Xanadu I and II - General Translation Project(s) Thread

[SkyeWelse]

Congratulations Elmer and SamIAm! Looks like the project is coming along very well and I'm happy to hear that the first draft of the script it finished.

Is an English dub project already open for this?

-Thomas

[esteban]

UTTERLY
MAGNIFICENT
PROGRESS

(UMP)

[SamIAm]

Is an English dub project already open for this?

Not just yet, I'm afraid. Depending on how many people are capable of doing multiple parts, we're going to need anywhere from thirty to fifty actors total to pull this off. That's going to be incredibly time consuming to deal with, and I am going to need everything in place...from a finalized script to ready-to-bake audio mixes...before I open those floodgates.

I'm basically going to do the Xanadu II dub over again, as well.

----------

In other news, I have play-tested Chapter 6 about two-thirds of the way through. Unlike Chapter 4, this one is very pleasantly simple and centralized. Chapters 8 and 9 are just like it, and Chapter 10 and 11 have little text to them at all, so once again, Chapter 7 will be the big challenge to get through. If I'm lucky, we'll have that one done by the end of the month.

Also, I spent some time today looking at Xanadu II. It has next to nothing to do with the first game in terms of story, but the introductory scenes still refer to it a lot. As much as I hate to admit it, I made a good few incorrect assumptions about the story of the first game when I wrote this stuff five years ago, and I've had to work at fixing problems related to that in the script.

Perhaps it's not surprising, but doing Xanadu I first really was the proper way to go. Now everything will be nice and consistent...although I can already tell that whoever wrote Xanadu I didn't write Xanadu II. That's kind of good, though; Xanadu II will be a fresh experience both to work on and to play.

[SamIAm]

Xanadu II is moving forward fast. And when I say fast, I mean that I got the entire prologue chapter smoothed over in the new script dump and ready for play-testing in one day. 

The other chapters are all a lot bigger, but still, this is some damn fine progress. I'll try to get chapters 1 and 2 done by the end of the month. IIRC, Chapter 4 is the big fat one in Xanadu II.

Anyway, I'd put money on being able to have this ready for play-testing by the end of March. 

[SamIAm]

I've waited five years to see this.

Legend of Xanadu II - English Translation WIP (2/17/2016)

Once again, please don't share this link. It's very much a work in progress.

The back story is that after the first game, Areios*  spent three years going all around the land of Ishtaria helping people get their lives back together. While he was busy doing that, a new continent was discovered, and one of Areios's friends and former party members from the first game, Lykos, sailed off to investigate it. When Areios returns to the capital city and learns that Lykos has been gone longer than planned, he decides to set out after him. The prologue you see here is Areios and his right-hand man Daimos aboard a ship approaching the new continent.

*We've decided to switch to name spellings we found in official Falcom materials.

I decided not to talk to all the sailors, but all of their lines are working fine and looking good. They actually change what they say frequently. A lot of little things are different if you talk to Daimos again directly after getting all the equipment from the treasure chests.

[ginoscope]

Very impressive good work guys and thanks for sharing the video.

Are you actually testing on real hardware when you do your play-testing?  I liked the blue font when he marked the map.  I been playing through Dragon Slayer and they used a similar green font to emphasize actions the characters were doing.

[NecroPhile]

That is so frickin' awesome. 

[MNKyDeth]

Wasn't sure if I was watching some sort of pron or a game.

But both seem to excite me in interesting ways.

[deubeul]

C'est magnifique 

[LentFilms]

Wow, seeing the Xanadu II footage is really throwing me for a loop. Congratulations you guys, it has been a long time coming.

[NightWolve]

I've waited five years to see this.

Legend of Xanadu II - English Translation WIP (2/17/2016)

Once again, please don't share this link. It's very much a work in progress.

Bah, I wanted to share it...

So, I noticed, do you like the idea of showing the character's name once in a text box on the first line, and if they have a lot more to say, excluding the name thereafter ? I saw it was being done with the navigator's text.

I really think I'll have to do that for Emerald Dragon to compress text blocks enough to fit them back in place. Seems like a simple enough idea to go with. Games like Ys IV never even showed anybody's name, the whole textbox was always dedicated to text, so that style varies.

