One of my biggest pet peeves is games with ‘choices’ where the outcome makes little to no difference, and LTE is a prime example of this:
Up to a certain point in the game, failing mini-games or giving a ‘bad’ choice leads to the same outcome, just with less information reached along the way, which affects the ending(since the protagonist can’t determine who she kissed the night before without enough evidence).
There are some mini-games sprinkled in amidst the drama, though, which are probably the highlight of the game(when they’re good):
The first one, the barista/cafe sim, is easily my favorite.
The rest are passably basic, like the simple rhythm game shown after, but they have their charms.
The real problem is the localization/editing, or lack thereof, often using words that don’t even EXIST, so a simple spellcheck should’ve done the trick.
Beyond that, the game is enjoyable enough, if you can tolerate the poor editing, which is even more glaring when it pops up, since most of the editing/writing reads just fine.
It has a fun cast, and solid production values, so it’s at least worth a look.
Also, the best potential pairing for Yeonwoo is her bestie, Seorin, but any fellow yuri-fans hoping for that is setting themselves up for disappointment, sadly(even though she gets her own ending).
The past few years have been interesting, to put it lightly. Our two major projects are behind us; one taken over by another team, another finally progressed to full release after upwards of a decade.
So while this means a lifetime of drama and anticipation are in the rear-view, where to go from here?
Yes, Ms. Alien, I know you have a question, please wait warmly.
Well, for one thing, we have Growlanser progressing nicely.
While I’m not spearheading this project(that’d be poorchief and a few other awesome squad members), I’m blessed enough to be editing and testing it, so please stay tuned for that.
Among other things, my personal new year’s resolution is to get back to the long-awaited, oft-forgotten Shadowrun visual novel/SRPG for the Sega CD.
Not even Jordan Weisman has played it! Now that’s street cred, chummer.
And of course, there’s the Devil Summoner TV Series that I continue to be involved in, as well as the RPG itself, both of which continue to be in varying degrees of translation and editing.
Yes, both have been in the works for a while, but hey, CCC got there. These will too.
I don’t have any dream projects waiting in the wings beyond that, nothing that other amazing teams aren’t already involved in, anyway, unless someone figures out how to hack a PSN-only Wizardry game, but that’s a story for another time.
With that done, BB hacked us and uploaded the patch to the Moon Cell we have finished the testing phase with everyone completing the game, so we’ve got no reason to hold onto it anymore!
With just how many years this project took, I wanted to give anyone who wanted to a moment to say a few words (okay some of these are essays~):
ItsumoKnight: While it's pretty dang trite, it legitimately has been an honor to work with everyone on the CCC Translation Team. It takes a special kind of crazy to go from “I wish this existed” to “screw it, I’ll do it myself”.
I initially signed on because I was pissed about Extra’s endings. I was so mad and when I found out there was a JP-only sequel with a better ending for dear sweet Hakuno, I signed right the F up. I was so ready to translate Fate/Extra CCC!......’s walkthrough. See, I played to an excellent Extra guide from Cirnopoly. Even back when, I knew that translating what amounts to an entire visual novel was a big task. So heck if I wanted to do that! What I wanted out of the project was to be a secondary translator; being the lore guy who could translate all the other things while someone else faces the behemoth. But yeah, life happened and then I was a main translator. There goes that plan.
Woefully unprepared as I was (and still am, I’m not blind to that) I must thank the people who jumped on this crazy train with me. cj_iwakura and esperknight for leading the way, being mentors and friends to us all. Kotcrab and JS who nigh-literally made this project a reality. And Aria, a collegue I look up to very much. The remaining names listed in the credits I did not have as much time working with as I’d have liked but everyone played their part in making this patch not-imaginary. I’m glad to have been in their company.
We only put 2 memes into this game. One is a loving homage to Aksys, and you’ll find it in a similar place. The other was an error message for installation, which we took back out when we disabled the install; we put it in the patcher instead, so just 1 meme. All other references in the game are on Nasu, not us. Please enjoy a faithful rendition of Fate/Extra CCC.
cj_iwakura: If you're reading this, you're about to embark on a trip through the longest fan translation project I've ever been involved in(as of now, anyway). Fate/Extra is a title that's near and dear to me, since it was a game that I picked up on a whim at a time when I was always interested in new and/or quirky RPGs that tried to do something different.
