ROM Hack Baten Kaitos HD Remaster - Dub Restore Effort

[wickerkev]

You work incredibly fast Helsionium! I am stoked to play your restored version of Origins as soon as I finish the first game. While the dialogue in the first game is charmingly cheesy and I love it to death, I think the English casting in Origins contains absolutely stellar performances. I am super thankful that we have fans as dedicated as you in the community succeeding where the devs failed!

 

[EvilBakura]

Thank you very much Helsionium!!!

I donated with paypal hope it arrived

Also i can confirm the patch works with the japanese version of Origins too!
Like for Baten 1 all i had to do was rename the folder 0100C07018CA6002 to 0100F28018CA4002, no problems

i uploaded on google drive all the files already patched for both games
if anyone was having problems obtaining romFS files etc... you can just use this and drop this folder in the sd card

Spoiler

( if not allowed i'll remove it )

 

[shawn_]

Thank you very much Helsionium!!!

I donated with paypal hope it arrived

Also i can confirm the patch works with the japanese version of Origins too!
Like for Baten 1 all i had to do was rename the folder 0100C07018CA6002 to 0100F28018CA4002, no problems

i uploaded on google drive all the files already patched for both games
if anyone was having problems obtaining romFS files etc... you can just use this and drop this folder in the sd card

Spoiler

( if not allowed i'll remove it )

Thank you Helsionium for the dub restore, and thank you EvilBakura for the uploaded patched files!

 

[MarnoAr]

Thank you Helsionium! You are the best!

 

[Edusama]

Thank you Helsionium. It's amazing how a dub can make you enjoy the game even more. I finished the first game but I couldn't bare Origins in Japanese and got bored at 10 hours knowing that I was missing an amazing dub, now I can finally play how it's meant to be!

 

[N7Kopper]

The beta release of the Baten Kaitos Origins dub mod is here!

Download link: https://files.helsionium.eu/BKO_EnglishDub_v0.9beta.zip

Features:

• All spoken dialogue should be in English now.
• The written text should match the spoken text in all dialogues.
• Reverted all text changes regarding alcohol use, Taintclouds and gender-neutral language with respect to the player or Marno. I didn't revert any changes from he and him to ***player's name*** because that's how it worked in the original release as well.

Funnily enough, "he" is the correct English neutral singular. It's what all the ancient constitutional documents use unless they're specifically referring to women. I suppose changing the language and memoryholing the change is an excellent way to pretend that misogyny exists. A cunning deception, really.

At least there's something good to come off of the back of endless CURRENT DAYING of history's works - more people are learning about Baten Kaitos. Sadly, downloading this lovely project would require me buying (or pirating, but then just pirate the originals) the PoS remaster and encouraging this sort of behaviour from the gatekeeping tourists who infest our hobby.

*adds Baten Kaitos to his ever-growing backlog of games to play*

 

[Kitocco]

Funnily enough, "he" is the correct English neutral singular. It's what all the ancient constitutional documents use unless they're specifically referring to women. I suppose changing the language and memoryholing the change is an excellent way to pretend that misogyny exists. A cunning deception, really.

At least there's something good to come off of the back of endless CURRENT DAYING of history's works - more people are learning about Baten Kaitos. Sadly, downloading this lovely project would require me buying (or pirating, but then just pirate the originals) the PoS remaster and encouraging this sort of behaviour from the gatekeeping tourists who infest our hobby.

*adds Baten Kaitos to his ever-growing backlog of games to play*

…mate, this is a thread about a voiceover mod

 

[Helsionium]

Hmmm... I've been looking at several of the mismatched text issues in Baten Kaitos 1. Seems like most of them will be pretty difficult, if not impossible for me to fix. It's certainly impossible by editing the text files alone.

Take the very early-game example of Kalas saying "How could you tell?" in the English dub (Moonguile Forest, after the first boss battle). The displayed text is "Why do you ask?". However, later in the game, King Ladekahn actually speaks the line "Why do you ask?". If I edited Kalas' dialogue to "How could you tell?", King Ladekahn's dialogue would now also display that new text (and it makes no sense there).

That's because identical lines of text (i.e. lines that are identical in the Japanese original script, I presume) are only stored once in the remaster's text file. There seems to be no way around it short of editing the event scripts, which is something I simply cannot do.

A similar problem occurs when the English voice file for a specific event consists of more voice lines than the Japanese equivalent - there's simply no corresponding Japanese voice line in the game that I could replace. These are the events where the last voice line remains silent with the dub mod (about 10 or so events in the entire game are affected). However, I'm evaluating some workarounds that might be able to fix at least some of these.

