[RHDNBot]

Update By: Verve Fanworks

Over eight years in the making, the Dragon Force II English translation is complete! The project has been a truly massive undertaking, combining the efforts of twenty dedicated storyline translators, an additional thirteen translators of gameplay text, a programmer, and a small army of script editors, tinkerers and testers.

Set 500 years after the first game, Dragon Force II follows a slate of monarchs who must band together to defeat a new threat looming over Legendra. Along the way, they learn the value of friendship and unravel the mystery of what happened to the original Dragon Force after Madruk's defeat. The eight-scenarios approach and Strategy RPG formula will immediately appeal to fans of the first game.

Dragon Force II differs from the original in three significant respects. Most importantly, players can now assign two troop types to their generals for added gameplay depth. An item forging system puts greater focus on the spoils of war, and Sega of Japan assembled a crack team of voice actors to bring the story alive; with the English translation in place, the game has a subbed anime feel.

At this time, Dragon Force II's FMVs remain un-subbed and the end-game credits un-translated, as FMV editing represents a new challenge beyond the scope of the project's original goals. Hopefully these can be addressed in subsequent updates.

We hope Dragon Force fans will brave the challenges of Saturn emulation and the confusion that's sure to arise from the game's numerous prints to give the sequel a well-deserved spin! Here's an hour's worth of preview footage to whet your appetite, and head on over to the website linked below to get started!

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link: (http://www.verve-fanworks.com)

[Synnae]

oh boy oh boy OH BOY

*super excited*

[Ultimate]

Awesome! I"ll get to this ASAP. Thank you!

[Special T]

I've beta tested two of the scenarios and I must say I think everyone involved in this project has put a lot of effort in to it. I really enjoyed it and I'm sure anyone else that tries it out will as well.

[getter77]

Congrats on this fantastic work and endeavoring the effort to do it well at that!   

[patuli]

This is great news, I will wait until my saturn arrives home, just to play these.
Congratulations to all the people involved in this!

[STARWIN]

There aren't many games like Dragon Force, so this is much appreciated.

Thanks for this you twenty dedicated storyline translators, thirteen translators of gameplay text, a programmer, and a small army of script editors, tinkerers and testers. Also FaustWolf for what appears good team leadership, constructive attitude and an open way of doing things.

[Wendell]

Oh, this is very exciting!  I look forward to playing it as soon as I have some time.

[BlackDog61]

Nicely done!
Added to my "must play" list (once SRW AP is out of the way ).

[travel27]

Looks awesome but sadly, have yet to try a solid saturn emu

[vincent_vincent]

Now thats a surprise, a great one too.
Why are we not aware of this until it came out though <_<

[Grillkick]

YES!!!! I've been waiting for this for so long!!! It is *on*. Thank you to all of the people who worked so hard on this!   

[KaioShin]

It's always a good day to see a completed Saturn translation 

[Spooniest]

Makes me want to look back into emulating the Sega Saturn!

Congratulations, guys!

[Starscream]

Congratulations. Looks like the game isn't that demanding, even my old 2007 notebook can run it with SSF judging from a short test I did yesterday. I was considering to wait a while, expecting some  possible minor follow-up revisions, but I'll probably start right away playing it.

[Pennywise]

Regarding FMV editing, doing hardsubs is not an ideal method. I've seen translations where there are multiple patches with one for the videos that's several hundred MBs. The optimal method is going the softsubs route. On the Playstation, softsubs are incredibly easy due to whatever software library the system uses. On the Saturn, I'm not really sure of the technical limitations. If I had to guess, it might be a matter of VRAM limitations.

[FaustWolf]

Thanks everyone, the response to this translation has been humbling! The real heroes of the story are of course the huge translation team, but also Turbo857, who did a miraculous recruitment drive for those translators when he joined up in 2013. NoahSteam also joined in 2013 to program a text insertion utility. I initially went into the project thinking I could insert the text by hand, but in hindsight, that would have been like building a beach one grain of sand at a time. And we wouldn't be here had Sixfortyfive and Sandslice not started laying the groundwork pre-2008.

