Langrisser III (Saturn) translation project revived

akari_dawn

Hey there everyone,

I'm glad to announce that the translation for Langrisser III is almost complete.

Some years ago Cyber Warrior X dumped the scripts for this game and ElfShadow ,Oogami and some anonymous others began the translation. As a result a patch was released featuring all in-game menus in English. While this certainly was great, it would've been even more satisfying to have a full fledged patch to understand the game's well-written story.

To give something back and to honor the work of those who came before me, I translated all those untranslated scripts Cyberwarrior X dumped and revised the ones ElfShadow, Oogami and co. translated.

So, how much has been translated until now?

Almost everything!

Simultaneously I've prepared a translation guide, which can be found on Gamefaqs. If there's no person out there to create a patch, the FAQ at least would allow an understanding of the game's story. As you may have guessed I'm currently searching for someone to take all those files and create another patch. If you are, or know someone who might be able to do that kind of thing, please feel free to contact me right away.

What else can you do?

You could play the game, check out the FAQ and keep your eyes peeled for typos and the like.

You could be happy about this project being revived and express it in any way you like. Leave a comment, help improving the translation, smile at a stranger or visit your grandma, it doesn't really matter much as long as you spread the good vibe.

In that spirit, I'd like to express my special thanks to Cyber Warrior X, ElfShadow, Oogami and all their helpers for all their hard work! High King Tir deserves special credit too for making many plausible suggestions, doing research on names and improving the translation overall!

Lastly I'd like to say a big thank you to D for his support, asking for Oogami's permission to use those files and for keeping the same safe all this time!

Thanks to everyone willing to contribute something so far!

D

Dealing with some unpleasant health problems at the moment. Saw your message a few weeks ago but didn't get the chance to write back. It's really great that you managed to slog through all that.

I'll try to find a chance and see if I can write something up to stick those scripts into the PC version of Langrisser III.

If you're interested in doing a little leg work, it turns out CyberWarriorX is still active on GitHub and has been contributing code patches to the Yabause Saturn emulator. You might be able to reach him there and send the finished scripts to him. It might be a really nice surprise.

https://github.com/cyberwarriorx

Also, could you shoot me the finished stuff in a ZIP file via email? I'll try to get it up somewhere where it can be preserved for all the other people who could benefit from it for other projects.

You already have my address I believe.

akari_dawn

Alright!

Sounds good. Lets talk about the details via pm then.

Senka

Oh, this is great! If this gets completed, Langrisser might be completely playable in English one day. After this, only V remains, right?

I want to find time to play through and give you a giant list of typos and grammatical fixes like I did with Kil's Langrisser IV patch (still sorry I didn't finish it), but I don't know when that could be.

Also, was the PC version of Langrisser III a direct port of the Sega Saturn game? Is that why the scripts could simply be inserted? Just asking because the PC version of Langrisser I was a total remake, and I forget if Langrisser II on PC was a port or otherwise had a duplicate script.

D

Been a while since I looked at it, but it's complicated, much like Langrisser I&II PSX.

See, in the CD games they stored ALL THE TEXT a scenario could possibly use in that scenario's file. This includes names, common strings and everything else. On the PC and in cartridge ports it made sense to break this up.

Essentially, we need to trim off that junk and that will leave us with the lines from the event script, which appear to more or less match up.

The bigger issue is that lack of Japanese voice acting. It's all dubbed into Korean or Chinese, and dubbed badly. The game also has a new, shittier soundtrack that would need to be replaced with the original Saturn music.

It'd be a big fix-up project, but it's the best port of Langrisser III in graphical terms.

Senka

Just aligning the script to fit sounds very annoying and fraught with countless odd bugs, and then to fix the audio sounds like a big project all on its own. I suppose it's not as simple as replacing music and audio files with matching renames? :(

Certainly, the voice acting alone would be a complete turn-off for me, but is the soundtrack really that much worse? For comparison, the Langrisser IV PS1 soundtrack sounded fine to me even though everyone says the Saturn soundtrack sounds a lot better. I guess I also went in with an understanding of PS1 game music, so that could be why.

Anyway, I didn't know the port had better graphics, so maybe it'd all be worth it. It's just cool anything's being done.

kain611

Will definitely throw my hat in the ring for some play testing. Should have some available chunks of time over the next month or so.

D

Hi, I added all the files you sent me to the repository:

https://github.com/sobodash/langrisser3 ... /script/en

Anyone curious can read the script there. It looks like there's still a couple missing that are just scenario summaries. Mostly for the secret scenarios. Will add those whenever they get sent along.

akari_dawn

Hey there, everyone!

The basic translation has been completed.

However, I expect a comparable huge amount of needed corrections, for two reasons :

1. I did this on my own. It's much better to have at least one additional person to take a look at stuff.

The one who wrote something overlooks his own mistakes very easily.

2. I had to translate some dialogues blindly because I couldn't make them to show up in-game.

Luckily this happened only rarely but in those cases I had no idea who was talking and what was supposed to happen. Translating Japanese on a good guess, is a daring thing to do.

So, if you should find something don't hesitate to contact me and help improving this translation. Thanks!

High_King_Tir

Hey this is great is see ^.^ And awesome to be able to read through.

I do have one question is there a reason Haja no Ken hasn't been translated yet?

It's evidently a weapon seen in a few other video games particularly Shining Force CD translated well really transliterated as Sword of Haiya.

