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Port & Translation of Atelier Kaguya games - Kajuu 100% and Onee-san x SHUFFLE Translation Project.


AsGryffynn

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This is a crosspost from my Reddit post, for those who are wondering. 

So... it's happened. Out of a sense of morbid fascination, a deader than dead muse struck by lightning hampering my creative writing and sheer frustration and noxious thoughts headed Atelier Kaguya's way because their engine is horrific, I've decided to do it: I'm starting a project for these TWO games, with no intention of going further than that:

The reason I'm making this post is because I've seen several posts across the internet about translating these games and all... ALL of them have had one thing in common: they either never happened, or they were abandoned. Want to know why? Because the freaking propietary KaGuYa engine is a POS that's borderline unprogrammable/impossible to make a patch for.

Someone, who was translating Baku Ane, did make a partial patch for the prologue - which is now fittingly MIA so I can't ask how they reverse engineered it, so for this reason, what I'm going to do is a lot different, and while NOT piracy, it does skirt the line.

I'm ripping every asset off, translating both things, and then porting them over to a new engine and piecing everything back together by hand. The reason being that so far I've had ZERO luck doing so much as getting the game to boot otherwise, presumably because of the hex code inconsistencies.

AT ANY RATE, to prevent any major issues regarding patching, I intend to require a full copy of the game (as in, "you need to run the installer first or it won't boot") in order to launch the game in the first place. Since at that point I can actually do what I want, requiring you to have the actual copy shouldn't be anywhere near as much of a hassle.

Since it's the most powerful, proprietary engine I have at my disposal that doesn't require me to commute to another city (I am currently overseeing a game using CryEngine 5, which would be insane overkill for this task), I will be using Unity to port the content over. I also intend to do minor rearrangements, but nothing that alters the story OR gameplay whatsoever.

As for the translation, I intend to be more liberal without changing everything over: I won't be translating the honorifics or obscure puns unless they are plot relevant. Whenever possible, I will actually replace a joke. The good news is that AK makes this easy due to their games' plots (LoveTore's plot, for lack of a better description, is essentially a parody of "Paranormal Activity", for crying out loud)... so if you want a loyal, literal translation, this probably won't make you too happy. If you want to play the game and actually understand the plot (which there's little for the obvious reasons that this is a nukige/erotic game), then this should be just fine.

Translation duty is going to be divided in four between yours truly, machine translation from several translation sites/services, a colleague who's signed up and is fluent in Japanese and will be in proofreader/beta duty and my older brother over the internet, who's not as fluent but still well versed enough in Japanese to have conducted business there over one summer.

This post is mainly intended to notify the crowd that yes, finally someone is going to take a crack at this product and try to actually put it behind himself for everyone to enjoy. I'm still ironing out the kinks since I am on new hardware now, but so far, it looks like this could be the start of something really good... or it could end like the Baku Ane translation project.

Just in case someone raises eyebrows at the "porting" part, do keep in mind I'm not going to upload anything UNLESS I can tie the repackaged product to the actual one SPECIFICALLY to deter attempts at "Hoisting the Colors", so to speak. I won't claim to know where people source their Visual Novels otherwise.

Addendum: In my original Reddit post, I said we were NOT accepting anyone from outside. While this still remains the case, I do require some participation from anyone willing to test one thing I need to get up and running to make this happen as fast as possible. 

In this post, I requested help providing a series of Save Files (not Save States, which are essentially what unlocks the galleries in game) so that I could test whether the engine could read external .dat files.  I will be unable to move much if I don't have Save Files available for at least the mentioned above as a kind of test. The other two are later translations I would get to eventually do if the porting went smoothly, which is... what has not happened. So far, we've got the text. Now we need everything else. If you happen to have one or both games in your system and have Save Files, please send them over. While I did request specific completion states, any game saves delivered should really help. 

This is AsGryffynn, signing off...

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