Seriously, people putting words in our mouths, and not bothering to listen to a single thing we’ve said, but instead choose to spread their own version of the truth about it. So how about I put it all out in the open, and in a place where it can’t even be questioned whether or not one of us is actually saying this? This is what you get when you want transparency, I suppose.
Yes, a patch did go out. No, this was not our patch. So if you think comparing us to what happened with Felghana is actually accurate, try again. This patch was a super early version of the translation that was being worked on by zerog way back in the day, and it was from before he actually locked everything down to be completely private for his project. We did not actually start working on this until December 2016.
What are we mad about? We are mad that someone (not on 4chan before you anons get up in arms) came to our faces to basically tell us that our work isn’t worth it at his rate. Work that we’ve put into this, pushing other personal projects to the side over.
“Why don’t you make a percentage?”
Since this keeps being asked about, let me cover this subject.
1) Because we don’t want to. We are already feeling the ‘soul draining’ aspect of this that also led Jess to cut her hair when working on FC’s script. This script is so massive, that each change we make isn’t even a tenth of a percent of the whole script. It’s already demoralizing to be told that our work isn’t worth it. We don’t want something like this demoralizing us more either. This is not a job. We’re doing this on the side from everything else we all normally do anyway.
2) Because our formatting isn’t going to make it easy. We’re working over ten spreadsheets, one of which has about 80-100 workbooks, at least. Now, I can easily make a formula to create a percentage based off of work from a specific column in a spreadsheet, but just today, we had to move stuff around in one of the workbooks because it was formatted funny, and didn’t have allowances for our edits in it yet. That would have broken our percentage recording, and the formula would have to be rebuilt.
3) The monster table is in very strict character counts. If this is the PSP version, we can’t break 22 characters per line. Percentages would be difficult to accomodate for lines that aren’t edited to fit in the 22 character limit. The PC version won’t have this problem, so it needs to be figured out if this table will work as is, or if it’ll look better to do something different with it with the higher PC resolution and more character count allowance due to our font selection.
Those Amazing E-celeb Points
If you guys think we’re doing this for the Internet E-Celeb Points, I have to ask, ‘are you daft?’ Have you seen what professional translators and publishers in the game industry go through on a daily basis? I feel it’s completely thankless and frustrating to deal with people on this aspect.
If I want e-celeb points, I’m doing the wrong thing, without fail. If I wanted e-celeb points, I’d make this post out to be more than it is now, even. But I won’t do that either. All I’m doing is telling you the truth about this project. It’s your choice to believe me or not.
Real Life and Endless History
This past week has been frustrating, on top of everything I’ve been doing for Endless History. Out of a desire to not let the outside influences of this translation project affect me, I’m temporarily stepping away from it. This could be a month to two months. I don’t know for sure yet, but I need to focus on Endless History and Anime Expo at the start of July, and the reaction over this whole thing has been enough to make me reconsider plans regarding that.
And to be fair, I don’t want that. I already put something in motion for AX that I want to see through (the fan appreciation box), and I need to step away. Seeing things said elsewhere is one thing- but having them brought up to our faces is something else entirely.
I can’t say anything about Guan and the others, though. This is just me.
What About the Translation?
It’s still going. We’ve made a change to make things a little faster, because the speed at which it’s going is already frustrating to us. (See the percentage aspect of things)
Translating, for me, has some aspects similar to website development (my actual line of work)- when you have a massive backlog of things that need to be done, it becomes difficult to keep yourself motivated when it feels like no progress is being made. If you want to completely devastate your progress in something like this, give yourself a percentage. That’s a sure fire way to make you realize how large and unending a project seems.
Guan’s Progress Update
Guan posted on neogaf yesterday with some updated info. I want to give a heads up, that our latest build for the PC patch can’t even render text right now (we’re changing font display in it), so it’s kind of difficult for us to show screenshots. Especially as, as I’ve said repeatedly, 95% of our work is going to be in these spreadsheets, which aren’t very exciting to show.
However, he did show a screenshot of what he was working on, along with one of our font tests for the PC version of the game.
In Closing
As I said before, all I want is respect- not to be told that my work is pointless, etc etc- and patience from people. I was reluctant to do this at the very start when people suggested I reach out to Zerog way back in the day. I straight up told him that I didn’t want to work 100% on the script. Yet, here I am.
Don’t get me wrong. I sound negative and frustrated, which I am- but the end result is people getting to play the first game of what, I believe, is the best arc of the Kiseki series. An editing job isn’t just a ‘check the line and move on.’ Many of these lines, as I said in the previous post, are requiring rewrites. The monster table, which is my baby, is kind of broken, because most of the entries actually break the character count. So those rewrites rely on me figuring out what does and doesn’t stay, and how much do I sacrifice to make it fit?
I believe fan translation is one of the most thankless things out there, but the end result of this is positive.
Oh, and one more thing, since I feel it needs to be reiterated, despite the times I’ve said how big this script it: Zero and Ao no Kiseki are the biggest games of the series. On top of this, the script itself isn’t linear. It’s mostly broken up by the region of Crossbell. So it’s likely that we can be working on one thing, then the sheet jumps to dialogue two chapters later.
More than anything, I just ask for patience. If you want to play the leaked patch, then by all means, go for it. But I’d like to think that what we can provide will be far superior in terms of editing.
I just ask that you respect us, and don’t do things like certain idiots have- and that’s come to us directly via twitter or discord or whathaveyou, and basically tell us that what we’re doing is worth jack and that we should stop. That’s when it gets rude, and that’s really what we’re upset about. Not the fact that people are playing with the early zerog patch.
