a fire emblem translation mill

the "i'm still alive and working, i swear!" status update: year 2 edition

2018-05-14T12:43:13Z

(mirrored on tumblr)

Awright, here we are, 730 days later. i think we can all agree that it's a downright damning reflection of the glacial pace at which i work that technically speaking, what i'm here to write is more or less exactly what i wrote this time last year. The circumstances are still basically identical; i'm the sole reason for the holdup, life keeps getting in the way, but i'm Working On It And Will Finish The Damn Thing i Swear.

Don’t worry, though. This time, i actually have something resembling progress to share. It's pretty good, too, if i do say so myself.

( bloody disgrace )

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Regarding today's Fire Emblem Direct

2017-01-19T02:22:25Z

i'm going to be completely upfront. this is the first time i've been this genuinely excited for the future of fire emblem in a very, very long time. the gaiden remake looks absolutely phenomenal and i'm so glad that the mobile game seems to be fully embracing the series' history. granted, there's a good chance i'm setting myself up for one hell of a fall here, just like i did with fe13 back in the day, but for once i don't care. it's nice to not be a living pile of salt for once

anyway, i'm here to talk about the reason i woke up this morning to a fuckton of people showing me things and asking questions on twitter (or at least, what passes as a fuckton for me)

i've often spoken of my preference to defer to the localisations when it comes to the names of characters, and that if a future localised fire emblem work included characters from jugdral, i would come back to incorporate them into my translations. well, it's happened. the character voting section of fire emblem heroes' site has given us the complete playable casts of genealogy and thracia, as well as a couple of randoms like sandima

here's the plan. i intend to go with whatever the app says, but i'm going to wait until the app is out and datamined before i do anything at all, just to be safe. official english sites for fire emblem have a habit of being a bit confused and error prone with the finer details (e.g. the fe13 site had a hard time remembering that celica and cecilia are not the same character), and it's entirely possible that any of the choices exhibited on this website will be inconsistent with what the app actually goes with. in addition there are cases where the site's listings are inconsistent with what pre-existing localisations already call a character (e.g. marduk instead of murdock, nimue instead of niime, lachesis instead of raquesis, osian instead of orsin), so my preference is to wait and see if any of this changes. my current theory is that all the obvious, significant shifts away from the form of the original name (e.g. astolfo, erinys, gwendolyn, delthea) exhibit clear thought and premeditation, such that they can be safely assumed to be final and unchanging, but that anything else is still a crapshoot at this point. hell, in the few days that the poll's been up, they've already edited some of the listed names! (e.g. the johabros have been changed from "luchar and lucharba" with an l to "iuchar" and "iucharba" with an i)

if it turns out the app does not include any of these characters at launch, however, my plan is to disregard the website until the characters actually show up in the app itself, if ever. i might take inspiration from it if it offers genuine improvements over my current ideas, but i won't treat it as hard and fast English Canon™ or anything. for what it's worth, i was already seriously considering renaming faval to "febail", so i guess this gives me an excuse

as for my opinions, reactions and potential explanations for specific characters? those are all over my twitter and tumblr right now, if you're really curious, but the last thing i want to do is ramble about them at length, because god knows my opinions will change over time. i wasn't partial to fe13's contributions to the characters at first, but obviously my opinion has changed since then

in conclusion,

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The Gigantic Pile of Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War Translation Notes

2016-12-26T03:36:33Z

The Gigantic Pile of Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War Translation Notes, Version 0.00002

aka The This Is What i'm Wasting My Time On Instead Of Finishing The Damn Patch, aka The Book of the Book of Naga, aka The Ass-Coverathon 2017, aka The Too Much Information (And Not In The Sex-ish Way That People Seem To Like For Some Reason), aka The Summa Genealogia, aka The Living Proof That book "bookofholsety" ofholsety Loves The Sound Of His Own Metaphorical Voice

right, here's the deal. i haven't been able to get back to proper work on the patch for a while because of uni and other personal reasons, but i have been thinking about what i've done so far, what i'd like to do and occasionally jotting down notes. i've been planning for a while to put together a set of translator's notes for the sake of those who'd like to use our foundation to translate genealogy into other languages, as well as for general information on various decisions and methods. i'd also like to expand it into broader documentation of other elements of the game, since there's a few things going on which frankly have not been documented particularly well

of course, the majority of that is still a while off, but i figure there's no harm posting the one completish thing i have so far. i'll add to this whenever i have the time, but who knows when that'll be?

