How come none of these games attracted any sort of attention

>>3972167
They're not very good.

>>3972167
>Saturn
That's probably why. They don't bother with these unless it's on PC or maybe PSX if you're lucky.

>>3972167
Same reason Starfox never did, it just never caught on.

The series was never popular in the west and now is dead so yeah its never happening.
Also saturn whose emulation is still shaky and was downright miserable years ago

>>3972167
They did, do you are homework next time dickwad

>>3972295
That's why they're all playable in english

Oh wait you're just an idiot

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>>3972175
umm what?
btw this game is the best strategy rpg

I know Saturn emulation is a pain, but weren't Sakura Wars 1 & 2 ported to the Dreamcast as well? And what about that one Russian PC port that came out a few years ago?

There's been a very slowly progression fan translation in the works for the PC version of the game.

I love the ST series, wish they got more love. I think Sega should localized them w/Atlus and drop them on Steam, but maybe I'm crazy.

The games that are translated usually have a lot of interest behind them. Either a community (Front Missions 2/5) or a single individual (Brigandine).

Sadly, there's also the technical effort of the translation itself, so even if a few people are interested, you need those two people in that group:
- a hacker
- a translator

Usually translations fail because either there's no hacker or no translator. And in an ongoing translation, if one of those people leave, everything crumbles. What we usually get is a few individuals who really want a game translated, but have no translation or technical skills. If we had more people interested, given time, those two people would appear within that group.

But sadly, few communities are that big and organized. If you look at Pokémon community, they have tons of translations and romhacks because they have a lot of people and are organized, and thus, a lot of hackers/translators find their way there.

I would love to give a try, but my backlog of translations is huge at the moment. And again, I get a lot of really enthusiastic people that want to work on a translation, but they don't have any useful skills, or worse, they drop out of the project after 1 week. Translating a game is not fun. You'll probably hate that game once you're done with it. Everyone wants in when it's time to translate item/character names, or insert their epic internet meme in the translation, but when it's time to work, everyone drifts away. Sorry for the rant.

>>3972262
>Also saturn whose emulation is still shaky and was downright miserable years ago

There was a working emulator as far back as 2003, and a working debugger as far back as 2007.

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>>3972167
First two games attracted attention from official translators.

>>3972167
>How come none of these games attracted any sort of attention from fan translators?
there are only so many fan translators and you have to remember, they often pick what they want to work on

nobody is going translate something because you want it, unless you pay them of course. this shit takes a long time. surely you've considered these things right?

>>3973247
Are you done with your weak shitposting already, or are you going to keep ruining the thread?

If you took 1 hour of your free time for 2 years you could translate the games yourself and find out.

>>3973262
Perhaps you can try making your own threads of value rather than being a shitposting moron

>>3973263
Is OP dedicated enough?

Here's everything he needs to do, not necessarily in this order. correct me if i'm wrong
>Play the game to the best of his ability
>find where the text is stored in the game (via debugger?) and learn how to edit/reverse engineer (hex, whatever), and document each section of dialogue he comes across and how to trigger it in gameplay
>make a font, replace the game's font with his font, and things can be terrible romaji for a little while
>learn moonrunes
>change all the horrible romaji to english later and adjust things so the text fits in nice

>>3973287
Not to mention the fact that you're essentially spoiling the game for yourself if you decide to work on a translation

If I knew enough japanese to play through a game I'd just play the game and leave it at that

>>3973289
>If I knew enough japanese to play through a game I'd just play the game and leave it at that
I'm the kinda fella who would at least do a write up of all the dialogue for others if I understood things. My brother and I were able to play Ganbare Goemon 2 almost 14 years ago thanks to someone who did this.

It seems that the hardest part would be editing the game itself because a lot of developers made their own tools and compression techniques, he'd probably hit a roadblock somewhere

>>3973294
oh and the tl;dr version of what i said

you best be hoping that shit is plain ASCII

>>3973303
Why would it be in ASCII instead of Shift-JIS?

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>>3972167
Gaylessness? Any Saturnfag can read enough moon to get by. No one cares about a few gaijin recent 50%s

>>3973353
>No one cares about a few gaijin recent 50%s
What?

Why do you continue being an EOP?

>>3972321
That and Policenauts are the only rare exceptions.