I'm not sure to what degree Baten Kaitos Origins is also affected by these problems. From my experience with the undub mod for the original games, I guess the second problem doesn't affect Origins, but the first probably will.

 

[Edusama]

Hmmm... I've been looking at several of the mismatched text issues in Baten Kaitos 1. Seems like most of them will be pretty difficult, if not impossible for me to fix. It's certainly impossible by editing the text files alone.

Take the very early-game example of Kalas saying "How could you tell?" in the English dub (Moonguile Forest, after the first boss battle). The displayed text is "Why do you ask?". However, later in the game, King Ladekahn actually speaks the line "Why do you ask?". If I edited Kalas' dialogue to "How could you tell?", King Ladekahn's dialogue would now also display that new text (and it makes no sense there).

That's because identical lines of text (i.e. lines that are identical in the Japanese original script, I presume) are only stored once in the remaster's text file. There seems to be no way around it short of editing the event scripts, which is something I simply cannot do.

A similar problem occurs when the English voice file for a specific event consists of more voice lines than the Japanese equivalent - there's simply no corresponding Japanese voice line in the game that I could replace. These are the events where the last voice line remains silent with the dub mod (about 10 or so events in the entire game are affected). However, I'm evaluating some workarounds that might be able to fix at least some of these.

I'm not sure to what degree Baten Kaitos Origins is also affected by these problems. From my experience with the undub mod for the original games, I guess the second problem doesn't affect Origins, but the first probably will.

Not too much in Origins as far as I've played (18 hours). I've only seen it a few times for example Sagi saying "Yes sir" to Verus instead of "Understood" as displayed on text, but very few though.

 

[Lightmanone]

Oh Helsonium. I found a bug. A piece of voice missing.
At the end of the Celestial Tree battle, when you come down. Eventually Gibari says "Enough chitchat. Let's go."
There is no accompanying sound with it.

 

[Vrmillion]

Hey Helsionium, thanks so much for working on the mod!

Been using the Origins release, and just had a bug (and possible solution) to report to you, or whoever else might have problems.

The issue is that a bunch of graphical effects would get anchored to the camera instead of to the elements, so to speak. Clouds, lighting, and things like magnetite bridges would remain in the same coordinates on the screen even when scrolling. In addition, Sagi's wings during his overworld dashing would sometimes spawn in a random spot on the screen instead of on his back. This persisted through several boots of the game.

For some reason, it fixed itself when I closed the game, uninstalled the mod, loaded the game without the mod, closed the game again, and then put the mod back into the folder to load it again. Haven't had any issues again yet, and I hope it stays gone.

Hope this is helpful!

 

[Helsionium]

Hey Helsionium, thanks so much for working on the mod!

Been using the Origins release, and just had a bug (and possible solution) to report to you, or whoever else might have problems.

The issue is that a bunch of graphical effects would get anchored to the camera instead of to the elements, so to speak. Clouds, lighting, and things like magnetite bridges would remain in the same coordinates on the screen even when scrolling. In addition, Sagi's wings during his overworld dashing would sometimes spawn in a random spot on the screen instead of on his back. This persisted through several boots of the game.

For some reason, it fixed itself when I closed the game, uninstalled the mod, loaded the game without the mod, closed the game again, and then put the mod back into the folder to load it again. Haven't had any issues again yet, and I hope it stays gone.

Hope this is helpful!

Thanks for the report.

However, I only made changes to the text file and the sound files, so I can't really see how the mod could have caused this.
Note that I (rarely) encountered similar issues when playing the original game on Dolphin. Perhaps it's a bug of the original game that was ported over to the remaster.

 

[Edusama]

Hey Helsionium, thanks so much for working on the mod!

Been using the Origins release, and just had a bug (and possible solution) to report to you, or whoever else might have problems.

The issue is that a bunch of graphical effects would get anchored to the camera instead of to the elements, so to speak. Clouds, lighting, and things like magnetite bridges would remain in the same coordinates on the screen even when scrolling. In addition, Sagi's wings during his overworld dashing would sometimes spawn in a random spot on the screen instead of on his back. This persisted through several boots of the game.

For some reason, it fixed itself when I closed the game, uninstalled the mod, loaded the game without the mod, closed the game again, and then put the mod back into the folder to load it again. Haven't had any issues again yet, and I hope it stays gone.

Hope this is helpful!

Adding some inputs to this. I was having this issue emulating the game, but it went away by updating to version 1.0.1. Never happened again in my whole playthrough, I just finished the game, so it's not the mod. Can't thank you enough Helsionium for your effort!