once i've completely finalised the script, i also plan to release it in transcript form. maybe i'll see if i can donate it to serenes? idk

I. The translation

The beginning
Menus and gameplay stuff
Prologue: Birth of a Crusader
Chapter 1: The Spirit Forest's Maiden
Chapter 2: Crisis in Agustria
Chapter 3: Eldigan the Lionheart
Chapter 4: Dance in the Skies
Chapter 5: Threshold of Fate
Chapter 6: Heirs to the Light
Chapter 7: Beyond the Desert
Chapter 8: The Dracoknights of Thracia
Chapter 9: For Whose Sake
Chapter 10: Light and Darkness
Endgame: The Final Holy War
Epilogue

II. Cut content

Unused text
Unused graphics
Classes, items and skills

III. The wank

Characters and locations
Classes, items and skills
On official localisations

Appendix

Genealogy of the Genealogy of the Holy War

Further reading

Fire Emblem 25th Anniversary Staff Book: Patty's story

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Genealogy of the Genealogy of the Holy War

2016-09-19T17:06:43Z

at the moment i'm unspeakably busy with uni and haven't had the time to keep up with fe4 patch stuff at all - for the past few weeks, if it's not been assessment, it's been uni poetry events, and if it hasn't been that it's been causing domestic disasters. even so, this is something i've been slowly chipping away at for a few months now and i figure, it's basically complete, why not just post it? if there's something wrong with it, then i can always edit it later

what happened is, over the years i've accrued waaaaaay too much material about various old translations of fe4, and for a while i've been kicking around the idea of piecing it all together into something resembling a history of the game in english. part of this was inspired by a smash bros practice meet i attended a few months ago, where i was chatting with a guy there about fire emblem. in a fit of ego i happened to bring up my work on fe4, and he remarked that he was surprised that i'd done another, since he thought there were already a lot of translation patches for fe4. i'd already been thinking about this on and off for a while now, but his point really got me thinking. it goes without saying that our little team here was far from the first to take a stab at translating fe4, but just how far from the first were we, anyway?

something tells me that most people aren't as ridiculously obsessive about this stuff as i am, but what the hell. those who don't learn from history etc etc

( Holy Holepunch, Celice! )

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FE4 translation patch now in open beta

2016-05-15T00:47:20Z

oh, er, i probably should've thought to say something here sooner, but what the hell. anyway, the patch is now available!

it's an open beta release and it's a work in progress, both for programming and writing. we'll be spending some time taking bug reports and ironing out kinks in the hacks and typos and other issues with the script

thanks to everybody who helped to take this project from just some guy pottering around in a dark corner of tumblr to an actual playable translation! i quite literally wouldn't be here if not for you lot

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another status update

2016-03-29T07:05:35Z

here, have some good news: dds has basically finished identifying and inserting script blocks, so all dialogue is in and (mostly) functional. that's right, after fifteen years of fan translators coming and going, fire emblem: genealogy of the holy war finally has a (mostly) working english epilogue

does this mean we're done? fuck, no! a lot of things still need doing, including but not limited to:

fixing issues with the text engine in menus
proofreading
finishing the title screen, specifically the subtitle plate
cleaning up text alignments
proofreading
dealing with major bugs
proofreading
did i say proofreading already? because holy shit, proofreading

in a development which will surprise literally nobody, my end of this particular bargain is probably what's going to slow us all down. i've got to balance getting this done with university work, which is currently in the middle of slowly gnawing my leg off. i'm hoping i'll be able to make good use in an upcoming lull in university proceedings, and i might be able to slowly chip away at the script in what little spare time i have, but i'm regrettably booked solid for the next two weeks

so, er, yeah. that is the state of project naga. the end is in sight

oh, and if you want slightly more frequent updates and tidbits, i now have a twitter. i might say interesting translation things there sometimes? who knows! it might just end up being a lot of bitter griping

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A long-overdue update

2016-02-21T10:41:48Z

okay, laptop hell is finally over. i'm back

it's been a long while since i've said anything about progress on the project here, and thankfully it looks like i've got a lot to say. in my absence, DDS and AzimuthFE have been doing a fantastic job with the technical side of the project and everything is looking really good. here, have some screenshots that they've been posting over on romhacking.net:

christ, it wasn't all that long ago that i was still using photoshopped mockup examples to plug/test the script. boy, do times change!

