Moonlight Sculptor:Hosted

[azneas]

Most of us are just determined/addicted enough to read all 29 volumes-machine translated...
Yeah....its scary how amazing Moonlight Sculptor is.

[Mystes]

Can someone give me a brief summary of the following volumes?

[azneas]

Starting from where? Vol 2? Or from the middle of Vol 2? (where the people who edited the machine translated versions left off) Furthermore, how many volumes. Since one chapter is approximately a paragraph summary and there are usually 6 chapters in one volume...o.O

[Vielfras]

I''l try but don't expect too much as I'm still holding out on reading the machine translation, secretly hoping I will get to see some high quality translation.

Unfortunately I can't help but read some of the spoilers in the Jcafe thread. I can't give a summery but I'll give the things I remember from the spoilers.
So here goes:
In volume 2 we have the exploration of the City of Heaven with a couple of plot twist. Also Weed start some secret training.

In an attempt to defy the 24 hour death penalty (where if you die, access to the game is denied for 24 hours) Weed gets a hidden skill that saves him from dieing at a great cost for him. (Rewarding us with a great plot )

There are the huge scale wars between clans, these wars are streamed online and on T.V and the whole world stands still when this is going on.

As the story progresses the story starts to take place in real-life, however with almost minimal cost to the RPG like story. (In my opinion it even makes the RPG experience better).

Romantic flowers begin to grow. Also I have to add that the romance here seems to resemble how romance is in real-life, and this realistic aspect is done so well that you just can't help but keep on reading.

Some of the characters meet outside of the game.

Weed gets a viewing channel where people can watch him as he plays the game, for a certain monetarily fee.

Weed uses he's sculpture mastery skills outside the game, same with his great cooking skill.

The heroes go to other countries for game promotion or something, Cairo/Europe/Russian/China. (It's hard to understand the real-life parts in the machine translation.)

Seyoun, the mental girl, start to play a big part both in game and outside of it.

The games AI is explained, and we learn how the game was created and how it works.

NEW skills, monsters ,characters and just other amazing things. Every game maker, and all RPG gamers must read this novel. But be warned, read it once and you will never be able to play MMORPG like you used to again.
These are only the part I unintentionally glimpsed as I was going through the thread. If you want to read some of the spoilers just go to: http://www.jcafe24.net/index.php?topic=14132.0. The spoilers start from page 4 onwards.

[Kadi]

Now, I can't deny that I've become a bit curious. Could someone send me a PM with a link to a machine translation/google-translatable txt-raws? Want to have a look at it once I'm a little less time-constrained.

(No raw-links in public, please)

[azneas]

Wait, do you want raws or do you want translated version? And if you want raws, which language? As for translated, I PMed the official vol 1 translation to you*; still have to ask the permission of the other people on Jcafe to pass on the links for google-translated vol 2+.

*And this is technically legal seeing as the official translating company posted the entire vol 1 on their site for free anyways before their company failed and the site was shut down.

[Vielfras]

*And this is technically legal seeing as the official translating company posted the entire vol 1 on their site for free anyways before their company failed and the site was shut down.

Where did you learn this? These are very serious words!

Bring proof of this and we should be aloud to post the first volume of MS on Baka-tsuki.

[Kadi]

...

Where did you learn this? These are very serious words!

Bring proof of this and we should be aloud to post the first volume of MS on Baka-tsuki.

You totally miss the point, if there are proper Jap RAWs, even non-Korean translators can translate it (with some help regarding the names, maybe). And we have some of those. Now you only have to find someone willing... And if none of the people around are willing, there are enough others all over the internet that might be.

Btw, thanks for the PMs, azneas

[azneas]

Where did you learn this? These are very serious words!

Bring proof of this and we should be aloud to post the first volume of MS on Baka-tsuki.

If you google " lulu moonlight sculptor" and click on the first link, it bring you to a page where MS is being sold. If you read the description of the novel, this is what is says:


"Heesung Nam, one of the bestselling authors in Korean fantasy novels, reveals an entirely unorthodox hero in an imaginary world of virtual reality for "The Moonlight Sculptor" series. Harn Lee, a debt-ridden teenage orphan, puts up for auction his account of the top-level avatar in 'The Continent of Magick', once the most popular online RPG game in Korea. Once the news is spread nationwide, a fierce competition to win Harn's avatar breaks out, raising the auction price to $3.1M. However, when men in black show up before Harn to collect his debts, he ends up losing most of what he has earned overnight. Determined to send his little sister, Hayan, to college and make the loan sharks pay back, he joins an online RPG game named 'Royal Road' to prove that history repeats itself. Why not claim the top once again? Visit http*://w*w.litenovel.c*m for reading the first two hundred pages, and enjoying free cartoons! 30% Discount FOR NOW! "

If you go to that site mentioned above, you would notice that the site doesn't exist anymore

Of course, like Kadi, this probably doesn't apply for anything but Vol 1 seeing as this was probably a teaser to get readers hooked onto MS when they made more. Seeing as they probably didn't intend to post every single volume they translated online, using this as a reason for translation is kind of flimsy sadly

Note: I took out a part of the website (and I just copy and pasted) so it would be technically legal right?....

