Category Archives: Oriental Blue

Oriental Blue Release

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obtitle

Admit it! You didn’t think it would happen. But as I’m sure you all know, it’s still summer! At least for most of this week.

Oriental Blue is an RPG that’s part of the popular Tengai series, also known as Far East of Eden to most (see the Readme for details on that). It features non-linear gameplay, an intelligent battle system with a unique magic system, and near endless replayability due to countless minor and major choices that you knowingly or unknowingly make.

The translation project was started on October 16 2008, and was announced to the public on March 15 2009. Tom, who is known for translations such as Dragon Quest Monsters: Caravan Heart and Persona 2: Innocent Sin translated it. It has obviously been a long project, taking much longer than I would have liked or expected. While the translation was finished relatively early on, the hacking dragged on for a long time… other projects were close to release and had to be finished, university took a lot of time away, etc.

We eventually reached a stage where it was ready to be tested on April 9 this year. It’s a massive game, so it was always the plan to have a long and thorough test. I didn’t expect it to be perfect, but as is always the case, the amount of issues that were found was pretty disheartening. A total of 130 issue tickets were opened on our bug tracker, of which 53 were technical issues. A huge thanks goes out to our beta testers for this amazing performance. I especially want to highlight Lord Oddeye, who played the game more thoroughly than anyone else and did his best to try every single possible outcome of all events, and made sure to catch all instances of the ever changing NPC text.

And now, make sure to read the Readme and enjoy the game!
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Update

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I guess it’s time for a status update on my projects. I don’t tend to update very often, so better not expect another one until a project is finished.

Before anything else, I want to clarify which projects are affected by KaioShin’s retirement. This does only affect projects in which he is the lead (as can be seen on this page). SRWJ will continue, as will Xenosaga, Oriental Blue, Dragon Quest Monsters 1&2, Tales of Innocence and all the other SRW games.

It has been quite a long time since the last status update, so I’ll give a report on everything. Tom has been constantly editing and improving Oriental Blue’s script, and he also took good care of locating the remaining problems. The quality of the script is nothing short of amazing! Tom is also making progress translating Dragon Quest Monsters 2 (the first part is already completely translated), but it’s not his focus right now.

Super Robot Wars J is almost done. All status and battle graphics are translated and inserted, and the script has been given awesome and thorough editing by deets. His editing makes the game much more enjoyable, there’s such a huge difference between the original engrish-y script and the improved version. So for any naggers who believe that the long editing phase wasn’t worth it, it was. By now, there are basically only more graphics left. The title screen animation has to be reprogrammed, and some ingame graphics also have to be redone (for example, the Naze Nani Nadesico event). It’s been quite a long time since the last technical problem arose, so I’m positive that there aren’t many bugs left either. Tyria is also translating the FF script now, having finished the F script some time ago.

Xenosaga is also well alive, but as many of you may have guessed, it’s been on the backburner for quite a long time by now. I really feel bad for this, but there are so many projects that are almost done… so some have to take priority over others. But the translation continues steadily. The project isn’t in any kind of danger, and I don’t intend to drop anything. There is no need to worry. Once SRWJ, ToI and OB are finished, I can give more attention to other projects that aren’t as advanced.

And lastly, Tales of Innocence. I’ll just say that we started the beta test last friday. All big problems have been fixed, and the editing is also pretty much done. I’m not sure how long the testing will take, but it will definitely be the first game to be released.

I have limited time, so I have to concentrate on finishing one project after another. Innocence has been in the focus since the beginning of the year, and it will be followed by SRWJ and then Oriental Blue.

News Round-Up and a Little Request

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Dear readers, this will be a BIG update. Not only do we have lot’s of news, no, to commemorate the event we also have a ton of pretty pictures to look at. We hope you enjoy them.

First off, we have a new project to announce, one that should please especially our long-time fans who are with us since this was just my personal little site about my newb attempts at hacking Caravan Heart.

Dragon Quest Monsters 1+2 (PSX Remake)

The hacking is currently being handled by Kingcom and none other than Tom (who also translated Caravan Heart) is working on the translation part of it. So far the project is already going very smoothly. As you can see in the screenshots a VWF is already implemented and working. Menu hacking is a different beast and will surely cause some headaches later on, but when did we ever let that stop us? I’ve been told the translation is progressing smoothly, although Tom will be moving to get a new job soon, so progress might slow down for a few months.

