Tenchi o Kurau II: Sekiheki no Tatakai Translation Project (Warriors of Fate/Dynasty Wars II)
I've begun work on translating the Saturn version of Tenchi o Kurau II: Sekiheki no Tatakai.This is Capcom's 1992 beat 'em up, originally released in arcades and later ported to both the Sega Saturn and PlayStation. Neither console version was ever released outside Japan. It is one of only a few beat em ups on the platform. The game is very solid and deserves to be fully playable in english.
The game is based on the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. Although largely unfamiliar to Western audiences, it is deeply embedded in East Asian culture and is also well known in Japan, where Chinese literary traditions and writing systems were adopted and adapted over the centuries. The story's cultural status is somewhat comparable to Greek mythology in the West: a body of stories that everyone knows in some form and which has inspired countless retellings and interpretations.
Tenchi wo Kurau II focuses on Liu Bei and five of his generals: Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yun, Huang Zhong, and Wei Yan, as they struggle against the forces of Cao Cao during the Three Kingdoms era. The game only depicts a small portion of the enormous original novel, which spans well over a thousand pages.
Many people outside Japan know the game through its Western arcade release, Warriors of Fate. However, that localization stripped away all of its Three Kingdoms identity. Character names were changed and the storyline was altered. Liu Bei became "Kuan Ti", Cao Cao became "Akkila Orkhan", and the generals were renamed Portor, Kassar, Subutai, Kadan, and Abaka. The back story was changed: in the original story, Liu Bei defends his realm from Cao Cao's invasion, whereas in Warriors of Fate the player is fighting to liberate some kingdom already under the villain's control.
Tenchi o Kurau II is also a direct sequel to the first game in the series, Tenchi wo Kurau, which was localized in the West as Dynasty Wars and released on several home computers including the ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC. Unlike Warriors of Fate, those releases retained the connection to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, making the title "Dynasty Wars II" arguably the natural continuation.
This creates an awkward situation with three possible naming choices for the translation:
- Devouring Heaven and Earth II: Battle of Red Cliffs (literal translation)
- Dynasty Wars II
- Warriors of Fate
Current Progress
Text and Encoding
- Text encoding formats have been identified.
- I've gained control over both the 16×16 and 8×8 fonts.
- The game can be made to display multiple text boxes in succession, allowing dialogue to be expanded beyond the original limits.
- All game text has been located and extracted.
This is just a screen of me fooling around with the 8x8 font.
Issues
One issue that still needs solving is the text display timing. Each dialogue box remains on screen for only about 2.4 seconds, which severely limits readability using the 8x8 font. This problem also exists in the English arcade version, where much of the dialogue disappears before it can ever be read. The game can technically display much more text using the 8×8 font, but the usability of the 8x8 font is severely compromised by the static timing of the messages.The English arcade version asks you to read this in no more than 2.4 seconds. I can only make it about half way in that time when making a real effort to read fast.
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