it's starting to look pretty embarrassing that i'm still waaaaaaaaaaay behind on script proofing. my plan was to dedicate at least the last month of the holidays to doing it, but then the laptop chose to go pthhbhthbhpthhhthtbbbthb so that went out the window. thankfully i'm pretty used to the Uni Vs Translation balancing act by now, so i suppose that's the plan going forward. all this technical progress goes to show that i really ought to clean up my act and make the script slightly less shit

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A quick survey

2015-11-11T04:21:59Z

okay so it's still pretty early as far as the hacking side of the project goes, but there's been one development which i thought i'd seek opinions about. DDS is currently spending a bit of time looking at implementing the translation's font which, big surprise, i chose to pilfer from earthbound. he conducted a couple of tests to compare outline schemes for the font and weigh the pros and cons of each, and those tests look like this:

left: a 3-colour version where the outlines are shaded with 2 colours, like vanilla fe4's japanese font
right: a 2-colour version where the outlines are a single flat colour

now, while i've got my opinions on each, i'm obviously very biased on the subject so i figure i'd see if i could sample some other opinions on the matter. to that end: which of these two do you prefer? which outline scheme do you feel looks nicer? do you have any legibility or accessiblity concerns about either one? i'm all ears

(also, for the record, i am extremely excited about my work being at least partially in patch form for the first time! you should've seen my reaction to the first test he sent)

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Hacking update (again)

2015-11-05T14:43:52Z

it's been over a month since MP2E left the project, and i finally have great news ~~after spending most of that time procrastinating~~: we have a... replacement? no, that's too cold and impersonal. successor? no, too pretentious. new guy! yeah, that's it. we have a new hacking/programming guy

point is, meet dds*. he comes with quite the solid resume as a hacker for fan translations; two notable snes patches he already has under his belt are megami tensei: the old testament and romancing saga, both of which are fantastic translations for good games that are very much worth your time (i'm still making my way through megami tensei in what little spare time i have from uni). he volunteered his services for fe4, and i'd wager that my script is in excellent hands here!

for everyone else, if you think there's something you want to contribute on the technical side of things, feel free to drop us a line! thanks for everything, people

*the blog's empty but what the hell, i had to link to something, didn't i? :P

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Soul Driver 2000: FE4 art scans

2015-10-10T00:47:51Z

putting this in a proper post because they deserve better than being hidden in a comments thread from a month ago :P

okay, so back in 2000, the mangaka kyouko tsuchiya did an artbook called soul driver 2000, which included a set of really quite lovely fe4 illustrations. taichara just scanned the lot of them (thanks for that!), and you can take a look at them over here. trust me, they're very much worth your time

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Hacking update

2015-09-27T02:44:39Z

basically everyone knows about this already (i think i might've been the last to know, actually), but there's been some unfortunate news on the hacking front. for a year or two now, the technical side of the project has been the domain of MP2E, who was working on reverse-engineering FE4 and devising new tools to dump and inject scripts for the game. regrettably, however, today he had to bow out of the project. to quote from the message he left on his github:

NOTICE: I’ve been putting off this project for quite a while in the hopes of being able to return and finish it, but it’s looking more unlikely as time goes on. Very sorry for all who got their hopes up.. I’d love to see FE4 translated and Bookofholsety has created a fantastic translation that very much deserves to be ingame, but I’m low on time and motivation. What killed this project was ultimately my inability to reverse engineer. I would like to pick this up at some time in the future, but I really have no ETAs and at this point I have to declare this project kaput. Resire never got more functionality than the original C patching tools floating around so there’s no point in releasing it.

i can't thank MP2E enough for all the work he put into this thing and for humouring my bullshit. the day he offered his services was the day that this thing went from "some arrogant idiot noodling around in some dark corner of tumblr" to "something kind of sort of vaguely resembling a legitimate translation". even if his efforts never came to fruition, he did so much for this project, including christening it "project naga", and i am so grateful for everything he did. best of luck with everything, man!

