[v1.2 RELEASED!] New English translation project (Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me)
Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2021 8:23 am
UPDATE (2023-08-30):
Patch v1.2 has been released! Click here to jump to the post.
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Hi all!
So since I just can't stop myself, I've begun another English translation project for our beloved SEGA Dreamcast! The game in question is Nakoruru: Ano Hito kara no Okurimono (ナコルル〜あのひとからのおくりもの〜), which I have dubbed "Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me". When completed, this will be (to my knowledge) the one and only English language visual novel for the SEGA Dreamcast, aside from the indie title "Divi-Dead". It's actually a spin-off of Samurai Shodown/Spirits, which makes this even cooler.
You can also see the modified VMU icon containing the English title in the screenshot above. For context, here's the original logo:
This game is a BEAST, coming in at almost 12,000 individual unique lines of dialog text. Funny enough, the 12 individual story modes from "Sakura Wars: Columns 2" was actually only slightly shorter than this. However, as this is one contiguous story, testing is going to be quite a bit more tedious. There's also plenty of images that need to be translated, 90% of which are using stylized text that cannot be identified via OCR and this requires somebody with legitimate Japanese reading/writing/speaking skills. Also, this game features tons and tons of little mini-games scattered throughout the story, all of which will require various degrees of creativity to translate effectively. There's even a typing portion in one of them, which makes me laugh, as it would seem I just can't escape the typing games!
Moving along, I have written a number of custom tools to successfully extracted the entire game script and even created nice, easy-to-use spreadsheets in order to make the translation process as organized and easy as possible.
One of the cool things about this game is the way the scripts are formatted. Similar to something like Policenauts (or other games with general purpose scripting formats), there are control codes scattered throughout that do things like control which images are displayed, which music is played, and more. In fact, the developers even left comments inside these scripts!
Check out the example below, where everything after a "//" is a comment, and everything else is controlling what is seen on screen. The areas highlighted in red are the actual dialog text.
And here's a machine translation of the above text, just for example purposes:
I've even got a nice little custom disc art PVR for GDMenu users:
All of that said, from a technical programming/hacking perspective, I've got my bases covered. In fact I'll probably even do all of the graphic work myself, too. However, one area where I'm still trying to gather resources is for the JAP->ENG translation. Unfortunately, my usual crew is tied up with other projects. Thankfully, I have garnered a fair amount of interest already, but so far do not yet have a team committed to the project. That may change very, very soon, but I wanted to put this out there...
...if you're interested, and I mean REALLY interested, in working on translation for this project, please get in touch!
