Square Enix Threatens Legal Action Against Type-0 Fan Translation

[WiiUBricker]

Well I knew it was strange that the patch was

a) ~ 2GB
b) convertable to the full game without any of the isos using a tool someone wrote

I will ditch this translation and wait for the HD remake, even if it's not for the Vita

 

[Zero Dozer]

I surely won't.

I didn't like Square's approach of things from the start, and even now, with Kotaku's article, it still sounds like Square was up for dirty playing since the beginning.

Also, what does it matter for the patching method or whatever? His team did the job they were supposed to, that is, they translated the PSP version.

Ditching the translation isn't ditching Sky's work (Which it seems, was nothing); by ditching the translation, you're ditching the efforts done by Merkabah and all of the others.

So, I will still lift my middle finger to Square Enix, and I still will play the translated patch. And pray that someone takes up from where Merkabah and the others stopped and complete their work.

 

[WiiUBricker]

No, by ditching the translation I respect the wishes of the other team members who didn't agree with Sky to release the patch too early (because it wasn't finished) and who wouldn't have released it after the SE announcement anyway. Also I don't like the camera controls.

 

[ryuga93]

After reading the kotaku article, it seems that Sky has some fault in it but still if SE sues him under copyright reason I think it is unfair,unless they also sued the chinese translation team too, because there are lots of pre-patched iso around the chinese websites,be it either a two disc iso or a combined one. Still I hope this could be solved in a better way...

 

[caitsith2]

I did some investigating into the entire processs, and determined that a properly made patch, should work around to ~400-500MB, if it had properly done the following things.

Extracted ISO 1
    Patched "PSP_GAME\SYSDIR\EBOOT.BIN"
    Patched "PSP_GAME\ICON0.PNG"
    Patched "PSP_GAME\PARAM.SF0"
    Extracted contents of "PSP_GAME\USRDIR\yellow.pkg" to a temp working space.
 
Extracted ISO 2
    Extracted contents of "PSP_GAME\USRDIR\yellow.pkg" to temp working space 2.
 
Merge contents of Temp working space 1, and Temp working space 2.
 
Apply a patch to the merged temp working space.
 
Repack temp working space into ISO 1 "PSP_GAME\USRDIR\yellow.pkg"  (which will also at the same time update "PSP_GAME\USRDIR\yellow.fsd"
 
Build final translated UMD iso.

 

[C-Kronos]

I did some investigating into the entire processs, and determined that a properly made patch, should work around to ~400-500MB, if it had properly done the following things.

Extracted ISO 1
    Patched "PSP_GAME\SYSDIR\EBOOT.BIN"
    Patched "PSP_GAME\ICON0.PNG"
    Patched "PSP_GAME\PARAM.SF0"
    Extracted contents of "PSP_GAME\USRDIR\yellow.pkg" to a temp working space.
 
Extracted ISO 2
    Extracted contents of "PSP_GAME\USRDIR\yellow.pkg" to temp working space 2.
 
Merge contents of Temp working space 1, and Temp working space 2.
 
Apply a patch to the merged temp working space.
 
Repack temp working space into ISO 1 "PSP_GAME\USRDIR\yellow.pkg"  (which will also at the same time update "PSP_GAME\USRDIR\yellow.fsd"
 
Build final translated UMD iso.

Honestly, I don't think Sky put much thought into the "patcher" itself and just whipped together something that does a few checks to "confirm" you have the game.. How much work did he actually contribute to this project? A novice programmer would have been able to easily replicate that "patcher" fairly easily.

He probably opted to rush something that "worked" together as the patcher for public release probably wasn't intended to be rushed out as fast; sky makes himself come off as an egomaniac attention whore. He also broke the widely accepted unspoken rule of scrapping a translation project of any type when a publisher decides to put out an official release; I feel that SE would have allowed a release after a certain allotted amount of time after the release of their localization, whether it be HD or not.

I just hope that if SE decides to take legal action, they'll go after sky for releasing it and not the whole team, as it seems the people actually translating it were against the release and essentially sided with SE.