Fate/Extra was definitely that. Love or hate the game, it has a genuinely unique battle system, an off-the-wall soundtrack that goes for more ethereal atmosphere than anything, and a plot that isn't afraid to mix up expectations with long-existing characters while introducing equally intriguing, brand new ones.
It was also, of all things, my first real gateway to the labyrinthine Fate franchise. After playing Extra, I decided to watch Fate/Zero, which rapidly hooked me, and became my first anime after a long drought of disinterest in the medium, and the rest is history. Since then, I played the original VN in its entirety, and watched almost every anime that came about in the meantime, namely the fantastic Ufotable adaptations of the original series and the underrated El Melloi II Case Files.
Little did I know there was also a sequel, and that for many years, there had been attempts at breaking through its Moon Cell-esque barrier in attempts at making a translation, with little success.
At some point, I happened upon the dormant project, and happened upon some other like-minded souls interested in carrying the torch and bringing the project to fruition.
Nearly a decade later, here we are.
We've had several testers going through the many, many routes of the game, primarily in an effort to fix grammar quibbles, typos, inaccuracies, and so on.
While we've been very, very thorough, bear in mind, CCC is a massive, MASSIVE script, and things may have slipped through the cracks. We're a pretty small team, but we're quick to fix problems, so if you happen upon any, feel free to let us know, just bear in mind, there's bound to be some escapees when dealing with a project of this scope. (I have a newfound respect for the lunatics at XSeed and the like who dealt with the Legend of Heroes games.)
We tried to be as accurate to the original script as possible. Anyone familiar with Kinoko Nasu's works knows that he loves his obscure references and intricacies, so we tried to keep those as faithful as can be.
So without further ado, put conventional thinking to one side, and enjoy your trip into the Moon Cell.
Well, I 'say' enjoy...
-cj
P.S. Shout-outs to the Tamamo faithful in our discord for keeping the faith.
Kotcrab: I still remember how excited I got when I managed to change some text on screen in Fate/Extra by manually fiddling with the emulator’s memory. Back then, I had no idea what I was doing or what it takes to make a fan translation. I was just learning and researching the game files with no particular goal in mind. Who knew it would go from that to releasing one of the longest and most complex projects I’ve ever worked on. I’m happy we were able to make both the CCC English patch and the Perfect Patch. I hope with this release we finally delivered to you the ultimate Fate/Extra experience. Thank you to everyone else on the team for making this dream possible, and thank you all for sticking with us for all this time.
- Kotcrab
P.S. For those interested in our translation tools we’re planning to open source them in the near future so stay tuned.
SnowyAria: It has been an honor being your shitposter. This project was certainly one of the longest I've been on, and I only joined partway! Being able to release Fate/Extra with subtitles was amazing to see, but that'll pale in comparison to seeing CCC in the hands of everyone out there! Thank you to ItsumoKnight and everyone for taking the chance and letting me join up! Originally, I thought I'd just be doing the audio-only translations, which at the time I was worried I'd gotten myself over my head with how hard that could be (I'm looking at you Gatou 🗡). I'm happy to say not only did everything work out, but I was able to contribute even more to getting this out the door. Someone had to take the team role of “deadline setter” and “whip cracking”~
Fate has been a special series to me ever since the Deen anime got me into it years and years ago. It may not be everyone's favorite, but I loved it to hell and back, and it was only uphill from there. I played the visual novel shortly after, but only the Fate route had been translated at the time. I remember rabidly jumping at the UBW patch the moment it released and reading it in record time. To think I'd go from a fan eagerly awaiting a fan patch to the translator providing the patch…
Thank you to all of you as well for your tremendous patience! For getting the editing pass done, Kotcrab rewarded me with a certain PSP script I've been wishing for, so you may see me again soon~
khikari: Just popping in to thank everyone for their amazing work and dedication! I didn’t contribute too much other than a couple of graphics and tidbits, but it was incredible to see the team put everything together. I’m really happy more people get to play this game and experience the full Fate/Extra series experience (and find some closure too)!
IgorAkou: Hi hi, I was mainly in charge of the image editing for a lot of the textures in the game. And I'd like to thank everyone's hard work for making this huge project a possibility and for making me part of the team. And if you're a fan of princess connect, feel free to check out my twitter ( ´◡‿ゝ◡`)
EsperKnight: I just want to say I'm incredibly glad that Kotcrab took it over. Without him this would not have gotten the treatment it deserved.