EDIT: Yeah, confirmed, you're already doing what I was thinking of doing too for ED. Show the character's name once, any more text, skip the name, but if it's somebody else's turn to speak, you show the name again to make that clear, and exclude it if they have more to say on that turn. Repeat. This might be all the space-saving tricks needed in ED's case.

[elmer]

So, I noticed, do you like the idea of showing the character's name once in a text box on the first line, and if they have a lot more to say, excluding the name thereafter ? I saw it was being done with the navigator's text.

That's just how Falcom have done it in the game ... I'm not sure if it's a specifically-considered decision to do it that way on SamIAm's part.

We have pretty-much-complete control over the script language at this point, so it's trivial to split text boxes and make new ones, and to add/remove the speaker's name however SamIAm desires.

[NightWolve]

Aaah, that was their style already. Well, it might just save enough space in ED's case cause they're printing the name and linefeed character every time, so done deal.

[SamIAm]

Very impressive good work guys and thanks for sharing the video.

Are you actually testing on real hardware when you do your play-testing?

Thanks!

I don't use real hardware at the moment because I'm always fixing things and checking them as I go. That entails essentially building a new CD image every time I want to see a change. An emulator is the clear best choice for this phase.

A real hardware test will happen eventually, though, and I'm confident it will work.

Bah, I wanted to share it...

Soon, don't worry. And thanks for wanting to spread the word!

--------

Chapter 6 of X1 is fully play-tested now.

There's one important conversation near the end that I'll probably want to tweak a bit more, but anyway, the big stuff that needed fixing is fixed. 

It's hard to choose, but Chapter 6 might be my favorite one in the game.

[nectarsis]

VERY cool can't wait to see more

[esteban]

I've waited five years to see this.
Legend of Xanadu II - English Translation WIP (2/17/2016)

I love little details like Areios being a "poor" artist (or cartographer, as it were). Everything from the moment the crew spots land onward is golden

[Arjak]

Wow Sam, you and Elmer have been busy! It always makes me happy to see the rapid progress you guys have been making on this project. I cannot wait to see the final result; I know it will be spectacular!

[Dicer]

This is like a dream, but I am awake...

[True Puffer]

Does this rapid progress means we could see the release of this game in 2016 on NX Virtual console?

[ParanoiaDragon]

Does this rapid progress means we could see the release of this game in 2016 on NX Virtual console?

No, however, we are currently awaiting approval for a ZX Spectrum conversion, once the Game.com port is done!

[elmer]

Does this rapid progress means we could see the release of this game in 2016 on NX Virtual console?

You've brought up the whole "repro/translation" thing before in another thread and been shot down.

From a practical POV, "yes" Falcom do have a relationship with Nintendo, and "yes" both Legend of Xanadu games are available on the Virtual Console in Japan, and so "yes" they've already got a PCE-emulator running on Nintendo's hardware.

Therefore, if Falcom got on board and wanted to release it officially on the forthcoming NX, then it would probably be technically possible ... but the chances are slim-to-none, and even if the Porcine Aerobatics Stunt Team did take-off, then it still wouldn't be in 2016.

[True Puffer]

I am glad to hear that you remember my thread on "repro/translation" thing.

The reason i am asking is because there is a rumour that Mother 3 could be published on Virtual console and if they make use of Tomato's work he could get a nice paycheck from Nintendo. The same thing could happen with yours and Sams work provided Falcom is aware that such a quality translation even exists. I would suggest to inform people at Falcom about your work before the patch is released because there is a better chance of success.

[Johnpv]

I just wanted to say this is crazy impressive, what you guys are doing is amazing.  Everything is looking killer so far, and thank you for doing this!  Can not wait to get to play these games in english!

[NightWolve]

The same thing could happen with yours and Sams work provided Falcom is aware that such a quality translation even exists. I would suggest to inform people at Falcom about your work before the patch is released because there is a better chance of success.

It's strange/silly hearing people think that such rare 1-in-a-million occurrences could be just around the corner again when there's little evidence to support that level of enthusiasm for it...

Bear with the soapbox tangent here:

How many times has this occurred in history, an official videogame publisher deciding to acquire fan translated results in the last 20 years ? The first that I know of in videogame history was with me and the main translator I recruited, Jeff "DeuceBag" Nussbaum, in May 2010, and that was handled horribly in a criminal, divisive, discriminatory fashion where they intentionally pit the language translator against the programmer, as the employee (Thomas Lipschultz) that pitched the idea to his boss, Ken Berry (an ex-SquareSoft manager!), hated me and his presentation about me guaranteed the criminal end result...