Probably the most important lesson I learned on this translation is that a desperate gamble can really pay off. By 2012 the project had completely run out of steam, with one scenario out of eight translated and about half of the non-story text translated. In a Hail Mary pass, we released a "Playable in English" patch that year, with just the menus and non-story text translations in place. I worried it would look shoddy at the time, but it was the "Playable" release that caught the attention of our new blood. I'm really indebted to the RHDN community for translating many odds and ends that made the "Playable" patch possible.

Revisions in the next few months will be incredibly minor -- we won't be tackling the FMVs for a while yet since it's gonna demand some research (thanks for the soft-subbing idea Pennywise). The biggest change in the works right now is simply devising a ripping method and patch that can be applied universally. I dropped the ball in not realizing that the user's disc drive and ripping software can interact in ways that produce different checksums even with the exact same game CD, but I think we're very close to a solution. There's also a huge demand at the Verve Fanworks forum for people with experience burning game CDs and playing on hardware; I wish I had the slightest experience with that.

In the end, we hope this translation will do justice to the great series that is Dragon Force, and that it'll inspire more totally huge projects.

[CrocMagnum]

Holy Diablo Cow! The scale of this project is out of the ordinary!

All scenarios translated, 8 years in the making, an army of translators...

Wow! Thank you for your dedication. Never tried the Saturn emulation though, but from what I've gathered I'm in for a world of hurt...

[CapsuleCorp]

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I never knew this project existed. I was just a teenager when the original Dragon Force came out. I've probably put a over hundred hours into that game over the years. When I was in my twenties I paid a good amount of money for dragon force 2, but completely gave up on playing it since I can't read Japanese (and didn't really have the desire to learn it just for one game).

So again, thank you so much for giving me the ability to play it!

[SCO]

Bump. Is there a version of this translation that uses plain files to be replaced on cdmage or similar? I ask because the base dump used in this binary patch is not the redump version, that i'd prefer (edit: i was wrong. It is the redump version, just turned into a iso first.)

edit: Tried to do it myself but apparently my method doesn't work with patched files larger than the originals.

If you're curious, i have the redump DFII dump, and the one the xdelta patch wants, same version (1.006), then apply the patch to the right iso, then mounted both isos and did a byte compare with diff -r cd1 cd2, extracted the different files from the patched iso, loaded the redump image on cdmage and tried to replace the files (right click -> import file). When i got to "DF2_LOGO.CHM" it wanted to truncate it because the replacement was larger than the original, so this is no good.

I can't simply replace track 1 from the redump dump with the patched iso because they're different formats, bin vs iso... maybe if i convert the iso to bin somehow (without being a dumb rename because i'm pretty sure these are completely different formats) and then do a xdelta patch from one to the other.

edit 2: tried gBurner that has a 30 day unlimited size free trial for the editor (unlike PowerISO / MagicISO) and the resulting edit of the cue/bin track1 file makes the game be recognized as a music cd instead of a game on mednafen saturn or yabuse. Pretty sure it's doing something wrong. Saving just Track 1 as a bin using 'data cd' and replacing that file in the original mixed mode cd has the same result: the emulators boot to bios music player.


Also what gave me this idea was the Story of Thor 2 Saturn hack here; the process the hacker says for the users to do is to use cdmage to replace the files on any dump. It worked on redump (though as said, all the replacement files were less or equal in size). Though yabuse boots it as a audio cd, but that happens on the original redump too. Mednafen boots it fine.


edit: turns out that this is not very practical. While it is possible to create a new track 1 with the same mode as redump (MODE1/2352), unlike the case where the size of the files is the same, the very fact that they change size offsets everything and changes the checksum data in the MODE1/2352 of most of the iso, which leads to hundreds of mb of xdelta patch unfortunately. I really didn't expect this, but oh well. Makes me think a specialized binary patcher aware of the cd modes that turns a cd into mode1/2048 before calculating the differences / patching could be valuable for distribution and softpatching (that mode has no checksums).

Also what i was missing is the saturn header mentioned here.