and OVERDRIVE, providing a varied catalog of both All-Ages and Adults Only titles.

No Name Losers originally started out in the old heyday of digital fansubbing, having released many fansubs of opening movies to visual novel games, such as Baldr Force and Family Project, as well as Wind -a breath of heart-, which is apparently the first one they did. They then teamed up with game translation group insani to fully translate minori’s game Wind -a breath of heart-, with insani handling the initial translation and coding and No Name Losers handling the editing and the rest. Meanwhile, they also fansubbed several episodes of the animated adaptations. The translator for insani, gp32, finished the initial translation in a few months and handed off the materials to No Name Losers for the remainder of the process. Before release, there was some debate as to whether minori should be contacted about this project. However, in the end, it looks like minori was not contacted, according to the README file that came with the final release, stating that “to [their] knowledge, minori has no idea that [they've] done this.”

When it became time to release the final patch, things became a bit hot. This release took place about a year and a half after insani noticed that despite providing easy-to-use instructions for obtaining one of their previous releases, planetarian, the vast majority of people using their translation patch did not pay for the game, resulting in their policy to no longer take on any more such projects. It was decided amongst the project staff that the patch would be initially released to people who bought the game by asking each person who wanted the game to reveal information about the packaging of the retail version, meanwhile a fully public release would come later. The attempts by many to game the system brought out hostilities on both sides, and soon a system was instituted where a person would be required to present physical evidence of having broken the extra disc with update patches that came with the CD release of the game. Thus spawned the meme, “break the support disc.” This had also resulted in a scuffle between NNL and the predecessor of this site, VisualNews, because of the latter party’s reluctance to fully redact a story on this issue after the corresponding entry was removed from NNL’s website. In a recent interview, No Name Losers stated that this was the reason the meme spread like wildfire. However, despite the drama, a full version of the Wind translation patch was eventually released to the public several months later.

Approximately a year later, No Name Losers announced a project to translate minori’s latest game, ef – the first tale. This announcement was made controversial by the fact that this release would be made a standalone package that did not require the original game to install. At the time, according to at least one of the people involved in the project, engineering for the game engine in the full version became an issue; the use of the trial version game engine in one of the public releases was most likely a result of this. The staff also issued statements that a standalone release wouldn’t really be all that different from an anime fansub and that minori wouldn’t benefit financially from a patch since their games had short runs. This spawned heated discussions in a lot of places and some animosity from No Name Losers’s GipFace toward this site due to the mods not wanting to close a thread on the attached forums that had gotten quite heated. The ef project itself had its ups and downs, including periods of time when it was stalled due to lack of translators. Eventually, however, several releases were made, including a complete one most recently.

The next game from minori, the experimental work eden* was not without drama either. After failed negotiations, there ended up being two groups of people working on the game — No Name Losers and a collaboration involving Sekai Project. The latter had hosted their files on TLWiki, which became the setting for a heated edit war and debate involving minori. That project was dropped, but minori had also contacted NNL, asking them to stop what they were doing. NNL had refused to cooperate at the time.

However, eventually the two parties started talking after a second email was sent to NNL and posted on minori’s website. OVERDRIVE’s bamboo came into contact with minori and ended up discussing the issue with minori’s nbkz Sakai over a meal in late July. NNL leader GipFace had also sent MangaGamer head translator Kouryuu a polite private message a few days later after the initial contact by minori to start a conversation.

Things were winding up that it might’ve been possible for the three parties to announce a collaboration during MangaGamer’s Otakon panel. However, due to last minute communication issues, the plan fell through, although Kouryuu hinted at the collaboration at the end of the panel with an “anyways — just — you know, as you guys all go home tonight, just remember: ‘keeping the minority spirit’”. Tweets from MangaGamer also hinted at this minori catchphrase as well. No Name Losers eventually updated their website to reflect that they were now a subsidiary of minori and posted a message to the effect that they have discontinued their fan translations and that they would not want their works to be distributed any further.

