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The other day, I was working with some visual novels to possibly start a FanTL and a question came to mind: Is it possible to make a Visual Novel that will only run if you have your region in Japanese, run in any region? I mean, yes, Locale Emulator exists, but that just makes the program you execute think the region is on Japan. So there must be a way to make it work without the use of those tools. But I needed a game to test on, in first place, so I started working with Karenai Sekai to Owaru Hana. This is what I found out until now: First thing I did was open the game executable with Resource Hacker to find anything that could help me. I found the game reads "Shift_JIS" encoding, at first I thought it'd be helpful in the process to make the game run in any region, I've reached somewhere, but I soon hit a roadblock. You see, kirikiriZ executables have two encoding options: Shift_JIS and utf8. Changing the encoding in the .exe to "utf8" made it executable, at least, in any other region. But you'd get this error: Investigating a little bit into the error I saw that the engine working on utf8 reads the files as UTF16 LE BOM, and since most .ks and .tjs files were in Shift_JIS, I had to make myself a tool to change the encoding of all the files from cp932 (Shift_JIS) to UTF16 LE BOM to see if it worked. And would you look at that, ANOTHER ERROR. However, this one was confusing. The error was this one: "What?" "But the startup.tjs IS in the data.xp3 I created..." The next thing I did was to find out what was happening, and when I saw the data.xp3 of the game, THIS is what I found out: If one startup.tjs isn't there, the game will not work. I searched if someone talked about this before, and I found a fairly recent post on this topic with someone mentioning this when trying to extract the data.xp3 of the VN they've been working on. No one responded, sadly, so I had to keep investigating. I remember that in the official Kirikiri tools, there was a startup.tjs in a folder called "Encrypt", but I don't really think it has something to do with it since it's probably for another purpose, like encrypting the .xp3 files. But now, what can I do? I got stuck now since I can't find a way to get two files with the same name in a .xp3 file. And making two patch.xp3 files with one startup.tjs inside each is contraproducent, as patch.xp3 is made exactly to be able to replace files and those two need to "live in harmony" in order to make the game work. After analyzing executables from other visual novels, I realized I may have been wrong this whole time since they all had Shift_JIS as its encoding property. And yet, they ran in any region. The first two I analyzed were Sousaku Kanojo no Ren'ai Koushiki and 9-Nine- Episode 2. The only difference I could find was that the .ks and .tjs files inside the .xp3 were all in UTF16 LE BOM. I appreciate if you read this hell of a text wall I made. Do you happen to know something I don't and want to add info to this thread? You're free to reply to this thread with your findings! If I knew japanese, I'd try to look inside the whole kirikiri docs to see if there's anything of value. But I don't, so... there's that. This whole investigation was purely made because I wanted to know more about the engine, but it might be of help FanTL if I/we figure a solid way to make the region restriction go away, imo. Might update this if I find something else.

Actually, it's simple. Use a hook which calls Locale Emulator function like this, and include LoaderDll.dll and LocaleEmulator.dll, you can run the game from any region.

I think the excessive slurping sounds the VAs make is nasty.

Bump the thread for obvious reason, namely it got exact release date and it'll be on May 2nd later. Also it'll be simultaneous release with Sana Edition, which to say is quite bothersome compared to just release it as one game considering Sana Edition is also has the common route. Anyway, feel free to note the date if you're been waiting for this.

Ushinawareta Mirai o Motomete (In Search of the Lost Future) Description At Uchihama Academy, the number of new students at the school has been increasing every year, so a new school building is constructed. Before they move to the new building, the school will hold one last cultural festival at the old building before it is closed down. Each of the clubs decide to give it their all to make it a success. The student council asks the astronomy club to calm the uneasiness among the students in regard to mysterious incidents at the old building. Sou Akiyama, a member of the astronomy club, is inspecting the old building when he finds a mysterious naked girl, Yui Furukawa, who appears to know him. The next day, Yui expresses her desire to join the astronomy club. (Description taken partially from VNDB and Wikipedia.) VNDB link: https://vndb.org/v4880 Where to purchase The game can be purchased legally from DMM (https://dlsoft.dmm.co.jp/detail/tin_0002/), but a Japanese proxy/VPN may be necessary to purchase it. In addition, there's an extra layer of DRM which requires the installation of the DMM Game Player software which then allows you to download and install the game. A Japanese VPN is necessary to use DMM Game Player, both to download the game once purchased, and also to launch the game, although once launched the VPN can be turned off. This is the copy I have obtained, but the patch will work with both the DMM version and the original disc version released in 2010, although the only difference will be in their encryption and the addition of one extra file to get the disc version to work on modern systems. Project The English localization project is being conducted by Studio Frisay as its third project following Imasugu Onii-chan ni Imouto datte Iitai! in 2022 and H2O √ after and another Complete Story Edition in 2023. As before, I (Tooko) will be doing all of the translating and editing of the script, along with probably most of the image editing, and working on the game engine. Also as before, nReus has agreed to help with the rendering of the game's videos and also some of the image editing (you can largely thank him for the design of the logo above). Studio Frisay discord server Progress Programming: The game uses the Kirikiri engine, one of the most popular and versatile engines around. I've already taken care of the preliminary engine hacks necessary to construct the patch after a lot of trial and error, and also received some help to streamline the patch creation process once the project is complete. Translation: The translation officially commenced on January 19, 2024. However, I already translated about 25% of the script by the time I announced the project a couple months later in March. The game has 35,416 lines across 180 scenario files split up between the five heroine routes: Kaori: 8519 / 8519: 100% Airi: 7368 / 7368: 100% Nagisa: 2087 / 7356: 28.4% Yui 1: 0 / 8334: 0% Yui 2: 0 / 3839: 0% Total: 17974 / 35416: 50.8% Relatively uncommon for this type of game, it doesn't have a separate common route and instead incorporates elements similar to a common route into the beginning of each route. There is also a set order the routes must be completed, which is the same order they're listed above. A full walkthrough will be provided with the patch to view all CGs and endings. Progress link on Google Sheets