As some of you may know, encubed has had the opportunity to talk with Circus (a Japanese visual novel company) about the commercial localization of some of their products, including Da Capo and Suika AS+. While Circus is not in charge of the translation team(s) working on these games, they did show an interest in what the fans would have to say about the quality they’d expect when they buy a commercial translation.

So this is your chance to let the localization companies know how you feel about their work. When do you consider a translation worth buying? Please let them know by reading and replying to the interview report (link).

I would like to bring to your attention a translation project that several of my friends have been working on over the past year. While under more favourable circumstances I would be doing this simply because this game’s story is extremeley good, the current situation calls for a slightly more urgent call: We are having serious trouble finding a translator.

The project is Saya no Uta, a famous horror game created by Nitro+ (authors of Demonbane and Phantom of Inferno), giving a Lovecraft-like account of the excellent madness of a man lost of this world. The game is relatively short and the language is not extremely difficult, but the writing is more literary than colloquial so kanji abound. Don’t expect to be able to work through it easily with only one or two years of Japanese classes behind you. To illustrate, the first 15% of the game has been translated by sebasdoes who had to give up for spending the better part of his time reading dictionaries instead of actually translating.

We have requested help on the project page several times, we have posted calls for help in encubed gemot and we have asked around amongst our contacts for nigh on three months now. We are however still no single step further than before. I would therefore like to ask the following of our readership:
If you know someone who can handle a literary text of Japanese and translate it truthfully to (fair to decent) English, please ask that person if he/she is interested in translating this famous horror story with us. We may be able to supply that person with a free copy of the game in exchange (but not before most of the work is done). It is not absolutely necessary that this person finishes the entire script translation on his/her own, but it IS greatly preferred.

Note that this is not a mirror moon project, but some mirror moon people are involved in it. In fact we have all positions filled, except for the translator. People interested in this job are encouraged to contact Teus (link). Please spread the word, so that we can bring this great game to the English audiences!

To now we get to an idea that is kinda cool. Kamen Rider Rising started as an idea I had one night while watching Venture Bros. I had started watching Kamen Rider Kabuto (yeah, I know, it sucked balls at the end!) and had this silly idea of “What would Kamen Rider be like if the hero was a monarch butterfly?” After having this strange.. and lame dream about it I was almost scared of the idea… but then I though… “What if the Rider was trapped in a dream world?” Well.. the Monarch thing was silly and current concept does not contain a Monarched themed Rider… more like a Knight in armor (not themed after any particular bug).

So, why the name “Rising”? It comes from the phrase “off to a raising start.” Ironically enough, the hero is trapped in his dream (in a comma no less) and cannot escape.

Plot. Our hero is a aspiring manga artist (comic book artist) who has a thing for the old comics. Unable to dream, he imagines his dreams threw the works of the comic books he creates. One day while working on an idea for a new comic book, he starts hearing people whispering rumors about terrible nightmares overcoming people, and even some people not waking up! This all seems like nothing more than chit chat gossip until our hero has his first dream of his entire life that night! It is a terrible nightmare where a giant monster slices off his arms and ruins his ability to draw! He wakes up, just before the monster smashes him.

Unable to sleep for days, our hero is near delusional. After walking outside from his studio he encounters a young boy attempting to cross the street. A large truck is about to run him down. Our hero jumps out and saves him, taking the hit himself.

Seeing the same nightmare again, the hero manages to save his arms and takes a massive hit that sends him flying straight into the air. While he’s in the air.. he realizes that he probably won’t wake up from this nightmare… and decides to make this dream a canvas. He waves his hands and a typhoon belt appears. He equips it and begins to descend. As he falls, the belt spins up and he says, “If this is the last dream I have in my life… then let’s start it off with a Rising Start!” A Typhoon appears and our hero transforms into Kamen Rider Rising.

Rider Punch! The monster goes flying back. Rider Kick! The monster explodes.

From here on out Rising begins appearing in other peoples nightmares, becoming the hero of dreams. Instead of a preset list of abilities, he improvises on the fly as he requires new power.

What dark secrets lurk in the dreams that follow?

