Translations of wapanese games

[Cosmo]

Helly, translate the Screamer -

Yes please, something so mad and unique deserves a translation.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Reconquista of Abyss is unfortunately too boring past the initial feeling of awe over its mechanics. It's basically repetitive linear shit, recruit units at the beginning of the turn and send them to fight at the end of the turn with rock-paper-scissors mechanics. Win enough fights and you get raep.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Helly I second (or rather third) the request to translate The Screamer. Pretty please?

Other games that simply must be translated are Lunatic Dawn and Lunatic Dawn II. They're basically western-style RPGs done by the Japs.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Dragon Age Origins - This is the New Shit

Dragon Age II - Fight Like a Spartan, Think Like a General

Dragon Age III - Dehumanize Yourself and Face to Bloodshed

 

[Helly]

felipepepe: I tried Taiko a little bit. It's pretty good by codexian standards (lots of stats and turn based strategic battles and sieges), and there seem to be a lot of stuff to do (you can start the game with several different characters with random stats but set skills like ninja, ronin and stuff). Still, this one seems a bit too much for a first game translation. I mean there is a LOT of text. Translating only gameplay things would take a while too, as there would be a lot of game "cards" with special effects to translate. I'll try and finish it, though, and I might even do a LP when I have the time, but I'll choose an easier target to begin with
You can find Taiko 5 quite easily on the internet if you want to try it out, it's kinda playable even without moonrunes' knowledge. Just google 太閤立志伝Ⅴ or PM me
PS

Helly I second (or rather third) the request to translate The Screamer. Pretty please?

Other games that simply must be translated are Lunatic Dawn and Lunatic Dawn II. They're basically western-style RPGs done by the Japs.

Lunatic Dawn looks awesome ! And with much less text than Taiko (praised be the gods !)
I'll try to play through The Screamer and Lunatic Dawn a bit, will keep you updated as always

 

[eric__s]

Yeah, Lunatic Dawn is awesome. I've wanted to play it forever. Also check out Phantasie IV, which was a Western game that only came out in Japan for some reason.

Helly

just translate everything. Go for it.

You know what would be really cool actually? If someone licensed these games for really cheap, got the right to set up an emulator front end for them, like what GoG does with DOSBox, and then translated them and sold them for like $5. I bet that would do really well. I don't know how many people actually want to play these games, but AGTP shows download statistics on each game and they're generally pretty significant. I seriously think this idea could go somewhere if you wanted to do that.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

Translating games for cash should provide a quite decent income if done right.

 

[felipepepe]

felipepepe: I tried Taiko a little bit. It's pretty good by codexian standards (lots of stats and turn based strategic battles and sieges), and there seem to be a lot of stuff to do (you can start the game with several different characters with random stats but set skills like ninja, ronin and stuff). Still, this one seems a bit too much for a first game translation. I mean there is a LOT of text. Translating only gameplay things would take a while too, as there would be a lot of game "cards" with special effects to translate. I'll try and finish it, though, and I might even do a LP when I have the time, but I'll choose an easier target to begin with

Don't worry bro, the other games sugested by Bee do seem interesting and worth your effort, and I'm learning moonrunes myself, so it's only a matter of time into I can bathe in the untranslated glory of japanese games.

Also, if you need any photoshopping help on a translation, feel free to call.

Translating games for cash should provide a quite decent income if done right.

The guy working on Generation Xth is quite a smart one, is finishing translating the demo and will purpose to translate the full game for commercial release. I definetly support this trend of bros spreading japanese incline and getting some nippon gold from it.

 

[Zetor]

Translating games for cash should provide a quite decent income if done right.

The guy working on Generation Xth is quite a smart one, is finishing translating the demo and will purpose to translate the full game for commercial release. I definetly support this trend of bros spreading japanese incline and getting some nippon gold from it.

Yea, it's pretty ambitious (he's actually planning on getting it on Steam, which is... not such an easy thing to do); tbh I'm afraid it may backfire and the japanese developers will hit him with a C&D. Here's hoping he succeeds anyway -- getting the entire XTH trilogy on steam would be pretty sweet.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Translating games for cash should provide a quite decent income if done right.

