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122 lines
4.8 KiB
122 lines
4.8 KiB
Notes and Musings on the Hacking and Translation of Magical Doropie
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by Shih Tzu
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Note: This document assumes you have already played through the
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translation, and as such it contains SPOILERS.
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No, I'm serious. SPOILERS. For like, the game's plot. Which I went
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to all the trouble to put back in.
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So, don't read any further unless you already know the story or just
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don't care. You know, 'cause like, SPOILERS.
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Eh, whatever. I tried.
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I consider the translation a decent success despite my having to
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accept some rather obnoxious limits. Gideon Zhi tells me some had
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thought Magical Doropie's script to be compressed, but nah, it's just
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stored slightly unconventionally. 12=ka, 13=ga, 14=ki, 15=gi, 16=ku,
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etc. A bigger problem surfaced once I found the script, though: every
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line is hardcoded in, and there's no way to add new ones. I could use
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pointers to adjust the length of each line, and that's it. And even
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if I could add lines, there was hardly any extra space to do so. I
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ended up using all but ten or so available bytes as it is.
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Thus, the translation had to be a bit...streamlined. I did my best to
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capture the salient points of each line and eliminate redundancy and
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yet avoid crammed writing that had a bunch of characters breathlessly
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shouting information at each other. The result is a translation that
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necessarily had to take the occasional liberty with the original.
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Still, while it's not ideal, I still think it's pretty good. If you
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couldn't tell that there were hideous limitations on the final
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product, I'd call it a success.
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Another problem was that I couldn't even save space by using pointers
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to reuse similar lines, because the damn game already does that!
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"Uwahh!" and "Kagemaru!" and so on only show up once in the script.
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There was a particular problem with one short line that was used three
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times in two different contexts. "Ha!" in Japanese was used in one
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place to mean "Yes, Your Highness." and two others as sharp intakes of
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breath by Doropie. Fortunately, the scenes all flowed perfectly with
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the line simply cut.
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One thing that had to be left implied was that the Empress had been
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"stirring up storms" (or something) in the spirit world, which is why
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Doropie banished her and sealed her in the human world.
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Speaking of the Empress, her full Japanese name and title is "Gokuraku
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Kijintei," or, roughly, "Machine-God(or Soul)-Empress Paradise."
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Kagemaru's name in Japanese sort of means "Shadow-Circle." The shadow
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part also has implications of assistance or backing, which I think
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fits.
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Akudama actually means "villain" or "bad guy," as in "I played the
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villain in 'The Matrix.'" I honestly was going to translate "Akudama
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Teikoku" as the "Badguy Empire," and yes, I had corroboration on this
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nuance from three native Japanese speakers, one of whom laughed right
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away when I said it. But as I played along I saw all the "A"s in the
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background art and decided to leave it, though I suppose I could've
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changed those to "B"s if I'd cared. I notice Vic Tokai didn't pick up
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on this for The Krion Conquest, leaving a bunch of random "A"s
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floating around.
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The Japanese version did the cutscenes using quotation marks, but to
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save space I went with little subtitle marks instead. I hope they
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don't suck. Believe me, this change freed up at least a hundred bytes
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for script.
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I don't know why Kagemaru is surprised magicians exist before Round 1
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and then goes on about magicians being sealed by the Empire after
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Round 1. I might have interpreted the line slightly wrong; I
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considered that he might instead be surprised that there really was a
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magician sealed in the Rod he made off with, but either way there's
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some kind of discrepancy. My theory is that he hadn't REALLY believed
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all this magician crap he'd heard rumors about, but once Doropie
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appeared he had no choice but to conclude all he'd heard was true.
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For those who want to take me to task, the original line in romaji is
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"Odoroita na. Masaka hontou ni mahou-tsukai ga iru nante."
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The problematic line I mentioned in the readme is the last line,
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Doropie's "Roger!" The Japanese was "un!", a casual affirmative along
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the lines of "Yeah!" or "Okay!" It sounds sort of like "uh," or "mm"
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if you have your mouth closed as she does.
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No, I don't know what the hell is up with the "MESSAGE FOR YOU FROM
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YOUR FRIENDS" bit. It was like that in the original.
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I like to think this game was made by hippies, what with the pagan
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imagery, the feminist gender-reversal on the Ninja Gaiden plot, and
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the sudden environmental twist at the end. Except I don't think there
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are hippies in Japan. Hey, maybe the friends are the hippies. I
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should change it to "MESSAGE FOR YOU FROM THE HIPPIES". There's space. |