Whatever the case, a horrible precedent was set which they stand by and their rabid fans agree, the translator can sneak around with translated results sitting on his/her computer, run off with them with a commercial entity, profit/pocket 100% of the payment, 100% of the credit, then disappear ever since and play stupid about it... According to them, that's how it's always supposed to work, and maybe if they don't hate the programmer, they could throw a nice little Special Thanks back-of-the-bus credit, assuming their employees don't dig up any dirt on him/her to then deny even that show of respect/appreciation...

You really have to trust who you're working with, and backstabbing is common place all over when it comes to fan translations... Shimarisu, my main Ys IV translator, was caught selling prepatched CD-Rs on eBay thanks to our translation project with original Ys IV CD-ROMs. Somebody reported it to me, I confronted her, and she just declared, "It's MY translation!" and that was all there was to it, much like how DeuceBag behaved with X.X.XSEED Games...

Before all of that, before even Tobias crawled out of the sewers to press his first Sapphire bootleg, a guy called Tru put up CD-Rs on eBay for sale with my Xak III patch on them! It broke our friendship for years, but he eventually apologized and it even led us to doing the Startling Odyssey II project... Shimarisu eventually apologized too, but our friendship never really recovered after that either. I wouldn't have cared if she had informed me about it, I would've told her to keep 100% of whatever she made, of course I would have to tell others in the project as it wouldn't technically be fair to them for such a public commercial situation, but it's the sneaking around, the backstabbing that gets to me... You can't trust anybody, I don't care how much you might think you're friends with said person so fair warning!

So, you have a horrible commercializing precedent with future implications where the programmer(s) has to watch his/her back in any fan translation team and must have absolute trust in their translator if something like this ever occurs again on a very modern game... It's never gonna happen with old retro games or the odds are just way way smaller, but if you're fan translating modern, powerful Windows PC games, it's something to keep in mind and really trust the person you're working with, and perhaps make agreements with your translator on the possibility, as small as it is if it ever happened again. In my case, any agreements with DeuceBag, all would've been ignored as he had contempt for me all along that he hid well, he broke and lied about other agreements, so yeah, even then you really have to know and trust the other person(s) you're working with!

In short, don't worry about this ever happening with old retro games... It's a silly, fanboy wet dream. I know of no precedent for it - feel free to provide one if you do (your citing a case with Tomato/Nintendo which never happened, only your hope)... But, I do know of a precedent if working on powerful, modern 3D Windows PC games or PSP such as "Ys: Oath in Felghana" which have real, future market potential to sell well, just that, you also have horrible shenanigans that go along with it and I wouldn't be all that excited as a programmer in a fan translation team given how that went down and all the claims that's how it's "supposed to work..."

[CrackTiger]

Even when Sega finally brought over MWIV to VC so many years after the fan translation, they still did their own translation. If ever there was a company that would absolutely never even consider using a fan translation, it's Nintendo. To believe even a rumor to the contrary only shows how little you know the company you collect for. I'm sure that MrSega honestly believes that his Dreamcast 2 project is legit and that he and Sega are simply hammering out the details, but the reality is that he's just mentally ill.

Just ignore Puffer. He's a repro collector who has already encouraged people to stab translation team members in the back, the way that Nightwolve described. He also refuses to donate towards any of the projects he demands be completed, until he is provided "Working Designs" style packaging. Because "donations don't look good on his shelf".

[True Puffer]

Yes, it is  truly my hope that Tomato gets the credits from Nintendo and set a precedent for future projects.

How many times has this occurred in history, an official videogame publisher deciding to acquire fan translated results in the last 20 years ?

Well, Virtual console existed only for 10 years but it never reached it's full potential. Virtual console and Steam are still untapped markets for japanese game developers.

The first real successful story of unpublished game in the west was Earthbound Zero on NES and the Mother 3 could be the smashing success which could open the door to other games such Secret of Mana 2 etc.

I still think that Gofundme and Kickstarter are untapped sources for retro game translators and it is sad that nobody has even tried it!

