[Post-Mortem] Serial Experiments Lain [PSX]

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.

Fate/Extra CCC – 2022 Update

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🔪

Persona 2: Eternal Punishment PSP Update

As you hopefully know by this point, another team released an official patch for Persona 2: Eternal Punishment’s PSP version yesterday, fully translating the game, all its menus, and the Tatsuya scenario into English.

https://github.com/sayucchin/P2-EP-PSP/

Myself and the others working on our version were completely blindsided by this, and had no idea it was in the works until it came out, same as everyone else. There was initially a great deal of panic, confusion, and disappointment, especially since one of the team had formerly been helping us out with coding and graphic modifications on our project.

Fortunately, once the smoke cleared, we were reassured that none of our work was used in the final product, which I’ve personally confirmed. The new patch is just modifications to the original Atlus PS1 translation, similarly to what our project had planned, the only key differences being that the graphic formatting and fonts are different, and this version uses honorifics(which I tend to localize or make variations on).

That said, our team was still left demoralized by this sudden announcement, and it’s been decided that without the need or momentum to continue our version, we’ve decided to cancel our in-progress build.

As some of you also sadly know, we’ve been met with no small amount of harassment, insults, and hateful responses. Thankfully, the others on the team haven’t been the public face of the project like I have, so I’ve been largely bearing the brunt of the drama. That said, it personally saddens me to see how the SMT community has degraded into something like this, as someone who’s been playing games and been part of the scene since the mid-90s. Toxicity like this is what contributed to other long-term community members and fan translators like AeonGenesis leaving the SMT scene and avoiding future projects of the like, and now, I can unfortunately understand why.

I hope everyone can take this as an opportunity to leave things in the past and move forward to just enjoy the game and support the series as well as any other fans working on SMT projects without undue harassment or hostility. This is something we do in our spare time, for sheer love of the game, and nothing else. We have never taken donations, and never will. During the course of the Eternal Punishment project, we’ve endured family deaths, a pandemic, and even an ongoing war that personally affected a member of the team.

Persona 2: Eternal Punishment is near and dear to me. I picked up my copy of Persona 1 in the late 90s, and Persona 2 at a store in Tampa in the early 00s. It remains one of my favorite RPGs ever, and nothing is liable to change that. Going forward, I plan on enjoying the new release of Persona 2’s translation as a fan, and look forward to whatever else Atlus brings in the future. If the renewed interest leads to Atlus releasing an official remake or re-release of the older Persona games, then that’s even better, and I fully plan to support that as well, and hopefully you’ll do the same.

In closing, just remember to do as Maya does.

P.S.: this is in no way affects the progress of ongoing projects. Devil Summoner is still in the translating/editing phases, as is Fate/Extra CCC. As always, we appreciate the support and patience.

Fate/Extra CCC Translation Reaches 100%!!!

Aria here, and you read that right! Mere days after finishing my 2^nd playthrough and finishing the voice lines and in-dungeon lines, JS dropped the rest of the CCC main script translations in one fell swoop!

We’ve updated the checkmark on the progress website, but we haven’t finalized a way to track the editing phase yet. Please give us some time to find out how to best present this next leg of work, and we’ll let you know when we have something!

For now though…

Though before rest, we’ve got one important question you can answer in the comments:

Fate/Extra CCC Summer Update – Extended Gameplay Preview!

Aria here! So, we might be bad at this whole “quarterly updates” thing, but I promise we’re making progress! It’s also still incredibly hot here, so it’s still definitely summer. But as Andersen put it, you all deserve a reward for sticking with us.

Without further ado, we have an update video for you! Go watch that!

Hopefully this is your reaction:

If so, then I have succeeded and survive for another day on the internet. I’ve been told CJ streamed the prologue a long time ago, but I wasn’t around yet and didn’t see it. But he says the overall quality now is leagues better and deserves to be shown off. The text looks clean, the images look slick, and all the voices have subtitles! (Those Kotomine lines in the joke intro were real and in-game btw). Remember we’re still on the translation phase, so what you saw still needs some editing. But somewhere around 86% of the game is translated and looks about the quality you saw in the video.