Sorry for the wait. As you may or may not know, Fate/Extra CCC has (finally) proceeded into the final testing phases.
That means the game is currently playable from start to finish, everything translated and edited.
This is basically the point where we’re fine-tuning the script to check for bugs, grammar errors, typos, things NISA would ignore, etc.
Some of our testers have already finished the game, but since there’s a total of eight possible routes(four servants, male/female PC), not to mention NG+ stuff, it’s a time-consuming process.
Yours truly is also the one tasked with the ever-popular Tamamo route, so here’s a sample:
We aspire to have the translation released by Christmas, so without further ado, I’ll let Aria take it from here:
100% 2,499/2,499 pages complete.
A video has been prepared for your amusement and information.
The problem with something being considered the “best” of its genre is that it often gets unfair expectations which a game can’t possibly live up to.
This is one of those games.
For posterity, this is a review of the PC version, which was a combination of the original game with the voice acting from the Saturn port. I wouldn’t touch the remake if they paid me, but I’ll get to that later.
Yu-No is, in a word, problematic. The plot, legendary as it is, takes forever to get going. The core premise is nothing particularly noteworthy, at least not on the tin: the protagonist’s father disappears under mysterious circumstances, and Takuya has to navigate a convoluted labyrinth of branching paths, intermingling dimensions, and numerous women to find out the truth.
Of course, therein lies the biggest problem: the game wears its perverted dating sim influence on its sleeve. It’s one thing to have every woman in a mile radius falling all over themselves for the lead, it’s another to have it happen with no rhyme, reason, or even notion of restraint or common decency.
(And here’s where we get into unavoidable spoilers yo, so bail out here if that concerns you.)
Two of the options that Takuya winds up intimately involved with, whether you like it or not, are, respectively, his stepmother and, later, his own biological daughter.
The first is problematic enough on its own, even if technically not too far outside of the realm of common decency, it’s still kind of gross. The second is just far beyond the pale in terms of good taste. By that point, I was nearly done with the game, so I just held down the fast-forward key and got past it for sake of finishing the story. (I’m aware the Saturn versions and remakes excise the adult content entirely, but the version I had access to was the PC port of the game, which was basically the original, warts and all, though I believe it had some editing of the more obscene elements, which I have no interest in, anyway.)
So how about that plot?
Yu-No requires dozens of hours of reading, maybe even 100+, even if you’re a speed-reader like I am. It’s a very, very, VERY long game, so you had better be very invested in the plot and characters if you’re going to see it through. Frankly, apart from a couple standout unique personalities like Ayumi and Mio, I found the cast largely uninteresting, paper-thin, and full of irritatingly predictable tropes. The protagonist is ESPECIALLY insufferable, often not realizing plot elements until they’re vividly beaten into his head(sometimes literally), and making the player examine areas multiple times until he gets the hint and moves on. (This is often made even worse by the fact that he breaks the fourth wall and ridicules the player for trying to leave an area prematurely, only to later reveal that you are, in fact, supposed to move on.)
Let me be crystal(bdmtsh) clear on one thing: this is in no way a fault on the incredibly talented fan translation team. The writing is very good, especially considering the sheer amount and depth of text in Yu-No. To ensure it was as consistent in tone as it was across the board, not to mention sharply written, and engaging with wittily localized jokes to ensure humor isn’t lost in translation. It’s especially impressive considering how much this game drags at a certain point, that I still had to admire the vivid amount of talent the translation team had to put in.
So if you’ve gotten this far, you’re at least curious with or familiar with the most noteworthy thing about Yu-No: the zero-hour twist that completely changes the setting and narrative.
In the last act, or “epilogue” of Yu-No, Takuya finds himself transported to a fantasy realm populated by knights, princesses, emperors, beasts, and all manner of otherworldly things.
Is it a welcome breath of fresh air after spending 60+ hours navigating the ‘real’ world and constant branching paths to find the true ending? Absolutely. Did it make it all worth it? Hardly.
This image of the official in-game map does not do the labyrinthine nature of this game’s convoluted path system justice.
Try this, the hint map that’s included with the fan translation, including my notes for reference:
I think you can see how this can get INCREDIBLY frustrating and time-consuming, and that’s even if you understand the game’s “gem” system, which lets the player leave ‘checkpoints’ of sorts to which you can go back and explore alternate routes. However, you still have to ensure you make the right choice to go back onto the correct branch and acquire the correct item, so you can’t just fast-forward the entire game.
