After working on Kyuutenkai I pivoted to Nekketsu Oyako, one of my favorite beatem ups, but progress was slow. I looked at the stack of games I had been wanting to play and Slayers was right on top. I had played through the game partially in Japanese, but I really wanted to get the full experience and I thought that it would be a good first project for a larger RPG style game with a larger text content, but not as big as something like a full RPG.
I started working at the end of April and I'm on my final ( I hope ) polish playthrough right now. I wanted to share some cool things that happened along the way while I'm getting the final build ready.
Here's some screenshots of the title:
Translation Notes
I didn't know anything about Slayers before playing this game, but I loved the art and I had collected both games for Saturn along with some of the fun trinkets that were given out at the time for the game. The game is kind of a "Comedy RPG" I would say. It doesn't take itself seriously at all, and pokes fun at standard RPG mechanics and genres while at the same time... being a very fun light RPG itself. It turned out that translating comedy can be tougher since humor doesn't always cross cleanly between cultures.
I started looking for sources to help give me an idea of what proper translations would look like for Slayers. There was an official DVD release of the TV show's multiple seasons, and there were some official movies with translations as well. I couldn't figure out what the proper spelling should be for a particular villain, but I found out that this villain had showed up in the "Slayers Return" official movie that was released in the states. I couldn't actually find anywhere to watch the movie online so I actually ended up buying the DVD on ebay to watch it for clues. It turned out that... the official U.S. translation was not great haha. It gets some names wrong and also conflicts with the Slayers wiki online. The villain "Galev Kainzard" is the main bad guy in the movie "Slayers Return", and he shows up in this game as well ( spoilers ), but the translation of his name between Galev -> Galef is not agreed upon between the DVD and online Wikis. I went with Galev as it sounded better to me. I had to do this with quite a few proper names and spells, but I did my best to choose names that felt right and maintain consistency. I started watching the show since getting the DVDs and it's pretty cute! I'm enjoying it, and love the game.
I also found some official trading cards that were released for the games and they helped me figure out some ambiguities. I had initially translated the brother and sister characters "Lark" and "Rynnea", but the trading cards showed them as "Lark and Linea", which made more alliterative sense and I took that translation. However, the cards also get some things wrong like "Ameria" for Amelia" which I corrected. It was tough! There were a lot of official sources but they were all a little inconsistent in their own ways.
One of the comedy bits that was fun to translate was the goofy party status screen that pokes fun at traditional RPG status displays. One of the running jokes in the game is that everyone treats the character Lark like a kid. The developers took this further and on his status screen his stats use easy to read Hirigana, whereas the other characters use more complex Kanji. His stats are all school kid terms, things that would describe a student. I was thinking of putting in a new font of like scribbling crayon to mimic the joke but changed his stats instead to "Pwactice, Payshens, Studeez" and it still makes me laugh so I called it done!
Another issue I ran into was that the overworld map screens had the town names baked into the maps with english town names that weren't spelled properly. The maps are very beautiful and beyond me to edit without making them look terrible so I actually took the names from the map sprites as canon and used them consistently. It isn't terrible, and gives the world a bit of charm. "LakeWood" in the shots below is one of the better town names.
Tech Notes
I ran into some hard to track down crashes that I could only reproduce on the Saturn hardware and not in the emulator so in order to track these down I implemented an on-screen debug tool that converted information I wanted like the current position of the program counter, the contents of particular places in memory, ect. into coded colored squares on screen. I drew these with some custom code I injected into the game loop and then when the game crashed I could decode the colored dots and figure out where and why the game crashed and work backwards from there. I actually first implemented this to track down crashes for the translation of Senken Kikyoden I'm working on and ported it over.
An actual crash with looping sound:
It was a little tough to read the colors on a CRT as there's so much variation but I stuck to pure R/G/B or black and that helped me when I was unsure.
Cinematics
For the cinematics I was lucky enough to figure out how to burn in subtitles, but ran into the issue of re-encoding the movies causing some quality loss. To get around this I implemented a pipeline where I actually copy the top strips of the movie where the subtitles aren't 1:1 from the original data and only inject re-encoded video strips for the sections of the screen where my subtitles are, which keeps the movies a lot cleaner.
I was also able to patch in the english "Slayers" title logo in the opening movie. The art cel that appears behind the title is static, and just shifts positionally while the title draws so I capture the shot of the static art image, moved it to match the motion in the movie, and drew the english title on top of it for every frame the title was visible. This resulted in me being able to get the english logo in seamlessly to the intro movie. This was pretty cool as the official U.S. DVD releases of the movies and TV show don't even have the english title in their animations.
