Secret of Mana: Script Augmentation Project

[Thirteen 1355]

Heyy! I'd like to ask if you guys could send me the full script of your retranslation! I plan to check for possible connections (canon or fan-made) between the Mana games, and having an actually competent script would help me out a lot for this purpose! 

[lexluthermiester]

Heyy! I'd like to ask if you guys could send me the full script of your retranslation! I plan to check for possible connections (canon or fan-made) between the Mana games, and having an actually competent script would help me out a lot for this purpose! 

PM the OP/author.

[Ligeia]

I missed this new translation since I always check rom hacks and forget about translations... I'll definitely play this ! Thanks for the hard work !

[romhacksaw]

Hi, hope it's ok to just post in here, wanted to give some feedback.

First of all thank you very much for this amazing project, it was a great experience playing through it. I learned so much about the game that I had no clue was in it to begin with. Opened my eyes to a lot of stuff, thank you for this.

Here's some stuff I noticed, not sure if those are mistakes though as I'm not a native English speaker.

- check the line "he gave his life for", forgot how the line continues. Something bothered me about it, maybe a space too much or something?
- When you free Luka from being locked up, the first few sentences seem like regular English to me and not the ELizabethan English that she usually speaks and that you wrote about in the commentary.
- search for "Traffault", I think in one instance you wrote him with an 'a' as the third letter instead of a 'u'
- search for "tempeth", isn't that supposed to be "tempteth"?
- you refer to the Sprite as 'he' in the ending sequence, whereas you would always use 'they' in the actual game. Respectfully, as someone else pointed out, I think you should just use 'he' throughout the game. They/them doesn't fit into a 90s game, it always takes me out of the immersion because it refers to a current social issue, although I fully understand why you did it in the first place.
- Gnome's accent was not possible for me to understand as a non native English speaker. Maybe it can be kept, but toned down a bit, so that it is apparent what is meant?

Looking forward to where you take this project in the future. I think I saw in the Turbo thread that you plan to make one big last release or something.

Also, let me say again I greatly appreciated and enjoyed the commentary PDF that was attached.

The effort you put into this is unbelievable and it's heart warming to see fans like you do this kind of stuff. Thank you again, and keep up the good work.

[reconstructingmana]

Hi, hope it's ok to just post in here, wanted to give some feedback.

First of all thank you very much for this amazing project, it was a great experience playing through it. I learned so much about the game that I had no clue was in it to begin with. Opened my eyes to a lot of stuff, thank you for this.

Here's some stuff I noticed, not sure if those are mistakes though as I'm not a native English speaker.

- check the line "he gave his life for", forgot how the line continues. Something bothered me about it, maybe a space too much or something?
- When you free Luka from being locked up, the first few sentences seem like regular English to me and not the ELizabethan English that she usually speaks and that you wrote about in the commentary.
- search for "Traffault", I think in one instance you wrote him with an 'a' as the third letter instead of a 'u'
- search for "tempeth", isn't that supposed to be "tempteth"?
- you refer to the Sprite as 'he' in the ending sequence, whereas you would always use 'they' in the actual game. Respectfully, as someone else pointed out, I think you should just use 'he' throughout the game. They/them doesn't fit into a 90s game, it always takes me out of the immersion because it refers to a current social issue, although I fully understand why you did it in the first place.
- Gnome's accent was not possible for me to understand as a non native English speaker. Maybe it can be kept, but toned down a bit, so that it is apparent what is meant?

Looking forward to where you take this project in the future. I think I saw in the Turbo thread that you plan to make one big last release or something.

Also, let me say again I greatly appreciated and enjoyed the commentary PDF that was attached.

The effort you put into this is unbelievable and it's heart warming to see fans like you do this kind of stuff. Thank you again, and keep up the good work.

Thank you for the kind words. We're currently preparing a new version, the beta of which is included in the latest release of Turbo (see thread). It's been fun to go back to the workspace and see everything we did.

As for your feedback:

1)The line in question is:

Code Select Expand

He gave his life for this key. 
If I just keep it without using it, he won't be able to rest in peace...
Literally, it's closer to:

Code Select Expand

My husband traded his life to steal this. If I just keep it without making use of it, he won't be able to rest in peace...
The mention of the husband is somewhat redundant as the previous line also references this.