P. S.
I am wondering if people at Falcom are even aware of your translation/dub of Ys 4?

Just ignore Puffer. He's a repro collector who has already encouraged people to stab translation team members in the back, the way that Nightwolve described. He also refuses to donate towards any of the projects he demands be completed, until he is provided "Working Designs" style packaging. Because "donations don't look good on his shelf".

I am amazed that you still remember what i have written so many months ago. This proves that my thread didn't go unnoticed.

[NecroPhile]

The first real successful story of unpublished game in the west was Earthbound Zero on NES...

I'd say the dozen or so PCE games released on VC in NA were successful.  I never saw any solid sales numbers, but I can't imagine they'd keep cranking them out if they weren't selling.

I still think that Gofundme and Kickstarter are untapped sources for retro game translators and it is sad that nobody has even tried it!

So go start one and quit sitting on the sidelines, pissing and moaning that the world isn't catering to your whims.

[NightWolve]

P. S.
I am wondering if people at Falcom are even aware of your translation/dub of Ys 4?

Only if some bilingual Japanese/English speaker translated information about it to Japanese and emailed them. And even then, such a person would have to know someone important above the email clerks in the company who likely don't forward general fanboy pie-in-the-sky hopes/dreams which I think this falls under. It's also not a game they developed, just guided and provided the music for. I would guess part of the ownership of it now lies with Konami since they absorbed Hudson Soft.

It's a money loser likely, and in an alternative reality, I suppose someone inside of XSEED Games could've attempted to get the ball rolling on this perhaps (though I know of no other retro games they might've tried to add to their library in some way), but as they burned all bridges with me given that Lipschultz used his company for petty revenge (brazenly so), there's no way they'd even hypothetically consider it because they'd have to reconcile with me on their past wrongs. At present, they're hoping they escape accountability for what they did on the PC Ys scripts with enough passage of time and me failing to hire a lawyer all these years (which was my last Hail Mary shot at correcting the situation, if ever).

I'm not making fun of you, honestly. But I think you're being a bit too fanboy-ish with such hopes/dreams in my opinion and you don't have precedent for it. And the one I mentioned for modern Ys PC and PSP games doesn't speak well for the industry in how they handled it... I wouldn't want something like that to happen to somebody else... It's better that a publisher hires a professional translation company like they always do rather than repeat XSEED's criminality.

[True Puffer]

So go start one and quit sitting on the sidelines, pissing and moaning that the world isn't catering to your whims.

I will be the first one to support such a campaign but the people like elmer, Sam or NightWolve should start such a campaign with the marketing help from the big youtubers like the guys from finalbosses.com who are all members of this forum. In this video between 6:25 and 6:35 Happy Console Gamer mentions NightWolve:

So he obviously knows about you only if you manage to persuade him to make a video about your future gofundme or kickstarter translation campaigns. He also could  persuade the rest of the finalbosses youtubers to promote the campaign.

Only if some bilingual Japanese/English speaker translated information about it to Japanese and emailed them.

In the translating community i think this shouldn't be much of a problem doesn't it? You are a insider, right?

[elmer]

TruePuffer: We've already gone through all of this with you once.

Now, could we please just move all this off-topic fantasy talk of publisher-funded translations and KickStarters off into some other thread, just like your last one?

pcengine-fx.com: Kickstarting translation projects?

Then perhaps we can leave this thread for talking about the actual translation that's being done, and move all the discussions of what we "should" do to a different thread.

[SamIAm]

Note: Don't anyone go getting any bright ideas and contacting Falcom now. They might give us a Cease-and-Desist order.

True Puffer: What we are doing is ethically in the grey-area as it is. Accepting money without official authorization is a big step toward the darker end of the spectrum, and it's not something I care to do. Thanks for your enthusiasm and all, but frankly, just seeing this topic come up makes me nervous and uncomfortable.

[True Puffer]

OK guys i will cease and desist. I will be watching your progress.

[NightWolve]

Note: Don't anyone go getting any bright ideas and contacting Falcom now. They might give us a Cease-and-Desist order.

Honestly, I'd never worry about that in the context of these old PC Engine Xanadu games. Plus, with their US partner XSEED Games snagging unlicensed fan translations for the Ys games, shady as it was, they're kind of essentially neutralized if you ask me. Business is tough, PC gaming market crashed in Japan, they lost their distribution partner hence why they no longer make many PC games and switched to consoles to save themselves, etc. It's so doubtful they would ever want the bad PR of this in the face of fans and have extra cash for paying lawyers to punish something that in no way affects their current business!