Eventually, the three parties got their acts together and realized it was time to make the announcement. Strangely enough, before the announcement sequence started, a copy of ef – the first tale. had appeared on J-List’s shop. For the announcement, minori posted a sequence of images of Yuuko carrying a bottle and flying from Japan to Toronto first and then to the Netherlands, where MangaGamer.com resides. When Yuuko flew through Toronto, No Name Losers posted a hand-drawn image of Miyako having received a bottle in the mail. MangaGamer translator Kouryuu posted as sequence of five messages (one for each chapter of ef) on the official blog while he tweeted in character. The first message about a sore wrist did bring up a few jokes amongst the readers.

Finally, the official announcement was made by the three parties after some furious F5-key pressing by many, bringing the story to a close(?) with a certainly eccentric finish.

UPDATE: More details and links added to writeup and certain statements were removed at the request of our source. The article has also been reordered and NNL has issued a comment, stating that:

[W]e appreciate the summary of events that [have been] written up — and that we’d prefer that everyone: the community, Gemot Encubed, and No Name Losers, move on from the bitter events of the past, as the minori/Mangagamer/No Name Losers partnership demonstrates so beautifully.

The edit war started with said user deleting the contents of the Eden* TLWiki page. This was quickly reverted, and the user in question returned around three hours later to replace the page with the following statements:

このページで提供されているファイルは全てminoriが著作権を有しております。
当社は当該ページの所有者に対し、再配布の許可を出しておりませんので
全て削除させて頂きました。

ご了承下さい。

なお、異議等ございましたら、
日本語で株式会社ミノり（info@minori.ph）までお送り下さい。

Translated to English, the statements read: “minori holds copyright over all the files made available on this webpage. We, minori, have removed the contents of this page because the owner of this page has not received our permission for distribution of these materials. Please understand [the above statements]. Still, if there are objections, etc., please contact Minori, Inc. in Japanese at info@minori.ph.”

This resulted in some arguments, insults, as well as back-and-forth reverts. At one point, said user posted an English notice of infringement:

Notice of Copyright Infringement

minori Inc.
Address:Takagi bldg. 6F, 1-20-10 Sugamo,
Toshima-ku Tokyo,170-0002,JAPAN
email: info@minori.ph

On behalf of “ minori Inc., ” in JAPAN, I hereby provide notice to you of copyright infringement by the website of www.minori.ph.

and request you to remove, or disable access to, the certain materials uploaded on the above website as follows.

1. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed:

eden*

2. I have a good-faith belief that the copyright owner, its agent or the law, does not authorize use of the material in the manner complained of.

3. I state that the information in this notification is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that I am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Sincerely yours.

This went on for several more revert wars, ending up with said user writing “これ以上、不当に更新を行った場合、当社は法的措置を行います。minori Inc.” (If there are any more improper updates, minori Inc. will be taking legal measures.) and then adding an English translation: “Our company legally takes measures when updating it unjustified any further.”

A string of more reverts continued for some time until a TLWiki administrator finally locked down the page and cleared it.

The user talk page for said user’s IP address also contains a discussion between said user and several other TLWiki users [comments and translations in square brackets]:

If you don’t want people translating your games, publish them in English and we will buy them. 134.173.60.163 [this is one of the IPs involved in the reverts] 13:14, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

私たちのゲームは全て日本国内の法令を遵守して制作しており、また日本国外への販売、日本国外での使用は全て禁止しております。もし貴方たちが日本国外でminoriのゲームをプレイしたいということであれば、minoriから翻訳のための正式なライセンスを受け、当該国における倫理審査団体（例えばアメリカであれば、Entertainment Software Rating Boardです）の審査を受けた上で、合法的に翻訳し販売（もしくは頒布）すべきだと考えます。当社はminori本社へいらっしゃって日本語で交渉される場合、その用意があります。–218.219.158.186 13:19, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

[All of our games are produced while respecting the laws of Japan; exporting of these games and usage of these games outside Japan is forbidden. If you wish to play minori's games outside of Japan, you should be obtaining an official license to translate from minori, adhere to your country's game rating agency (for example, in America, there is the ESRB) and legally translate, sell (and perhaps distribute) these games. We are willing if said party wants to come to minori headquarters and discuss these matters in Japanese.]