We have one unused Easter Egg that was shown as an error message if installing the game failed, but we’ve since removed the option entirely since it doesn’t improve anything. In honor of Tsukihime Remake’s release, we decided to share it here:

Lastly, we wanted to give a shoutout to the kind person who sent us all the CCC Void Log books, which contain *nearly every spoken line of dialogue in the game written down*! They have made my life so much easier for transcribing battle lines ; _;

If you’re reading this update, please get in touch with ItsumoKnight in the iwakura productions discord! He had something Gundam related he wanted to follow up with you on.

And as for you, dear readers, let us know if there’s anything you’d like us to cover/show off in future updates. We’ll probably be back around New Year’s (who are we kidding, it’s September, we’ll probably skip to a Winter update next), so see you then!

– Aria

Serial Experiments Lain (PSX) – fully translated and playable!

In true fashion that Lain herself would approve of, no less: exclusively via the Wired.

https://3d.laingame.net/#/game

This effort is nothing short of astonishing. The team remade the game from the ground up, then hardcoded subs to translate what was thought to be an untranslatable game due to the biblical scope of what’s an exclusively voice acted experience.

Serial Experiments Lain was developed concurrently with the series, and designed to be its own thing, though you could probably make a case to tie it into the show, if you wanted.

It’s not so much a game as it is an A/V experience. You explore diary entries, listen to interviews between Lain and her psychologist, and spiral further down the rabbit hole until you learn the truth: both literally and figuratively.

If you’re even a cursory fan of the series, or a hardcore obsessee like yours truly, it is a must-play.

Fate/Extra CCC: Spring Update, Trackers, Gil!(?)

We have a short update for you today since we’ve mostly been pushing forward in translation progress rather than anything flashy. Though speaking of flashy, Kotcrab has set up a progress tracking page where you can see an estimate of our project updated in real time! You can view that page here –

https://kotcrab.com/progress/ccc/

In terms of translations, we have some updates here: – Chapter 6 has been fully translated! – In dungeon translations are now underway – Over 530 audio files have subtitles now (including misc areas of the game like in Kotomine’s shop, My Room, and the Secret Garden) – Misc bug fixes encountered in playtesting

As always, thank you for your patience as we push the translated line count higher and higher!

(Disclaimer: please don’t be liberated from your money.)

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Fan Translation: Preview (Colons)

This is kind of a long story. If you want that, read on after this.

If you don’t, uh, just watch this.

Still with me? Good!

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner is a spinoff of the SMT series. It was originally released for the Sega Saturn(wise choice) and then later for the PSP(tough call) and then never localized(thanks Sony. NOT).

What separates Devil Summoner from SMT? In a nutshell, Devil Summoners are basically the same as SMT’s protagonists: normal humans who work with demons. The difference is, Devil Summoners are more, shall we say, hands on with their demons. Demons tend to get more personality and have more influence in the story, and be more friendly with their summoner, not just tools for a job. (Especially in the Raidou games.)

Basically, Devil Summoner games are more ‘street level’ and character-driven. That’s how I like to think of it, anyway.

Devil Summoner takes place in 199x, where a college student with terrible luck winds up having to save his girlfriend, the city, and maybe the world from the machinations of a Bible/Grimoire-wielding dark summoner hell bent on reviving a goddess and wreaking all kinds of the hades(props if you get that).

This brings us to a few years(?) back when on 4chan’s “SMTG” community, a user I’m fortunate enough to now-know as Fukuzatsu decided he was going to translate the game for the PSP.

At least, until he hit the worst of SMT walls: demon negotiation. It’s been hell on him.

Enter another Spanish team of savvy hackers, who’ve been making progress, namely https://twitter.com/megaflan/ and https://twitter.com/GriffithVIII , each of whom were kind enough to join up and make Fuku’s life(hopefully) easier.

I have to give special props to @NakuFox, who came up with the INCREDIBLE title screen, as seen in the video above.

So without further ado, here’s some screens.

Also, mad props to Marsh, the absolute madman below. He beat the game in raw Japanese, and his charismatic flow made the game even more popular than it was already.

SMT: DS was a huge success in Japan, and lead to its (IMO) vastly superior sequel, Soul Hackers.

Fate/Extra Perfect Patch Release! (1/15 Update)

               Hello, Aria here! Hope everyone is staying warm and opening hundreds of loot boxes in FGO (wait, did we miss Christmas? Pretend it’s still Christmas! Padoru!). Not to distract you from the necessary grinding, but our Fate/Extra Perfect Patch is here, which includes battle dialogue, ruby text, berserkers going berserk, and more! This patch was a long time coming, so I thought I’d talk about the battle dialogue process a bit!

