W-Z

I have to strongly disagree with you on this one. Your main point seems to be that all the good story titles are being translated by fans, which simply is not true. If you look at the number and description of visual novels being published in Japan every month, data available in English from say omochikaeri @ wordpress, there can easily be upwards of a dozen visual novels coming out every month. Many of these are story driven and have large scripts above 5 Kb. Obviously not all of them are spectacular and which ones you like is largely dependent upon personal taste but there are bound to be visual novels that are released regularly, even every week that catches your eye. The vast majority of these will never be translated into English simply because there are not enough fan translation groups to handle it all. Translating visual novels is VERY time consuming and requires a fair bit of computer know how. Plus as the years have gone by, story driven visual novel's text files have gotten much larger. Manga Gamer has stated in forum posts that the reason they do not plan on doing the Koihime Musou sequel is because it is so large that they probably won't be able to sell enough to make a profit. It had to be split up into 3 files and each of those files are roughly the size of the Koihime Musou that MG did, which is already a fairly large game. The bottom line is a lot of high quality visual novels slip between the cracks because the resources to translate them simply aren't there. To get back to the OP, I think most of the relevant points have already been said, but I would like to add that an underlying cause of the lack of translations is the market they are trying to go to. The key point is that the general public does not really know much about visual novels and those that do are by and large computer savvy enough to pirate the games. This combined with the amount of money and time it takes to acquire and translate story driven visual novels means that they have to carefully consider what novels to translate in order to make a profit, which leads them to translating nukiges because that generally sells and has less overhead costs. [/rant]