If Atlus won't, fans will: a group of fan translators has completed their work on making Persona 2: Eternal Punishment playable in English. This game is an enhanced port to PSP of the original PS1 release, and is the second part of the Persona 2 duology. Persona 2: Innocent Sin, the prequel's enhanced PSP port, did receive an official localization in 2011, but prior to the fan translation's release, the only way to get the full experience and play Eternal Punishment in English would have been through the original PlayStation 1 localization which came out in 2000.

The project, composed of a team of three—eiowlta, Sayucchi, and DarTisD—takes that original PS1 localization script and modifies and improves upon it, while taking the Tatsuya scenario—exclusive to the PSP version--translation from another team—p2px-scenario tumblr--with permission, and editing it. You can download the English translation patch from GitHub, note that you'll need a backup of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment for PSP, as well as the ISO patcher, also available on the project's GitHub. According to the translation team, the patched ISO will work on PSP, PS Vita, and on PPSSPP.

This news also follows upon a poll from Atlus, which asked fans which Persona game they'd want a remake of, to which Persona 3 and Persona 2 were tied with the most votes. Persona 3 is at least getting a remaster of its PSP version, Persona 3 Portable, sometime next year, while Persona 2 remains stranded, and only fully playable thanks to the efforts of fan translators.

Source

 

[DS1]

Sure, literally the week after I beat the Japanese version

I can read Japanese, but it takes me forever, and some of the language in this game is weird (like whenever the fortune teller speaks). I'm pretty sure I missed a bunch of stuff. Glad everyone else can enjoy it going forward

 

[jimkage]

Fate Extra CCC next, can we have it ? Please.

 

[Cris1997XX]

Why is cj_productions so fucking slow at releasing translations? They said they had Fate Extra CCC's script fully translated, but the updater hasn't caught up and they're taking their sweet time with implementing it in the game. If they are as slow as snails, they deserve being treated like this as they would've never released the patch for Eternal Punishment anyway

 

[such]

Seems like they're just doing a lot concurrently. But yeah, the release happened, because a former team member got sick of the project taking an eternity, apparently...

 

[Clydefrosch]

so is anyone gonna go in and fix the cringe onee sama stuff?

 

[such]

so is anyone gonna go in and fix the cringe onee sama stuff?

Give it another decade or two, mate

In all seriousness, though, I'm glad this exists. Even if it's a bit of a hack job, and kind of craps on the bro-code, I still welcome playing EP PSP within my lifetime.

 

[whitesword7]

Nice!! I was about to play the ps1 version, but I’m glad I didn’t

 

[DS1]

So... There apparently is some behind the scenes drama here. (See cj_iwakura's Twitter.)

Person was part of/joined a team that had been working on this for over five years, disappears, and later drops this out of nowhere.

While that's shitty, the thing that REALLY gets to me. They took an official localization and somehow managed to completely butcher the crap out of it and make it worse?

Example:

Original: "How cruel... My big sis it not a murderer!!"
"New": "How cruel... My onee-sama is not a murderer!!"

Yeah I was checking it out the other day... it's... interesting. I'm not going to knock anybody for at least trying (I sure as hell wouldn't, not with an official re-release enevitable at this point), and not just copy/pasting the original text, but it's very very rough... almost like machine translation.

The honorifics aren't the issue, it's that a lot of the conversations are disjointed, which is very typical when you try a "literal" translation of a game. A lot of the liberties taken in localization aren't because the translators have some weird agenda (as a lot of... uh... geniuses seem to be whining about these days), but because they don't have any context for what's going on in the script they're translating. So, they do their best to make everything coherent.

People that do a "literal" translation are reintroducing the incoherence inherent in a lot of old (especially PSX-era for some reason?) Japanese scripts. BUT, back to the fact that this is a fan effort, they might not have had the resources to deal with textbox limitations, and editing line-by-line to make everything fit with a character limit is a bear of a task.

 

[such]

Yeah I was checking it out the other day... it's... interesting. I'm not going to knock anybody for at least trying (I sure as hell wouldn't, not with an official re-release enevitable at this point), and not just copy/pasting the original text, but it's very very rough... almost like machine translation.

The honorifics aren't the issue, it's that a lot of the conversations are disjointed, which is very typical when you try a "literal" translation of a game. A lot of the liberties taken in localization aren't because the translators have some weird agenda (as a lot of... uh... geniuses seem to be whining about these days), but because they don't have any context for what's going on in the script they're translating. So, they do their best to make everything coherent.

People that do a "literal" translation are reintroducing the incoherence inherent in a lot of old (especially PSX-era for some reason?) Japanese scripts. BUT, back to the fact that this is a fan effort, they might not have had the resources to deal with textbox limitations, and editing line-by-line to make everything fit with a character limit is a bear of a task.