So while the game does spin a compelling narrative and offer some fascinating ideas, it is in no way worth what the player has to suffer through. Yu-No tells a story in 100+ hours that could have been easily condensed to take 40-50 hours, tops. The writer badly needed an editor, and it shows. (The show was also adapted into an anime, which I gather also told the entire plot in 24 episodes or so, so I imagine it is very doable.)
My thoughts on Yu-No aren’t all negative, though. Firstly, the artwork is nothing short of incredible.
Despite wearing its perverted intentions on its sleeve, frequently and often, the talent on display is beyond compare. The backgrounds are full of intricate details, well-designed vistas and settings, and every character is full of unique touches, standing out despite their fairly predictable personalities. (One of the characters has an alter-ego, and you can probably guess it the very first time you meet them, despite Takuya constantly staying in the dark, as he often does.)
(Thanks, captain obvious.)
So how about the other legendary aspect of Yu-No: the music?
I can clearly see why the OST is regarded as highly as it is. The chip-tunes are distinct and full of personality(RIP Ryu Umemoto), but honestly, the melodies tend to get repetitive before long, and are more for mood than anything. Very few felt catchy or memorable, and the OST is hurt even more by the fact that you’ll be hearing the same tracks over and over and over again before the game draws to a close. (The music used during the Epilogue does have a different vibe, though, which was very welcome, and a massive improvement over the content of the main game.)
Now, the elephant in the room: the remake.
That’s right: somehow, the game not only received a full-on remake, complete with brand new art and remixed music, but it even got localized.
Not only is the art completely redone(care of the artist from Ar Tonelico, who has a pretty distinct style), some of the characters are near unrecognizable.
The differences are so drastic that you’d almost think they came from a different game, and it’s a massive insult to the talent of the original team, despite the art itself being passable in quality. (Also, very few if any of the original team get credited in the remake, which is sadly par for the course in the industry.)
It might have been more forgivable if they had at least offered the original art as an option, a la the recent ports of Langrisser 1 & 2, but sadly, this is not the case.
On the bright side, the localization(much like that of the fan translation) goes above and beyond the call of duty, but again, it can only do so much with a mediocre core plot.
The other positive I can give the remake is that Umemoto’s OST was given the original sound as an option, in addition to the remixes, but I imagine the team knew removing his original music would be considered a blasphemous move at best, unforgivable at worst.
The remixed OST isn’t nearly as big an affront as the new art, so it’s still well worth a listen.
In short, Yu-No is a game that’s very much a product of its time. I respect the influence and legendary status that it holds in the industry, but it’s the type of classic you’re better off learning about in brief referential terms, not playing in its entirety. It does not respect the player or their time, so nor should they respect it.
Aria here, back in CCC land. It’s been no secret that progress has been glacially slow. We left too few people in charge of editing the entire script, and life made things difficult for them to make much progress. We didn’t reach out in a timely matter to see if they needed help, and they didn’t want to disappoint us, so unfortunately, we let that go on for too long. For that, we apologize.
What matters now though is getting this project done.
As you can see by the joking header image, I’m in-between major projects myself after finishing Ancient Roman’s translation and Kotcrab won’t give me the script for something else I want to work on until CCC is out the door, so I’m all-hands back on CCC until it’s over. We’ve brought in extra help from friends on other projects, so I’m confident things will move better now that I’m here to crack the whip.
There are two jobs in this editing process:
Editing: Editors handle checking for typos, grammar, clarity, and the like. CJ’s been doing a great job on this, and we’ve brought in more help too.
Approvers: Approvers verify the lines render correctly in game. This includes control codes for special text rendering correctly, lines don’t run off the screen, things like that. This is my job here as well as ItsumoKnight’s. If I run out of lines that need approving, I’ll be switching hats to editing.
Two weeks ago:
Today:
Right now, the progress bar looks pretty disheartening, though CJ’s accumulated a backlog of edits that need approving, so that’ll help give the bar a push soon. Scratch that, drafted this post 2 weeks ago and have since nearly doubled the progress. Just gotta keep up this pace~ Progress is only shown here if a line has been edited and approved, so these counts are finalized lines.
