The Dragon Force II Translation Project

[Dragoon ZERO]

Going straight to the source, eh? It's not an idea I would jump on after the Crimson Echoes experience, but has anyone in the game modding community ever done that before? I mean, got a technical question answered by the game's very developers? That would rock.

A Secret of Evermore programmer, ItsBillsFault, has done that over at GameFAQs. Not a common thing, I'm sure, but you never know who might be willing to help.

[FaustWolf]

Holy shit! That is truly amazing. This is for another thread, but I'd love to see some kind of effort to document those few instances in which game developers have crossed over to assist fan communities with unofficial translations and stuff. The only other similar instance I can think of is that the person who translated Mother 3 works as a translator in the videogame industry as well, though I'm not sure whether he's related to the Earthbound/Mother property in any way as part of his job.

[KingMike]

Tomato's done a few video game related things, but I think he mostly works in anime. He's just a big fan of EB.
(and he visits this board sometimes)

[FaustWolf]

Just a proof of life here -- still goin'!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFxBf1tm39c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9tVNqBnKY4

Way more has been translated than is reflected in the anniversary video, I've just gotta sit down and get it all inserted. Big news on the technical front though: a small ASM tweak has disabled a text decompression routine that was active in the game's storyline text, allowing straight ASCII input there. I can't describe just how worth it sitting down and learning some basic assembly language concepts is. A year ago I was seriously going into this with the idea that I would fill up the SHIFT_JIS space on the font sheet with English character pairs, because the text decompression routine basically forced the use of SHIFT_JIS encoding...yeah, that would have been bad. Now we can focus on shifting around menus and other onscreen elements to better display English text.
 
Still keeping an eye out for more translators! The final stretch on the translation side is all the story dialogue, which dwarfs what's been translated to date. We could always use more help on the technical side too if anyone's interested in Saturn game modding.

[murphy9926]

Just singed onto theses forums just to track this. Very glad to hear its still moving forward!

[cj iwakura]

Looks sharp so far. Hit me up if you want a tester, or an amateur translator.

[FaustWolf]

Yeah, it'll be difficult to go through every scenario for typos and crashes once the text is in, so I'll divvy up the beta testing process. It's still a ways away though. I'm hoping to get what's been translated so far inserted by New Year's.

How comfortable are you with Japanese-to-English, cj iwakura? I'll take every bit of help we can get, though I have to admit there's probably no more easy-to-moderate difficutly text left, since we've got the various labels and item names translated. I've been toying with the idea of hitting up Japanese Dragon Force or Saturn fansites and see if any bilingual fans there might be interested, so even some good Japanese searching skills would be helpful at this point.

[cj iwakura]

Mediocre, but I know people who are better who may be able to help.

[Special T]

I'm glad to see the amount of work you all have put into this, it's shaping up to be a promising project!

Do you have any plans on translating the manual? The US manual for the original Dragon Force was pretty helpful and an interesting read.

[FaustWolf]

cj, if you can get in contact with some folks and let them know we're on the lookout for additional translation help, that would be awesome.

Do you have any plans on translating the manual? The US manual for the original Dragon Force was pretty helpful and an interesting read.

Most definitely! I absolutely adored the manual Working Designs did for Dragon Force I, and we've got several physical Japanese Dragon Force II manuals on hand amongst the project team members. It's a lower priority right now, but I'd like to release a PDF with the story & nation background, general bios and troop matchups at least. Rather than a scanlation of the physical manual, I think we'll probably go in the direction of composing a fresh mini-booklet based on the source material so the quality of the imagery won't depend on our personal scanners .


The text insertion in the game still looks pretty rough right now, really; some menu rearrangement and text wrapping alteration needs to be done to fit general class names and some other labels.

[Special T]

Most definitely! I absolutely adored the manual Working Designs did for Dragon Force I, and we've got several physical Japanese Dragon Force II manuals on hand amongst the project team members. It's a lower priority right now, but I'd like to release a PDF with the story & nation background, general bios and troop matchups at least. Rather than a scanlation of the physical manual, I think we'll probably go in the direction of composing a fresh mini-booklet based on the source material so the quality of the imagery won't depend on our personal scanners .

Well that's good news and I'm looking forward to seeing this project released. Thanks for all your hard work!

[FaustWolf]

What's this? P-p-p-progress!? Spooky...

I think I'm in the running for creating the translation community's ugliest text font, but what's killing it is the game's image stretching filter, which seems to be applied even to images that aren't stretched for animations. It really plays hell with thin lettering. Might look into disabling it later and see what happens.

We're still looking for more translation help, of course! We got a miraculous injection of help from Reinofhearts recently, but the more the merrier!

[Special T]

Thanks for the update & video, this is definitely showing some promise.

I check in to this section of the forum every so often just to check on this thread  :-)

[FaustWolf]

Here's a bit of a belated holiday gift for everyone who's been watching the project and patiently awaiting progress:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReWhOmuTr-0

Thanks again to reinofhearts for the translation work shown. Can't wait to show off Sandslice's in-battle translations once I get more inserted. As always, we would graciously accept more translation help! 

[golden]

Awesome stuff FaustWolf! I remember when you started messing with this game and I'm glad to see that you've successfully acked the ROMH

[FaustWolf]

Thanks, I'm just lucky Dragon Force II ended up being pretty friendly to work with, and that the Saturn's memory management was so well documented at the Yabause wiki. Still gotta figure out a few odds and ends, but it looks to be pretty smooth sailing from here on out. When we finish will depend most on how many translators we can get on board now.

[Special T]

I know this project still probably has a long way to go but once done, what's next? I really only know of two groups working on Saturn translations and was curious what (if any) your next project would be?

[FaustWolf]

Currently I'm trading off between Dragon Force II and script editing for a seriously, seriously awesome Chinese-to-English translation project. Whereas I'm foolishly intent on pushing through Dragon Force II with sheer elbow grease on the technical side, the second project has been going much more smoothly thanks to Magil coding text injection and image compression utilities, not to mention connecting with the game's huge source language fanbase. I'm waiting to reveal the second project until we've got some really snazzy preview videos. It's not a Saturn game, but nevertheless, look forward to Chinese New Year.    I hope it'll encourage more interest in Chinese-to-English projects, because there are some serious overlooked gems out there, just as there are on the Saturn.

On that note, and at the risk of going too far off topic, I never thought to ask here at RH.net: anyone know of forums where lots of bilingual Chinese/English videogame fans gather? We've been blessed with the amount of help we've received from the game's already existing fanbase, but I suspect we can interest a few more translators once the preview samples are done.

[Starscream]

Some bilingual Chinese/English folks should hang out at the kongming.net forums, it was the origin of the Legend of Cao Cao translation after all. Maybe also Hongfire.
Is it by any chance a project that was already started before by another group, or something entirely new?

[FaustWolf]

Thanks Starscream! kongming.net/the-scholars.com was on my list of places to visit but I didn't realize its connection to previous translation projects -- beautiful! I'll check out the Hongfire forum too.

Fairly certain it's a brand-new project, as the game has below average exposure in the West (compare to, say, Legend of Sword and Fairy, which is pretty well known judging from its own fan translation efforts). It doesn't even have a common English-language title beyond the nickname of its installation folder; I have a feeling finalizing the title might end up being the most difficult part of the project, at least on the translation side.