Progress report

[aquagon]

Currently, a general translation check of the parts that have yet to be reviewed would be nice, as it would be translating anything that hasn't been translated yet.

[Cless]

Hello, hello...wall of text time!

I recently replayed Ar tonelico I, which in turn motivated me to (finally!) give Ar tonelico II another shot (Phase 4 now, and just loving the ever living hell out of it.). The retranslation project is of course well on my mind all the time while playing it...

Anyways, I decided to do some peeking at the text I dumped last year, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to redump things like the Dualstall conversations using a different method (PS2 compiler seems to optimize exectuable text spaces by recycling strings for duplicates rather than using multiple copies, and my current algorithm is only designed to find the text pointers). The new dumping method would dump from the pointer table itself, allowing me to dump the duplicates as separate strings, thus restoring the proper order of the lines.

In short, this'll get you Dualstall conversation lines and such in the order they appear in-game, without any funny gaps.

The bad thing about this is...it's going to require more space to fit the duplicate strings, and it's highly likely there's won't be enough in the original text space.

Which leads me to my question: has anyone located the file containing the game's main font? Many Japanese games store a copy of the full font in memory at all times, and, at least in Tales games, they're incredibly large. It's quite clear that the English version of ATII retains its full Japanese font. If ATII does the font-copy-to-memory thing, we could gain a ton of free space since we could overwrite the useless Japanese characters graphics with text data. (FYI: Tales of Destiny remake's font is over 900K, IIRC).

Still, it's a total "If" thing. But it's worth looking into since more memory for text storage is never a bad thing.

I'm not completely "back" yet, but just playing the game has ignited my motivation. I really want to see this game done better justice. It's pretty much soared up into my top 3 PS2 games of all time...

Other random thoughts:
I'd really like to help you guys edit the text, too, but I just don't think I have the time. The experience I've gained editing Tales of Phantasia's script over the 12-15 months has given me some sort of editor's instinct. I look at scriptwriting much more critically and carefully than I used to.

I wouldn't mind giving ATI a little cleanup at some point. I honestly don't think too highly of that game's localization either...it's much less of a mess than ATII's to be sure, but I still found it really plain and dry all over the place.

Judging from a little bit of net detective work, there may be some hope for the eventual ATIII localization, if done by NISA (they finally seem to be shaping up).

[aquagon]

Hi again, Cless!
And I'm glad you've been enjoying so much At2!

Well, as far as I know, there's another group that has started hacking At2 too to try to translate it into some other languages, and I've been told they have already found the font, so I guess it'd be a good idea to contact them about it (and I don't think they'll have too much problem with it, given some of us have given them some help with it).

And I think that cleaning up At1's script wouldn't be a bad idea either (since I have found some rather... interesting things from what little I played from the JP version), but we can try to start thinking on it more seriously when we're at a more advanced point in the project.

[Cless]

I'm glad I'm enjoying it so much too, hahaha. Some people don't seem to like it as much as the original, but it honestly seems like a rather large improvement on it in almost every way.

The font stuff isn't all that urgent; just a curiosity for now. I'll probably try to find it later when I have the time.

The other day, just because I felt like it, I did a concept edit of the first conversation in the Dualstall script file. It's based on NISA's script, and I have no idea about core translation accuracy. At this time, I also have no idea how much creative freedom this project is allowing for edits of minor details. In my view, this is reasonable enough and flows a lot more smoothly... (original NISA line first, edit second. Speaker names are assumed, as they are not clarified in the text dump)

Spoiler:  [ Open ]

Luca:
I brought this with me today.
Look what I brought today!

Cloche:
Is that a toy goose? What're you going to do with that?
A toy goose? What's that for?

Luca:
Don't you ever play in the bath?
Don't tell me you've never played in the bath before.

Cloche:
Tell me if I'm wrong, but the bath is not for playing around, right?
Play? But I thought baths were just for washing off and relaxing.

Luca:
What?
R-really?

Luca:
It's strange to not play in the bath!
It's totally weird not to have a bit of fun while you bathe!

Luca:
Geese are traditional bathing toys!
I'll have you know, geese like these are pretty common bath toys...

Cloche:
This...is traditional?
Oh, is that so?

Cloche:
So, how do you play with it?
What are you supposed to do with them?

Luca:
It floats on the water.
Well, first, set one on top of the water.

Cloche:
And then?
And?

Luca:
You watch it.
Just watch it float and drift around.

Cloche:
......
......

Cloche:
And...then now what?
Is...that all?

Luca:
Shove it, make big waves for it, or...
No! Push it around, splash at it, or...

Luca:
Watch it.
Just keep watching!

Cloche:
That's a simple way of playing.
Hmm... If that's all there is to it, it might get boring.

Luca:
You just don't know how addicting it is!
You should try it! It's more addictive than it might sound!