anyway, this also means that once again, i'm a free agent in need of a good hacker, or perhaps several. gringe has graciously offered to give it a look and see what he can do, but the man's really busy and perhaps there might be some value to having multiple hands on board for this thing. now, i should mention that i have exactly zero experience directing any group efforts at all, let alone a programming project. i don't know the first thing about how to structure a group programming effort. hopefully we can figure something out together, but i apologise in advance because i have a feeling i'm going to be terrible at the whole "responsibility" thing

a couple of notes/stipulations for anyone who's interested:

part of the issue with my work is that i've kind of got a ridiculously stubborn idea of how i'd like the finished product to look. we're talking "oh dear god this guy has made fucking mockups" levels of stubborn. as part of this, i'm kind of dead-set on the gameplay side of fe4 (menus, etc) having a variable-width font implemented, though if MP2E's commentary is anything to go by, that might actually be the least frustrating thing about hacking this game!
in addition to properly implementing the game's script, i'll also be needing somebody who can hack graphics. there's a lot of graphics which, in current patches, remain untranslated, and i'm determined to see those sorted out for this translation. i've prepared prototypes of most of the graphics changes myself, but i don't know the first thing about how snes games actually format these things or how to implement them
fortunately, there's a sizable amount of prior work to use as reference here. MP2E's github is still a very useful resource for documentation on the game, and the source codes for the earlier work of the j2e team and twilkitri can be found here and here. as i understand it, both are very dated and less than optimal, which was the entire reason MP2E sought to develop the resire engine to begin with, so keep that in mind

if you're interested in the job, leave a reply on this entry or shoot me a pm on serenes, and be sure to reference any development and/or fe/snes hacking experience you have. odds are you'll hear back from me sooner or later

thanks, everyone. and once again, thank you so much, MP2E

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[Project Naga] On name change decisions

2015-08-05T16:54:47Z

(last edited 11-6-2016)

let's face it, as much as i profess to not give a shit about namewank anymore, i was going to have to do this sooner or later. i was hoping this would wait until the complete translation was in patch form, but eh

i should reiterate that i am absolutely not open to any suggestions/demands/begging with respect to changing my changes. i cannot emphasise this enough. fe4's patch is out the door, and while i'm still editing the script, the names are done. finished. set in stone. changing them now is much, much more trouble than it's worth. fe5 is still obviously a work in progress, but the same goes for it as well because i'm not interested in having it beleaguered by endless namewank when frankly, we all have much better things to focus on.

i also want to mention that i did not take this lightly at all. i've been around the fire emblem block more than a few times, and i've seen again and again just how apeshit people go over namewank. where i felt a tweak or outright change was needed, i spent a damn long time mulling it over and grappling with whether or not it was really worth punching the fe fandom in the snout. when you spend three years working on a thing, that gives you an absolutely obscene amount of time to think, research and plan, to thoroughly vet your ideas to make sure you haven't just gotten your dick bitten off for basically no reason. i knew exactly what i was doing when i made these changes, i did the research and i talked most of them through with people who know what they're talking about

also, yes, names inevitably change in translation. this includes fan translations, believe it or not. sometimes a name needs to be tweaked to properly make the reference the original work intended, and for the most part this is what i was concerned with and what i did
( i feast on fanwank tears )

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Fire Emblem 25th Anniversary Staff Book: Patty's story

2015-05-15T01:28:34Z

i've been chipping away at this for a couple of weeks now and it's finally done. here, have what's probably the most important thing to happen to the jugdral games in the past decade: an entirely new bit of story in the form of a genealogy scenario which did not make it into the finished game, courtesy of the 25th anniversary staff book. it's a direct prologue to chapter 7 of genealogy, which gives some context to patty's mission to rob the yied shrine and contributes to her backstory in general

quick bit of context: this thing was contributed to the staff book by masayuki horikawa, an intsys employee who's contributed to every fe game since thracia 776, except fe8 and fe12, mainly as a director, scenarist and writer. according to his introduction, he found this script for a scrapped fe4 scenario while cleaning out his computer and decided to put it in the staff book. if you're interested, you can find the original scans here

as usual, huge, huge thanks to ammie for proofreading it and helping out with parts i was stuck on

( finally, the objective best character in fe4's secondgen has an entire story to herself! )

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[Project Naga] Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War script index

2015-03-26T00:47:51Z

the translation patch is now in open beta. play it! the copy of the script here is woefully outdated compared to the contents of the patch, so i've decided to just close it off for now. once the patch is out of beta, i'll go through and provide a finalised transcript of the entire game

Stuff of interest

25th Anniversary Staff Book: Patty's story
some notes on name adaptations/changes
Eternal Fantasy: the japanese script website i used for most of this translation. i also used MiruPage for parts of the epilogue

To do

i'll probably keep making minor revisions to the script in the patch until we're out of beta and/or i'm 100% content with it. i wouldn't expect much to change from its current state but you never know. if you encounter a typo or other issue with the patch's version of the script, be sure to report it here, in the serenes or rhdn threads, or on twitter

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