Assault Suit Leynos 2 English Translation - WIP

[ryanm8]

Hey all. Long-time lurker here.

I've been a software engineer for 15+ years and dabbled in ROM hacking during that time. I wanted to get back into it, so I figured I'd start with an "easy game" (or so I thought) I'd like to see in English. So, I started working on a translation for Assault Suit Leynos 2 a few months ago. I initially hit some roadblocks with the text compression for the dialogue, but recently was able to finally crack it.

I have all the dialogue text translated with a rough draft. I still need to proof-read each line, and then locate the rest of the text in the game (various title screens, pause screen, etc.). So still quite a bit of work to go. I plan on releasing my tools at some point so anyone can change the wording of the translation if they want to.

I don't know Japanese so I'm relying on AI and Google for the translation. If any Japanese speaker is interested in helping to translate, please let me know. I will also be looking for beta testers once the translation is closer to completion. Drop me a message if interested.

 

[samuraisaturn]

picked a great title and looks like great progress. Ill be looking forward to seeing this complete.

 

[Danthrax]

There is an official translation of this game now on Steam and modern consoles. It's part of the Saturn Tribute line from City Connection. If you can find a way to extract the English from that, you wouldn't have to rely on AI translation.

 

[ryanm8]

There is an official translation of this game now on Steam and modern consoles. It's part of the Saturn Tribute line from City Connection. If you can find a way to extract the English from that, you wouldn't have to rely on AI translation.

Good point. I will try to use that translation as a base for mine. I didn't really want to go down the rabbit hole of trying to pull the script from the Switch/PC version, but I did a quick check on YouTube and there are longplays I could use if nothing else.

From what I recall when researching that Switch version in the past, they use some kind of custom Saturn emulator where they layer the translated text over the emulated Saturn game. I might run into space constraints where I can't bring over the text 1-for-1 but I will see what I can do.

The hard part was cracking the text compression. The translation will be the easier (although still time consuming) part!

 

[Danthrax]

Good point. I will try to use that translation as a base for mine. I didn't really want to go down the rabbit hole of trying to pull the script from the Switch/PC version, but I did a quick check on YouTube and there are longplays I could use if nothing else.

From what I recall when researching that Switch version in the past, they use some kind of custom Saturn emulator where they layer the translated text over the emulated Saturn game. I might run into space constraints where I can't bring over the text 1-for-1 but I will see what I can do.

The hard part was cracking the text compression. The translation will be the easier (although still time consuming) part!

I don't think they're layering the English text over the original game. I think they hacked the original game. The problem is that it's encrypted so you can't just find the bin/cue files sitting around in the game folder.

 

[ryanm8]

Here's that first dialogue screen with the text inserted from the Switch version:

I had to move "ahead" to the line below due to space constraints, but so far, it seems the official translation will work with minor modifications.

Anyway, I will save the text editing for near the end once I have all the text located. 🙂