In Dragon Quest it seem to have been translated a few different ways and may be they just didn't know how to translate it. in Dragon Quest sword its translated as Rednusadner, ("rend asunder" backwards) - Sword of Malice in Dragon Warrior IV NES, Cautery sword in the IV's DS translation? I'm really not sure how good a translation

One DQ FAQ says it should be Evil-Crushing Sword? http://www.ign.com/faqs/2003/dragon-quest-iv-chapter-3-faq-386259

The Glory of Heracles fan-translated it as Baneslayer from what I see as well.

And I guess, just by looking for the term it's also used in Yu-Gi-Oh for a , where its translated as Wicked-Breaking?

Senka

I found a page on Wikipedia that translates it as Evil-Crushing Dagger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realm_of_Garo#Evil-Crushing_Dagger

There's definitely a common theme here, and what it actually means seems to change a lot with context. Even the name Demonbane could work here, maybe.

akari_dawn

Hi,

first of all, thanks for reading!

The main reason for leaving it at “Haja no Ken” is that it seems like ElfShadow wanted it to stay that way and I support this decision.

Out of the other suggestions, I like Evil-Crushing Sword and Demonbane the most. But in my opinion they sound a bit unrefined compared to the original name.

The original Japanese name makes the sword sound dignified and underlines its mysteriousness and uniqueness. It also has a nice ring to it. As a reference Kirikaze's name hasn't been translated as well and I think it's more atmospheric to leave those names as they are.

High_King_Tir

Thanks for answering. I can understand that, and it does certainly sounds mysterious. And I guess it does make it clear that the sword was made in another country so a foreign name would fit.

I guess its just that this line in scen067E.txt

The Haja no Ken is so-named because it is the sword with the power to vanquish those sworn to evil.

Seems to lose a little of it impact for an English Audience or at least to me. But then again fantasy stuff does that sort of thing all the time.

I figured Kirikaze hailed from somewhere that was more or less Japan with his being a samurai who is planning on committing seppuku so I would think a Japanese name fit him the best.

I do want to stress how awesome this is and just thank you. I guess I'm just nitpicking on some things.

akari_dawn

It's actually really nice to see someone taking an active interest and making an effort to read those scripts!

Considering the line you referred to, I can totally see what your point is.

Although we can be pretty sure that Lady Jessica and Kirikaze would be able to speak “Yamato” and maybe Lord Raymond as well, since he's highly educated, I agree with you that some minor adjustments would make it more sensible for an english audience.

What do you think about the following :

“Are you familiar with the Haja no Ken?

It is a sword shrouded in legend, said to hold the power to vanquish those sworn to evil.“

High_King_Tir

I think that line works better.

akari_dawn

Glad you like it. Make sure to let me know if anything else comes to your attention or if you got a list of suggested corrections. Thank you and keep up the good work!

CyberWarriorX

Hey guys,

So yeah, I'm currently in the process of cleaning up and getting what tools I have on Github. I'll have to rewrite several of them since a lot of the insertion work I did originally was done using some crude tools I wrote and a hex editor. Basically a product of it being my first translation project.

Anyways, the first couple of tools I have up right now may also interest people working on Langrisser DE, IV or V. in /buildcd there's two programs: vcdextract and vcdbuild

vcdextract should theoretically extract all the files and cdda tracks out of saturn game. It also creates a disc layout script file you can modify. Source code is on Github.

vcdbuild takes the script file and files generated from vcdextract and builds a new bin/cue image.

I've tested it already on Langrisser III and it works fine. Not sure if it'll work on every game. I had some issues on at least one game using mpeg files, but they should otherwise be able to rebuild any saturn disc, even those pesky Semi-XA(aka the two data tracks) ones.

https://github.com/cyberwarriorx/lang3

Senka

I prefer the revised lines too.

Btw, I thought the name ElfShadow sounded familiar, so I looked up some stuff, and it turns out he actually contributed to the Der Langrisser translation!

Also, when you said the Langrisser III translation originally started "some years ago," you sure weren't kidding, haha. I wasn't aware it was nearly 14 years ago or older, wow. https://segaxtreme.net/threads/japan-rpg-to-english-translations.2310/#post-19347

akari_dawn

Hi,

it's great to have you back Cyber Warrior X!

The impression I get is that you have acquired an even deeper understanding of the matter at hand. We're all looking forward to what you can do!

Yeah, it has been a pretty long time since this project started but good things come to those who wait!

Btw, the change we spoke of earlier has been applied and commited to Github. Thanks for the support!

D

@akari_dawn:

Got your email. Sorry about the delay but things have been a little tight here with the upcoming holiday. I'll get those new scripts you sent me pushed up to GitHub today so whoever wants them can have access.

Hopefully next week I can sit down and really look at how the PC and Saturn versions match up and write something that will strip the scripts down to work on that port as well. We already had the EXE patched to use nicer TrueType fonts with type hinting (Nightwolve and I figured out how to modify the compiled win32 API call), so it should be possible to plug in the script and let whoever wants to take a crack at playing the game tweak the formatting.

@CyberWarriorX:

Thanks for stopping by after so long and sharing that. We actually have the scripts for Langrisser I, Langrisser II and Der Langrisser done, and for the most part they can be matched up with Dramatic Edition.

If I recall correctly, DE adds some extra dialogue, changes the formatting of the text and includes a few typos and other corrections. The easiest way around this would be to get off my butt and make the tool I've been meaning to make for several years that throws text strings into a hashed database and makes the "script files" references to those database entries.

That would solve the problem of keeping lines in sync when they repeat across scenarios (for path variants) and also matching around 80 percent of the Dramatic Edition text to greatly reduce what needs to be translated.

Will look into it during the next week. Shouldn't be too painful.