天下制覇

Happy Birthday, Seiha.

Since it’s the semi-arbitrarily determined birthday for the domain (well, give or take a week), I suppose it’s time for the annual state of the union address.

Uh. Things are going great. I know there’s a lot of fuss over Omni retiring lately, but life for the blog-o-muck will go on regardless. I’ll take entertaining myself however I damn well please over being informative or being careful not to annoy the rabid fandoms any day of the week. Mocking things is so very very much more fun, and if this ever stops being fun, I’m done with it. It does feel a little lonely out on the raw front (at least when Totali’s not bothering me on IRC about SFIV), but I’ve got to admit, sub groups are better than ever, and even CrunchyRoll’s pitching in to get shows out within days on the outside. Long gone are the days of even as recent as 2006 when some subtitles wouldn’t show up until months after the show aired. The internet has spoiled us all and made the whole raw blogging thing more of a curiosity, almost like the vestigial appendix of the blog-o-heap.

That’s enough of that. On to assorted random other rambling.

I’ve been keeping a sort of response to this post over at BTNR in my pocket for awhile, for reasons that should quickly become apparently if they aren’t already. RelentlessFlame also had a few interesting things to note on it and on the nature of presentation in visual novels, particularly how people view the almighty text box.

This is a little dry, but it’s something that’s interested me lately. Feel free to skip a couple paragraphs if you so desire. The gist is a somewhat dry discussion on the semantics of translating sexual moaning. Since I’ve been translating entirely too much pornography lately (dammit, Alicesoft), which was a completely new experience for me, it did give me quite a bit to think about. Of course, since there are only about 5 different syllables available for your typical Japanese moan (ah, ha, fu, uu, and n… taken off the top of my head, I’m sure I’m forgetting a couple more), after the 300th line of those being slotted together in more or less random combinations, the mind begins to search for greater meaning in whatever it can find.

In any case, Akira proposes that the transliteration of the sounds be omitted entirely, which I feel falls apart not because of any loss of translation, but because of a loss of direction applied to the scene, or specifically, the presence of presence. Very zen, I know. Essentially, if attention is not called to a line, then it does not exist. This extends well beyond pornographic scenes and into basically all forms of media. The presence of silence is different from no presence at all. In most media, characters just stand around patiently waiting their turn to say or do something. That’s different from drawing attention to their silence with a close up shot, having them ‘say’ "…", or in this case, whatever strange noises they make. And sex is pretty much the epitome of a human act full of gasping and funny noises.

Yeah, that’s really all I had to say. I haven’t been thinking that hard about it. Just enough to keep me distracted in between laughing at the terrible terrible metaphors. I haven’t even gotten to the threesome between twin catgirl demons yet… one of which is more tentacles than person.

That all brings me to the continuation of my proud March 32nd traditional  site ‘birthday’ translation announcement and the worst kept secret around. I’m over halfway finished translating Alicesoft’s Big Bang Age. It’s a great little SRPG telling the story of a post apocalyptic Japan (destroyed last decade apparently!) filled with super powered people and the man who has made up his mind to destroy the corrupt world that’s taken over. It’s relatively typical Alicesoft fair, meaning simple but challenging gameplay until you learn how everything works, adorable sprites, lots of silliness, oodles of horrible puns, and lots and lots of sex. Often with a very irate little wolf. It’s definitely a vast departure from the saccharinely sweet Galaxy Angel, but it’s been a lot of fun so far… well… barring the occasional adventure when I end up with a script full of mismarked speakers and absolutely no idea where it came from. Then it tends to often get very very filled with expletives.

I wish I had some kind of actual landmark, but "I should be finished doing 100% of the scripts I grabbed in one run within a week or two" is about as close I can get. It’s completely playable (assuming you recruit the exact same set of characters that I did), but I’m not sure that I’d suggest it… for any number of reasons. The least of which is that none of the graphical work is done yet, and the most of which is the fact that I’m still randomly updating things that can break save games. Plus all the editing things that change at my whim. You can poke at it if you get really bored though. It’ll probably be at least another four to six months at least before I wrap it all up. I’m at just over 50,000 lines so far, which is about how long I estimated it was when I started without a proper script dump, but unfortunately, that’s only about halfway. If you need a comparison, Moonlit Lovers is around 27,000 lines (IIRC). I’m really not sure if I should be happy with my progress or depressed with how much I have left to go.

In any case, it’ll probably be at least another couple months (or however long it takes me to get through Senna’s route) until I’m comfortable calling it something approaching a beta. It’s hard to really get a good grasp of where exactly I am given the nonlinear nature and relative lack of organization in the scripts… as well as how many assorted scenes are hidden around with truly obscure triggers. At some point, I am going to have to stop fishing for scripts inside the game and have to just work through the pile in the folder. There are still 1500 individual scripts to go though, so that’s not going to happen any time soon. Hopefully I will be able to finish it before Big Bang Beat 2 drops.

And that’s all I’ve got to say. Here’s to another year, and hopefully many yet to come.