Tell that to the Western anime distributors who virtually all folded. Their fanbase are freeloading bastards.

 

[eric__s]

Translating games for cash should provide a quite decent income if done right.

Tell that to the Western anime studios who virtually all folded. Their fanbase are freeloading bastards.

I don't know anything about anime, but there have been a number of successful independent game localization companies recently. First is Super Fighter Team who translated and released old Genesis games like Blue Almanac and Beggar Prince on the actual cartridge, which is unbelievable. Evidently they've been successful because they've been doing this for several years. The other company that comes to mind is Carpe Fulgur, whose games Recettear and Chantelise have also been fairly successful. They're catering to a niche market, but also one large enough to support them and one that clearly has the potential to grow.

HHR you are one of my favorite dudes here but you are so jaded. You always see the worst in everyone. Sometimes bad things happen not because people are intentionally malicious, but because they don't understand the consequences of their actions. If people were better informed about piracy (all aspects, like that it does raise awareness of a product and in some cases, increases sales) they would be more inclined to act differently. I'm also certain that if you're in the translated games topic, you've done some piracy of your own too.

 

[felipepepe]

It's all a matter of audience. As cboyardee said, Recettear and the likes are a great success, and MangaGamer seems to be doing very well translating Visual Novels; I've read some complains on how people pirate them a lot, but still the website seems to be growing, with a massive library of titles, so it can't be that bad.

Besides, most western anime distributors are folding due market blindness.... they fail to realize the world has changed and they can no longer charge premium prices for poorly subbed & edited anime when their audience is freely watching the full, unedited product online. Compare One Piece DVD releases; 4Kids DVD is english-only and full of edits, while FuNimation same DVD has japanese audio option and no cuts. The Funimation DVD's have great user rating and are ranked #3,642 in Amazon's Movies & TV rank, versus 4kids edition with only bad reviews and positioned at #186,374 on the same rank... same product, but one respected it's audience and knows htey can't fool people with half-assed releases anymore.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

What you don't realize though is that this pricing thing is due to Japanese licencers who are either very protective of their licenses, or wary of having a lot of Japanese people import the products at extremely lower prices. Western studios had nothing to do with it.

Of course Cape Fulgur has fewer risks of getting into these sort of troubles when they approach doujin studios, but anything from an established company no matter how minor would be a formidable battle. I also wonder if Recettear wasn't a perfect storm of some sort, and if it allows them enough revenue to keep doing this and not have day jobs.

Sure I did pirate stuff, I won't hide it. My approach to this is practical, in that you should pay when a product is made accessible to you. When it is virtually derelict I have less qualms about it. But maybe a better way to put it would be that anime and JRPG fanboys are part of a generation who are used to getting what they want off peer to peer networks for free. It's probably no wonder that the amount of niche Japanese game localizations has steeply declined over the years.

I welcome any such projects but I doubt it's going to lead to a turnaround.

 

[agentorange]

From what I've tried to translate - a PSX game and a Saturn game - the actual translating of the script is the least of the concerns, provided you know Japanese well enough; it's figuring out how the fuck to extract the text from the game, then reinject the english text. Some people even go about programming proprietary "hooks" to extract text from a specific game, but those may not work on any other game and even if they did the person who made it may not be willing to share it. It would be a godsend if someone create an omni-program for easy extraction of text from a game (they have them for sound and video), but I can't see that happening any time soon.

*and yes this is a cleverly disguised call for help to anyone who thinks they might be able to help get text out of a PSX or Saturn game

 

[Damned Registrations]

Translating games for cash should provide a quite decent income if done right.

Tell that to the Western anime distributors who virtually all folded. Their fanbase are freeloading bastards.