Well, I thought I'd share that. Some light extrapolations in there, but I don't believe they harm anything that matters (unless I've grossly misinterpreted something, which *is* possible) and I hope that kind of thing would be acceptable here. Would love any feedback.

[aquagon]

As far as I can see, the edit sounds much more nicer than the original form, not to mention more natural when it comes to showcasing the personalities of both girls.

And I think that our position is trying to preserve the spirit of the original script, yet trying to make the in-game lines sound as natural as possible, so it should be fine to have some creative license when it comes to minor details.

[Kensou77]

of course we should look into that after the base translation of course, that's my suggestion. but that aside, it seems well rewritten. i haven't looked into the dualstall scripts yet though.

[Cless]

Okay, awesome. I wasn't too sure how my approach to script editing would be taken here, so this is reassuring! I'm not perfect though, and do occasionally write awkward lines unintentionally. Plus, I'd probably need assistance in more difficult parts.

I'll see what I can do about more text editing in the future, then. I need to at least wrap up ToP before I get serious, because that project is way too old at this point. I hope that won't be too long from now.

[aquagon]

Well, if you have any hardships with any specific parts, maybe the translations I did for the official material book could come useful, because of the explanations it contains (which I think was what made us decide the definitive names for Lakra and Jakuri in the retranslation).

And with some luck, your Phantasia project won't take much longer, since from what I have seen, things seem to be going pretty smoothly lately. Of course, that might just be the impression I got from reading the posts over at your forum (though a little wishful thinking doesn't harm anyone, I think).

[Cless]

That might come in handy at some point, but I was just a little more concerned about styling certain characters' dialogue. Like, right now, I don't really have any solid ideas about how to write Jakuri effectively...but I'll try not to worry about it too much. Retranslated lines could make it easier to settle on speaking styles.

I haven't actually done any work on ToP in the last couple weeks, but will resume after I'm done playing ATII (pretty close now I think. Luca just sung Viena).

[SleepingTiger]

I would suggest using a partial masculine tone of voice for Jakuri? As long as she doesn't sound too feminine, I think it should be fine.

[Cless]

Yeah, something like that could probably work pretty well. Then there are a couple traits I think I picked up on: 1) Sound slightly antagonistic, and, 2) Not afraid to speak her mind (and often be quite blunt about it). Well, when the time comes, this is probably material for a separate thread.

That said, I finished AT2 last night (Cloche's path). I loved it so much that I'd definitely like to get more involved with the project here. But like I said, Tales of Phantasia's gotta get finished. And I'm probably also going to need to get some more stuff done on my Tales of Destiny 2 / 1 remake projects.

[aquagon]

Well, later on we can begin analyzing more deeply how the characters should be portrayed in their dialogs.
And don't worry about it, after all, your Tales projects come first than this retranslation (because of their antiquity mostly), so go on with them and think in the retranslation whenever you see fit.

[Kensou77]

for characterization, i strongly suggest the drama cds if you understand them. you can learn a lot about how a character speaks/acts/interacts etc...

[SleepingTiger]

There's that, yeah.

[aquagon]

And a minor update time.
I did some tests with the file that was giving me headaches (52.evd) in PCSX2, and I finally managed to make it run without any freezes, and also, I finally fixed that pesky bug with the Hymmnos glyphs not appearing.
However, there was an small difference this time: for the previous tests I used the undub, while I'm now using the retail version. Maybe the undub causes some unexpected crashes...

[SleepingTiger]

Which would seem kind of odd, since the only thing being edited were the voice files.

[aquagon]

Which would seem kind of odd, since the only thing being edited were the voice files.

Though I remember they had to do some hacking too, since some voice files didn't play even after being inserted back into the game.

And like I promised, here the screenshots of the edits (please, ignore any skewed images and graphical artifacts, since these are all caused by the emulator):

Spoiler:  [ Open ]

Coolame, anyone?


At least it fits her better...


Same here.


At1 consistency, RESTORED.


Reika.


No matter the name, she's still the same Tsundere ^^



REPLEKIAAAAA!!

And as an small bonus, the screenshot of the fixed bug (you can check up this scene in YouTube, and see that no matter the version, the glyphs at the end don't show up)

Also, I think I understand now how the Hymmnos font command exactly works, but I'll leave the explanation for later.

[Kensou77]

instead of people, i think the replekia screens should be persons

[Lunatic Drache]

"Persons" is fairly rare in usage. You see it in technical/legal documents, mostly.

In current usage, there is really no distinction between the two words. Really, your usage of "persons" is archaic.

[Kensou77]

"Persons" is fairly rare in usage. You see it in technical/legal documents, mostly.

In current usage, there is really no distinction between the two words. Really, your usage of "persons" is archaic.

forgive me for being born in the 80s