Wrong. The ESRB in the US is not needed for PC releases, as companies like JastUSA and Mangagamer do not use it. 134.173.60.163 13:23, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

他社の事情はわかりかねますが、私たちのソフトウェアに関しては必ず当該国の倫理機構団体の審査を受けることを条件にライセンスを提供します。それが当社のポリシーです。私たちは英語版をリリースする予定はありませんが、英語版をリリースしたいと考える会社、グループが正式な手順でコンタクトしてくるのであれば、可能性を閉ざすことはありません。当社は社会的ルールに従って行動することを要求しているのです。–218.219.158.186 13:28, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

[I do not know about other (game) companies, but with regards to our software, review by an ethics organization in the target country is a condition to our license. That is our policy. We have no plans to release English versions of our games, but if there is a company or group interested in releasing an English version, and they follow proper procedure in contacting us, there is some possibility for it to work. Our company wishes to operate along the rules of society.]

MangaGamer.com releases games from Navel, OVERDRIVE, Nexton, Circus, 07th Expansion, BaseSon, and a number of others in English, despite never talking to the Entertainment Software Rating Board

MangaGamerがどのようなシステムを取っているのか当社ではわかりかねます。
当社はレーティングを行わずリリースする行為は道徳に反すると考えています。
当社のソフトは全世界どこでリリースされたとしても、第三者による保証が必要だと考えているからです。
MangaGamerはMangaGamer、minoriはminoriで別の会社ですから考え方が違うと思います。ご理解ください。–218.219.158.186 13:33, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

[We do not know how MangaGamer operates. We believe that releasing games without going through a rating agency is immoral. Even if we release our software worldwide, we believe that it's necessary to have a guarantee from a third party. MangaGamer is MangaGamer, and minori is minori; different companies have different viewpoints. Please understand.]

Unlike other countries the American ESRB system does not refuse to rate anything they are given, they have no policies in place to allow them to refuse a game. So it would be trivial to get a rating, nothing more than giving them the cash.

現在ESRBに変わるシステムが無い以上、その審査を受けなければいけないとminoriは考えます。 それが商業としてソフトウェアを社会に送り出すルールだからです。当該国の文化は当該国が守って行く大事なものです。ですから、その国の定めたシステムを守ることも企業として当然のことなのです。ご理解いただけますか？–218.219.158.186 13:39, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

[As long as there is no alternative system to ESRB in place, we at minori believe that games need to go through the ESRB system and that it's a rule that a business should abide by when releasing software into society. It's important that a country protect its own culture. Therefore, an enterprise naturally must abide by the rules set by the country it is in. Do you understand?]

To avoid confusion, just in case you didn’t notice: the person you’re currently arguing with is just a random user, he’s not speaking on behalf of the project staff or TLWiki staff. At the moment, none of the project staff members are online, and I am currently the only TLWiki administrator online. Just saying this to avoid any potential misunderstandings. VDZ 13:49, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

VDZ様、ありがとうございます。ですが、例えプロジェクトメンバーでない任意のユーザーだとしても、私たちは企業として真摯に対応し、minoriがどこの国においてもその国のルールを最大限尊重している事を理解して頂くために努力をしなければなりません。 また、今後、プロジェクトのメンバーやTLWikiのメンバーが私たちの会社にコンタクトを取ろうと考えるならば、その扉を閉じる事はありません。–218.219.158.186 13:57, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

[Thank you very much, Mr. VDZ. However, even if it is just some random user unrelated to the (translation) project, we, as a company, are sincere, and we strive to have people understand that we respect the rules established by a country to the utmost degree, no matter what country. Now, if the project members or TLWiki members wish to contact us, our door is open to them.]

