So recently the translator Koestl contacted me for some help with the hacking for ‘Grisaia no Kajitsu’ (or ‘Fruit of the Grisaia’), since the game uses the CatSystem2 game Engine.  CatSystem2 was used by Kamikaze Explorer, which I released tools for before.  The tools didn’t work very well with Grisaia however, so some work was needed to get things playing smoothly. In the end I volunteered to help out making the game run well in English.

I should keep in mind that Koestl is the one doing the bulk of the heavy lifting, since translating the game, and it’s a huge ass game, is all his work.  I’m just working on the technical parts.  His translation is great and he does a really good job making it work in English.  He must keep an editor in his pocket because his translation comes out quite polished.  Look forward to playing it in English way (waaaay) down the road.  At the moment, the translation is 10.5% complete.

So anyways, that out of the way, onto the hacking stuff!

Text Insertion

If a line starts with English text, it's a command. That makes it a bit tricky if you actually want to use English!

CatSystem2 is a really finicky game engine to run English on, because the scripting system generally relies on text being in Japanese.  Lots of things you’d take for granted, like word wrap, the ability to use quotes and apostrophe’s, or just right out displaying English text at all, don’t work out of the box.  The system differentiates what lines are script commands and what lines are text to display in game by what language it’s written in.  More annoyingly, quotes and apostrophe’s don’t work properly, and there is no word wrapping by default.

To make the text work well in game, I first extracted all of the game text out of the scripts into their own files, and then made a tool to insert text from those files back into the original script with some modifications to make them display properly in game. Koestl can then just translate those text files without worrying about the silly technical workarounds, and then run compile and have it work in game immediately.

A random scene in the intro chapter.

Solving some of the limitations was a bit of a challenge. For quotes, we’ve ended up relying on the original Japanese quotes for the script. After a while we realized that we could use unicode directional quotes to surround sentences, but we decided to stick with the Japanese style quotes. Apostrophe’s we’ve had to convert to backquotes.  It’s not pretty, but our font choice cloaks it well enough.  For word wrapping, originally we relied on automatic line breaks after a set number of characters, but we changed the system we were using part way.  CatSystem2 allows you to mark a word or sentence to be wrapped as a single unit by surrounding it in square brackets, like [this].  Getting word wrapping working was simply a matter of bracketing each word with square brackets so the game wraps them as one would expect in english.  And lastly, to make the engine pick up our English sentences, we prepend an unnoticeable script command to the start of each line.

The resulting script looks almost unreadable, and it would be almost impossible to write it all directly if it weren’t for the text insertion tool doing the heavy lift it.  It looks good in game though!

That same scene in the game script. It looks way better in game doesn't it?

Making it Look Good

Once the text is in game it actually looks pretty good.

Text Insertion is only part of making a game work in English.  There’s many other things that need to happen, such as updating the UI, the game engine interface, and making text that isn’t in the dialog box itself accessible.  I figured having access to Debug Mode would make fixing these a bit easier, but debug mode is locked behind a key file.  This is where hacking gets real.

I haven’t really done any serious reverse engineering of executable files before. Breaking CatSystem2′s script files was more of a matter of just prodding the data file until it caughs up the right info… actually changing the executable was on a completely different level.  It was a good learning experience, and it took a fair bit of time, but I managed to modify the exe to launch the game in Debug Mode!

Here's what the game engine looks with all the debug features visible.

Debug mode actually gives you access to a lot of cool features.  For one, you can instantly jump to any file, and even any line in any file.  It has an in interface button to recompile the game script, which I mapped to run a batch file that does all the text insertion too.  It gives you a debug message window that gives output from the commands the engine is given, and it even allows you to see all of the engine variables and open image and plane resources.  It’s fun stuff.

Armed with debug mode, I’ve been working on translating on screen text and spoken dialog that is in the background and not listed in the dialog box for normal display.  What I’ve done is made a small slide down panel that appears in the top right corner that shows the translation of the background dialog.  It’s non intrusive and it looks pretty good to see it in action.

An example of the subtitle panel. The text I don't think is final.

The rest of it is just UI modification.  It’s kind of tedious work, but in the end it’s important to having a good play experience.

I think it looks pretty decent?

I swear this game system has like 5 billion different options. Bad for me, good for you.

 Conclusion

So yeah, the game is starting to look pretty amazing in English, and Koestl’s translation is all kinds of awesome.  Actually, the game itself so far has been great, and it’s really exciting to see it slowly take shape in English.