2)We rewrote Luka to be more consistently "old" sounding. That line was redone for the next release and I believe your concern has already been covered.

3)Good catch! I fixed.

4)Another good one.

5)The sprite is referred to as "he" early in Reborn by the dwarf elder. Just about everywhere, "they" has become the standard for Popoi after the 2018 remake. Personally, I disagree with this choice for reasons indicated in the commentary. Nevertheless, we wanted to acknowledge current practice while also acknowledging the SNES convention.

6)We simplified Gnome as much as we could for the upcoming release while retaining the accent.

[reconstructingmana]

Soon, we'll be releasing SoM: Reborn V2.0, but here's a prerelease if anyone wants to try it out:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XUO7daZv2cxv356fmbs1pdTd-Om7YB89/view

[lexluthermiester]

Soon, we'll be releasing SoM: Reborn V2.0, but here's a prerelease if anyone wants to try it out:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XUO7daZv2cxv356fmbs1pdTd-Om7YB89/view

Nice!

[reconstructingmana]

Today, we released SoM: Reborn V2.0!

Overall, we were very happy with the last version. We had identified enough improvements after our initial launch to justify eleven small updates.

Late last year, I casually began playing around with a few lines and debated whether it was worth putting a V1.12 together. Queue was on indefinite hiatus from SoM and I wasn't sure if a few of us who are not Queue should try to make an update ourselves.

In time, I saw other avenues for improvement and was able to get ahold of Queue in January of this year who agreed to revisit Reborn. This time, we'd take as much time as needed rather than updating in small increments.

Most of the 2020 team was not available (and in one tragic case, passed away quite young), but we were able to convince a few folks to come back for a bit and briefly revisit some of our previous work.

The conventional, ultra-literal translation we made as the basis for this project three years ago was extensively reexamined. We found ways to implement dozens of nuances that weren't in our first effort.

We also watched streams and consulted playtesters to find remaining areas where things didn't read well.

Each line was checked countless times to find any way we could improve it. We even found a few more spelling and grammar mistakes that were still present in the last version.

After all this took place, about 25% of the script changed from V1.11 and we decided to release this as V2.0, instead of another iteration of V1.x.

The Source Commentary was completely overhauled. Originally, we envisioned exhaustive line-by-line academic footnotes that we figured would be ignored by all but the most interested players. It took on a life of its own, however. Our original goal was a bit too lofty as maintaining it was taking a massive amount of time, and pervasive issues abounded no matter how much we addressed them. Eventually, we threw in the towel and edited it down to the important stuff in a later release, and this time we went even further gave a very succinct explanation of our important changes.

I am beyond proud of the work that we did on this. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, we recognized how monumental the first full translation of Secret of Mana would be, and aimed to do the absolute best we could. While you can never please everyone with your decisions, we hope that folks will agree that this is the best Reborn yet.

[2tack]

Very excited to check this out! Are there plans or a timeline on integration into the SoM Turbo suite?

[Zeikar]

I want to know if it's compatible with like the 9 item limit patch or any of the stuff by Kethinov, hmsong, etc..

[lexluthermiester]

I want to know if it's compatible with like the 9 item limit patch or any of the stuff by Kethinov, hmsong, etc..

That requires testing. You are, of course, welcome to report back if they do or don't. Chances are good that they do as mods to functionality areas of the game are in different address ranges than the addresses for the script/text of the game.

[Pethronos]

I want to know if it's compatible with like the 9 item limit patch or any of the stuff by Kethinov, hmsong, etc..

I use to trust the CRC32 in order to blend patches. I patch them in different orders, and if the CRC is the same, it usually means that patches don't affect between them and they are 100% compatible.

Example: Reborn + Item Limit 9 + Scroll hack + Fix Barrel = CRC32 1D2ED7D4 (independenty of the patching order)

[MD_Prometh]

I find it weird that Gemma is referred to as Jema, especially given that Gemma is more consistent with Final Fantasy Adventure, the first Mana game. Gemma is also what was used in the 3D remake.