Finally, there was an additional post on TLWiki administrator’s talk page:

当該のページで公開されていた「.sc」ファイルは全て弊社の著作物であり、著作権法で保護されています。これを翻訳し公開する行為は、翻訳権、複製権、公衆送信権の侵害となります。本件について当社の見解は、管理人およびプロジェクトのメールアドレスへ送致いたしました。なお、異議がある場合は、日本語で当社アドレスinfo@minori.phまでお送り下さい。（IPアドレスを調査いただけば、これが当社（minori）より投稿していることをご理解いただけると思います。）

Translation:

The .sc files made available on said page are copyright materials belonging to our company and are protected under copyright law. Translating and publicly distributing these files is an infringement of the translation, replication and distribution rights of the copyright owner. With regards to the current issue, the views of the company have been emailed to the maintainer as well as the project. Still, if there are objections, please send email to our company at info@minori.ph. (If you investigate the IP address, we believe you will realize that these posts have been made from our company, minori.)

Following this, several pages on the wiki containing .sc files have been removed by said administrator.

Thanks to Dan88 for the heads up.

UPDATE: A video of the ef fandub produced in cooperation with NNL and linked from their website has now been taken off YouTube “due to a copyright claim by 株式会社ミノリ”.

UPDATE 2: An official response has been posted on TLWiki regarding minori.

The translation project originally started a little over a year ago, but ended with the translator leaving for personal reasons. Since then, they’ve picked up a new translator and finished the translation. There are no plans to continue with the second chapter, as there appears to be a group working on a release of a full translation of the game. Therefore, NNL’s next project is to tackle the first chapter of ef – a latter tale.

In their documentation, they provide their reasons for releasing a standalone build. One reason is that they claim that minori would not profit from a patch release, because “minori is notorious for short print runs” and that the game would become out of print by the time a lot of people would want to buy it. They claim that “ef – the first tale is effectively abandonware because it is no longer possible to obtain a legal copy that will support minori.” Currently, ef – the first tale is still in stock in many Japanese online retailers and there are even copies remaining of the limited edition copies of ef – the latter tale.

NNL then goes on to argue that what they are doing can be compared to The Underdogs, a famous abandonware site, and anime fansubbing. They note that a standalone release is no more illegal than a patch release (both are copyright infringement). However, a standalone release not only violates the derivative works aspect of copyright, but also involves wholesale distribution of unmodified content, and may have a higher chance of invoking a publisher’s ire.

One thing the documentation did not comment on were the difficulties involved in hacking the game engine to support a translation patch. From the description, it appears that they are using a slightly earlier build of the game engine used in the trial version. Therefore, there is no flashback feature to replay scenes, something that was added in the commercial release. The commercial release also added in various copy protection measures as well as a check for whether the user had his/her timezone set to Japanese time. Hence, it looks like they still had issues inserting scripts into the original game, as was stated previously with their project:

Do not purchase ef – the first tale with the intent of applying a patch to it. We are unable to circumvent the numerous copy-protection schemes for this title. Therefore, our current plan is to release a ~1.8 GB standalone. Yes, this goes against the ethics of virtually every other visual novel fansub group. However, this project is not a joint effort with insani, and we are free to do whatever we please.

UPDATE: There is now a more detailed post on No Name Losers’ webpage detailing plans for a more polished upcoming release, various features they’ve added to the current release, and plans for their work on ef – the latter tale. Oh, and according to their post, this news article you’ve just read is anti-piracy propaganda.

On the site, GipFace states that the project was only around 20% complete and that there will be no partial release of materials related to the patch. As to the question on whether the project will be revived should another translator sign, the answer is that 30% translation of the game would be required to continue and that nothing will be announced until over half of the script has been translated. In the event of a cancellation after that, a Miyako standalone story release will be done.

They have currently assembled a team of regulars from the IRC channel #nnl to work on this project, and due to current technical issues, have decided at the present moment that the release of the game translation will be as a standalone file. This is the first time a standalone release was decided for something of this magnitude, and thus this decision has been met with both criticism and commendation.