I actually worried about that with Ys: Oath in Felghana which is partly why I scared pirates away by playing to their crazy paranoias about me at one point (they accused me of patch viruses to stop their pirating), but you see the BIG difference, it was a newly released modern PC game at the time and we could've released the English patch ONE MONTH later after it was published in Japan, so I purposely delayed the project for another year and a half (we moved too fast)!

But yeah, if you really have this fear, I will safely say I'm 100% sure there's nothing to worry about here. The president of Falcom already knows about our fan translations on their games, FYI, if you're curious:

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ysinterviews/ysinterviews.htm

JS: English speaking fans are so passionate they've made unofficial translations of Ys - what does Falcom think of this?

TK: We're really honored that people are interested in the Ys world so much. However, at the same time we always felt guilty for not being able to bring an official product to their hands. We're very pleased that after a long time we were finally able to bring over an official English version for this audience.

Falcom is "honored" that we hacked away at their games. ;)

I will be watching your progress.

Why did that sound a little creepy to me ? ;)

[technozombie]

Lol to get back on topic, the translation is looking beautiful. I can't wait to give this game a playthrough.


Oh yeah, on the subject of Earthbound Zero, that wasn't even a fan translation. It was a leaked prototype already translated by Nintendo. It can hardly be used as a success story for geting fan translated games published. I'm certain the sales of EB on Wii/Wiiu had a much bigger impact on the releasing of EBZ than a ROM floating around the internet or a few repro carts.

[Vimtoman]

Just caught up on the pr0gress on this translation.
Well done guy's

[SamIAm]

Good news, everyone. The Xanadu II translation is now ready for play-testing. 

The primary reason why this happened so quickly, of course, is that the translation was done a long time ago. However, I owe a lot to elmer for writing up some code to automate the copy/pasting from the old dump to the new dump. I'd have been searching->copying->pasting for weeks if it weren't for that. Once the automated copying did its thing, though, all I had to do was go through and do a little extra massaging to make sure everything was fitting like it needs to. There were a couple little spots that hadn't been dumped before, but those didn't take long to get done, either.

Of course, it also helps that Xanadu II has less than half as much text as Xanadu I.

Besides play-testing, the big thing that remains to do on my end is the dub. On elmer's, it's primarily hacking in the graphics and getting ADPCM tools ready. Anyway, big progress is happening every week, so hopefully these things will start coming together soon!

[seieienbu]

Good news, everyone. The Xanadu II translation is now ready for play-testing. 

!!!

...seriously, this is the best news.

[technozombie]

Definitely awesome news. Can't wait.

[elmer]

Woohoo!!! 

But ...

Besides play-testing, the big thing that remains to do on my end is the dub. On elmer's, it's primarily hacking in the graphics and getting ADPCM tools ready. Anyway, big progress is happening every week, so hopefully these things will start coming together soon!

That was incredibly quick. OMG ... I've got to get off my lazy butt and get more stuff done! 

[SamIAm]

The Xanadu I cutscene draft script has advanced from "at least we have something in English" to "we could use this now if we needed to".

In order to make a good dub script, you really have to carefully measure how long each Japanese line is, then test-read each English line to see if it can fit in the same amount of time. Adjusting your reading speed and adding sighs, laughs, pauses etc. can help, but some lines simply have to be either cut down or padded out for them to work.

Once you've done that, you need to go back and re-read all the lines focusing more on whether they sound good, all the while re-testing for length anytime you make a significant change. Since you're doing everything out loud, working on a dub script gets tiring faster than when you're editing something that's only going to appear as text.

If I wanted to rush, I think we could start recruiting for the dub in just a couple of weeks. However, elmer and I have been putting a lot of work to make this whole translation look as good as we can, and I'd hate for this one part to be so rough around the edges that it distracts from everything else. A fan-dub is going to have a bit of an amateur feel to it no matter what, but I definitely think that putting in the time to double and triple check everything before we start asking people to record is going to pay off down the line. It just means you'll have to wait a few more weeks before we release this.

I'm honestly considering making a full test-dub consisting only of me reading every line, just so it'll be easier to judge what's working and what's not. That would be interesting. 