>>3973353
>Any Saturnfag can read enough moon to get by.

I don't know any moon I just power my way through some games like the SRW series until I memorize the menu layouts.

>>3973570
Why would you do that to yourself? You're just wasting your time instead of actually learning something.

>>3973579
Because I'm not going to learn an entire language to play a couple of games and watch Steel Jeeg.

>>3973582
Why not? Are you adamantly against learning that you rather spend hours on brute force approaches?

>>3973583
>spend hours

It doesn't take that long to learn a menu layout and there just isn't enough out there that interests me to justify spending years learning an entirely different language for.

>>3973586
You don't need years to learn what you need. Understanding what a menu says is a matter of seconds.
If you play SRW you probably already got a lot of the basics down anyway, they're just not getting used because you can't read.
I used to be in a similar position until I realizedthe error of my ways.

>>3973287
There's a few ways to find the text in the game, debugging is just one of them. Actually you can find text by trial-and-error, and I can bet almost every romhacker did this at least once. It's just a little more time-consuming. This works better for older games (NES/SNES), because the game doesn't have a lot of kanji. Most NES games only use kana (hiragana/katakana), and most SNES games use only a few select kanji. From the top of my mind, Megami Tensei/Shin Megami Tensei uses a lot of kanji on the NES, and Tokimeki Memorial on the SNES. Even Metal Slader Glory, which is a VN, doesn't use a lot of kanji.

About the font, even japanese games come with an english font, but you need to add characters if you want to translate to some other language. Also, japanese games use monospace fonts, which can be a waste of screen space when you write in English. For example: the Live-a-Live translations. The first version uses the monospace font, so everything looks s p a c e d o u t, and there's not enough space to write some of the names (like Oboromaru's). To remedy that, you have to hack in a proportional font (called a "variable-width font" in romhacking) to get that sleek look from the second version of Live-a-Live's translation. To do that, you NEED to know the Assembly for that processor, there's no way around it.

You may need to repurpose menus in some games. Some games store the menu size in tables, but in others you also need ASM hacking to resize the menu. Of course, there's also cases where you need to redraw the menu completely, like when the japanese draw the menus vertically instead of horizontally. I think a few official translations back then didn't even bother with it, and just overwrote the menu, so seeing
A
L
L
Y
written wasn't that uncommon.

>>3973603
But then you miss out on all the Visual Novel cutscenes which is like half the appeal of a game like this.

>>3973621
Those are often voiced so I could understand some of what they said.

All games worth playing are already in English. The ones that aren't have their quality exaggerated.

Seriously, this is coming from someone who spent well over a year to learn the language. You're not missing out on anything special. There aren't any hidden gems you're missing out on.

>>3973668
THIS

>>3973668
>>3973682
What games did you play. You can't possibly play everything.
Frankly speaking, translations are not a good alternative to playing the original.

>>3973687
>Frankly speaking, translations are not a good alternative to playing the original.
Not this argument again. 9/10 times the translations is EXACTLY what you get in the original, these rpgs have simple easy to digest stories.

>>3973668
But that's wrong, not only you didn't play every possible untranslated game to know that but you are forgetting that other people may have a different taste in games which they might enjoy more then you do.
It's like I said that all FPS games are not worth playing solely because I don't enjoy them.

>>3973695
You're not fooling anybody.

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After a bit of research I found some of the good Saturn games. They're just a nightmare to emulate properly

Pic related, it's my collection.

>>3973707
Woah, nice collection you have there!
You need to do some more research and find those good Saturn games!

>>3972321
Hi, Shining Force 3-kun.

>>3973687
>translations are not a good alternative to playing the original.
You don't actually believe this, do you? I know you need to justify the fact you spent so much time learning a mostly useless language, but come on.

>>3973728
Not him, but I agree 100%. There's so much characterization and nuance that gets lost in translation.

>>3973695
This. The stories in JRPGs are, at best, from an okay light novel and nothing more.

>>3973731
Examples of this happening in a fantranslation?

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>>3973738

>>3973747
Use your words, lad.

>>3973728
It depends on what games you play, but looking at what OP posted, most games like that are either untranslated or have a bad localization, a bonus to that would be cut content, censorship and American dub.

>>3972321
Many rules have exceptions.

Glad that was translated, though. The Saturn library deserves more of these.

