Mar 26, 2007
A new section: memory
BY DERRICK SOBODASH
or those who don’t know yet, I am done translating games.
I will try to finish the two projects I am able, those being Der Langrisser and Heroine Anthem, but I’m otherwise finished with what has been most of my hobby and life for ten years.
Ten years is a long time, and at this point, there is nothing left for me to translate.
That’s not to say there aren’t dozens of excellent games yet to be done. At the top of my list would be Langrisser IV–the Langrisser translation I actually wanted to make happen.
I hope to see a translation of a real release of Emerald Dragon, not the Super Famicom remake. I do blame myself that only that remake is being worked on. When I began pushing to get the game done in 2003, I offered my services to Nightcrawler before one of our many disagreements pretty much killed all chances of us cooperating on anything ever again. Maybe if I had researched and played more before leaping onto the bad Nintendo remake, I could have found the help to make an X68000 or FM-TOWNS translation happen.
Or perhaps not.
There are still dozens of Chinese and Korean games which will never get any attention, a problem I tried multiple times to remedy.
Lakuuna will soon be releasing a complete translation of Magna Carta: The Phantom of Avalanche. That translation has been completed using the tools I originally wrote six years ago. It took that long to find a willing Korean speaker to look at the script. I gave up after two years waiting.
For a period, I ran The Second Dimension, a Web site which covered Chinese and Korean gaming news, and who’s domain is now owned by a spam squatter after negotiations with the other The Second Dimension failed to reach agreements–they wanted it to cover comic books, and I refused to work on a page about anime. When T2D closed its doors in early 2005, I passed on all content to the tsd crew. To date, the reviews have never made it online.
I wrote all the tools necessary to finish translations of Heroine Anthem I&II, but due to a lack of time on my part, I could never get through the massive script files. Everyone who offered to help failed to delivered even a single file.
Even the most famous of all Chinese games, Xian Jian Qi Xia Zhuan, met a death fed by disinterest. In 2005, Jacky Weiss and I translated the beta for the game. Then the worst thing that could happen to any fan project happened–we found jobs. With Waiss slaving away in Square-Enix’s Beijing sweatshop for a bajillion hours per week and me tearing my hair out preparing lessons for university English classes, we quickly found ourselves with no time.
Perhaps my only success was with Beggar Prince, a commercial release done under Super Fighter Team, a private company owned by Brandon Cobb, a fellow Chinese game nut. Of course, Cobb takes it a bit farther than me. I would never start a company to translate these games, let alone name it after Super Fighter. Through his magical contacts at C&E, he legally acquired the licensed to sell the game in the USA. Yu “TechMaster” Chen-shih was hired to tackle the script, and I was hired to write the magical tools to make it all possible.
It was a long road with years of debugging, but we managed to put out a finished product that received fairly good reviews. It also fulfilled my childhood dream of appearing in the credits of an RPG. Sure, I’ve stuck myself in free space in all the projects I’ve done, but this was something official.
But these aren’t my tasks anymore. I’ve had a good run and accomplished more than a lot of people. There are just too many other things in my life now that pull me away from having the time to work on translations.
I’m not sad about it. In fact, I’m quite happy with my life today. There’s no way I could have imagined ten years ago that things would change as much as they have. A lot of choices I made look stupid in retrospect, but when I map out the linear course of my life, it becomes astoundingly clear how even one different choice may have landed me on another page of the big Choose Your Own Adventure book.
And that brings me to what this series of posts will be about.
If you notice, this post is tagged “Memory”: Memory is exactly what it is about. For the next as-long-as-it-takes, I will be posting about my memories of my experiences translating games.
This is not intended to be historically accurate, well-researched, or anything else that would make it citable to get Wikipedia Nazis to stop flagging the “fan translation” page. Just what I remember, who I remember, and what I did.
My goals for this series are two. Firstly, I hope people who get interesting in game translation in the future can know how it was in the old days, and fully appreciate how things have changed, and how much more is truly possible now. Secondly, when I’m too old to remember how to shit on my own anymore, I can refer to these writings to learn what I did for ten years of my life.
Your comments will be appreciated, and if you notice any inaccuracies, please reply to correct me. I will not, however, edit the posts to correct mistaken information. This is intended to be how I remember it, and if I remember things wrong, so be it. If nothing else, your corrections will stand as a great example of why one shouldn’t wait ten years to start recording the details of his life.