I kind of expect that when we get people to agree to play parts for us, they'll be really enthusiastic for a week or two, and then they'll start falling off the radar. When we do start asking people for recordings, I want to be able to spend all my time on helping them get the best takes they can while they're interested, rather than asking them to wait while I re-write something that isn't working so well.

------

By the way, I'm still play-testing Chapter 7 of Xanadu I. I have a day off tomorrow, and I'm going to try to finish it all then.   

[deubeul]

I don't know how long it took to dub Ys4, but if you can reach the same quality for the Xanadus, take the time you want! And that's anti-dub, pro-subtitles guy's  words.

[NightWolve]

Subtitles are just too tough in games like these, easier to simply find/replace APDCM voice-acting clips... If anybody could ever do it if they put their mind to it, it'd be elmer though. But, given he's already mentioned how tight memory is, and that's the same thing Neill Corlett told me about Ys IV 12 years ago, it's likely impossible, not without perhaps using a hacked system card with a flashcart that allows reads/writes as was talked about around here in the past.

[seieienbu]

If I wanted to rush, I think we could start recruiting for the dub in just a couple of weeks. However, elmer and I have been putting a lot of work to make this whole translation look as good as we can, and I'd hate for this one part to be so rough around the edges that it distracts from everything else. A fan-dub is going to have a bit of an amateur feel to it no matter what, but I definitely think that putting in the time to double and triple check everything before we start asking people to record is going to pay off down the line. It just means you'll have to wait a few more weeks before we release this.

As eager to play this in English as I am (and I'm sure everyone else is too), I'd much rather wait for a final, well-polished, professional seeming finished product.  There's no need to rush whatsoever.  I'd much rather this continues as the current pace; stuff is being accomplished fairly rapidly, yes, but the attention to detail and the level of perfectionism is what makes me excited most about this project.

Glad to hear about chapter 7 play through, too.

[Dicer]

Excellent progress as always and when it comes time around for voices, please allow some submissions, I'd love to voice something even minor, just to be a part of this, these are games I've wanted in English since release, second only to the FEOE titles, which you guys should totally tackle next ;)


Keep up the amazing work...

[deubeul]

Subtitles are just too tough in games like these...

Yes, I'm aware of that..

What I tried to say is that as a subtitle elitist, Ys4 dub's quality totally changed my mind.

Now I'm all for a Xanadu dub, all my doubts and disapointment disappeared!

... the FEOE titles, which you guys should totally tackle next ;)

Keep up the amazing work...

That would be a dream come true

[Vimtoman]

Being a pc engine shooter based fan I'm still looking forward to these translations. Do we get to try this before the English voice overs?

[SamIAm]

We're not going to do any releases until everything is done, if that's what you're asking.

When the day finally comes that we do release the finished translation, however, we'll make it easy for a person to elect not to use the dub. I'll release the script, so you can print it and keep it nearby to read when a cutscene happens if that's what you prefer.

For the two games combined, it will be about 60 pages. 

[SamIAm]

Finally, I've finished my first pass of Chapter 7. I've got 76 savestates archived for this chapter alone.

Also, I went ahead and made a test of me reading my script of the intro for Xanadu I. The script was good. My reading sucked. What can I say? I'm not good at playing wise old men. Too bad there aren't any nerdy middle aged guys in the game.

Finally, for a change of pace, I went and translated a no-frills Japanese walkthrough of Xanadu I to English. Its format is pretty simple:
1. Talk to Person A in (Location)
2. Talk to Person B in (Location)
3. Talk to Person C in (Location)
...etc.

Already, though, I dare say it is the most thorough and accurate walkthrough ever made in English. My plan for now is to release it with the game, hopefully with maps included.

[Arjak]

Holy shit, Sam! I can see the finish line from here! I'm going to need to buy a copy of LoX1 soon! Keep it up!

[Vimtoman]

We're not going to do any releases until everything is done, if that's what you're asking.

When the day finally comes that we do release the finished translation, however, we'll make it easy for a person to elect not to use the dub. I'll release the script, so you can print it and keep it nearby to read when a cutscene happens if that's what you prefer.

For the two games combined, it will be about 60 pages. 

Script sounds good. 
Really looking forward to playing this game now.
How many voice actors do you need.