Les Fleursword is an adult otome visual novel featuring romance and fantasy set in a medieval Western period. The game runs on RPG Maker assets by MagicHouse that features a female knight captain Adelaide Devondell who was inspired by her father's heroic deeds when she was young. Hence, she followed in her father's footsteps by training hard to become a knight captain.
Her childhood friend Yufia Langerton was jealous of Adelaide's combat prowess, rank, and status among the knights. Adelaide was the only woman to have surpassed him at their knight academy, and the two have been exchanging snide remarks whenever they meet, although he also secretly cared for her safety and well-being.
One day, her father tasked Adelaide and her devoted squad member, Phil Cross, to investigate a merchant. The trader, Marlowe, revealed himself as a magician and cast a curse on Adelaide that could eventually kill her as part of an ongoing feud between knights and magicians. The story follows Adelaide as she grapples with her curse, and develops a special relationship with a junior knight, a knight captain or a magician who try to save her from death.
When Les Fleursword was localized and published in Steam by SakuraGame (later renamed to Paradise Project) back in 2017, the game received mixed reviews and numerous complaints of the poor English translation, adult content, and alleged bad practices by the publisher. Despite all these, quite a number of visual novel fans played through the game and felt the game had the potential to be a decent visual novel, provided the English translation was improved.
Agreeably, the game has excellent artwork in the character sprites and CGs, and is accompanied by a good theme song Minazoko ni shizumu hikari which may have influenced players and the Steam community to pin their hopes on the publisher to improve on the English translation as more players purchased the game showing their interest.
I grabbed the game when it was selling at around a dollar, played through the Chinese version, wrote a recommended review of it with the same hopes as the Steam community, and the wish that the game would qualify for Steam trading cards in future. Sadly, we did not see any improvement in the English translation even though many fans wished this to happen.
Preview music of theme song Minazoko ni Shizumu Hikari on YouTube by Souichi Sakagami
In 2020, after I worked on the English subtitles for another RPG Maker-based game by SakuraGame, Tales of the Black Forest, the publisher gave me permission to edit any of their RPG Maker-based games. Cleared of this major hurdle, I began to look at several of MagicHouse's titles that I recommended previously, and decided to work on Les Fleursword as a fan translation in my free time based off my own opinions and community feedback.
Steam store page description of Tales of the Black Forest
In March 2021, Les Fleursword was removed from Steam with a short notification that it was done on request by the publisher after a discussion with the developer. In spite of this, I pressed on with the fan translation, and finally finished it two months later. As the game has a Western fantasy setting, the story in English after the retranslation looks even better than the last time I played the Chinese version.
We hope that players who bought this game earlier with hopes for an improved English translation could take another look at this game with the retranslation patch, or consider buying the Japanese version from Japanese adult game webstores. The subtitles in both versions can be converted by installing a set of files that are available for download with installation instructions in my published Steam community guide, or at the Sinical Network translation page.
Lastly, I would like to thank SakuraGame/Paradise Project for bringing this visual novel to Steam for three years, and for giving me the permission to start on this project. I would also like to thank my friends in Steam, and the Steam community for encouraging me to work on this project, and for helping out with parts of the translation.
We hope you will enjoy this otome visual novel as much as I do. It was a pleasure to work on this project and seeing this game come out for the better.
Initial gameplay video with retranslation patch on YouTube by Kimchi Tea
DLSite game page (Contains NSFW content)
Digiket game page (Contains NSFW content)
DMM game page (Contains NSFW content)
Thats a masterpiece,it improves so much the reading ^^
The characters look beautiful, especially the guy in the purple jacket.
Great review and thank you again for all your hard work!