I don’t want you to take us at our empty words in this blog post. To prove we mean business, we’ll start updating the stats page every weekend and posting updates on Twitter. This’ll act to both show our progress and light a fire under us if progress isn’t made.
Honestly, CCC is a bit of a cursed project, but it’s so close that we can’t let it drop now. My personal goal is to release it either by the end of this year, or early next year, and I’ll be pushing to make that happen.
Thank you.
PS: I’m sure you’ve heard, but just in case: the wonderful folks at Tsukihimates have released their translation of Tsukihime Remake! You can find a link to their patch here – https://tsukihimates.com/patch/
PPS: Oh apparently an official one was announced too after this blog post draft?
Where do I start with this crazy game? Serial Experiments Lain was made in 1998 as a companion piece of sorts to the legendary anime of the same title.
The game follows the same basic premise as the show: a disillusioned young girl slowly becomes more engrossed with the internet, and eventually finds it takes over her world entirely, both in the literal and spiritual sense.
What makes the game version different is that it takes place entirely in a virtual world of sorts, where you access datalogs, interviews, and diary entries sprinkled with occasional animated sequences to try and piece together Lain’s story and unravel the mystery of her existence and those she interacts with.
While most of the entries are in chronological order, some are locked out until you access others first, or aren’t visible at all. Some don’t even let you see them until after you reach the ‘end’ of the game(more on this later).
First, I can’t continue any further without giving credit to a massive undertaking: the team responsible for translating the entire game and putting it up as a website. https://laingame.net/
This takes what was thought to be an untranslatable game, due to the massive amount of dialogue-only sequences with no subtitles, and not only making it accessible to a non-Japanese speaking audience, but doing it well. The translation work is spectacular, and even makes it so you can access any of the numerous audio/video sequences on the fly, so mad props to the team for an incredible effort: I can’t stress enough how much they knocked it out of the park.
As for the interface itself, a virtual depiction of Lain is shown moving through the virtual world to navigate the numerous entries, accompanied by colorful expressions, idle animations, and even whimsical pratfalls when the player tries to access an unavailable datalog.
The cutscenes have a visual style all their own, surprisingly by the same studio that did the 1998 anime, albeit with a completely unique look.
The writing is the highlight, as well as the artwork, contributed by two of the most important members of Lain’s team: the writer(Chiaki J. Konaka) and of course, the inimitable artist: Yoshitoshi ABe. The game is also fully voice acted, with Lain’s actress reprising her role. There’s only a handful of other voice actors, but all their work is excellent, especially that provided by Touko.
ABe’s artwork is seen as backdrops for several events in the game, often depicting mundane things like Lain receiving her first computer, accessing email, or even giving her psychiatrist, Touko, some cookies.
Touko is also a crucial part of the game’s narrative. Touko arguably has the most multi-faceted personality in the game. Some entries are her attempts to diagnose Lain’s increasingly unstable state of mind via their psychology sessions, some are her professional observations through personal notes, and others are even her private diary entries. Through these recordings and those of Lain herself, the game allows an intimate view of both an unstable subject’s bouts with mental illness, and how it comes to affect those around them, especially as the worlds of the internet and the real world begin to blur, much like in the show.
It bears warning that Lain PSX deals with very heavy subject matter in addition to its already delicate subject of mental illness. Hallucinations, schizophrenia, unrequited love, parental conflicts, alcoholism, abandonment, abuse, bullying, and even suicide are all fair game for Lain’s narrative, so sensitive viewers need be warned.
That said, if the player has the patient for the game’s sensitive subject matter, it spins a narrative just as engrossing, unique, and often startling as the anime, especially when it goes to darker realms that the anime only touched lightly on. (It’s worth noting that while suicide is also a factor in the story of the series, it happens at the very start of the series, while it doesn’t become an element until much later on in the game.)
Lain is an experiment that takes much patience to experience, and requires just as much thought to fully take on an understanding of the narrative. Also, much like the anime, it’s bound to leave an impact long after the credits roll.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
After the final diary from either Lain or Tohko, and Lain is fully ‘integrated’ into the wired, you unlock most of the missing datalogs: little snippets of wisdom(?) and advice from Lain in a virtual form, suggesting that you’ve been using her digital medium to access all the information you’ve been reading thus far.
While these post-game snippets are hardly mandatory, they’re fascinating, and a vaguely Monika-ish epilogue worth glancing at here and there.
