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A distant goal is to create a script for my custom emulator project that will allow fans to play the Japanese Final Fantasy VI T-Edition hack in English. The hack is incredibly complex and thorny, enough that a full translation patch is considered to be impossible. Personally, I say it’s possible but just excessively work-intensive to do a patch. In any case, I started laying the groundwork for a non-patch translation project (which uses my custom emulator sidebar stuff as a base) a few weeks back but I needed to determine some info ahead of time in order to save myself a ton of work later.

First, the original FF6 script contained about 3000 lines of text. The FF6T script clearly has many more, and after doing the necessary reverse engineering, I learned that it’s around 4600 lines of text. Most of the original script was left intact, though, so I decided to run a comparison to see which of the original FF6 lines matched the FF6T lines. In these cases, since nothing was changed, I simply display the equivalent line from the SNES English translation. This alone will save me a lot of time – otherwise I’d be retranslating the entire original game from scratch (which has already been done to death) AND the entire new hack!

But I soon discovered that many of the changed lines simply had kana words changed into kanji – in other words, no meaning was changed. So I wanted to find a way to identify these lines too and avoid having to manually translate them. So I made a big HTML file of text lines that were different in FF6 and FF6T, which you can see here if you’re interested:

diffs

Using this file, I then manually made a list of the line #s that were essentially the same despite kanji differences. In all, about 440 original lines were changed, and adding in the number of completely brand new lines, I have about 1600 lines of text to translate. Oh man. That’s on top of all the other programming, enemy/item/spells/technique names, and whatever else I’m forgetting. But I think it’ll be worth it in the end… whenever that comes.

I’m currently using FF6T version 2.5 as a base, but it gets updated often enough that by the time I finish it’ll be beyond 3.0. Hopefully not TOO much will change between those versions, or we’ll just be stuck using 2.5.

While working on my academic paper about Funky Fantasy IV I noticed something familiar.

First, the game was obsessed with fluoride for some reason:

Then, while looking through another really badly translated game, I found this:

I can only assume that Google’s old machine translation system considered dentistry as fantasy.

Here’s a blurry look at the bonus we’ll be including with every copy of “I’m Stuck in a Video Game”! Spritework by Nina Matsumoto~

Well, this arrived in the mail today. We’re using it in an upcoming LoL project. Can you guess what we’re working on?

Here’s a peek at the LoL research room. We have all the Japanese materials on the left side, and all the English ones on the right.

We picked up the Hong Kong version of The Legend of Zelda this week! Our copy is pretty beat up, but it’s cool to have.

Found in the April 26, 1991 edition of Marukatsu Famicom:

Whoaaaaa UNDERTALE is officially headed to Japan! It’s been professionally translated and localized by 8-4, and the announcement was tucked in the middle of the UNDERTALE on PS4 and Vita trailer at E3 last night:

Toby Fox did a short interview about the release on the PlayStation blog here.

Fun fact: I’m Mettaton’s hands/arms in that trailer. We filmed my hand gestures backwards to give it a weird, ethereal quality.

I’m really looking forward to playing UNDERTALE in Japanese with Mato. I can’t wait to see the localization decisions 8-4 made!

One thing we needed for our latest (currently unannounced) book was the earliest example of English appearing in Japanese media that we could find. I scoured auction sites looking for old Japanese magazines from the 1960s and 70s, and I found a few neat things. None of these examples ended up in the book, and it’d be a shame for these photos to go unseen.

It’s already time for a reprint of Legends of Localization Book 2: EarthBound. Last week, we received the book proof from our printing company. This is the final step in book publishing before a book goes to print. We need to check each page and make sure nothing is wrong, and I especially watch out for pages that may accidentally be in there twice (a flub that happened to the MOTHER 3 Handbook many years back).

The proof comes spiral-bound and it’s printed on a lesser printer than the big machines that print the real books. The EarthBound book is THICK:

If we spot a problem on the proof, we need to mark it on the page with a sticky note, and also note it on the sign-off sheet so the printers know where to look. You really don’t want to have to make changes at this point, though, because they get expensive.

The proof of our book covers always looks really weird, as none of the color is there. Plus, there are additional transparencies laid on top for things like spot varnish and debossing effects (are these terms confusing yet? I’ll make a post explaining them later). The obi/book sash is also a separate part that we need to check.

We’re gonna send the proof back today, then the shipment of new LoL books should be here in about two months!