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?
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🔪
Aria here, and you read that right! Mere days after finishing my 2nd 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:
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 –
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.)
Kotcrab has been kind enough to provide an update. Have an enjoy! Stay cool, and stay safe. – cj
Kotcrab here with this month’s update to tell you more about the tools we use for this project! Let’s start with the script editor. We’ve come a long way with this one. At the beginning, there was a big spreadsheet with all the text from the game.
From there, we moved to a simple application with three text fields: Japanese, English and notes. We wanted to add more functionality to the editor, but since we didn’t have the source code for it, JS created the new app you can see in the screenshot below.
It’s packed with features, but most notably it allows us to see a live preview of how the text will look in the game as you type. You can play audio and see the image for the character speaking the line. When editing subtitles, we can adjust the timings and simulate exactly how it will look in game.
This worked great assuming that only a single person was working on the script at a time. With more people joining the project, it wasn’t sustainable as merging two versions of the script was a time consuming process. The next step was to create a central database for the editor. Once we finished that feature, multiple people could work on the same script in real time. We’re able to track change history for each entry, suggest changes, and mark completed entries or ones requiring more attention.
We also designed tools to extract and repackage the game. The tools understand how to parse the game files and make all the necessary changes. They also assemble and apply code patches.
Both Extra and CCC make extensive use of archives. First you have the game ISO file which contains the main archive. This archive contains smaller PAK archives, which can either be the actual game files or more archives. For example, a texture bank file will contain multiple textures. Due to various reasons, a single file can be duplicated across many PAK archives and a PAK archive can be repeated multiple times in the main archive. Our tools fully automate the management of these archives webs. After changing a file or adding a translation, the tool figures out what needs to be changed and replicates the changes to the proper places.
Finally we have the patcher tool. Its main purpose is to take the patch file and input ISO then create a patched ISO. It’s a fairly recent addition to the toolkit, but it had to be made. At first, we used xdelta, but this produced huge patches due to how the games are packed. The first Extra mod was over 500 MBs and the CCC patch was estimated to be even bigger. With the new tool, the patch for Extra is just 11 MBs. Thanks to it, we can also provide an option for selecting which Meltrylis name to use.
To sum up, a lot of custom stuff was written for this patch. Some of it is already finding use in other projects. Hopefully we’ll be able to reuse more and more of these tools going forward.
Now for some progress updates~
The initial translation pass for the Extra subtitles is finished. It adds almost 800 subtitles for the in-battle dialog. Of course, this patch also includes all the changes from the first mod.
(don’t worry, this file is automatically generated)
Thanks to the help from our image editors, we have finished and tested all of the texture edits for CCC. This is 436 edited images. The last ones were the textures used in the prologue.
The CCC script translation efforts are going smoothly. According to our database stats, we have over 1000 edits per month on average to the main script. Let’s take a closer look:
Script source
Tools (extraction, insertion)
Translation
DAT (the main script)
Done
5 out of 7 chapters done
EBOOT
Done
Done
Indungeon
Done
Not started yet
Infomatrix
Done
Done
Items
Done
Done
Interface
Done
Done
SG
Done
Done
Subs
Done
In progress
Finally, it’s likely we will post smaller updates on our Discord. Last month, I shared updates on the two technical issues; check the pinned messages!
And beware the gatcha! Unless it’s for Ishtar, then it’s okay. Maybe.
Hey there, it’s ItsumoKnight again. Now that we’re very, VERY far away from April Fools’ we can do that update. If there’s ever one thing I did right by you all, it’s my absolute insistence that we “never ever crack a CCC team joke”. Ever. Some jokes are good-bad and some jokes are BAD-bad. I feel very strongly about that.
Before we begin, thank y’all for the kindness of your hearts. Seriously, thanks.
In regards to updates, it’ll probably be mostly iwakura.p as per usual but I’ll pop in whenever I feel the need to exposit.
Now, as I recall, you wanted a shiny. So here’s a shiny.
————————————
.
.
.
Now let’s go over what we got here.
The first chronological thing that you saw the versus text. Ye, we did it.
For the folks who don’t know what this is because they, oh, never played JP Extra (and why would you, I sure wouldn’t have if I didn’t have to for this): “Type-Moon loves dat engrish. Go figure.” When Aksys did their localization, I’ll admit they did…a few neat things. One of which was localizing the Arena battle texture. And it IS a texture, cuz it sure would’ve been convenient otherwise. Sooooo we had a couple of our hard-working team members typeset this out for us. I don’t know about you but from what I’ve seen, font hunting is not fun. They did great. It’s so shiny.
For comparison, in Extra:
(For the record, the line “Flame dancing, Earth splitting, Ocean withering” is in the Extra script. I’m mad at Aksys because they didn’t quote it verbatim when it came up even though they did the dang texture, meaning they just missed the ref. It’s one of those flashbacks with the ruined city. See if you can’t find it.)
Now the >>>actual<<< first thing you saw were the subs. Oh boy, we put in subs!
So apparently we already said we were doing softsubs. Who said that? WHO DA F%*& SAID THAT!?!? Well, fine. You get confirmation from the rest of us.
It sure is pretty isn’t it. Now that I look at it as I’m typing this, we did put the “h” in Rin’s name. It just didn’t feel right without it. And for the sake of authenticity, we kept the name order the same too. Totally not because it’s a pain to rearrange or anything. Right. Speaking of, we’ll be sticking with “Meltlilith”. I think it’s cooler and it’s not our friggin responsibility if TM’s own documents had the wrong dang spelling for years on end.
Now about Skills.
For CCC we switched around the text and furigana.It just feeeeeeels better when you pick the option that says [Rho Aias] or [Caladbolg II] instead of ‘7 Rings’ or ‘Helix whatever’. Currently we’re keeping the Skill descriptions and names as they are Extra (unless of course they’re plain wrong). I suppose it’s us wanting to keep continuity with Extra. So if there’re any skill quirks, better figure ‘em out yourself.
Did you think we were done? Surprise! Extra’s never over!!!
Extra subs, baby! Now if you ever wondered what the heck they were saying in the middle of story fights and wanted to know, you totally can! You just have to beat the game again. Thrice. >_>
It’ll be out sometime. Until then, writhe.
As a bonus, here’s Shiki using her Noble Phantasm.
Chances are the battle goes either “She’s dead” or “You’re dead” so the fight almost never gets this far. As you can see on the top-left, I literally had to cheat to drag the battle out until she seals all 4 of your options. Witness her dissing you in all her glory.
Welp, that’s all folks! IzamleKnizzle shining out.
————————————
Short version: Look at dat polish. Is so shiny. Extra patch laterz.
iwakura productions 