Right now the project is at 10.5%, with the common route being almost half translated. I’ve been impressed with Koestl’s work so far, and I’ll do what I can to help out as the project goes on.  I don’t think he plans on any intermediate release however, since the common route betrays the overall intent of the game (the ‘comedy’ common route versus the ‘heavy’ character stories), so we’ll have to work towards a final translation.  It’ll be a long term project, and certainly the release is a long ways off, but hopefully, you’ll be able to see this screen too:

Yes, screenshotting the patch installer makes me a huge dick.

Mangagamer released a new patch for Shuffle a few days ago, which apparently fixes a game crash that occurs when viewing some of the CG in the CG room.  The patch also breaks the font patch I put out for the game.  So that said, I’ve updated the font patch on the site to work with the new patch.  If you want to install the font patch, you’ll now need the latest version first, head over to Mangagamer’s site to grab it, it’s only 1.3mb.

Updated Shuffle Font Patch

So I finally got my copy of Aselia the Eternal (Eien Aselia) in the mail.  Between JAST sending it out two weeks after release even though I pre-ordered, and Canada customs being dinks, it took a good while, but it’s here!

Unfortunately, I have a bunch of other games currently on the go so I don’t think I’ll be able to dive into it right away, but hopefully soon!

So over the Halloween sale I picked up Soul Link from MG, and also at the same time decided to grab Shuffle too. Both games default to my least favorite second least favorite font in the known universe (behind Comic Sans), Courier New, so I quickly fixed up a font patch for both games.

Shuffle! Font Patch

Soul Link Font Patch

I’ve also set up a Game Patches section on the site which has a collection of all the patches I’ve released, so you don’t have to go looking around for them later.

So I finally got my latest swag in from Japan.  This time I ordered from J-List since they had a good deal on a game I wanted to play from a looong time ago.  Customs didn’t open my package though, so I took a look at the declaration.  ’See other invoice’ as a description of contents.  Are they even allowed to do that? I have a feeling that you aren’t.

The other invoice itself is located below enough tape that it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that it would be actually easier to open the box rather than actually extract the invoice from the envelope.  But anyways, lets look at the invoice.

I’ve seen a lot of unique invoice declarations, but this one is new to me.  I’m sure there’s a joke to make here, but it’s too much of a stretch.  I’m not really sure what to think about it. J-List isn’t unique here, everyone I’ve imported from has tried to play down the contents, including Amazon Japan.  It seems pretty standard practice, but this one is still unique.  It’s funny though, if absolutely everyone lies to the government about what they’re importing, I wonder what the point of it is?

The ‘glue’ in question.  Yeah, I’m like… 6 years behind the times, but it’s a game I’ve been meaning to play and the time may be right!

Well, they must have done something right though since customs didn’t open it.  They always open my games, Canada customs is pretty paranoid that way. It’s like they just presume that everything from Japan is immoral and need subjugation by the censorship cops.  I’m kind of amazed you can get away with declaring goods in that way though. Maybe if they catch you lying you’ll get in trouble, I don’t really know!

For a while now, I’ve been trying to get my Mangagamer games to launch from steam’s game library as a non-steam application. Unfortunately, the DRM that is built in with Mangagamer releases crashes because of how Steam hooks into the games. Downloading a cracked version is of course one option, but it’s kind of a pain and I have quite a few games.

Luckily, it turns out there’s an easy solution.  All you need to do is enable compatibility mode for the game executable in question, and it will launch properly in steam.  I’m unsure exactly why it works, it doesn’t require you to set any OS compatibility in particular, just that it’s enabled.  Either way, now I can launch my games from Steam and creep my friends out by having it show when I’m playing an Eroge!

I just want to go on the record and say: sometimes this game (Koihime Musou) scares me.  The fact that… it… is voiced by Norio Wakamoto just makes it weirder!

Alright, it’s done! As I mentioned in detail in my last post, Kotori Love ExP contains the shared route story and Kotori’s route for Da Capo Plus Communication, which is an improved/expanded version of the original Da Capo. It also gives the game a much needed editing pass over the original release (back when Mangagamer’s releases weren’t as high quality) to make the game much more readable. The original translation wasn’t so much bad, but it was in desperate need of an editing pass to make it flow properly.

So what I’ve done is taken all of the matching dialog from Kotori Love ExP and ported it back to the original Da Capo. Things don’t line up exactly, so not everything is updated, and the individual character routes will use their original translation since they aren’t in Kotori Love ExP. Obviously updated content from Plus Communication doesn’t make an appearance, just lines that were the same in both versions.  That said, there’s still a huge amount of text that was updated, with approximately 260 of the games 600 script files receiving updated text.  Maybe I’ll give a full count sometime, but it makes up about ~40% of the game dialog.

