At the end of character designer Na-Ga and scenario writer Kai’s Talk Show and Live Drawing at Animaga 2019 in Melbourne, they showed off a video of gameplay of Key’s most recent visual novel Summer Pockets in English, along with an announcement that a full English version of the game is in the works.
The announcement was posted on Twitter (in Japanese), although nothing has been said by the VISUAL ARTS Western branch yet:
Animaga expo 2019
2日目トークショー終わりました。
ライブドローイングは「しろは」です。
そして「Summer Pockets」の英語版の発表です。
現在鋭意制作中です。
(オーストラリアより) pic.twitter.com/4UTOhb4qLe— Key開発室 (@key_official) August 25, 2019
My best translation of this is something along the lines of:
“Animaga Expo 2019
Day 2 Talk Show is over.
It’s the Live Drawing of Shiroha.
Now, Summer Pockets English version announcement.
We are working hard on it.
(From Australia)”
Pretty low-key announcement, and without the video itself publicly available at the moment, there’s not much else to go on – much of what I know comes from a Reddit user present at the announcement. We will be updating this if and when more concrete information on the English version of Summer Pockets comes to light tonight.
Summer Pockets was released in Japan on PC in summer of 2018, with a Switch port following in June 2019. There was an English fan translation in the works, but how this announcement affects the future of the project remains to be seen.
