[hollowaytape]

Here's the PC-98 gif everyone loves to post:

It's from a game called Possessioner, which is a neat little sci-fi graphic adventure/18+ visual novel/RPG by Queen Soft. In 2035 Tokyo, women are constantly disappearing, then returning possessed by monsters. You play as Alisa, a member of an elite squad that tracks down the possessed women, defeats them and the monsters in combat, and then... subdues them in a consensual but not terribly safe-for-work fashion.

This game looks and sounds so good! Great character art, and some of the most gorgeous and detailed backgrounds I've seen on the system. The FM synth soundtrack is fantastic too. (Here's a song on YouTube)

You spend most of the gameplay exploring the city, talking to people and solving puzzles. The combat is pretty simple, but decently fun, with some fun little animations for all of your attacks.

(Top-right image has a translation taken from a WIP by Nana. The rest is machine translations.)

I've made some decent progress on hacking so far. Here are some accomplishments:

• All of the system text is (machine) translated and working. That includes all the commands for the adventure segments, combat, and H-scenes.
• The dialogue file format is pretty easy, so they can be reinserted and expanded without any issues.
• I've reverse-engineered one image format (.SEL), which is used for all the combat controls and various UI elements. I wrote an encoder for it, and so far all the combat images are translated.
• Nametags in dialogue wouldn't display ASCII by default, so I hacked that in.

And here are some remaining challenges:

• All the dialogue pointers, from like 25 different files, are hard-coded into a huge code segment in the main EXE. This presents some difficulties.
• The intro text has some quirks. All the text is twice as wide as it should be, and apostrophes/commas doesn't display correctly. That'll need some hacking.
• The intro has some images in a second image format, .CGX, so I'll need to reverse engineer that too.
• I'd love to be able to increase the text speed. Gotta respect the player's time and all that.

Since I'm just a hacker, I am seeking a translator as well. The script is about 485 KB, and has some significant adult content. You can see the full plaintext script dump here. If you think you'd be interested in working with me on this, please let me know!

P.S. I usually hack for a group called 46 OkuMen, and we are doing just fine! I just thought I'd pick up another project to pass the time while the others are busy handling major life events. I figure this is the kind of project they wouldn't miss if I did it without them.

Edit 2/1: Added link to the game's script.

[drauch]

I'm so excited for this. Best of luck!

[hollowaytape]

Sort of an anticlimactic post. I found a very qualified translator, and they've just begun. In the meantime I've finished playing through the game and finished up all of the required hacking.

• I hacked the text speed to go about 8x faster, so now it's significantly easier to test, and certainly less time-consuming to play.
• I hacked the intro text to display normally. It was using some sort of ugly custom font I couldn't easily edit, so I just replaced it with the system text.
• I fixed the horrible pointer situation. I found better ways of identifying pointers as belonging to particular files, so that should cut down on the guesswork and inexplicable crash bugs.

As for other things to do, there is still another image format, but it looks pretty difficult. It is only used in the game's intro, so I may just remove those images and integrate them into the text. I may try to increase the text speed from very fast to instantaneous, too, though that would skip things character portraits being displayed.

But for now I think I'll take a break. My next post will probably be several months from now with a trailer/release.

[drauch]

Glad to hear. Thanks for the update!