Here's some more shots:
I started working at the end of April and I'm on my final ( I hope ) polish playthrough right now. I wanted to share some cool things that happened along the way while I'm getting the final build ready.
Here's some screenshots of the title:
Translation Notes
I didn't know anything about Slayers before playing this game, but I loved the art and I had collected both games for Saturn along with some of the fun trinkets that were given out at the time for the game. The game is kind of a "Comedy RPG" I would say. It doesn't take itself seriously at all, and pokes fun at standard RPG mechanics and genres while at the same time... being a very fun light RPG itself. It turned out that translating comedy can be tougher since humor doesn't always cross cleanly between cultures.
I started looking for sources to help give me an idea of what proper translations would look like for Slayers. There was an official DVD release of the TV show's multiple seasons, and there were some official movies with translations as well. I couldn't figure out what the proper spelling should be for a particular villain, but I found out that this villain had showed up in the "Slayers Return" official movie that was released in the states. I couldn't actually find anywhere to watch the movie online so I actually ended up buying the DVD on ebay to watch it for clues. It turned out that... the official U.S. translation was not great haha. It gets some names wrong and also conflicts with the Slayers wiki online. The villain "Galev Kainzard" is the main bad guy in the movie "Slayers Return", and he shows up in this game as well ( spoilers ), but the translation of his name between Galev -> Galef is not agreed upon between the DVD and online Wikis. I went with Galev as it sounded better to me. I had to do this with quite a few proper names and spells, but I did my best to choose names that felt right and maintain consistency. I started watching the show since getting the DVDs and it's pretty cute! I'm enjoying it, and love the game.
I also found some official trading cards that were released for the games and they helped me figure out some ambiguities. I had initially translated the brother and sister characters "Lark" and "Rynnea", but the trading cards showed them as "Lark and Linea", which made more alliterative sense and I took that translation. However, the cards also get some things wrong like "Ameria" for Amelia" which I corrected. It was tough! There were a lot of official sources but they were all a little inconsistent in their own ways.
One of the comedy bits that was fun to translate was the goofy party status screen that pokes fun at traditional RPG status displays. One of the running jokes in the game is that everyone treats the character Lark like a kid. The developers took this further and on his status screen his stats use easy to read Hirigana, whereas the other characters use more complex Kanji. His stats are all school kid terms, things that would describe a student. I was thinking of putting in a new font of like scribbling crayon to mimic the joke but changed his stats instead to "Pwactice, Payshens, Studeez" and it still makes me laugh so I called it done!
Another issue I ran into was that the overworld map screens had the town names baked into the maps with english town names that weren't spelled properly. The maps are very beautiful and beyond me to edit without making them look terrible so I actually took the names from the map sprites as canon and used them consistently. It isn't terrible, and gives the world a bit of charm. "LakeWood" in the shots below is one of the better town names.
Tech Notes
I ran into some hard to track down crashes that I could only reproduce on the Saturn hardware and not in the emulator so in order to track these down I implemented an on-screen debug tool that converted information I wanted like the current position of the program counter, the contents of particular places in memory, ect. into coded colored squares on screen. I drew these with some custom code I injected into the game loop and then when the game crashed I could decode the colored dots and figure out where and why the game crashed and work backwards from there. I actually first implemented this to track down crashes for the translation of Senken Kikyoden I'm working on and ported it over.
An actual crash with looping sound:
It was a little tough to read the colors on a CRT as there's so much variation but I stuck to pure R/G/B or black and that helped me when I was unsure.
Cinematics
For the cinematics I was lucky enough to figure out how to burn in subtitles, but ran into the issue of re-encoding the movies causing some quality loss. To get around this I implemented a pipeline where I actually copy the top strips of the movie where the subtitles aren't 1:1 from the original data and only inject re-encoded video strips for the sections of the screen where my subtitles are, which keeps the movies a lot cleaner.
I was also able to patch in the english "Slayers" title logo in the opening movie. The art cel that appears behind the title is static, and just shifts positionally while the title draws so I capture the shot of the static art image, moved it to match the motion in the movie, and drew the english title on top of it for every frame the title was visible. This resulted in me being able to get the english logo in seamlessly to the intro movie. This was pretty cool as the official U.S. DVD releases of the movies and TV show don't even have the english title in their animations.
Here's some more shots:
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