I understand SE's position, and it'd be a completely different matter if they weren't going to release it themselves in some form, irregardless of the fact it'll be done for "next-gen" consoles. Returning to my belief that they'd allow the release after they've made their money, which is understandable, it's probably because they'd also want it to be playable in English on the platform it was intended for, which makes sense since it'd help various demographics apart of that fanbase to stay happy, and make sense from a business perspective.

Not to mention, it would have satisfied both parties, and allowed for the game to be accessible on various platforms. It'll still probably come out on "next-gen" platforms, but thanks to sky's reckless actions, he's essentially put the team in danger of legal action just because he more than likely wanted praise as someone who "stuck it to the man."

He handed the matter in an extremely unprofessional and immature manner and has burnt the bridges with everyone who may have possibly considered working with him on any future projects. Not to mention, this could also have negative effects, besides the probable lost sales, on people wanting to translate other games in the future as the possibility of legal repercussions wouldn't make a project like that worth it. I'm sure games and other various forms of media will still be translated in time, but this could put people off of doing something that they may have eventually done.

Thankfully the franchise in question is Final Fantasy, if it were from a franchise with a considerably smaller fanbase, it could be deemed as counter-intuitive from a business standpoint.

 

[Randqalan]

So are we getting mind Frelled by both SE and Sky now ?

Sorry for the Farscape reference

I hate to quote myself but here it is
SE trying to put us off for years and teasing us then finaly well we will put it on next get (I will believe this when I see it not before BTW)
Sky trying to shortcut for exact reason I honestly do not know and wrong doing to the Trans team

 

[castfromhp]

While I do agree that these revelations showed that Sky made some pretty damn poor decisions regarding the patch, it's a bit much now to start attacking his contribution to the project. It just reeks of bandwagoning, honestly. Before this article was published, it was in line with the trend to hate on SE for shutting down the patch and being the big bad evil corporation out to squash our fun, and now it feels like the pendulum has swung the other way and people are searching for whatever kind of faults and flaws they can to make Sky look worse here even if it's totally unrelated to the actual mistakes he made.

Before I go on, I'm gonna be fully open with the fact I've mostly been a lurker on the GBAtemp forums, and I never bothered to make an account post much with this account until the FF Type 0 patch was released. But even just browsing through the PSP hacking subforum and looking through projects, I saw many instances where Sky stepped in to offer programming advice and other help to fellow fan translators. The patcher he put out for Type 0, which he fully admitted was a rush job before he even released it, may be shoddy, but think a bit before you go discrediting the work he's done since the beginning of the project, such as programming the tools used to actually edit the ROM (just look through the beginning of the Type 0 thread and you can see the progress as he creates and uploads the tools). Remember, this is a guy who has a long history with ROM hacking projects, many of which aren't well known here because they're Spanish language rather than English.

So, yes, what happened was shady, and Sky shouldn't have forced an early release of the patch against the wishes of his team and (presumably) against whatever arrangement was being made between him and SE. But saying his work on the patch "was nothing" or turning this into an excuse to make further attacks on his character or competence as a programmer seems petty and distracts from the actual issues at hand here.

Sadly, the NDA is going to keep us from knowing exactly what went on between SE and Sky, and chances are, if he's facing legal action, then he can't comment on that either (or his lawyer would advise him not to). I also wish I could see more of that Skype conversation for more context, but at the same time I also wish it hadn't been released, since we don't know if any of those team members wanted their private statements made public in such a way...

On a more positive note, I think the team did a fantastic job of supporting the patch on the day it dropped! Merkabah in particular went above and beyond in my opinion by setting up a stream to personally run people through the issues they were having with the patch, and if there was still a great deal of internal strife on the team at that time, he and the others certainly didn't show it, which is admirable.

I think the translators and programmers who put so much work into this patch would like for it to be remembered for more than this fiasco, so let's all keep in mind that despite showing such strong disagreement with Sky's decision to release the patch early, these folks put in their time during a last minute release to make sure everyone could enjoy this game without problems.

