天下制覇

Merry Christmas.

English Patch:
http://bmw.seiha.org/GAPatchv98.rar
Subtitled Movie Pack (~272 MB):
http://rapidshare.de/files/48870144/GA_Movies.rar.html
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Y7Z8ZAL8

Direct all questions, typo/error reports, and comments to http://bmw.seiha.org/viewforum.php?f=3.

Whew. Done. Well, 99.9% done. In more than enough time for Christmas too. All that’s left outside of typo fixes is a little bit of image fixing, but if you don’t mind a couple random things being mis-aligned or a location marker or two spilling out of its text box, it’s completely 100% done. The very minor text output lag issue is… well… a lost cause at this point I think. C’est la vie. At last, somebody translated a Japanese game that is appropriate to play with your 12 year old sister. A niche that I’m sure the VN community has been clamoring for.

Special thanks go out to Phiber and TK for all their hacking help, TK especially. SetraJonas, TBD, and Hikago were the front line defense against typos, and Metal_Cocoabo did the lion’s share of the rather irritating image editing. 98% of the translation cheers and jeers go to me, with Shio doing a chunk of chapter 3 before he vanished back into the void of the internet, and Totali gave me a hand with the movies. I like having a small/nearly non-existent group though. Nobody to yell at or blame when things don’t get done except for myself.

It’s been an interesting project to work on for a number of reasons. I’m glad that I got the battle quotes out of the way first because they were by far the most frustrating things to work on. Outside of the endless repetition, the line length limitations made for some… how to say… somewhat creative translations in more than a few cases. Next time, I’m going to be certain to abuse the hell out of search/replace first and then adapt things to each character’s speech pattern second. I’ve also learned firsthand just exactly how awful the official translation for GA have been thus far, which is always entertaining. I suppose most of the official translations of Japanese stuff were pretty awful in the early part of the decade though.

Outside of that, it was definitely a lot easier to work on than Battle Moon Wars, although I’m starting to develop a nervous twitch every time the writers have a character say "Really?" "Is that so?" "I see," or any of the billion other space filler lines devoid of intelligent content. I feel no shame in saying that there are parts of BMW that I look back on and cringe. It’s just really not all that readable in a lot of ways and maintains a lot of the crappy Japanese sentence structure for no good reason. There are definitely parts of GA that I don’t feel great about as I read over them, but overall, I’m a lot happier with how it turned out, even if there are still things that I tweak when I come across them. I still crave oversight, and late at night when I’m half asleep and wondering what the hell I was thinking when I translated a certain line in a certain way, I think of strange desperate scheme to trick other people into looking it over, but then I just mark things down and look at them when I’m feeling somewhat less unhinged.

That’s pretty much just about all that I have to say about it. It’s certainly not the most challenging game out there and the real development between Tact and his girl doesn’t really start until the next game, it’s still a fun little game. ML steps things up in just about every department aside from the antagonist, so it’s something to look forward to, even if I’m not going to get around to working on it for at least a month or two. I’m making decent headway on my new project, which is turning out to be both a lot sillier and more poignant in places than I had remembered, so am looking forward to escaping the tutorial sections and getting to the meat of the game. 

Anyway, enjoy.