Potato is yum

Asura is a website that I have used for over five years to read english translations of many webcomics. In the past, their selection of comics has been quite good with their translation team doing an excellent job on pretty much every comic. It seems in the past it was a fun hobby a group of people did rather than a cash grab. Now days, it almost feels like the site is only taking in new stories to make more cash.

I think I can prove this downfall without much effort by looking at the most recent addition to the catalogue with a story that has the English translation of Initializing the Sect System. Hilariously, the boosted ratings just 1 day after release has dragged the story down to 7.6/10 on the Asuracomic website. This story has pretty quickly been labeled as disappointing by the general community. From looking at recent releases, we can see that the length of time Asura continues to translate these new stories has decreased significantly from the start of the translation group many years ago.

On the other hand, this pattern kind of makes sense. Asura in the past had to play it safe by choosing stories that were already fairly well known and established they would be able to build up a reader base to grow upon. Now that the group is big enough, they can afford to fail on new stories and gamble on new ideas. This can clearly be seen from when they picked up Eternally Regressing Knight which was initially met with confusion until the novelty of the story brought in many new readers. However, many of these new stories don’t offer anything as novel as Eternally Regressing Knight and are almost all standard Murim or systems with a weak ass protagonist that abuses some kind of special ability to get through fabricated difficulties.

The story choices that Asura has isn’t something they can do much about since there is only a finite number of webcomics and a finite number of people interested in each genre. However, the quality of translations in even long standing stories has been going down with users reporting missing panels, typography errors, and many mistakes that previously never appeared in well loved series such as Dungeon Odyssey and Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint. We’ve also started to see some English errors in other long standing series that are the literal life blood of the website. It’s a little disappointing as a long time reader to see series like Nano Machine and The Greatest Estate Developer have chapters be release to premium with errors.

I recently canceled my premium payments to Asura because I couldn’t justify paying for a defunct translation group when other groups like qi, drake, and flame exist and give free translations that have been proofread and edited properly. It almost seems as if Asura is trying to push out new series at the cost of long time readers and it’s sad.

Still, I think Asura is better than a majority of the other scanlation groups by going adless due to the widespread use of NSFW ads and popup ads which infest many lesser known sites. This made Asura a great example and unique for many years until other sites learned methods to stay afloat without NSFW ads. Now many sites such as qi and drake don’t run intrusive ads and provide a similar user experience to Asura. There’s not much that makes Asura unique anymore other than it’s catalogue of high quality translations from multiple years of past work. But most long time readers wouldn’t be going back to read it all again.

It really seems like Asura has decided to care less about their long time readers and unless they return back to the quality I really don’t see myself saying they are the best translation group anymore.