               When I first joined up with the project, I had never actually finished Fate/Extra before. I played on PSP when it came out and rage quit a couple rounds in after dying instantly to some mobs. So, my first task was to play through the game and subtitle the battle lines along the way. All the character voice lines are labeled like “ner_1700” without much additional context, which made things a little tricky. This includes non-battle dialogue as well, which we don’t want to translate. Thankfully, Kotcrab set up a debug message that appears on the bottom of the screen that displays the name of the currently playing file.

(You won’t see that message in the bottom left, but it made my life much easier~)

               With that, I was able to figure out the general number range of what’s battle dialogue and what’s story dialogue. I started by translating as many Nero battle dialogue lines as I could, then continued playing the game. From there, I’d beat a boss, then translate their lines. All was fairly smooth…

               …until this fucking guy.

               Now remember, I’m doing all the subtitles with audio only. I just remember sitting in the library on my laptop, shaking my head in utter confusion as to what the fuck this guy was saying. His dialogue blends several religions into one to make his “true” religion, also known as a nightmare to my ears. I was in such a desperate state of despair that I just googled what I could make out and prayed. What answered my prayers…

               …was a devote follower who created a Twitter bot that regurgitates his lines every hour or so. I managed to find the line in question typed out! It was a godsend, until the next line didn’t exist. But that one led me to a Japanese wiki with every line in the game typed out! (Well, it turned out to be more like 70%, but it was still an amazing blessing). Using that Japanese wiki, I was able to recreate it on my own local wiki and organize all my notes:

               Each line had context written out as well, and with its help, I was able to match line numbers to specific actions, such as break attacks, master healing servant reactions, and more! With this new tool, I was able to check my previous translations, then advance much more smoothly into the horizon, with the crazy fanatic Gatou now defeated.

               Now until that point, I was using our editor to translate without seeing anything in the game. Just before Gawain, everything was set up to add my translations into a patch. I pre-translated all of Gawain’s lines, then did his battle for the first time. It was the most intense battle in the whole game, improved immensely by having the battle subs working as he slammed his Noble Phantasm into me two turns in a row. I knew it was coming too because every enemy Servant has a “tell” line that announces their intention to use their Noble Phantasm that turn (it’s always line #1752 for anyone curious, with #1753 being a “you survived!?” follow-up). I had just translated Gawain’s, so I knew exactly what to look out for:

               I recorded the battle as an early test to show the rest of the team the subs. I should have died in that fight with how sloppy I played, but damn if I didn’t win first try white knuckling the entire time. You can watch that terrible test video here (Keep in mind that since it was an early demo, the lines are unedited with some technical issues present that are now fixed. Timestamp is when things start going crazy – https://youtu.be/jomlQ6cx9uw?t=238 .) There’s no mic audio, but you can feel my spirit break when Leo announces a second Noble Phantasm. It just gets worse from there.

               During the cutscenes before that battle, we also noticed an issue with battle subtitles playing during the pre-combat smack talk conversation. Turns out people say battle lines outside of combat for dramatic effect! Thankfully, Kotcrab had no issue hunting down a variable that would let us know if we were currently in battle. With that, subs would only play if we were in combat. BUT we also subtitled level-up lines post battle and those aren’t in battle! We settled on a set of flags in the timing, with one of the flags meaning “play only in battle” if true. Whew~

               After that, the game was defeated, Holy Grail obtained! No strings attached, they just gave me the Grail and wished me on my way~ Next steps were to translate the rest of Nero’s lines plus Archer, Tamamo, and the Rin route servants. Sprinkle on some sound effect translations as well (those ended up being stored separately as we learned, requiring some more code tweaks to get just right), then it was time for Archer!

               Wait that’s not right.

               There we go, that sounds more correct. At this point, I’m mostly getting to just enjoy the game, while spotting a missing line now and then. Most of these lines are battle victory lines, separated into “servant doesn’t give two shits about you” (first half of the game) and “servant will die for you” (later half of the game). When I got to Alice’s fight on Week 3, I asked if colored subtitles were possible.

               ItsumoKnight: “What’s so hard about it, it’s just Alice and Alice”

               Turns out the color codes should just work since the subtitles use similar code to the game!