Aria here, hope everyone’s having a good holiday season! I haven’t been keeping up with FGO, but if it’s roulette harvesting time, then don’t make yourself sick from all those golden apples ;_;.
We’ve received several “oh no the project’s dead” messages lately, so I hoped to alleviate some concerns with a holiday post. If you’re unaware, we have a progress tracker running at https://kotcrab.com/progress/ccc/ – though admittedly, it’s been rather unmoving lately. I’d like to apologize for the confusion there.
The past several months since we finished the main translation effort has been combing through the massive script and working through troublesome lines, essentially a translation check pass. There were several lines that were marked as “this could use more eyes,” “pun attempt needs workshopping,” or “I think Nasu is trying to shoehorn in a pixiv meme uhhh” kind of thing. Sometimes it takes a room full of us to realize the obscure joke going on.
The main issue with this and the tracker is that these are the worst of the worst lines that need attention and fixing, which barely makes a dent on the tracker. Hopefully once we clear these lines, the tracker will become more accurate. We should be through most of them at this point!
We’ve also been fixing up issues with translation consistency for terms since we’ve had a few different translators on this project, so that’s another one that doesn’t reflect on the tracker.
During one of our “what the hell is this line” voice calls, I sent a screenshot to ItsumoKnight to show how a line looks in-game, who proceeded to die in laughter. I didn’t think much about it until I looked back at the screenshot:
I forgot that the default Kotcrab setup for the editor uses Issei at the school gates since it’s one of the first lines, but I rewired it to Kotomine since it makes the lines x10 more amazing. For reference, this is what Itsumo would see on his side:
Really Hakuno’s blue glasses just improve everything.
There was also a section of prototype dialogue that was untouched that I translated since I finished my current tasks. Not that it’s accessible, but here’s what the line would look like (once again if Kotomine said it for some reason):
And now back to actual dialogue:
Kotomine aside, we have been slower than we could be lately, for that we apologize. Things have been busy the end of this year, but we’d like to kick the momentum up for next year, so stay tuned, and thank you for your patience.
And if Itsumo slacks off, I’ll be sure to drag him over for a CCC editing marathon session followed by mahjong thrashing🔪
I couldn’t have been more excited when Atlus announced, of all things, a sequel to Soul Hackers. Sega had said it was one of their ‘brands’ that they planned to leverage in a meeting, but I sure didn’t think anything would come of it, especially not in form of an avant-garde live action… thing.
Still, there was a good amount to be intrigued by. Another cyberpunk game by modern Atlus? Then… gameplay showed up, and excitement was doused significantly.
The end result looked much less like Soul Hackers and more like #TMS, and anyone familiar with that game knows that’s less cause for excitement and more for worry. Still, I wasn’t about to let that scare me off. I had to try the game on general principle, so I did, day 1 and all. Where do I even start? Soul Hackers 2, right from the jump, surprised me with how many narrative threads it pulls from the classic games, even the Raidou games.
The Phantom Society are introduced as the key antagonists, the Yatagarasu are still running around trying to stop them, and the protagonists are caught in between the two in a fight for the future of the world. The core plot is, by the numbers, everything you’d want from an SH sequel. The introduction is definitely one of the more stylish parts of the game, feeling like a stylistic throwback to classic openings like the all-timer, Digital Devil Saga 2’s Alive.
Sadly, it’s all downhill from here. As the opening shows, the supporting cast are all victims of the Phantom Society’s schemes, and are revived by the protagonist, Ringo, to aid an AI system with saving the world from an apocalyptic scheme. As most reviews state, there’s nothing wrong with the cast. Arrow, Kaizo, and Milady(pronounced more like “Melody”) are all interesting, fully fleshed out characters, with interesting backstories and solid voice acting.
Unfortunately, the protagonist is probably the least interesting one. She has great banter with the cast, and her voice actress has a lot of fun with the role, but there’s never more to her than happy-go-lucky AI helps everyone stop the Phantom Society. Her partner, Figue, definitely gets the lion’s share of a character arc. She also has a much cooler design than Ringo, to the point that I wish she was the main character.
The direction her plot takes is also part of the problem, but we’ll get to that later(involving major spoilers). Let’s get the core negative out of the way: Soul Hackers 2 is super lazy. It feels like it was a low budget game, and it probably was, given how miraculous the game’s existence is. That’s no excuse, though. If they had gone for a smaller scale game instead of something full 3D, they could have made this into something that was more faithful to the original game in depth and variety, and also a more fleshed out game in its own right.