Yeah, I know this is a real rare treat: TheXev is writing a blog. I wonder if people even remember what I do around here. I know I don’t remember what I do around here… ~_~

Message gets all the flames for taking time, but I haven’t done any work on Men At Work! 2 in over a year… why doesn’t 4chan flame me? :/ foowy. Guess it goes to show how much demand there is for that. I guess I need to get my confidence back to get my butt in gear. Then today, while sitting at a Pizza Hut down the street and reading the internet news off my phone I read a story (I’ll be damned if i can find a “real HTTP” link to it now) about a Japanese blogger who recently won an award for best beginning writer (or something.. its a very prestigious award).

The thing about the article wasn’t that she got this award via blogging, or even the staggering information that there are more Japanese blogs then English ones (37% vs 36%), and that most Japanese blogs are personal, rather then contain news. No, the thing that got me is that she was able to show others her creative abilities by blogging. I don’t like to talk about my personal life, and I only ever thought of blogs as either being personal or about news…

Getting back to the subject at hand, my year long funk, I think part of it is related to not being able to vent my creative abilities. In all truth, my goals in life are to making a living of writing (and writing video games, like RPGs), yet I haven’t been able to actually bring myself to muse over any of these silly side ideas. So……

Why don’t I tell you people a little about a few of them, maybe some encouragement or “damn dude, that’s stupid” comments will get me to come back to earth? Some of them are silly but fun, and others are a bit more serious.

I feel some of these idea’s would only end up as glorified fan fiction if I actually started writing them. But they are original in base (most of them), while a few play off existing series (yeah, I have ideas for a Super Sentai series and a Kamen Rider series… I’m going to hell).

Let’s start out with the most disappointing idea of them all:

Idea #1: Dori Sentai, TougeRanger.

I shit you not, I came up with this idea over a year ago in the chat room and would play around with the idea of an entire Sentai filled with drifters and totally about drifting. The idea started as a stupid musing of “What if Initial D where a Sentai series.”

Can you imagine how my heart was crushed when the latest Super Sentai series was announced? Well, I am really enjoying it, but now that its started I don’t feel like a lot of my ideas are going to go to waste! I am also enjoying Go-Onger.. which I had serious doubts about before actually watching the first ep.

My only real issue with Go-Onger is how Go-OnRed is yet another copy and paste clone of DekaRed. DekaRanger is over, its time to actually have a new Red Ranger.

My concept for TougeRanger revolves around a mysterious mountain that has been closed off to the public since an infamous accident occurred several years before the beginning of the show. In reality, the land and road was purchased by TougeRed (a Bunta like character who sits out most battles in the beginning) and he is building the first spectator friendly Touge Race track. A few interested drifters manage to break into the road (TougeWhite male and TougeBlue male), and start driving there at night. Then one night they are chased down by a mysterious yellow car (TougeYellow male). Just when they think they are about to get away the car transforms and both Touge Blue and White spin out in mid-drift. TougeYellow catches the two when an earthquake starts and monsters appear near the base of the Touge.

Instead of lamb basting the two, TougeYellow is instructed by TougeRed via radio to give them “TougeShifters,” a device that accelerates ‘over-tech’ (covered in other Sentai series as the technology behind the Super Suites) threw “TougeRuins” (artifacts discovered on the Touge. unleashing accent powers modernized). The device enables its user and car to transform into TougeRangers and TougeDrift Cars.”

The basic enemies resemble yellow/orange construction road cones (a drifters worst enemy, as the joke goes) and they easily defeat the enemies in the first ep.

If you can’t see the Super Sentai first of the Red Ranger not being introduced in the first episode (and he prob won’t be for 4-5 eps), then … well I’m telling you right now that’s the big first.

I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier, but I wanted to mention this in case some of you don’t visit the forums.

krfsm on the mirror moon forums has announced the creation of a patch which allows the importing of voices from the PS2 version.

While I haven’t had a chance to enjoy the patch yet (my game probably arrives next week), I can imagine it must be great!

Much thanks to krfsm for his contribution to the fan community!

Read the details here.

I just wanted to throw this out there…

Someone recently had the following complaint on the forum about the translation (I’m not picking on you, it just raised a good point):

——————–
I can kinda see stuff like daimyo and nii-san, changing daimyo to “lord”, “count”, or whatever would be appropriate would be kinda like changing “emporer” to “king”, and siblings always referring to each other as “brother” or “sister” in English sounds kinda odd, so stuff like that is alright as long as its not a dub.

