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🔪

[Post Mortem] Dragon Force II

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.

Just don’t play as Highland.

Tell them Junon sent you.

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:

[Post-Mortem] Death Come True

I love FMV games. Been playing them since the ancient times of Night Trap and Sewer Shark and well into the modern FMV renaissance, from high production value gems like Late Shift to no-budget schlock like Press X To Die.

It’s about time Japan threw their hat into the ring.

https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/death-come-true-switch/

As has probably been known, this quirky experiment was written by Kazutaka Kodaka, the lunatic behind the Danganronpa games, a weird VN/murder mystery series known for having the characters die in elaborate ways while trying to solve an elaborate mystery.

Death Come True is basically that, except the protagonist is the one doing (most of) the dying.

Makoto Kuraki wakes up in a hotel with no idea of who he is, what he’s doing there, why he keeps dying, or why everyone thinks he’s… a killer!?

Like most FMV games, Death Come True boils down to making choices… and, uh, that’s literally about it.

I finished the game in about two hours, give or take. It’s VERY short, and far as I can tell, there’s not a whole lot of replay value. It has a few neat twists and turns, high production values, and good acting, but nothing too shocking. In fact, it’s a little predicable, knowing what the writer’s penchant for certain types of tropes and storytelling swerves.

I still had a fun time with Death Come True, but I would suggest waiting til it hits the $10ish mark for maximum enjoy. It’s nice to see FMV games from Japan, especially with a budget and big names thrown at it, just hopefully next time it’s something a bit meatier.

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

Shin Sakura Wars: Demo Translation Guide!

ShinSakuraWars Guide

Yes, the full game is out in Japan, but the demo is free, and easier for everyone to get.

Eien1no1Yami was kind enough to translate it and crazy enough to ask me to edit it, so here you go.

This only covers the drama section, so if you want help in the action part(unlikely), sadly, you’re on your own.

Good hunting!

The unappreciated depth and secrets of Night Trap

Probably the most infamous FMV game ever made, Night Trap is part of the reason the video game rating system as we know it exists. Infamously used as part of Nintendo’s arsenal during the Senate hearings on violence in video games, Night Trap was falsely presented as a game where the player kills hapless girls by luring them to their doom.

It’s also commonly reviled as an awful game, a waste of the Sega CD, and often cited as one o the main examples why FMV games are the worst.

While there’s no secret that Digital Pictures churned out FMV games like candy, in many ways, Night Trap is probably their most replayable title, and has a lot of content that most players will miss… if you know where to look.

So much for Golden Reverie: Cross…

MangaGamer beat us to the punch. Ah well.

 

I have absolutely no clue when they’re releasing it, but it is a thing! Sincerely glad to see it, just a little disappointed we were never approached. Ah well. Those who hated our localization should be happy, because I guarantee they’re doing their own thing.

If they’re not, well… I don’t have any attorney, sucks to be me I guess!

But really, looking forward to it. No idea when we would’ve gotten to it, anyway.

 

We’ll always have the vanilla version, right?

The Silver Case Comparison: PS1 VS PC

By popular… by semi-popular… okay, because three people asked me to, sheesh.

PS1 opening, original resolution.

(PS1 Title Screens)



(This is how you select between the main chapters and the journalist chapters.)

(PC Title Screen)

(PS1, Chapter 0 Prologue)


(Tetsugoro arriving in his car. Wonder how they’ll redo this…)

[B]Comparison of Chapter 1: Decoyman[/B]

(PS1)

(PC)

Hope you enjoyed.