So... to clarify: have you gone through this translation and discovered more script changes other than the honorifics? Or are you commenting on Japanese localisations just in general? Or is the original English EP translation just a bit crap to the effect that you pointed out? Or any/all of the above?

 

[DS1]

So... to clarify: have you gone through this translation and discovered more script changes other than the honorifics? Or are you commenting on Japanese localisations just in general? Or is the original English EP translation just a bit crap to the effect that you pointed out? Or any/all of the above?

Yeah this is just translations from Japanese (when they try to be literal) in general. The only differences I've noticed besides the honorifics are that some of the names still appear in kanji.

I wouldn't say the original is crap, it's just that a lot of things were translated literally instead of trying to be written to make sense. I don't blame them though, they were probably getting paid per word (at a bad rate, because Atlus was a nothing 3rd party at that point) and had a tight deadline.

 

[sl0ps]

Edit: Wait... I got excited and of course there's some drama catch.

 

[whitesword7]

Edit: Wait... I got excited and of course there's some drama catch.

Lol, glad I never care about drama like this, just let the people inside the circle to handle it.

props to that person to able to get out of that joined group so that he can finally release the translation instead of waiting another 10+ year

 

[sl0ps]

Lol, glad I never care about drama like this, just let the people inside the circle to handle it.

props to that person to able to get out of that joined group so that he can finally release the translation instead of waiting another 10+ year

I, can feel you on this. I don't like sitting on stuff for the sake of it.
Too much like 3D Realms. plus the things I'm seeing so far are what I'd call minutia.

 

[Kur0shitsuji]

Testing, note, does not work as cso[578 MB (606,923,618 bytes)].

 

[Kwyjor]

It's probably best to wait a bit for the inevitable bugfix patch anyway.

 

[such]

Yeah this is just translations from Japanese (when they try to be literal) in general. The only differences I've noticed besides the honorifics are that some of the names still appear in kanji.

I wouldn't say the original is crap, it's just that a lot of things were translated literally instead of trying to be written to make sense. I don't blame them though, they were probably getting paid per word (at a bad rate, because Atlus was a nothing 3rd party at that point) and had a tight deadline.

Alright, so it's something I can live with. Thanks.

What you're talking about is a huge issue in filmdom - it's exceedingly rare to get decent subtitles that don't sound machine-translated. Reminds me especially of the Yuzo Kawashima subs on Mubi - some Moon guy did the translations, and they read like machine-translated text, no joke.

 

[Cris1997XX]

Yeah I was checking it out the other day... it's... interesting. I'm not going to knock anybody for at least trying (I sure as hell wouldn't, not with an official re-release enevitable at this point), and not just copy/pasting the original text, but it's very very rough... almost like machine translation.

The honorifics aren't the issue, it's that a lot of the conversations are disjointed, which is very typical when you try a "literal" translation of a game. A lot of the liberties taken in localization aren't because the translators have some weird agenda (as a lot of... uh... geniuses seem to be whining about these days), but because they don't have any context for what's going on in the script they're translating. So, they do their best to make everything coherent.

People that do a "literal" translation are reintroducing the incoherence inherent in a lot of old (especially PSX-era for some reason?) Japanese scripts. BUT, back to the fact that this is a fan effort, they might not have had the resources to deal with textbox limitations, and editing line-by-line to make everything fit with a character limit is a bear of a task.

"Not with an official re-release enevitable at this point"? Bro, aside from the characters Atlus literally forgot about Persona 1 and 2. They ported them to the PSP in the late 2000s and swept them under the rug since. I think they just want to release the 3D games on modern consoles and PC (And poorly at that, as seen by Persona 3 Portable) to milk fans even more

 

[DS1]

"Not with an official re-release enevitable at this point"? Bro, aside from the characters Atlus literally forgot about Persona 1 and 2. They ported them to the PSP in the late 2000s and swept them under the rug since. I think they just want to release the 3D games on modern consoles and PC (And poorly at that, as seen by Persona 3 Portable) to milk fans even more

They'll do it. They'll build it up for a solid year, then do a release on modern consoles and Steam. Beats running a new product.

Also is the P3P release even out yet? What's wrong with it?

 

[Polk120]

They'll do it. They'll build it up for a solid year, then do a release on modern consoles and Steam. Beats running a new product.

Also is the P3P release even out yet? What's wrong with it?

They are referring to the fact that the port of P3P will be Ai upscaled....Which isn't that big of a freaking deal. It's not even that freaking noticeable

 

[DS1]

They are referring to the fact that the port of P3P will be Ai upscaled....Which isn't that big of a freaking deal. It's not even that freaking noticeable

Yeah I've played a few games like that (granted from Vita, not PSP), and I didn't really notice. It's not like the sprite smoothing that I keep seeing in classic 16-bit 'remasters'.