               …okay not quite. It initially caused some interesting text glitches which made the following line even more creepy than before. With some quick debugging by Kotcrab, we got everything working:

               Along that same line, we wondered if we could do the Berserker scream, which ended up being easier than expected. There are 4 possible Berserker noise characters, so I wrote a quick python script to randomize different combinations at different lengths, then I matched them to lines that seemed to fit and added “!” marks as appropriate.

               The last major improvement we added was adding ruby text support. Kotcrab went into detail about this in an earlier post, but essentially it lets us add the small subtitle above certain skill names that CCC uses.

               In this case, it adds “Rho Aias” above the skill name for that extra touch.

               With Extra moving into an editing and playtesting phase, I was free to move onto CCC. It’s hard to give actual progress numbers with the battle dialog since there’s a lot of non-battle dialogue mixed in, but I’ve translated the lion’s share of Nero, Archer, and Gilgamesh’s dialogue. Once I finish with Tamamo’s (nearly there), I can play through CCC and translate missing lines as they come up. This will include the in-dungeon subtitles as well, with context! Sadly, the Japanese wiki for CCC is much more incomplete, so most of the lines will be by ear, but on the other hand, the line numbers have the same meaning as Extra! So with that, I’ll know when a line is a counterattack remark, an “I just died” line, or a “chiding the player for playing terribly” line.

               Lastly, thank you for all your patience! This has been a tough year for all of us, and I hope that you can enjoy the work we put into vanilla Extra while you wait for CCC!

               PS: I suppose you want to download this patch, huh? F-fine, it’s not like I want you to play it or anything!

UPDATE:

Now with Mac/Unix patching options and various Aksys translation fixes mentioned by the community!

https://mega.nz/file/3F0iUTDK#gHldA8BBZTXzcYjjZWd9urcWl9kb7h711I24sAzqKGY

(Editor’s note: Fate/Extra is very special to me. It was my exposure to Fate, and without it, I wouldn’t have become the fan I am today. It also lead to me neglecting a blind date, and in retrospect, the game was the better choice, but that’s a story for another time.

If this is your first go at F/E, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did and still do. Especially the amazing Shinji Hosoe OST. -cj)

iwakura.p state of the union – 2020

Crazy year, ain’t it?

Actual depiction of most 2020 social life, I imagine

Thankfully, we’ve been busy, so here’s where a few things stand.

Persona 2: Eternal Punishment

As you may or may not know, I was able to test out the first playable build earlier this year.

Unfortunately, it only gets me so far, so I’ve been asked to keep it on hold until the rest of the gameplay text can be finished. This is fine by me, as it will make testing worlds easier on me, my Japanese is NOT that good.

Fate/Extra CCC

Thankfully(?), the updates are largely handled by the CCC team, so be looking forward to that soon-ish.

Things That Were Completed

(disclaimer: iwakura.p was only cursorily involved in some of these. Napple Tale and YaruDora in particular are the results of hard work by people I’ve worked with and am more than happy to signal boost.)

Napple Tale, c/o Cargodin and EsperKnight:

A quirky Dreamcast RPG with a devout cult following.

http://www.romhacking.net/translations/5091/

YaruDora, Double Cast, again, c/o Cargodin and EsperKnight:

A fully animated visual novel! We all knows what it is.

https://www.romhacking.net/translations/5777/

Sakura Wars (editor)

The classic RED/Sega strategy RPG, on Sega Saturn(shiro).

https://www.romhacking.net/translations/5318/

Last Blade 2 (editing and revision)

The classic SNK fighter, now with a new translation! And a happier ending. (May vary)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19rXmrdl1f1nIyTUrIIi_RCDOfgzbC1SQfkQdb1rv9Ps/edit

And now, a taste of things to come…

Moonlight Syndrome

One of Suda 51’s first outings as writer/director, a precursor to The Silver Case and the Kill The Past series. Suda is in full unhinged crazy town. If you think you’ve seen madness, you have NO IDEA.

Castle Shikigami 2

The sequel to the original, and IMO, one of the best shmups of all time… with one of the worst translations ever. Which, I for one, have no intention of abiding.

Here’s hoping 2021 will be better than 2020. It’ll sure be an exciting one, I think.

Catch you on the flip side.

-cj