And if Sky manages to make it out of his legal troubles and decides to return to fan translation work, let's remember that everyone makes mistakes and that he's someone who has helped many in the community with their own projects. I think if he does choose to return despite knowing that he's burned bridges with so many people and made a dire mistake in the eyes of the community, then it would show he does care a lot about fan translation work and the community, and it would be a mistake to incessantly attack him or drive him out.

 

[Randqalan]

Do not take what I said as a Sky bash far from it SE really did the most wrong in telling us mutiple time we will realease it we have 90% done and we are talking about a release and finally well next gen home console and shody tec demo FFVII had a better for PS3 and look were it is no were point proven

SkyBladeCloud do not take what I said wrong I know SE is the real problem they do not want the West to have anything really and it is not new either
No FFIII untill DS
No FFII untill PS
No FFV until PS
FFIII really FFVI
FFII really FFIV and so on KH1 KHFM KH2 KH2FM KHBBS KHBBSFM last I noticed Disney is USA but you all get my point
Also really wondering without going in the red if we would have got VII at all or any on the PS without this selling well here
This was the final straw for me enough of the leftover forget the west attitude

Enough of my rants changes nothing about the SE Shinra corp

 

[FAST6191]

Uh, they're still an ignorant, evil corporation. You forgot the stain they left with Chrono Ressurrection.

The chrono series is still a money maker for them, if one has a trademark you are legally obligated to defend it (you can let copyright, patents and most other things slide, trademarks vanish when you cease to defend them).

Also, what does it matter for the patching method or whatever? His team did the job they were supposed to, that is, they translated the PSP version.

Quite the opposite, equally this is part of the "job" of a translation crew. If your patch includes copyrighted data (beyond the quirks with translating a copyrighted work or doing things like putting mario in a sonic game) then you have probably failed at patching. There have been several cases (though not legal ones) in various hacking circles -- why do you think the Wii CIOS stuff comes as an installer rather than a plain IOS? It would be far easier to just use a WAD installer for it all.

 

[Randqalan]

^and all this would be null if SE keeps word so
I agree to disagree yes it is their property but like stated we are nothing but dogs in their eyes now throw a scrap when they need us to fetch($find the $)
Maybe it is our fault for saving them by buying the first when they would have went BR

 

[GHANMI]

With that, I admit I spoke prematurely about SE, so I retract everything I said about them prior to this post (unless the article linked above turns out to be false, which is probably unlikely).

All I can say is, if SE were to reach out to me regarding a certain IP of theirs, I would have handled the situation quite differently from how Sky did.

Just curious, what exactly was Sky's role in this project? The title of "project lead" doesn't really mean much to me--what did he actually do for the project?

I'll add this article to the first post. Thanks for sharing, mkdms14!

I agree with your post now that the entire picture of the drama is out there (angering the devs AND the translators, which are from what I saw one really cool bunch of people even from a human perspective, and of course their dedication for a high-quality work).

The one nitpick I have is the doubt you're casting on Sky's role. Regardless of anything else, his rom/iso editing and arm mips skills are indisputable, even for unrelated stuff (ToDestiny 2 PSP, God Eater 2, ...). It's a real shame the original team exploded (and that he's probably in troubled legal waters right now so this won't be his hobby for a potentially long while)... it's because of drama like this that the Saturn/Dreamcast fantranslation scene (TM4, Shenmue 2 Undub, etc) and X360>PC port projects (Tomb Raider Underworld) are dead areas. Let's hope it doesn't creep to the PSP, which still has a lot to offer that likely will never be translated.

 

[Densetsu]

Just wanted to clarify something: I never "cast any doubt" on Sky's role, nor did I attack his contribution. I just asked a simple question: what did he do for the project? I was just curious because I wanted to know what made him think he had the right to release the patch against the wishes of the rest of the team. Did he do 51% of the work and felt he owned a majority of the patch? (I know it doesnt work that way, but you get the idea). I stand by my original assertion that he shouldn't have released the patch without consent from everyone else, because I'm assuming everyone who worked on it had some important contribution to make, and therefore should have all had an equal say in the decision to release the patch, "project lead" or not. Other than that, I never "attacked" him on anything else.

