Magic Knight Rayearth 2: Making of Magic Knight Translation

[Bob Liu]

My next translation again working alongside my buddy Kiiri, the aim of this one is to train the Magic Knights for 50 days to face the invading armies and to find the pillar. Im glad this one is actually based on the second season as none of the other games are which disappointed me alot because....... no Nova (Probably isn't in this one either ). Anyhow I'll make a release when a playable portion of the game is translated just like what im currently doing for the missing colors. I hope people will become interested as I want people to be involved and talk to one another about how the translation is going and stuff along those lines, anyhow thanks for reading and be on the lookout for this in the near future.

Team
Pearse Hillock (Username Bob Liu) - Hacker/Production/Everything else other than Translating
Kiiri - Translator

RHDN Page
http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2178/

Follow me on my blog
http://pearsehillock.blogspot.ie/

23rd March

I finally got through the first couple of screens, it took me a while to figure out the differences in the code on how the characters were layed out as some of the Kanji didn't just have a two digit hex to represent it ingame. They had FF 05 1B and this inserted one character while mostly everything else does it like this 5B, there was that and a ton of other problems I faced but after today I got them all sorted out while is good. I will explain more in detail tomorrow but for now I want to know what you think.

[cobaltex]

Looking forward to this, and I'm really enjoying the missing colors so far.

BTW, are you planing to do the fist games for gb/gg?

[USC]

@cobaltex: If you check the front page of the site, you'll see a news post about him doing just that.

Good work so far!

[Bob Liu]

Looking forward to this, and I'm really enjoying the missing colors so far.

BTW, are you planing to do the fist games for gb/gg?

Glad your liking the missing colors, there is comedy in the game and it was actually funny to see. There's a bit where one of the fairy villagers sexually harasses hikaru, you'll notice that after you try to touch the color jar multiple times. I am going to do the first games after the two im working on, they have been partially translated but I wouldn't want to continue off someone elses work so im gonna do it from scratch.

Really glad to see someone interested, if you want to you could test out the translation for me as I don't have much time to actually play through the translation to check for spelling mistakes and such. All you would have to do is take a screenshot everytime you encounter a spelling mistake, then I'll know where to find the mistake. I have played through the entire game in Japanese and the translation half way through the blue tower, im gonna make time for it soon though but balancing time between translating two games and play testing time is kinda messy.

@cobaltex: If you check the front page of the site, you'll see a news post about him doing just that.

Good work so far!

Thanks but cobaltex meant the first games for the GG and GB as the other game im translating is again a sequel but I think I stated I would translate the other games if that's what you mean. Anyway it's nice to see you guys interested in the games as that's what I really want to see, thanks.

[cobaltex]

Really glad to see someone interested, if you want to you could test out the translation for me as I don't have much time to actually play through the translation to check for spelling mistakes and such. All you would have to do is take a screenshot everytime you encounter a spelling mistake, then I'll know where to find the mistake. I have played through the entire game in Japanese and the translation half way through the blue tower, im gonna make time for it soon though but balancing time between translating two games and play testing time is kinda messy.

I'll do that (I'll ignore obvious abbreviations), also I'm playing it using emumaster for my PSP and so far I haven't run into any issues.

[Bob Liu]

That's good to hear.

[Bob Liu]

Progress is going well but also slowly, I have been running into problems from time to time and the games code is more complex than The Missing Colors. This is due to it being on the Game Gear but I can't expect it to be as simple as a Game Boy, this is holding me back but I am getting there and in the space of time I have been working on it a good amount of progress has been done. You can see that in the video below, I just wanted to update those interested with this post so if your reading give me your support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGMHDayjiUo

Note
I will go into detail about the differences between the code of the games at a later date.

[Bob Liu]

Progress Update - 17/4/14
Progress is taking way longer than expected or when compared to The Missing Colors, there are various problems stalling me. One of which is this huge adventure mode that branches out far, each stop has it's own dialogue for the character your talking to and different dialogue depending on if your playing as Hikaru, Umi or Fuu. This part has been crazy to translate and im not even done, this is only one of the multiple adventure locations you can choose from as during points in the game you can move into a new area.

They don't even have names, I had to make these up

The code is way more complex than The Missing Colors, since the game is in color certain text appears in various colors to highlight items. The text highlighted is multiple of hex's long rather than single text or characters, this has caused me problems when trying to find the offset of the colored text on the rom. An example of this is FF0506 and then 2B (2B = The Text/Character) for it in red or just simply 2B uncolored, on times this has left me with fewer or more hex's than needed causing further problems like this.

I did eventually find a few around it but all of this is just a few of the problems I have faced trying to translate the game, there is also the problem of finding the offset of the kanji on the menu's and certain screens as my current hex's can't find them meaning they use separate tiles. Now I have to find those, isn't this just wonderful. I have also had to play through the adventure mode in the village multiple times with each character to take screenies for my translator soaking up the time I use to implement the translation, im going to have to do the same for the entire game for each character as during events you pick one of the three girls to go each with different dialogues. Even with all this I am still making good progress having near translated an entire playthrough, sadly though many playthroughs are needed as this game has multiple endings. Anyhow in the end it will all be worth it, thanks for reading and wish me good luck.

Kawai Desu

From my Blog
http://pearsehillock.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/magic-knight-rayearth-2-making-of-magic.html

[Bob Liu]

There's just so much text in this game, it's driving me crazy. It's kind of killing my goal of translating that Martian Successor Nadesico Dating Simulator game for the Sega Saturn, im trying to get some help on ROMHacking about gathering the hex's so hopefully I should be able to make progress there soon. Anyhow progress for Making of Magic Knight has been going good and I should be able to make a release soon, by then two playthroughs will have been translated. Most of the main events have been translated but don't hold much hope for the adventure mode further than the village as of yet, that's still in progress and due to the variation and multiple playthroughs needed it still will be for time to come.

Here is the flowchart I made for the woods adventure, I have to go to each one three times to get the dialogue for each character and that's really time consuming. After this it's to the mountains and oh lord will that take long, for The Missing Colors I took 982 images of text to translate but for Making of Magic Knight I have 1018 and im nowhere near done. From that you can just see the scale of this translation compared to the previous one, anyhow comment to share your thoughts as I want to hear what you think.

[Bob Liu]

Progress Update - 06/5/14
Sadly not much going on at the moment, my translator has been kinda busy for the past week and I haven't been able to get any work done. What I have been doing is collecting more pics of Japanese to be translated which is just going to pile up but hope may be ahead, a guy on ROMHacking said he's looking for translating experience and he said he would help me out. Hopefully he will come through and then I will be able to continue working on this, that and eventually Aretha which is another game I am interested in.

Anyway about that in progress release I mentioned before, Im going to hold that off for a while. Mainly because that was before my translator was busy and you know the story there. If you want to try what's done of the game so far then just send me a message or something like that, I'd be more than happy to.

[Bob Liu]

Sad to say, I have stopped working on this over a month ago. Mainly due to my translator being busy and myself meanwhile moving onto another game, anyway I uploaded what I have done and you can download it here. Have fun and if you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask.
http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2178/

For more info, you can read the post on my blog.
http://pearsehillock.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/magic-knight-rayearth-2-making-of-magic.html