Sepia Tears

"I'm the person you wish you never met."

Sepia Tears is a romance visual novel. It's about a memory that a boy named Mark tries very hard to forget, and a girl named Myra who unearths it.

Together, they search for a storybook romance and realize that love doesn't always bloom as neatly as it ought to.

Perfect for fans of anime and VNs who want a classic story with a twist!

Features: Vocal ending song, 40,000 word story, and a CG gallery containing game CGs, chibi CGs, and promo art.

Sepia Tears is my first ever (notable) localization project and one of the first visual novels I've ever played. It was a game which I had played in my younger years, back in the mid-2010s, and enjoyed very much. It made a huge impact on how I perceive visual novels as a genre, and they became one of my favorite video game genres to this day.

The idea to localize stories, let alone Sepia Tears itself, didn't occur to me until 2024. When my English proficiency progressed to a point where I was completely comfortable using it in my daily life, I started to think about how many games are inaccessible to larger audiences, including my home country Turkey, because of the lack of localization efforts for the Turkish language in both indie and well-known games.

I was pursuing my astronautical engineering degree back then. In May 2024, I saw an announcement about Sepia Tears being translated to Russian. While initially I didn't feel anything about it other than gratitude that a game I used to love was still getting support and updates, it eventually started raising some new thoughts inside my head: "What if I attempt something similar?", "What if I end up being the person who translated this game to Turkish?", I didn't have any experience translating video games before, so I had many questions.

Being the introvert I am, I didn't have a habit of being the first to start conversations. I endured this mental warzone for months, and after some pre-planning for the localization process, I finally had the courage to contact the developer in early 2025, saying that I am a long time fan of Sepia Tears, and want to voluntarily translate it to Turkish, and get my localization officially released with his help when it's done. I also added that I had no tangible prior experience that I can show him.

To my surprise, he appreciated my message and was willing to work with me on this project, and that is how my journey as a translator officially started. To answer one of the questions I had in my mind back then:

"Yes, I ended up being the Turkish translator."