Unwilling/unable to pay 200+$ for a 26 episode series you have ostensibly never seen before = freeloading bastards. Uh-huh. Tell me, when was the last time you went and pickup up the ultra premium retarded overpriced edition boxed set of a show you've never seen before? Fucking HBO shows sell for half as much. And all they're selling for anime is a (usually shitty) translation. Considering that there are hundreds of people who translate this shit for basically nothing within days of release, I'm not terribly inclined to believe that subtitles are a costly venture that warrants a price point outstripping any other fucking entertainment media by a huge margin. Frankly the fact that people buy any of this obscenely overpriced, belated, and low quality shit at all is a testament to how deep the market is over here. Can you imagine if you could sell a (badly) translated box set of Game of Thrones S1+2 over in japan for 200$ years later?

Anywhere they've been remotely reasonable (like releasing translated shows on TV, or translating decent video games and putting more than five and a half copies on the market) commercial translation has been hugely successful.

 

[felicity]

Lunatic Dawn II had some good points but was ultimately dragged down by its messy battle system. I think Lunatic Dawn Passage of the Book is the best in the series.

If you want a game with minimal text to translate try Vantage Master Japan. It is one of the rare games that the AI can kick your ass in a manner you can only experience in a chess program.

 

[LundB]

From what I've tried to translate - a PSX game and a Saturn game - the actual translating of the script is the least of the concerns, provided you know Japanese well enough; it's figuring out how the fuck to extract the text from the game, then reinject the english text. Some people even go about programming proprietary "hooks" to extract text from a specific game, but those may not work on any other game and even if they did the person who made it may not be willing to share it. It would be a godsend if someone create an omni-program for easy extraction of text from a game (they have them for sound and video), but I can't see that happening any time soon.

*and yes this is a cleverly disguised call for help to anyone who thinks they might be able to help get text out of a PSX or Saturn game

Hit the nail on the head. There's a reason why many game TL projects need not just TLs and TL checkers, but a good 'hacker'. In fact, a number of projects fail precisely because while there are quite a few translators available, there's no one who can get the text out of or back into the game effectively.

I'd try my hand at translation, but unfortunately while my spoken Jap is pretty decent thanks to work, I'm pretty much illiterate, only able to understand some of the characters that overlap with Chinese (thank god I know a decent amount full form as well as simplified, or the overlap would be even smaller).

 

[ghostdog]

^ This.

If Helly wants to proceed with an actual translation he should either learn how to hack the game rom, or approach experienced hackers to help him.

 

[TigerKnee]

I wish someone would translate the rest of the Eve series from C's Ware, i.e. Eve Zero, Eve: the Lost One and Eve: the Fatal Attraction.

I've always been told by quite a few people that the series should have just ended with the first game because the sequels kind of sucked overall.

 

[abnaxus]

I wish someone would translate the rest of the Eve series from C's Ware, i.e. Eve Zero, Eve: the Lost One and Eve: the Fatal Attraction.

I've always been told by quite a few people that the series should have just ended with the first game because the sequels kind of sucked overall.

I've heard good things about Eve: Fatal Attraction at least.

 

[Helly]

ghostdog
Yeah, I know that getting the text in and out of the games is not going to be a walk in the park, but I know some PC98 games have already been translated (for example, the Farland Saga), so it's most probably feasible.

cboyardee
Yeah, I'm pretty sure there is a big market for translating & licensing japanese games in the rest of the world, but it's too much work for me right now. Honestly though, if I just wanted to make money I'd buy the license to each and every japanese 3D hentai game out there. Like stuff from Illusion or Teatime. I can't even start to understand why nobody is selling them in the rest of the world yet o_O

We should start a codexian KKK translation team. I'm pretty sure that with the codexian talent pool we can translate any game out there :D

 

[Haba]

Translating games for cash should provide a quite decent income if done right.

Tell that to the Western anime distributors who virtually all folded. Their fanbase are freeloading bastards.

Look at this magic word here, HHR!

simulcast

http://www.crunchyroll.com/

 

[abnaxus]

Oh look, some new Key moeshit translation got released.

 

[eric__s]

mods or admins. . .

please make this image my signature. it's an emergency.

 

[treave]

Oh look, some new Key moeshit translation got released.

That's actually some pretty good Key moeshit. The main writer is the same guy who did Cross+Channel.