天下制覇

I hope you like disappointment.

As was (irritatingly) revealed by Twitter at large two months ago, I began working on translating Baldr Sky some time in 2015. This wasn't predicated on me suddenly discovering a love for the game as much as it was attempting to work on Baldr Force and the entire thing crashing in a blue-screen hot mess multiple times before I could even get out of the prologue. I put far too much stock in the belief that the writing gets better the less brain damage Kou starts with each progressive route, and that the tools were in more or less a decent shape. That was an extremely stupid thing of me to do on all fronts.

It astonishingly only manages to get worse as the characters begin (continue?) acting with no regard for sense while going "Maybe in another world or another time and place, we could've taken 15 seconds to explain things and everything would be different." And that's when it's not just pulling deus ex machinas out of its ass while going "Gee, it must have been a miracle." At least the toolset is in a fairly decent situation now. There are still some obvious issues that remain unresolved, but nothing major… at least unless you're trying to put out something that looks 100% professional.

But that's enough about my disdain for the writing. After all, I despise Seinarukana's writing/characters so very much more and its official tools are nigh-unworkable, and Bunny Black wouldn't even make my top five Softhouse Chara games. It's been two months since the announcement that BS would be officially localized, but the open question still remains: "By whom?" I remain under no contract to anybody. I learned about the licensing from the announcement from AnimeExpo, same as everyone else. While I have received a very small handful of e-mails from Sekai Project, and I have no doubt whatsoever that the license was obtained primarily due to the tools Doddler and Nagato created, as well as my own significant work on it, Sekai Project has yet to make any kind of substantive offer to work with us to translate/release the game(s). Or anything vaguely in the ballpark. We made an offer to them (which was flatly rejected for reasons that remain unclear to us even after expliclty asking), and they did make an 'offer' to give us a grossly inadequate sum of money to hand over everything we've done and walk away, after being told at the very beginning that doing so was completely out of the question. That was a toughie to consider.

It's been over eight weeks now, and I have done literally no translation work on it, or anything else, in that time because I don't know what the future of the project is. Mostly, I've played Overwatch. Badly. The most recent communication from Sekai Project was that we should "step away from it for a little while and come back next month." This was in response to an e-mail from me saying not-so-politely that "I'm concerned about the lack of communication," which was itself a followup to a more polite e-mail from Doddler pointing out that we're frustrated because they're not communicating with us… which had gone ignored for the better part of a week. The solution to the issue of poor communication is, clearly, no communication. That's merely the tip of the iceberg.

I'm under no illusion that airing (just one of) my grievances publicly will spark any kind of peasant's revolt, nor will it ingratiate myself to them, but that ship's apparently long since sailed. This has gone on long enough and caused me enough stress. The situation hasn't changed at all for two months and counting. Being as that I'm not contracted to Sekai Project, nor anybody else, I'm beholden to only myself to do what I think is right and best. For me. So as of now, the project's in indefinite abeyance and I'm moving on to something else. I'm not entirely sure what yet. Maybe I'll take another swing at getting Baldr Force to work using one of the alternate PC releases since clearly nobody cares about that game. Maybe I'll revive Prism Ark or Alternative Sphere's aborted projects. Maybe I'll pray somebody can fix the engine's text display issue before I finish some SHChara game. Maybe I'll do something else entirely. I'm not taking requests.

Maybe I'll come back to Baldr Sky in the future, but I honestly can't say when it'll be, or for certain that it'll happen. I've tried. We've tried. We really, really have, but at this point, getting that ball rolling is on Sekai Project to start communicating with us in ways that they haven't to date, and then we can start dealing with everything else. So long as we keep getting stonewalled, it's impossible for any conversation to even begin. I personally think they're woefully underestimating the amount of work the game needs, both in translation and on the technical side, and it's… disconcerting… for them to be this obstructive instead of trying to make any effort to work with a group that already has the tools, the knowhow, and the scripts/interface significantly more translated than not. Especially after what that group has already done for them.

I apologize if anybody thought my involvement or Dive 1's (script) translation having been finished for the better part of a year would lead to any kind of speedy release, but that's clearly not happening from my perspective. There's no danger of the work done so far being lost, short of an EMP detonating over the entirety of the Northern American continent, at which point I'd postulate that there are more pressing concerns.

Hopefully the next update I have about anything game translation-related won't suck as much. For all of us. Enjoy some foxes. Or don't. Peace out, bitches.