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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!
(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)
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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Short version: Look at dat polish. Is so shiny. Extra patch laterz.
I know I haven’t been updating like I should, but I’ve been neck deep in testing Sakura Wars, a job with an inordinately insane amount of hours, and a certain Kojima game about package delivery, but I digress, let’s get on with it.
@tauke on twitter was kind enough to help us promote the game, and we’re very close to the finish line.
As you may or may not know, we sadly decided to can the PC version and combine our efforts to work with @noahsteam_ ‘s team. Thanks to him and his crack team of translators and testers, I’m confident that this game never has and never will look better. It’s the biggest group effort I’ve ever been involved in, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed working on it.
The end result will be worth the wait, I’m sure.
(Li Kohran is the officially sanctioned Best Girl for Iwakura.P, accept no substitute.)
I was as shocked as you. What’s next, Ougon Musou-oh. Yeah.
Anyway!
Despite that most of the internet seems to not be aware that there IS a fan translation, I happen to recall vividly, having edited the damn thing.
There’s a billion reviewers out there talking about Shikigami’s gameplay, so I’m going to talk about the most important thing(well, at least to me): the story.
As most of you hopefully know, Shiki 1’s first US release was… less than optimal.
Yeah. All the story was removed. So we translated the PC version to fix that.
And now Degica’s put their own spin on it. So without further ado, let’s compare.
Fan Translation
Degica Translation
Nitpicks aside, the Degica script does convey the meaning of Kohtaro’s dialogue. But it lacks kick. Kohtaro’s never that calm!
It’s a solid translation. But it lacks flair. (Also, notice the Degica text is left-aligned and doesn’t fill the bar. That’s a forced thing in the translation. We fixed it in our version. Degica did not. You’ll see it in our version of Fumiko’s text below, likely a line we didn’t correct, as it required manual updating. )
Again, the sentiment is the same. The delivery isn’t.
Also, have some Engrish. Shiki tradition, right?
I gotta give them credit for that. It comes across as very clinical and autopsy-like in tone.
So in short, they made a valiant effort. It’s not perfect, but I applaud them for bringing Shikigami’s story to a wider audience… even if most won’t even notice it.
I’ve been slacking on my duties as a fan translation reporter.
Gonna get back on that horse.
Wizardry Empire II‘s fan translation was just released. Our very own EsperKnight helped program this, so consider your support as indirectly supporting iwakura.p.
You’re also playing an awesome RPG, so bonus.
This was developed by Starfish of Elminage fame, so I’m sure it’s great.
![Amazon.com: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner [Japan Import]: Video Games](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51YMGHTR9XL._SY445_.jpg)