Xenosaga I+II DS

Yes we know, it’s been ages since we talked about this one. Translation is steadily going forward though and we also got a help offer from another translator, so things might move along even faster soon, if the original translator gives the OK. Here are some screenshots of translated scenes from the game:

Oriental Blue

Oriental Blue has been completely translated for a little while now. The news about that was eaten by the server crash, so here it is again. Kingcom also continued hacking work on it, so it’s getting closer to completion all the time. There is still a fair bit of stuff to be done (lot’s of minigames that’ll surely require lot’s of annoying image hacking) but this project is propably the second closest to completion apart from SRWJ. Speaking of which, it’s still in editing. We now started to edit the chapter graphics too.
Anyway… back to Oriental Blue. Yeah it’s going great and to apologize for the lost news entry here is a bunch of screenshots:

Devil Children – Ice Book

This one has also been translated for quite a while already, but the hacking of this game can only be described as a neverending nightmare. So don’t give me too much flak for slacking off on this one. It will be finished though, even if I’ll lose my soul in the process (not unlikely). We noticed we never showed any menu screenshots of this game either, so enjoy these. I paid for every single correctly menu label and every single correctly printed string with blood.

Tales of Innocence

Absolute Zero’s throughhim413 made a few special progress reports. Instead of just writing about it, he created two videos with commentary by himself. Pretty neat, be sure to check them out:

Progress Report 1

Progress Report 2

And before you ask, no I won’t do such a thing for any projects here. My accent is why too thick for you to understand anything anyway =P

Also… Could anyone create a new site theme for us?

Together with this news, the Project Overview page has also been updated. There has been some, ehm, critique, that we shouldn’t make such a page if we don’t update it often. It’s purpose is not to give you 0.01% exact live updates updated directly whenever we receive 2kB of text from one of our translators. The page is intended for new visitors who want to get a overview over all the projects combined into one page instead of reading up on all the news entries of the last two years. In that spirit we’ll probably update it only when we also have a front-page news like this.

Last but not least, we have a little request from you. We’d really like to have a new theme for the website. Is there a fan out there with webdesign talent who could help us out with this? Both Kingcom and I are pretty much n00bs when it comes to web stuff. As you can see on the Xenosaga screenshots, the current theme has some problems with pictures for example. 800×600 really isn’t up-to-date anymore, we’d really like a 1024×768 optimized design. There isn’t much we can offer in exchange for any help, other than access to our betas when they are done (might still be a few months off before we get to the first).

It would really be kick ass if someone could create something for us. We don’t have any fixed ideas on how it should like, I guess the only parameters are that it’s a WordPress theme, compatible with the newest version of WordPress and that it should handle pictures better than our current layout. Leave us a comment with a valid mail address if you’d like to help.

That’s it for today, thanks guys and look forward to more news whenever it’s ready.

Need Moar Newz

Woah, has it been three months already since the last post? Time sure flies by. We meant to write something for quite some time now, but you know how it is… there’s stuff to do, games to play and translations to finish. Despite our silence work has been steady and progress has been amazing on many fronts. I’d hope at some point you people would trust us on that instead of declaring us dead.

So what’s up?

Script translation and preliminary editing of SRW J is complete! Hackingwise the game has been very advanced for a long time already. We have a new editor on the team who is giving the whole script a second edit to make it shine as much as possible. His name is Deets and this second edit is also already well under way. I realize many of you would be happier with a raw beta release now and a polished translation later, but we decided against it. We’d like to present you with a truly professional translation that’ll make us proud and all of you happy. Please have some patience and bear with us, the end result will be worth it.

Tales of Innocence is also going excellently. The story event portion of the script has been completely translated leaving only the skits left to go. I’m damn excited myself to see this finished soon. For more information and screenshots, see Absolute Zero’s site.

In other, even greater news, I have the honour to announce three new projects to the public. Yes ladies and gentlemen, three! They have been worked on in the background quite some time already (one of them for half a year), but we feel the time is finally right to make them official. If you follow the comments and the board at romhacking.net you might have already known about some of them.

Oriental Blue
This GBA RPG is a spin-off of the famous Tengai Makyou series. Tom will be translating it and Kingcom is taking care of the hacking. It has actually quite far progressed already, with the translation progress reaching past the 50% mark.

Super Robot Wars F
After Tyria finished translating SRW J it was time for a new project of course! He’s currently translating the PSX version of SRWF. The hacking is still in early stages, but there has been great progress already. Compared to SRW J the script isn’t even that big, so maybe this one won’t take Tyria too long.

Super Robot Wars D
Another SRW? Yes, we’re totally serious. This one won’t be translated by Tyria however since he is obviously already busy. Another translator who’d like to stay anonymous at this point, is handling this script. It’s the predecessor to SRW J, so it’s not as spectacularily looking, but most people agree it has the superior storyline among the two games.

That’s all for now, rest assured there has been steady progress on all of our projects. If I didn’t mention one specifically, assume that no news is good news. Not all of our translations are as insanely fast as Tom or Tyria. We’ll bring up these projects again when they reach major milestones.