They're both the same lines from the game's opening scene. The bottom screenshot is the updated translation.

Porting it has been kind of an adventure of it’s own.  Normally I would attempt to automate the process, but the scripts from the two versions are different enough that that’s not really possible.  So what it came down to was manual comparison and text insertion.

It's kind of embarrassing some of the strange things that made it in the translation...

After a bit I realized that just manually copying over lines was going to take ages.  There’s thousands of lines that are in need of updating, and just the act of copy/pasting that much makes me a sad man.  Eventually I wrote some tools that rips the dialog from each of the game scripts and puts them into a comparable format.  I used Beyond Compare to compare the two, because out of all the diff/compare tools I looked at it was the only one that allowed (effective) comparison of entire folders. After that it was just a matter of going through the slow process of merging lines that made sense to merge, skipping lines when the story diverged, and making small tweaks to lines where it’s needed.

The actual comparison process. Boring right? At least one click to merge a line makes it go quick.

The whole project gave me an interesting glimpse at exactly what was changed for the Plus Communication version.  It’s not just the new characters, but a lot in general was updated.  Some particularly awkward scenes and development have been outright replaced, some scenes are extended to make them flow better, and characters are added to other scenes which increases the amount of time the characters are interacting with each other.  Oh, obviously also new CG, new character stand art, and improved ‘gameplay’ aspects.  It’s a real shame that they aren’t planning on bringing this over, because it gives Da Capo a rather impressive face lift.

So yeah, that’s about all there is to say about it.  You can download it below, it’ll work with both the download version and package versions of the game.  It also includes the font fix.  I hope at least someone out there finds it useful!  If you don’t already have a copy of Da Capo, you can pick it up over at Mangagamer.com.

Download the Da Capo Dialog Update Patch

So I’ve been playing Da Capo recently, which is one of Mangagamer’s earlier titles. It came out roughly around the time where their translations are kind of sketchy. They’re good translation wise, but there’s no… flow. Maybe they just didn’t have an editor back then, who knows!

This was more of a stand out issue in Da Capo than it was in Suika I think because Da Capo has more humor and just general randomness, which doesn’t come across very well in a stiff translation. I think Suika’s story came across a lot better (despite it was probably the same translator) probably just because the script works better with a direct translation.

But! Mangagamer released one of the Da Capo fandisks, “Kotori Love ExP”. The fan disc contains Kotori’s stories from Da Capo Plus Communication (the updated version of Da Capo with new characters and content), Da Capo Innocent Finale (an all ages retelling of the DC story), the other fan discs White Season, After Seasons, Christmas Days, as well as a new scenario featuring Kotori.

The key here is Plus Communication, the Kotori Love ExP version is the main game except it won’t let you continue on any story other than Kotori’s. That means that the entire common route for Plus Communication is actually already translated. Most of the games content is the same as the original though, just with extra scenes with the new characters. Since I’m just playing Da Capo for the first time, and I happened to already own a copy of Kotori Love ExP, I decided that when playing Kotori’s route I should play through the updated version of the game instead. Why not?

I wasn’t sure if Mangagamer would re-translate the content that was already translated for Da Capo, but it seems they did actually do that. It looks like they did a full re-translation, or at least a serious re-editing, of all the game content, which is quite obvious when you play the two side by side.

Well, even though Mangagamer won’t fix the translation of their old games, and likely won’t release Plus Communication fully in English, we do have a re-translation available for all of the game’s shared content (scenes that appear before the routes branch off). It’s only the first half of the game, but it’s still better than nothing right?

So what I’ve started doing is actually port the translation back from the new translation in Kotori Love ExP back to the original Da Capo where the scenarios actually overlap. I’ve got the first two days done, and while it’s kind of tiring, boring work, it’s not really that hard. And, hopefully when it’s done it can be used to provide a more enjoyable experience for the common route, and maybe even Kotori’s route if it’s not too different in the Plus Communication version.

This is a title that is definitely outside of my comfort zone, as ‘surprise sex’ is not usually on my list of favorite things. Liquid games are widely known for their mastery of the non-consensual, which is definitely a put-off. But you know, they say a wise man once said “Don’t knock it till you try it”. I’m not sure this phrase was intended for sexual assault, but what can I say. When Kouryuu of Mangagamer announced that “Rape is now on sale! Get your rape now!”, I knew that I had to at least give it a shot.

(For the record, I do feel some guilt for playing and reviewing this game!)