But do they really have to leave words like “archer” untranslated? Its not like they’re “the Japanese equivalent to an archer”, they ARE archers, they use a bow and arrows, and that’s what they’d refer to them as in English, too.
——————–

But just to clear up some confusion…
Words like periyerai, aperyu, and many other words with furigana/kanji over them in the original game are NOT Japanese words. They were made up words used in the world of Utawarerumono that Japanese wouldn’t even be able to understand and had furigana over them in the original version. Some of these were modified versions of Japanese, Okinawan, or Ainu words; others were simply just made up. The only Japanese words that I can remember not translating and having furigana were the terms of address. The rest of them are made-up words or intentional variations on Japanese. There is one notable exception to this late in the game, but it’s a spoiler, so I won’t mention it here. In order to get the reference, I’ve left it in Japanese.

I’ve been cruising the internets when I’m not busy with mirror moon, work, or writing my own story, and I have stumbled across (with the nudge from Peorth and Graus) about Katawa Shoujo.

Katawa Shoujo (goddammit, I keep typing ‘Kawata’) is the biggest (known) Original English Language Visual Novel (more commonly known as OELVN) project to date. I believe they are approaching the 200,000 word mark, which is pretty big, considering it’s almost a third of the size of Tsukihime, quite hefty itself.

It is an eroge and is under development by Four Leaf Studios. KS was partially inspired by a thread on 4chan’s /a/ board, which is fairly amazing in my opinion, as you have to have balls of steel or lack of brains to take a page of doodles, character descriptions and ideas, scenarios and somehow compile it into a visual novel.

Katawa Shoujo’s main quirkiness (apart from the easily-typoable name; did it again :/) is that all of the main characters are disabled in some way. The main character you play, Hisao, has a heart condition; some are blind, some are without legs, and so on. The story is set in a school for the disabled. I thought it was initially odd at first to have a visual novel full of cripples, I gradually warmed up to the idea, as it brings out the idea that disabled people have feelings, too.

I have seen some of the character designs and I am definitely already liking some characters more than others (so sue me). Also, the backing music is composed by NicolArmarfi, and after hearing a sample (namely Romance in Andante II), I would have to say the music is probably one of the main things I’m looking forward to in Katawa Shoujo.

A demo is being worked on, although estimated time of completion is unknown.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this project, so I guess I’ll keep people posted.

Website: http://katawashoujo.blogspot.com/
Forum: http://ks.renai.us/
IRC: #zettai-shoujou on irc.rizon.net

I have done up a screencast of QED showcasing the basic features.

This is my first screencast so it’s terrible, some things bug out here and there, and I constantly have to switch between Dvorak and Qwerty otherwise you would be wondering why I’m saying L when it shows up as N, etc :p

Please be warned: This video contains POSSIBLE SPOILERS for ALL ROUTES IN FATE/STAY NIGHT!

I avoid the UBW and HF files, but the dashboard contains maybe ten lines out of HF Day 4. From what I read, it’s not that much different to the other Day 4s, so maybe not.

The screencast is encoded with H264 in the Quicktime container, so you’ll either need Quicktime or Quicktime Alternative to view it. The size is 31.3mb and the duration is 23 minutes and 39 seconds.

View

Enjoy!

Been a loooooooong while since I last posted a blog here.

Anyway, it’s 2008 and I’m working full time for a year. The sad thing is, I have more free time working full time than I had working three full days a week plus five units a semester at uni.