At any rate, neither side is innocent. I'm no more or less a fan of SE before this started, and I can't exactly advocate for Sky. But I do recognize the tremendous amount of work that went into the translation, so I just hope those who worked on it can be remembered for that. Most importantly, I just hope this incident doesn't deter the talented people who worked on this from translating games in the future, because from what little I played of it, I thought it was strong work.

 

[Randqalan]

He did almost all the rom hacking

 

[idiotstrike]

I'm trying to understand why do you people start attacking Sky for no contribution. Sky did MOST of the work on the translation and without him, this whole thing wouldn't ever exist to begin with. He was the one who started with this whole thing, translators have joined along the way. He started a project and he sticked with it to the very end, if you think that deserves no respect then I don't know what does.

How much work did he actually contribute to this project? A novice programmer would have been able to easily replicate that "patcher" fairly easily.

I doubt a novice programmer would also be able to reverse engineer and decrypt the entire game, which many tried before him but just ditched it saying it's impossible.

None of you have seen the yellow.pkg structure and I also doubt any of you is a programmer, so please let's drop this "Sky did nothing, any programming beginner could do that" subject. I'm fairly sure he had his reasons as of why to copy the contents of the entire data package. Do you realize that there are also videos and pictures? Those would be illegal ANYWAY, no matter if the patch was 20MB or 2.3GB.

As someone who has been following this project from when the day 1 post, I can see some unexpectable behavior from Sky but I also understand his decision. You weren't in the charge of the project and you weren't getting 50 emails/spam on the blog daily asking for a link to the download. Square "announcing" a HD remake on E3 with no gameplay footage also seems like there really wasn't much point behind it other than "Well, we've had the translation the whole time but never really had a reason to release it, until now."

I think we can all agree that both parties were at fault to some extent without insulting the team members.

 

[drgnslayers]

Do not take what I said as a Sky bash far from it SE really did the most wrong in telling us mutiple time we will realease it we have 90% done and we are talking about a release and finally well next gen home console and shody tec demo FFVII had a better for PS3 and look were it is no were point proven

SkyBladeCloud do not take what I said wrong I know SE is the real problem they do not want the West to have anything really and it is not new either
No FFIII untill DS
No FFII untill PS
No FFV until PS
FFIII really FFVI
FFII really FFIV and so on KH1 KHFM KH2 KH2FM KHBBS KHBBSFM last I noticed Disney is USA but you all get my point
Also really wondering without going in the red if we would have got VII at all or any on the PS without this selling well here
This was the final straw for me enough of the leftover forget the west attitude

Enough of my rants changes nothing about the SE Shinra corp

No FF IV Hard type until PS
No Dragon Quest V until DS
No Dragon Quest VI until DS

Differences are Enix closed their NA headquarters. That's why DQV and DQVI were never released in NA. FFV, however, was about to be released in NA for the SNES in 1994 but Squaresoft decided to release FF VI who was released in Japan sooner that year and forget the release of FFV

 

[Randqalan]

You forgot NA did not get FF10 international
Final Fantasy 12 had international
NA did without without trans that is and yes I know that 10 international even had English dubs and menu but did they release it again here nop noda

So in reality we are an after thought in SE eyes

 

[Thirty3Three]

A friend of mine downloaded the English Patch off a site yesterday and got some "Illegal Activity" notification, from their service provider.

So, for anyone attempting to download the English patch, be careful. Squeenix is a bitch.

 

[LoyalZero1]

You forgot NA did not get FF10 international
Final Fantasy 12 had international
NA did without without trans that is and yes I know that 10 international even had English dubs and menu but did they release it again here nop noda

So in reality we are an after thought in SE eyes

Actually.... 10 international was released in america on PS3 as FF 10 HD. but i know what you're saying.

 

[Pedeadstrian]

A friend of mine downloaded the English Patch off a site yesterday and got some "Illegal Activity" notification, from their service provider.

So, for anyone attempting to download the English patch, be careful. Squeenix is a bitch.

That can happen to anyone with any kind of download. I highly doubt Square Enix is going to every single ISP and saying "Hey, monitor this very specific activity."