Vincent Conquer is a wanderer and mercenary, moving from place to place in search for work.  He’s also a massive asshole, but he’s pretty good at hiding it when he needs to.  Vincent finds himself between the nations of Katusha and Eclipse, both of which are at war with each other.  While deciding which side he wants to solicit his services to, since he definitely doesn’t want to be on the losing side of the war, he hits the jackpot and finds a group of bandits trying to abduct the princess of Katusha.  Seeing this golden opportunity, he dispatches the bandits and rescues the princess.

Upon his arrival in Katusha, Vince realizes that this golden opportunity is well beyond simply collecting a reward for saving the princess, but he could turn the war around and if he played his cards right, even dispose of the worthless Katusha king and claim the throne for himself.  Beyond his skills as a swordsman, Vince is an incomparable strategist and easily convinces Katusha to allow him to become an officer in their military.   As it quickly becomes clear that he is invaluable to Katusha, Vince slowly rolls out his plan to dominate and violate his way to the throne, and there is little they can do to stop him.

 

The game is dark, but the translation is catchy and often doesn't take itself too seriously.

Given that this is a nukige (a game where the focus is on sex over story or gameplay), the story is more interesting than I initially anticipated.  That is not to say that it’s a good story, there’s not a whole lot to it, but it is at least somewhat interesting to see how the war plays out and how Vincent’s plan to rape his way to the top folds out.  There is some suspension of disbelief required, as one might be convinced that Vincent is the only one with a brain in this game in order to get away with what he does.

And there is a lot of rape.  I think there’s all of… maybe 2 consentual scenes in this game, although you might technically count that number higher if you consider women broken to the point where they beg for sex as ‘consentual’.  That said, rape is a weird thing in this game.  Girls as you might imagine aren’t too keen on the idea of getting raped, but despite the amount of un-lubricated ass sexing that goes on there’s never any bleeding, and of course the girls always have orgasms when raped.  In fact, ‘conquering’ the females in the game often involves raping them enough that they admit they love being raped and become subservient to you.  It’s really a bit silly when you think about it.

Luckily, the game seems to be fully aware of how ridiculous the whole thing is. The game text is always written seriously, but you’ll pick up a wink here, a nudge there, where the game is basically telling you it knows just how silly it is, and that it’s laughing with you. Even though it’s a dark game, maybe it’s just the writing but I never felt particularly squeamish about most of what happened in the game. The showcase here is ‘surprise’ sex, not necessarily the suffering of the characters.

By this point, it's less 'surprise' and more 'sex'.

Which brings up the matter of translation.  I must say, I’m really impressed with the translation in the game.  I’m told that the translation was done by the same translator that did Kara no Shoujo, and while I think his skills might be underutilized in a game like this, he does a great job.  When you read the game, it feels like it was written in English, not simply a translation of Japanese.  There’s almost no awkwardness or difficult to understand lines at all.  The translation utilizes some slang, but I never found it out of place.  You might even catch the odd language joke slipped in.  As I mentioned it gives a slight air of not taking itself too seriously, while still accurately portraying the game’s scenario.  The translation alone I’m certain contributed most strongly to my enjoyment of the game.

As the game is strongly focused on sexual content, there is, well, a lot of sex.  There is plenty of scene variation, from 1 guy 1 girl to many many guys 1 girl, even a lesbian encounter and a demon sex scene, with everything in between with many different positions and styles.  There is a whopping 48 porn scenes in the game, and a total of 95 illustrations (plus variations).  That’s a lot of rape.  To be honest I’m not personally a fan of Liquid’s art style, but it’s a good match for the style of game at hand. The game does run at a smaller resolution than I’d like (640×480), which makes sense because of how old the game is but its still disappointing to see a game run in this resolution these days.

The queen you will be conquering. With your penis.

The voice acting, I’m not sure really if there’s much to say.  Only the female characters are voiced, and they all sounded good enough.  There wasn’t any particularly stand out performances, but I didn’t identify anything really too bad either.  Most of the dialog in the game is moaning and yelling anyways so it’s hard to really get a good idea of how well it’s done.  I guess if it didn’t catch my attention it probably wasn’t too bad!

The gameplay aspect, to say the least, there isn’t really any.  There are all of 4 options in the game, the first of which has no influence on the story past the scene immediately following, and two of the options are whether to pull out during sex.  There are 4 endings to the game, with varying levels of debauchery and depravity.  I don’t really understand how pulling out and not pulling out gets you a different ending than not pulling out then pulling out, but it does.  It’s really weird the way this game works!

I went in with low expectations, and it’s really not my kind of game, but there’s more to the game than I anticipated.  As a nukige, this game gives you a pretty good porn bang for your buck.  What can I say, if you like Liquids art style and are a fan of surprise sex, then you’ll probably have a rapetastic time with Conquering the Queen.