天下制覇

And also alliteration.

When last we left our story, I was trying to discretely float some ideas and see how the internet at large would react. Unfortunately, I was apparently too discrete and it was taken as I had stopped or slowed translating yet. Well, the latter is true, but not really at an appreciable level once you take into account the uphill battle against a number of things in the main project which often have less to do with translating and more to do with the Sumerian blood rites that are occasionally necessary to make the engine work.

I passed the halfway point on that one last week actually with only a 25% or so chance left that there’s yet another vast swathe of undiscovered text strings that may or may not actually be implemented. I’ve discovered multiple rich veins of both so far, always mixed together so I have to do them all anyway. But today our story lies not with my battle against the pit fiends of the third dimension there, but with Project A, my erstwhile and mostly on pause initial quest that began in late November and went into the fridge in January.

As I mentioned before, I’m quite curious as to both the viability and the effect of a Kickstarter-like project for this kind of thing. On the internet, especially for the kind of community VN fans are a part of, it seems like people are a lot more willing to pay it forward for developers/translators to do what something they’re interested in than buy something already completed after the fact. I already noted commissions of manga and doujins are quite common, but a big project’s a different story. Again, though that hasn’t seemed to deter the Canadian gender bending furries. Yes, I am bitter. Shut up!

So as a first step to see if it’d even fly, I put a sample KS project together. Lo and behold, KS apparently has no problems with it whatsoever and about a week later, they gave it the greenlight. Perhaps they were drunk. Perhaps it’s the grey area of a freely distributed unofficial translation in a region the developer has no interest in. Perhaps they just want their cut. I’m not questioning things.

However, since I have a paralyzing fear of any translation project going off without a hitch and this one had been mostly hitchless, I decided to drop the devs a line about it, link to the KS, some sample work, etc. Mostly expecting mostly to be ignored, mind you. To my surprise, I got back a response quite fast saying that they had no interest in selling their games in the west because of piracy, to stop because I would be promoting piracy, and that if I wanted to play their games, I should move to Japan. Somewhat daunted, I talked to a connection I have with MangaGamer to see if a full-on real release et al could persuade them to let me throw money at them, but they got the same answer as me.

So that’s a tad bit disheartening. Apparently so long as piracy exists, they’re uninterested in even discussing any kind of localization, but at the same time, a stern admonition that I’m promoting piracy of their half-decade-old game in a market they have no interest in selling their product to lacks the same kind of oomph as certain other things might. Not to mention that they’ve known about the KS for going on a few weeks now and have demonstrated little more than apathy toward it otherwise (or to most other games of theirs that have been translated). Which isn’t the same as a yea, but is delectably different from a cease and desist. If you need an analogy, it’s like asking Shatner if you can write the Official Definitive Slash Fiction^tm between Kirk and Picard. You’d get laughed out, but it’s very rare that anybody raises a stink about fanfiction (ie derivitive work) distributed freely online. Patrick Stewart would likely offer to publish it himself.

However, if this is something that can really be done, I’d be willing to go into translator overdrive mode and work on both projects at the same time. It’s stressful, kills your social life, and torches your ability to function in either languages, but I’ve done it before… mostly with mountains of bad porn. It would take a few weeks of that to finish the main part of the game’s raw translation, but there is a large chunk of extra side stuff and a number of major engine concerns that need to be manually addressed, as well editing, checking, etc.

Otherwise, the plan is waiting until I finish the top priority work in 3-4 months and then, if I have nothing else demanding my time, such as providing food and shelter, shuffling Proj A quietly out the door when the chance comes. Worst case scenario, the devs do finally actually do something besides demanding I stop internet piracy and move to Japan, and my work on it ends in its current unfinished, unedited, unchecked, occasionally misromanized state, but since I’ve already distributed files to editors and they’re as able to keep things under wraps as a cheesecloth condom, it’s not hard to imagine what would happen in that future timeline.

Anyway, that’s how things stand right now. I’m leaning heavily towards letting this rip. If I must go out, let it be a blaze of glory… not counting the other project at any rate. Not to play myself off as victimized here, but I tried. I really did. At the very least, it’d hopefully answer the question of whether this kind of thing will fly in the future for other people should mine be curbstomped. I’m a fan of the game, not the developers. If paying it forward really works, then that could open doors for localizations that are otherwise too expensive for a multitude of reasons. Or so I’ve heard.

So let’s hear opinions on whether or not I should go ahead on this without any of that blog birthday nonsense or the like cluttering things up. Have at me, peanut gallery.