[Odin]

I would gladly give an arm and a leg if somebody is willing to translate this

[Guest]

I also recently finished reading the first volume of moonlight sculptor. I got into it after reading the SAO translations here. The premise between the two stories involving VR and originally solo playing might be similar, but the stories branch out and I enjoy them for their differences. I also hope that Baka-tsuki decides to pick this up, as I heard that there are 20 some volumes already out, and the general plot of the volumes that were posted by a user above sound interesting.

[Guest]

The world of Moonlight Sculptor is awesome!

Some of my favorite things are:
1)The monsters can level up, either by fighting with the user's or by fighting among themselves. Skeleton Knights levels range from 120 - 140 on average, but if they can level up to 200+ then they can have a class change and become Death Knights. It is like this for all monsters in the game.
2)The NPC's have true AI. In fact users(the actually game players) sometimes have a hard time determining who's a user or a NPC. The NPC's also evolve, creating family's, new class/jobs, dying, marriage etc.
3)Quests. It nothing new to actually have quests affect the game world(Witcher, WoW, etc), but what is truly amazing is the actually effect. Quests are ranking S,A,B,C,D, E. E is the classic fetch/do/kill quests, D is the group/instance quests in wow, C is literally a town/city changing event, B is kingdom/area changing event , A is literally continent changing event and I can only imagine what S is since I haven't read about that yet. To give you a idea how awesome A class quests are

Spoiler! :

Weed(the main character) talks on a A class quest where he has to defeat a legion of Undead full of 40,000+ monsters. If Weed fails the whole continent would have a significant Undead problem since they would hate all life and try to destroy it. Around the same a time a large & famous clan in the game attempt a A class quest and fail.. resulting in the continents temperatures on average 10-20 degrees hotter due to the curse.

[ReddishWhite]

lolspoilers

That sounds great! I took a look over at JCafe, asking an account and posting to see their links, but ended up seeing much since the site was just too slow for me. Did you get the spoilers from there? I actually tried reading their volume 2s machine translation, but stopped right away when I couldn't make sense of it.

[scarfazed]

I've been reading translated novels on here for a while now. I started with HP, and wanted something similar, and I was told SAO was the next best thing and I was directed here and thats where I found this site. I finally got around and caught up with SAO and I was searching for something that's similar settings with both of these books, and thats when I accidently found MS.

I must say out of these 3 series, my favorite is probably MS due to its RPG elements and witty main character, while HP is funnier and SAO was more serious, MS to me seemed like an actual game, and I'm hoping future games could be like this, well maybe a bit less hardcore. This is just based on the first volume of MS, thus I am leaving a lot of potential for this novel open (tried to read machine translated version, gave up), but the spoilers I read from here makes me REALLY want to find out what happens.

Ok, with that out of the way, here is the reason I'm writing this. I try to see every week to see if there is anybody picking this series up, and today I saw this on google search so I gave it a shot and saw that you were seeing if people actually liked this series. I just wanted to show support in this novel and hope that it would be translated in the future because it is one of the best reads I've come across. (I been reading here for a year now and this book is making me create an account and POST something!!) To be honest, more people WOULD know about it if there was more information on this novel, I found it randomly due to the fact I wanted something similar to SAO/HP, something set in a VRMMO setting that is not ./hack (not nearly as good), and I randomly gave this one a shot and I finished reading this during work while not doing work

[azneas]

I actually tried reading their volume 2s machine translation, but stopped right away when I couldn't make sense of it.

Hmm... you do know that fan edited versions of the machine translation are out right? And I have to say, they're pretty amazing compared to what they originally were.

For example: (By archmagination2002):

Spoiler! :

Weed and the party held on closely to the captured bow stem as the Giant Beanstalk reached toward the sky. All Weed knew was that at some point the stalk started reaching for a specific direction.
I feel like a blade cutting the wind Weed thought.
It felt like the City of Heaven was not far away, but as time went on they starting losing hope of reaching the city.
Shooting through a large cloud Weed spotted a floating island in the sky, blurring through the mist, the stem of the stalk seem to drill directly towards it. Weed and the party reached it the island and immediately started examining the surroundings. The city on the island was composed of a little over a thousand houses and shops with a large central spire seen in the middle. Over ten thousands birds were sitting on the large central spire and beyond the city could be seen fields and mountains.

You can find the continuation on jcafe.