Anearth Fantasy Stories - Translation Development Blog

[seieienbu]

This is seriously good news.  I had never played Anearth Fantasy Stories until after reading about the translation attempt a few years back and thought it sounded like a great game.  I picked it up and played it a bit but decided that I'd wait for the translation.

I'm eagerly looking forward to reading the techno jargon of this project as much as I did the Xanadu.  God speed!

[Necromancer]

That's right, I seem to remember the mention of not doing dubbing on Anearth.  I always prefer dubbing, but of coarse, on a homebrew translation project, it's an added bonus.  It's nice that there's subtitles, that helps!

Same here.  Without a dub it feels incomplete.

[Michirin9801]

That's right, I seem to remember the mention of not doing dubbing on Anearth.  I always prefer dubbing, but of coarse, on a homebrew translation project, it's an added bonus.  It's nice that there's subtitles, that helps!

Same here.  Without a dub it feels incomplete.

Eh, I could go either way so long as I get to play the game...

[LentFilms]

That's right, I seem to remember the mention of not doing dubbing on Anearth.  I always prefer dubbing, but of coarse, on a homebrew translation project, it's an added bonus.  It's nice that there's subtitles, that helps!

Same here.  Without a dub it feels incomplete.

I would love a dub too but I also know what an insane undertaking it is to create a fan dub, let along one of any quality. Organizing all those volunteers and having the whole audition period is a monumental task, all the more reason the Xanadu dub is an awesome feat. If the game has speech bubbles for all the voiced lines then I am totally fine with just having a text translation, which is already going to be a huge project for Sam and Elmer.

[spenoza]

I tend to prefer subtitles/captioning unless the dub is just stellar.

[elmer]

I would love a dub too but I also know what an insane undertaking it is to create a fan dub, let alone one of any quality.

I tend to prefer subtitles/captioning unless the dub is just stellar.

I believe that the aim of a translation from my POV, and maybe SamIAm's too, is to make the game fully-understandable to an English audience.

For games where it's not possible to hack in subtitles, or use the existing text display mechanisms, then a dub is the only way to do that (or lifting the audio from another version like with Dracula X).

We still have to prove that we can do a "stellar"job on one dub.

It's far too early to contemplate another dub, especially for a game that doesn't actually need one.


Now, maybe we'll reevaluate things later on, but it would be nice to just get this translation finished in a decent timeline rather than deal with the whole issue of dubbing.

Speaking of which ... aligning the text display to the Japanese VO is going to be tough-enough. Aligning it to an English dub would be a huge extra level of pain! 

[elmer]

For anyone that's interested, here (for the next few days until I need the space on dropbox) is all of Anearth's ADPCM speech, extracted and converted in WAV files ...

http://www.dropbox.com/s/gc0j9gphncjp19a/anearth-adpcm-speech.rar?dl=1

That's 374 files, totaling approx 100 minutes of audio.


Now ... the surprising thing, is that it's not really "acted" radio-play-style scenes, it's just a bunch of separate single-person lines, and there is no background music or effects in any of the speech tracks (that I tested).

Really, you couldn't ask for an easier a dubbing job than that! 

But ... it's still 100 minutes of speech that needs to be transcribed, polished, re-recorded, processed, balanced, etc, etc, etc.

[ParanoiaDragon]

Really, you couldn't ask for an easier a dubbing job than that! 

Heh, well, you have your answer right there on if there'll be a dub!

[elmer]

Heh, well, you have your answer right there on if there'll be a dub!

Sure, if someone would like to organize one, after the translation is finished and released, a bit like Ys IV.

But, being "possible" doesn't make it either necessary, or something that I would personally like to see delay the release of a translation! 

[nectarsis]

 

Between Legend of Xanadu 1&2, and now this I can die and go to OBEY heaven   

[elmer]

As a developer ... one of my pet-peeves is sloppy UI work.

Now, I can totally understand Japanese developers not making their Engrishy menus look pretty for us Gaijin, because ... those menus just weren't meant for us.

AFAIK, they were there to be just-about-understandable to Japanese players, follow gaming conventions, fit in small screen spaces that wouldn't allow for Katakana or Kanji, and maybe even be a little "exotic".


But to me, large strings of capital letters, with almost no spacing between the letters or the lines, just looks like some horrible alphabet-soup on some very early 8-bit home-computer.


So, here are a couple of initial thoughts of where to take the Anearth menu font.

The Japanese version contains an almost-full set of half-width Katakana (81 tiles), so there's plenty of space to add lower-case latin characters, and make things a little prettier, and maybe even enough to make some strings into VFW bitmaps.


Here's the Japanese original, followed by a small-caps version, and a lower-case version.

And "yes", there's the obligatory drop-shadow, too, just to help lift the text off the background a little bit.

[esteban]

VOTED FOR: Lower-case w/ DAT DROP SHADOW.

[Michirin9801]

The lower-case version looks just about perfect I'd say... Go with that one!

[SavagePencil]

Bleh the full lower-case looks like a 1991 DOS reject.  I like the small caps.

[Black Tiger]

I like the small caps and it's the easiest for me to read.