First, let’s look at just a handful of the dungeon variety in Soul Hackers 1:
Off the top of my head, Soul Hackers 1’s dungeons include a warehouse, a port side dock, a hotel, a corporate headquarters, an airport, a supermarket, an art museum, a virtual reality world, and a haunted mansion.
Soul Hackers 2’s dungeons include, in ALL, a virtual reality world, an abandoned building, a portside dock, reskinned subway tunnels, and the final dungeon. That’s literally it.
Soul Hackers 2’s dungeons are a boring slog, and the music is set to match. You only hear three-four tracks repeated ad nauseum, and they get super old, super fast, as opposed to Soul Hackers 1, which had a ton of variety, all of which was fantastic.
As per usual, the protagonist is a Devil Summoner, and has a wide variety of demons are her beck and call… but unlike the previous three games, the demons you accumulate are neither party members nor companions. For all intents and purposes, they’re just Personas, and function accordingly. You can change them on the fly during battle, and each has different weaknesses & skills associated with them. They also occasionally appear on the field to give out items and healing opportunities, but since quests revolve around finding key items, this quickly turns into more of a chore than using them in creative ways a la the Raidou games.
Oh, and demon negotiation? Utterly gone. Now your demons just act as a middleman for random demons and you can decide if you want them or not. If you do, they ask for one thing, then join. No questioning, no bartering, that’s all there is to it.
And good luck if you’re trying to find a specific one, you’d be better off ponying up for the fee to fuse them at the Gouma-Den. Credit given where credit due, Soul Hackers 2 does get a lot of the references right. Just about everyone you’d expect to show up in some capacity is there, right down to Victor and his ever-changing Gouma-Den(no Mary, sorry), and even Madame Ginko.
I can say a lot of things about Soul Hackers 2, but I can’t say it was done by people who didn’t know about the original game and how to pay homage to it. It was just with a lackluster budget and no creative drive to make anything that truly lived up to its legacy. Even the city is well fleshed out, and has some genuinely cool visuals and NPCs.
Don’t expect to get much in the way of exploration, though.
You get three tiny hubs around these shops, and apart from that, the city is just a vague backdrop, which doesn’t get to have much life. I’m not saying it should have been like Kamurocho in Yakuza, but…
Actually, yes, that is what I want. It’s something, but it could have been much, much more. (See also: the dungeons, but again, it’s clearly low budget, so that wasn’t gonna happen.) Which brings us back around to the story. Soul Hackers 2 has a decent rogue’s gallery of villains, and to its credit, they get to have a bigger role in the plot than some of those in SH1(some of whom literally appear only in a single scene!).
(Don’t let this image fool you. You NEVER fight them all at once. Cowards.)
Iron Mask and Ash are the definite highlights. They’re charismatic, memorable, have solid ties to your party(both are literally exes of separate characters), and even manage to be a little threatening. Iron Mask and Ash are not to be taken lightly, and can easily wreck an unprepared team. I can’t mention them without going into an extremely problematic element of Milady and Iron Mask’s backstory, though, so spoilers ahoy.
Iron Mask saved Milady’s life as a child, and so naturally, she winds up looking up to him and idolizing him as her savior. And later on? They become lovers.
If that strikes as you as all kinds of messed up, guess what? You’re right.
Does anyone call this out? Nope, and I doubt Atlus even thought about the ramifications of such a plot twist. It would’ve been nice for Ringo to chime in, but nah, she’s more supportive than anything.
Then… there’s Figue. At the zero hour, after Iron Mask is finally defeated, the weight of killing him becomes too much for her to bear, and she decides to take up his cause for little-to-no good reason.
EVIL FIGUE(ooh, scary) actually has a pretty badass design, but other than that, her inclusion makes no sense, which I guess is as good a cherry on top of Soul Hackers 2’s screwy narrative cake as any. Then the game ends, everyone goes their separate ways, happily ever after.
Soul Hackers 2 is an uneven mess, and I’m being nice. The gameplay is fun, but it lacks the depth and core aspects of the classic SMT games. The characters are cool, but the plot takes them nowhere special. The music and dungeons are generic drek. The classic Devil Summoner games, and even the Raidou games to an extent, felt like the passion of a small, devout team knowing what they wanted to accomplish, and did everything they could to make a fully fleshed out game within limited means. This feels like the exact opposite.