>>3973749

He's referring to a very famous example of text being altered by fantranslators. something like "she is nice" was translated to "I bet she fucks like a tiger"

>>3973749
The DeJap translation of Tales of Phantasia (SNES). In it, there's a cutscene where the male characters discuss about the females in their group.
The original was something like, "Mint has this sort of elegance around her, while Arche is feisty and impulsive". In the translation, they wrote "I bet Arche fucks like a tiger".

>>3973738
I wish I had screenshots but in the fantranslation of Danganronpa 1 they make the (very much japanese) rich kid say "oy vey" at random times, because the fantranslators thought that'd be funny. There's also a "bazinga" snuck in there.

>>3973790
D E E P E S T L O R E
E
E
P
E
S
T

>>3973731
It's a good translation if only those are lost. More likely they miss the whole context or just make shit up.

>>3973728
I never had to justify learning English until now.

>>3973821
And you shouldn't have to, because it's easily the most useful langauge in the world. Which is why smelly third worlders like yourself took the time to learn it.

>>3973821
>More likely they miss the whole context or just make shit up.
Which would matter more if they were literary masterpieces. They aren't, however.

>>3973832
Third worlders can live their entire lives without needing English precisely because they are third worlders. Also, stop pretending as if you being born in an English speaking country wasn't a mere coincidence.
「有用な言語ではないから学びたくない」のような言い訳をする奴が完全に言語学に興味ないか怠け者だけだ
それに、「有用」はそもそも主観的なコンセプトだ

>>3973909
t. br weebaboo

>>3974095
>says he while on 4chan, wasting his time on a board dedicated to retro games and posting on a thread about japanese translations

>>3973668
Can you list untranslated games you played and didn't like?
I'll name some games I enjoyed that have no English translation (or possibly no foreign translation at all);
Shadowrun - MCD
Tengai Makyo Zero - SFC
Dragon Knight 2, 4 - PC98

>>3973731
If you're not a native speaker you're going to be losing some level of nuance regardless.

>>3974617
Impossiburu

>>3973356
Take solace in not getting it. It's something no one except a colossal weeb should get. If you ever do get it take a hard look your yourself. Top yourself if you don't chuckle at the sad state of weeb fagotry.

>>3972321
>not Vachenroeder
Son...

>>3973668

>he learned all those fucking runes and never even bothered to play Gunparade March

HAAH
WAAW

>>3973803

Hey, anon? I got some pretty fwiggin bad news for you. You're actually talking about the officially-released NISA translation. That's the one with oy vey, bazinga, "epic for the win," etc. The fan translation is pretty tastefully-written with no shitty memes. NISA is notorious for pulling that shit, though.

>>3975538
He didn't learn anything.

>>3973668
>Seriously, this is coming from someone who spent well over a year to learn the language.

t. N4-kun

>>3975547
FUCK

>>3975547
The official NISA translation was on Vita and on though. And I played this on PPSSPP. And I patched the japanese original myself with the fantranslation I downloaded directly from the fantranslators' website the day they released it. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that was the fan translation I was talking about.

>>3975547
Can confirm fan translation was oy vey. Can't remember seeing BAZINGA anywhere tho.

It'll happen. It's easier to learn stuff like that nowadays and the more years go by the more things will be translated. I used to think that made no sense but I'm an /m/fag and those guys have translated some ridiculously obscure stuff. 1 guy did all of Dougram iirc
With the upcoming everdrive and the interest in retro games its only a matter of time. Look at all the fami games that got translated for no reason.

>>3976750
All those Famicom games have been translated because the tools are already there.
People just take a game, extract the script, run the script through a machine translator, brush it up so it looks coherent and then insert it back in.
It's easier than fan translation anime or manga.

>>3972262
This more or less.

>>3975547
NISA and fan translation both have bazinga. that is how sad the state of danganronpa translations is.

>>3979579
It fits modern anime fans.
BLAZINSKY

>>3972167
because they're generic haremshit titles

>>3972175
dreamcast too fucknuts

>>3976776
>People just take a game, extract the script, run the script through a machine translator, brush it up so it looks coherent and then insert it back in.
This probably explains the bad quality in some of them, like Getsu Fuma Den, where they refer to the protagonists and his brothers as the "Fuma brothers", when the family name is actually supposed to be Getsu.