[RHDNBot]

Update By: Supper

Culminating nearly five years of work, an English translation of Yumimi Mix Remix for the Sega Saturn has been released!

In a town somewhere in Japan, there once lived a very average high school girl named Yumimi. Together with her best friend Sakurako and friend/crush Shinichi, she enjoyed happy if very average days…until one fateful morning when, on the way to school, she witnesses a procession of ghosts(?) crossing the street before her very eyes! And then in the hallway, a girl suddenly latches on to her, tells her she has to "go stitch the holes," and – declares her love for her!? Suddenly, Yumimi's life isn't so average anymore, though she may soon be wishing it was…

Yumimi Mix Remix is a 1995 adventure game for the Sega Saturn. A direct port of the 1993 Mega-CD game Yumimi Mix, it was created in a collaboration between developer Game Arts (of Lunar and Grandia fame) and well-known shoujo manga artist Izumi Takemoto, who wrote and storyboarded the entire game. A happy marriage of Game Arts' technical skill with Takemoto's cute, whimsical artistry and inimitably eccentric sensibilities, the game is comprised entirely of fully-animated, fully-voiced, full-screen cutscenes coupled with periodic multiple-choice prompts, creating an experience almost exactly like watching an anime while still making full use of the interactivity afforded by the game medium.

While this game may be unfamiliar to Western audiences, the advanced animation engine developed for it was later reused to power the cutscenes for Game Arts' renowned RPG Lunar: Eternal Blue. And though Izumi Takemoto isn't a name many outside of Japan would recognize, his unique style earned him a considerable cult following and had a wide-reaching influence: Touhou Project creator ZUN is known to have been a fan, to such an extent that an early game in the series features an (unauthorized) appearance from one of Takemoto's characters.

This patch fully translates the game into English, subtitling all dialogue, songs, and important background text in the manner of a typical subtitled anime. It also adds new in-game options to show or hide Japanese honorifics, to partially or completely disable the subtitles, and to allow unimportant scenes to be skipped during gameplay.

This video demonstrates the translation in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgMF5H3DLEo

This translation was the work of Supper (hacking and translation) and cccmar (testing). Work on the project initially began in 2017, but stalled for years for lack of a translator; the authors hope you'll feel the result was worth the wait!

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link

[Pennywise]

Excellent work as always.

I didn't notice this until a friend pointed it out, but it appears you modified armips to support the Saturn. You're dedication is impressive.

[Supper]

Excellent work as always.

I didn't notice this until a friend pointed it out, but it appears you modified armips to support the Saturn. You're dedication is impressive.

Thanks. I can't hold a candle to your group's Saturn work, obviously, but I do the best I can. This game was a pretty big challenge in ways that are very different from a "conventional" text translation, so it was a lot of fun to work on. (I'm quite impressed we managed to finish our completely unrelated translation projects for remakes of 16-bit games on the same console within about half an hour of each other, btw; you'd think we'd planned this.)

And the armips thing was just a three-day hack job to throw together something usable, nothing to get proud about. It did what I needed it to do, at least. I was motivated by some very painful memories of trying to use GNU Assembler for a Saturn project years ago; given that the only options seemed to be that or the official Hitachi assembler, this was the most sensible course of action I could come up with. Or maybe I just missed something, because I still can't believe no one really ever bothered writing their own assembler for an architecture as simple as the SH2. Seriously, the code I wrote was easily less than a quarter of the size of the ARM module I used as a template.

[PhantomandGhost]

Congratulations on the release! I remember seeing this one sat around as an old wip, so it's amazing to see that it's finally come to fruition and a real testament to your hard work and dedication 

[goldenband]

Wonderful! Looking forward to checking this out.

By the way, if you happen to know: is the script exactly the same as the Sega CD version? Or to ask the question differently, how much of a 1:1 content relationship is there?

[Supper]

Congratulations on the release! I remember seeing this one sat around as an old wip, so it's amazing to see that it's finally come to fruition and a real testament to your hard work and dedication 

Thanks! Your own assistance in finally eliminating the "limbo" section of my web site is greatly appreciated

Wonderful! Looking forward to checking this out.

By the way, if you happen to know: is the script exactly the same as the Sega CD version? Or to ask the question differently, how much of a 1:1 content relationship is there?

Well...



That's a little simplified, but basically there's very little difference. I actually wrote a short explanation for the readme, so I'll just quote it here:

What's the difference between the original game and this "Remix" version? Well, practically nothing. The graphics were not redrawn, so despite being on the Saturn, it looks no different from the original Mega-CD game. What few changes do exist are very minor and probably unnoticeable if you haven't played the original – think "an occasional extra fade-out here and there". A few small cosmetic improvements were made to the opening sequence, and a single scene in the middle of the game was slightly extended to match how it appeared in the FM-Towns port. Unfortunately, some small graphic bugs were also introduced, as detailed below.

The game does benefit slightly from the more powerful hardware; there is no longer a screen blackout when changing scenes, and scaling and rotation effects run more smoothly and at a higher resolution. And naturally, the music no longer uses the YM2612 chip; the actual compositions are virtually the same, just with a much more MIDI-like sound. (Though whether that's an improvement or not may be a matter of taste.) Yumimi Puzzle is also new for this version.

In short, this is a Mega-CD game running on the Saturn – nothing less and very little more. Try not to judge it by 32-bit standards, because obviously it's not going to measure up to games that were originally designed for the more powerful hardware. I didn't translate it because it was an amazing Saturn game, I translated it because it was an amazing game period.

[FCandChill]

Fantastic job on this. As said before, we appreciate your dedication and hard work! Also, I can related to the "too dumb to quit" lines abundant in the readme.

[goldenband]

I actually wrote a short explanation for the readme, so I'll just quote it here:

Ah, sorry to overlook that! Thanks for your gracious response, much appreciated. As you might guess, my main motivation was wondering what would be involved in backporting (if you want to call it) the script to Mega CD -- not an entirely hypothetical question, as I've dipped my toes into Mega CD hacking with some (very) slight success...

In any event, congratulations on the release!

[Supper]

Ah, sorry to overlook that! Thanks for your gracious response, much appreciated. As you might guess, my main motivation was wondering what would be involved in backporting (if you want to call it) the script to Mega CD -- not an entirely hypothetical question, as I've dipped my toes into Mega CD hacking with some (very) slight success...

In any event, congratulations on the release!

Well, that was the original idea, and I did make substantial progress on the MCD version before finally giving up on it. I got as far as automatically generating prerendered subtitle graphics from text and jumping through some elaborate hoops to make the script builder insert extra rendering commands for them where needed based on special directives added to the scripts. This basically "works", but doing it for the whole game would require manually editing every script to place subtitle on/off commands where needed, which would be very painful for a lot of reasons. It's possible the process could be further automated with enough work, but I have no desire to try it.

There's also the fact that the game is quite taxing on the graphics hardware as it is, so adding in a bunch of extra graphics for subtitles is going to have detrimental effects in some cases -- for instance, once the total number of graphic patterns in a scene exceeds a certain threshold, the game automatically switches from preloading all the graphics at the start of the scene to loading them dynamically as needed, causing slowdown. And then there are other factors, like the opening sequence consuming virtually all of the memory allocated for loaded scenes and leaving no room for premade subtitle graphics without doing something drastic (I at one point contemplated temporarily unloading the FM sound driver to load in special game-side subtitle generator code specifically for this scene).

All in all, it would be an incredible amount of work just to make something that looked worse. But if anyone ever wants to try, the old code's buried in here somewhere, though you might be better off just starting fresh.