So with my free time, I’ve been getting back into the scene, catching up various things (which involve playing Tsukihime a whole year and a bit after it was originally released >_<, and playing Fate/stay night). One of the major things I'm working on, however, is this little fickle thing we call 'QED'. It's one of those weird acronyms that is out of sync with the words itself. It's an acronym for 'distributed quality enforcement', and also the codename of a fairly exciting tool that I'm developing for mirror moon. In a nutshell, it allows us to streamline the proofing/editing process by quite a lot. I'm estimating that it'll increase the ease of reporting errors in the text, as well as making the grue's (GRand Unifying Editor) job much easier. Previously, we have tried a variety of different solutions for proofing, including Trac, flyspray and are currently using just a forum thread for it. Trac and flyspray was too complex for what we wanted, but granted, they were full on issue reporting applications. I happened to browse the forums one day and came across the forum thread with a day of UBW's proofing. What I saw made me cringe: Each proofreader posted a few sentences of the original text that warranted a change and the proposed fix along with a reason (if needed). Then the master proofer (Message) would go through the posts and either agree or disagree with the change, and in the case of one that he can't decide (usually due to a translation styling thing), it goes to the grue (who happens to be TakaJun). After all THAT, then the grue looks at the thread, decides whether to implement the fix or not, opens up the diff, looks for the line, then changes the line. Repeat that by at least ten fixes per scene, around twenty scenes per day, then by however many proofers reported that change... it's a lot of boring and time-consuming work. There are also a few downsides that further slow down the process. The master proofer doesn't easily have access to context (as it's generally the line that needs changing), and he has to go look for it, which further wastes time. Then, the grue might have to scroll all over the place to make sure the same line isn't reported twice, as one might have a better fix than the other. I considered all this and decided that we needed a custom proofing solution. So I made one. QED began development on the 1st of December, coded in Ruby on Rails. It is fairly close to completion; I'm just implementing keyboard support for even faster proofing (thank you, Message, it is really a timesaver ;o). Each script file counts as a Section, and they have many Blocks (think chunks of text). The Block contains a copy of the original text and all the English lines within that block. Each Line then has Fixes, which are proposed fixes to the original line. Each Fix has a reason and comments. The proofer's general workflow is now:

1. Proofer sees a problem.
2. Proofer adds a fix.
3. Proofer moves on.
4. Proofer sees another problem, but this time, other proofers have suggested fixes.
5. Proofer can then vote on a fix, optionally comment on why, then continue.

And so on. This is already muchly improved compared to the old method already… no duplication of efforts (apart from more than one person proofing the same thing, but that’s what we want).

Lets look at the master proofer workflow:

1. MP sees an unresolved line (marked with an orange number on the left).
2. MP looks at the list of fixes.
3. MP looks at the context, which is above and below the line in question.
4. MP optionally looks at the original text (which is shown by a toggle link).
5. MP makes decision based on intuition and votes.
6. MP clicks a button next to the decided fix.
7. MP moves on.

How much time did we just save there? A lot.

Now, lets look at the grue’s workflow, which is really the above, plus this:

1. Grue makes sure everything is resolved by checking the stats at the top part of the page.
2. Grue clicks ‘Download Diff’, which depending on where he is, sends him a .txt in his chosen encoding or a zip file.

I’m pretty damn sure that saved a shitload of time there.

Plus, when keyboard shortcuts are done, things will be even faster. The whole thing also heavily uses AJAX to streamline the process even more. It also has versioning built in so we can see who made changes to what, and also revert if needed.

We will be using QED for HF, and I’m using it to report various bugs I’ve found in Fate as I’m playing along. QED also has project support, so we will be using this for future projects as well.

That rant was almost tooooooo long, but I hope you guys enjoyed a sneak peek into what goes on behind the scenes.

Well, time for another blog post. What can I talk about… who am I kidding, eroge. So, I finished all the playable games I bought in Japan (Some games were unplayable on my system –;) So here’s some of the good games I’ve played recently.

First of all, my personal #1 game of the year, KIRA KIRA!!
This game is fucking awesome and the OP is great, too. It’s making me want to buy a guitar… おファック！

Another great game was Harukani aogi, uruwashino. A game with lovely atmosphere, and great characters, especially Miyabi (みやびちゃんぷりちー！)

Next, Koibito doushide surukoto zenbu. This game will literally make you cough up blood and lets you die of moe.

Then there’s Fossette and Kono aozora ni yakusoku wo. I honestly think the game was overrated, but it was still good.

Then there’s Daiakuji. Alicesoft games never fail to get me hooked, and this game succefully made me waste 100hours of my life. –;

There were other good games like StarTRain, 世界でいちばんNG（だめ）な恋, そして明日の世界より

…
Maybe a little progress report on Heaven’s Feel translation won’t hurt. (I have no idea how the UBW installer is going)
Heaven’s Feel is 15% translated as of now.