This was a few individuals who were tasked with making a sequel because it was considered to drive potential for brand recognition and profit, so they scraped together whatever they were given, and tried to make the most of it, while throwing classic fans a bone whenever they could, while also trying to keep it approachable for new fans, and creating an end result that isn’t anything special for any demographic.
I’ve owned Dragon Force II for nearly twenty years, and after aeons of struggling on and off with various characters over the past decade or two, I finally finished Bozack’s campaign.
I should precursor this with a known fact: Dragon Force is the greatest SRPG ever made.
It was like nothing else for the Saturn, or any system of the era… or ever, for that matter. Massive armies of 200+ troops ducking it out in real time, with strategies that you can change on the fly, with a wide range of charismatic generals to use them with, all kinds of devastating magics and abilities, and best of all, eight totally unique campaigns with their own troop specializations, stories, and even strategies.
Fandaria Empire has the strongest batch in the entire game, but no faction will ever join you. Tradnor Kingdom has the weakest, but everyone will join you without complaint. Of course, this means Fandaria becomes one of the most battle hardened factions, while Tradnor becomes one of the weakest.
In short, the game has hundreds of hours of replay value, especially if you take on self-imposed challenges such as using only the core generals, not recruiting, using default troops, etc.
So… Dragon Force II was given a tough act to follow. Sadly, even when I first played it, I knew I was dealing with an inferior product.
Dragon Force II uses a drab color palette, lacking the bright Sega Blue Skies aesthetic of the original. It adds in a neat idea of using dual troops, so a general could command, say, a front line of archers with a back line of cavalry. Unfortunately, in execution, this still winds up being frustrating. In the original Dragon Force, when you told your troops to stand by, they stayed put. Not so in DFII. The moment enemies approach, they break formation and start attacking. This is devastating for any ranged troop, as archers and mages are known to be ripped apart in a melee.
Another noteworthy change is on the world map. In the original, whenever an attacking army wasn’t quite finished off or retreated(which was often), you could easily catch them with a swift dispatch of a pursuing army to put them down once and for all(or more likely, recruit them or toss them into the dungeon).
Not so in Dragon Force 2. No matter how quick you dispatch an army, a retreating force will always manage to escape. This means they have an opportunity to get back to a home castle, restock their troops, and maybe even their HP. While this might sound like a welcome challenge on paper(and even makes for a fun challenge route in the original), in practice, it drags out an invasion, and makes the game tedious.
What about the story? Surely that improves on the original in some way?
Nope. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Dragon Force II laughs at the legacy of the original. After all they struggled through, the original Dragon Force all succumbed to ignoble deaths, one after the other, creating a seal to hold back the “Dark Dragon Force”, leaving only the immortal Teiris alive, who comes back to help the modern Dragon Force finish off the forces of evil once and for all.
Well, except there no longer IS a Dragon Force… so they kind of just band together for reasons.
I might sound like I’m being overly harsh on the game, but there is some positives. There are some great new characters, like this goddess in my playthrough:
As shown in her literal towering over the competition, some of the new sprites and generals are great, and have a lot of personality in their design. While the overall aesthetics of DFII pale to the original, some of the sprite work still shines through.
They also do get some neat features, like having aerial specific attacks when enemy troops are attacking from the air, and even getting to take out multiple troops in one hit. Unfortunately, the aforementioned Standby tactic, where you could just have a Mage or Archer literally sit still and lay waste to an enemy general, is rendered useless thanks to their new melee AI mentality.
Another major flaw is the massive presence of Demon Castles, castles manned by the immortal Dark Dragon Force faction, aka the Dark Elves, usually staffed by generic demons with 100 strong demon forces, making a pain to take out at best, dangerous at worst.
One thing that is beyond reproach, though: the fan translation quality. All the generals and dialogue were given a loving amount of polish, most likely because each campaign had its own writer, and ensured that each was given a special amount of TLC. It really shines through, and the team deserve all the praise I can muster.
Purists may balk at some of the slang, but when a game has as much text as Dragon Force II, as Victor Ireland would surely agree, you need to make it fun to read.
So is it worth a playthrough? If you’ve played the original countless times and want a new challenge, sure.
If you’re new to the series? No. GOD NO. Play the original now, thank me later.
iwakura productions 