Partially Translated ADV Game

[GLACIER]

Hmm....I finally found a link to this freeware game again. Everything has been translated except for player selections, a few item names, and (unfortunately) ending text.

The game is by far the best Japanese fan effort (my sampling is rather limited, of course) I've had the pleasure of playing. The story isn't remotely original, but I found the atmosphere and design to be unmatched by anything else I've tried.

Despite the incomplete status, I'd highly recommend giving the game a try. By repeatedly saving and loading, it's quite easy to figure out the player selections (you select from a main menu most of the time).

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA018423 ... index.html

English download
http://www.perapera.co.jp/freeware/time ... ftware.asp

Latest Japanese download
http://www.vector.co.jp/games/soft/win9 ... 02094.html

Q&A + Event Flowchart
http://wwwi.netwave.or.jp/~pleiades/soft/qanda.htm
http://wwwi.netwave.or.jp/~pleiades/soft/qanda2.htm
http://wwwi.netwave.or.jp/~pleiades/sof ... events.htm

Excite's Auto-translator
http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/web

It's been over two and a half years since I first played the game, but the translation project hasn't progressed any. Out of interest, I tried converting the game to Ren'Py (using a dumb combination of Babelfish, Google, and BizLingo to interpret names and phrases, as well as the walkthrough to help determine where flags should be set) while fixing a couple bugs in the process, but this couldn't work out. To be honest, I guess I'm still a little hopeful that a complete translation might one day be released.

[PyTom]

I'm curious as to why you say a translation to Ren'Py couldn't work out. Is there something missing, or was the effort too great, or what?

[GLACIER]

I'm curious as to why you say a translation to Ren'Py couldn't work out. Is there something missing, or was the effort too great, or what?

The guess the task became too daunting for the amount of time I was willing to spend. Creating English selections was straightforward - with character dialogue already there to guide me, I relied on machine translation to gain a rough idea of how the Japanese text could be translated and pieced everything together from there.

However, my main concern was that I was unable to do a conversion without significantly bastardizing the game. From the beginning, I'd already decided to make certain changes due to my inability to work with all the original files. Sound effects were either replaced or omitted entirely. In place of Shockwave cutscenes, I also began working on still images that would serve the same purpose.

These aesthetic changes worked okay. However, organizing event flow was pretty frustrating. There were many variables to track, and I was often unsure of how certain scenes or dialogues opened up (what you see depends on the protagonist's 'relationship' with Yuriko, on which events you previously saw, on the items you picked up, and on the things the protagonist did or didn't discover), or when a counter had been incremented to a value large enough to fulfill a particular requirement. The final third of the game relies heavily on these, and even after hours of testing, I was unable to work everything out by observation.

At this point, I considered redesigning things to my liking. However, since less than half the game had actually been implemented, I just wasn't inclined to finish a butchered product, nor was I willing to sit down and stupidly study the game again.

At any rate, the original game appears to have been written with Javascript and HTML, so it'd be possible to go in and check the original material. I have no experience with JS, so it's all beyond me, but recreating a game without documentation is just a bad idea.

[mikey]

OMG, thanks for this piece of information!! I'll give the game a go ASAP. I know there are several games that are made in Japan, but have been internally translated, even completely, but since my Japanese is non-existent, I can't actively search for them. Thanks again!