For those of you who may have been familiar with me in my earlier days, I used to write VN reviews on the old Lemnisca blog. After going official, I took down those reviews and since then have generally found myself too busy to devote much time to playing actual VNs. But recently, I decided to try writing a VN review again for a VN I finished a little while back, Baldr Force EXE. Please note that by principle, I avoid writing about spoilers in my review, so you can feel free to read without worrying about spoiling yourself on the route. With that said, I hope you enjoy reading the review.

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Welcome to Komorebi! I am John Hooper, a Japanese->English translator. For those of you who don’t know me, I am the CEO and lead translator for the Japanese->English localization company, Lemnisca LLC. We focus mainly on the translation of Japanese software, most notably video games and visual novels, or VNs. We made our debut with the translation of a VN from the company known as Regista, Root Double -Before Crime * After Days- Xtend Edition. From 2015-2016, I worked at Regista, where I also worked on the visual novel Dies irae ~Amantes amentes~ as the localization director and one of the translators. A few years earlier, I also was involved of the fan-translations of Never7 -the end of infinity-, I/O, and Killer Queen (along with the never released fan-translation of 12Riven). As for the future, well, let’s just say it’ll be more fun for you to see and find out!

I’ve set up this place as a way for me to talk about things that may not directly related to Lemnisca, whether it’s random thoughts on virtually any topic, musings about the translation projects I’ve worked on, or highlighting any particularly interesting games or other such works. As such, I hope you find this blog interesting.

For those of you who are unaware of the meaning of the blog’s name, komorebi, or 木漏れ日, is a Japanese word that means “sunlight filtering through the trees”, one of my favorite Japanese words that has no single English word equivalent. It is a word that I feel represents the work of a translator quite well- a job where we find the way to take that which is normally incomprehensible and convey it in a way to bridge the barriers between languages and cultures.