天下制覇

 

And crap and whatever and yada yada.

It’s been a couple months since cataloging the latest in the endless stream of translation issues challenges and shockingly, nobody has done anything about any of them, so I’ve moved on for now, although like all things, that means more of “a completely different brand of headaches” that “Woohoo! A totally frustration-free project!” Moonlit Lovers was the closest I’ll ever come to that I fear, and only suffering lies ahead.

 

Anyway, status update since I feel like it. I did a short game just as a kind of filler and refresher after all the frustration. I actually finished the script part of translating it a few weeks ago. Like Kamidori though, it has a mind-boggling amount of ancillary text, most of it copy pasted between things or completely redundant, that needs making up rewriting which I pushed to the back of the work instead of the front, mostly due to some issues handling it, a few of which persist even now. Oh, and an ungodly number of buttons in exceptionally incomprehensible formats. There’s nothing that can’t be fixed or worked around in some way, but… well, let’s just say that this project added quite a few more to my ever-expanding repertoire of localization issues I’m aware of. I don’t even particularly like the game, although it was an easy and generally amusing thing to work on for the most part. It’s just the game part that’s the sticking point. It also felt great to look back on a productive three day weekend and see that I got close to 15% of the script done.

  

As for when it’ll be released… eh. There’s almost no actual translation work left and the interface is about 95% done, but that last 5% is killer. Weirdly formatted and arranged buttons, single kanji in 20×20 icons, so on and so forth. A lot is hidden away in the exe (in unicode instead of shift-jis, no less!), so the going’s slow and mostly involves playing the game until I find a new untranslated string or an error and adding it to the list.The game’s files are mostly organized, but if you change a string for one thing, it might mess up a reference somewhere else. For example, if you change the name of a location string, because of the way things are referenced, you can still travel from the… uh, hub?… to the location and back without issue, but not from one of the target locations to another target locations unless you fix the reference ID in some other file somewhere.

   

Random strings might also be hidden in the exe instead of with all the other text of the same kind (item name/description for example… 99% of them are in the item file, 1% are in the exe for Hera only knows what reason). I’ve also only done the barest minimum of work on the ancillary text so far. It badly needs to be jazzed up and there’s so, so much of it. There’s also the world’s most imbecilic and unneeded tertiary minigame that has… translation irregularities of the Chrono Cross variety… and the only way to win it is to save scum anyway so if I had my way, I’d just replace it with an RNG. There’s also the chance I just sit on the game once finished and declare 2015 the Year of Me after 2013 and 2014 were the Depressing Years of Nothing.

  

As for what’s next, well… probably a little bit of backsliding. I had originally planned on doing another short game, but I’ve seen the innards and it has almost all of the same issues as I’m currently being frustrated by. There’s about a 98% chance I’ll do it eventually since it’s short and would be similarly easy/amusing to translate, but I’m not eager to jump right back into the same things that’s killing my motivation at the moment. There’s rumblings in Jastville that Romanesque’s time may be approaching, which will probably mean some tweaking and making a trial at some point. Seinarukana is… still finding new issues. Not localization issues, mind you. Pre-existing issues built into the game. I found a fun one that puts you into an inescapable loop until you either get a game over or hit Alt-F4, but thankfully, it’s close to impossible to hit in normal play. Not fully impossible though (at least I don’t think so), so someone can challenge themselves to find it without dev tools! The latest and greatest issue discovered is some wonkiness in the formulas and scaling that results in some very, very obviously incorrect behavior on the highest difficulty. It’s not really the localizer’s job to fix that, but on the other hand, it’s wrong. But hey, working as intended, eh, Xuse?

 

Speaking of Xuse, or more precisely, the Eternity Sword series team which split off from Xuse to form Eternal (Yumina, Nega0, Corona, etc), they recently got permission from their ex-company to continue the series themselves, so you can maybe look forward to a sequel in stunning 3D animation. Christ, guys. Eternal games have a lot of issues with their gameplay pacing, flow, and almost fetishistic love of having impenetrable interfaces, but at least they were stylish and flashy. Alpha Ride gets pushed back 6+ months and then spits out… that. At least every comment I’ve seen on that promo so far shared my distaste for the change in presentation and style.

I’ve been looking at some bigger/longer/more requested things (and some not) because attention is like a drug it’d be nice to work on something I know is well-reversed and the work would be appreciated, motivational things lacking as of recent. I prodded at a number of things over the Labor Day weekend, but mostly it was a lot of reminders of “Oh yeah, this is what turned me off it.” I’ll probably try to power forward a little more on a few and get to where they supposedly become a bit better, but I’m kind of lukewarm on things in general so I think my plan is to just get an extreme head start on the next anime season preview. Maybe I’ll even be able to put together a PV pack again. Maybe. That’ll fill a whole day or two before I need to think of something else to get motivated about or go back to grinding through ancillary text.

   

I think my ego’s also been getting a boost seeing the woeful affairs of the ‘professional’ game translation world. It feels like for every decently localized game, there’s an abomination like Escha & Logy or SAO. Even Disgaea 4’s port has instances of text running out of the window, across another window, and off the side of the screen, to say nothing of releasing something where they somehow accidentally replaced a butt-ton of blank spaces with Euros, one of the main settings being uncapitalized, or being unable to create a basic numerical list without error.

An error here or there is completely forgivable for massively text heavy things like RPGs are wont to be, but with this kind of clusterslop of problems it makes me wonder if anybody even took a moment to QC any part of these games at all. Consider this my commentary on the news regarding Clannad’s existing translation being repackaged and sold as well. Far be it from me to consider myself in the upper echelon of this kind of thing. I’m not. I’ve been doing this a long time without any oversight and began without a lot of formal education, which is a good way to get into a lot of bad habits and then reinforce errors until they become mantra (and I can be careless!), but good god. It’s almost 2015. This is professional work. I thought we were beyond this kind of amateur crap. Get it together, guys.

Rant and such complete. An instrumental version of Nature Trail to Hell would make an awesome Castlevania theme. Back to work. Seacrest out!