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Thursday, September 13, 2012

Dangan Ronpa Translation Project

The SA thread is better at explaining this game than I am.

If you've read this blog for a while, you have probably noticed two things:
  1. I'm a very promiscuous person.
  2. Perhaps because of #1, I also translate things other than manga sometimes, like an anime movie and a drama CD.
With that being said, the next item on my list is ROM hacking. On one hand, I've gotten decently far in figuring out how to attack a few ROMs like Ni no Kuni DS and 7th Dragon 2020, but I've never really convinced myself to start translating them. On the other hand, I had looked at Dangan Ronpa before with great interest, but I never got myself to adequately analyze the ROM. However, after playing SDR2 (which is superior to the first game in every way), I finally got the motivation to make a breakthrough.

The result is DREditor (src). It can convert the most important parts of the script files and all 2D art assets to editable formats and repack them. Here are a few screenshots that shows what it can do.




It still doesn't fully understand script files, but it understands enough for translation.

Anyways, the translation project has no time goal, because my main focus will still be on translating manga. Also, the scope of this project is pretty huge; IIRC, the total character count for strings in scripts is about 1.1 million. In contrast, after translating about 60 volumes of manga over 2.7 years, the total character count for all of my translations is about 2.5 million, and that's the English character count, which should be way greater than the Japanese character count. I'll probably take a while to find my tempo. I'll also put the translation on GitHub as well when I get far enough.

I'm fully aware that the Let's Play has translated a huge chunk of the lines, but the problem with that is that the translations were made without having to consider about how small the message window is. The dialogue is made so that the character on screen changes his/her expression pretty much every line, so splitting long lines into two isn't a good solution in my opinion.

Anyways, enough talk. Here are the links to the editor again. You're free to try to copy the Let's Play translation if you really want, or to do anything with it. The source is open to public domain.
DREditor 0.0.1 (mf)
DREditor source code (github)

Here's some documentation. The technical documentation isn't that great, so just look at the source code or ask me if you want to know more. Note: the editor, the script files and the documentation contain heavy spoilers (even for people who are following the LP).
How to Use DREditor
Technical Documentation
Main Page

This is what the Chinese translation effort looks like, by the way. They've just started a few weeks ago, but they also have had an earlier Let's Play-style translation, which is why they're moving so fast.

10 comments:

  1. You're like the grateast person ever

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    Replies
    1. *greatest
      Too excited to type properly

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  2. Can you please translate Front Mission 2089 Border of Madness for DS?? PLSS

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  5. Hello, I'm rather confused on the first part of the instructions, could you explain it to me? (Sorry to bother)

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  6. This game rather intrigued me for a while now and what a good surprise too see somone trying to translate it.
    Thank you very much!

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  7. hi, idk if you'll be answer my question though but.. how do you do step 5? i mean, how do you put eboot.bin into umdgen?


    thanks!

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  8. Hi! Does this work on the PSP iso of DR2?

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