 

[Manaboy]

It is actually a little bit difficult to tell exactly what has changed because the lines are in a different order than in the original games. I've written a tool that identifies all lines that are identical or nearly identical, but it failed to identify about 2.000 (of about 13,000) lines. Moreover, it appears that each of the European language versions (for the first game) was revised separately, so there are some changes that affect only a specific language. What I can tell you so far (note that I only worked on BK1 so far):

• By far the most changes simply fix punctuation, formatting and spelling errors. These will not be reverted by my patch.
• Alcoholic drinks are replaced with non-alcoholic drinks. This seems to affect all languages. Some of these changes are hilariously nonsensical (e.g. "Beer" -> "Wheat Tea" or apples simply becoming apple juice by aging instead of fermenting to wine). This will be reverted by my patch.
• In the English version, the Taintclouds are now called the Toxiclouds. The word "taint" is also replaced in every other instance (e.g. with "corruption"). Don't ask me why. This will of course be reverted. It may or may not affect other languages - e.g. the German name for the Taintclouds was not changed ("Kummerwolken", i.e. clouds of sorrow). I guess someone at Namco doesn't like the word "taint".
• In the English version, all of Mizuti's lines were updated. Mizuti now properly conjugates the word "to be". Otherwise, Mizuti's dialogue is the same. Will of course be reverted.
• Some dialogue has been changed because the original was objectively mistranslated or updated to use terms from BKO (e.g. use the word "machina" for Alfard-made machines). I will revert these only when they're voiced.

These aren't really changes, but rather direct translations of the Japanese lines. I'll try to change them to the dub taunts, but I don't have a Voice 4 or Voice 5 magnus in my save file to test them all.

No, all of these English lines are left unchanged, as is Sagi's mother being called a "wh*re" at one time.

To be honest it's a woke thing, to change everything as if it'll influence teenagers to drink etc, but at any rate, I purchased like 3 copies of this game only to be let down in this manner. I have 10 more copies on its way, my way of supporting this game I suppose, I was literally 15 when this game come out, so its definitely a big part of my teenage years.


I know the USA audience didn't get a physical hard copy of this game only released for digital download but the rest of Europe had a physical hard copy released. The 3 I received on day one didn't have the Nintendo seal strip, apparently third party games don't have this strip only a generic wrapping. Can anyone confirm if it's just the store I got it from talking nonsense.

Post automatically merged: Oct 11, 2023

OTE="EvilBakura, post: 10261400, member: 279288"]
Thank you very much Helsionium!!!

I donated with paypal hope it arrived

Also i can confirm the patch works with the japanese version of Origins too!
Like for Baten 1 all i had to do was rename the folder 0100C07018CA6002 to 0100F28018CA4002, no problems

i uploaded on google drive all the files already patched for both games
if anyone was having problems obtaining romFS files etc... you can just use this and drop this folder in the sd card

Spoiler

( if not allowed i'll remove it )
[/QUOTE]



Is there no way to patch it into the ROM?

Thanks

 

[Vrmillion]

Thanks for the report.

However, I only made changes to the text file and the sound files, so I can't really see how the mod could have caused this.
Note that I (rarely) encountered similar issues when playing the original game on Dolphin. Perhaps it's a bug of the original game that was ported over to the remaster.

Gotcha, maybe it is just a bug I have to squash elsewhere. Thanks again, and thank you also Edusama for the input!

 

[bambangtales]

My I ask what tools did you used to unpack unity assetbundle?

I just want to look at the game resources and find the cause of
(*inhale before rant*)
WHAT THE HECK THERE ARE SO MANY LETTERBOXED 4:3 ASPECT RATIO SCENES ON MY REMASTERD HD VERSION OF A GAME?! ITS FREAKING 2023!
BAMCO, CAN YOU PLEASE REMASTER YOUR DAMN GAME SERIOUSLY?
YOU'VE REMOVE THE ENG DUB, NOW THIS?
(*end of rant*)

Rant aside, I know Helsonium been working hard for the dub mod already, so I won't bother him more. So, what causing those immersion breaking "glitch" so to speak.

 

[Helsionium]

It's not really a glitch. The game uses 2D images for its overworld map/town/dungeon backgrounds. These were not remade for the remaster, only upscaled. That means they were only able to achieve 16:9 on screens that were able to scroll horizontally in the original game. Screens that didn't scroll horizontally just don't have enough pixels to the left and right for a 16:9 display. There's no real solution for that other than completely redrawing these screens.

But I agree that they chose a particularly ugly method of letterboxing.

 

[Manaboy]

My I ask what tools did you used to unpack unity assetbundle?

I just want to look at the game resources and find the cause of
(*inhale before rant*)
WHAT THE HECK THERE ARE SO MANY LETTERBOXED 4:3 ASPECT RATIO SCENES ON MY REMASTERD HD VERSION OF A GAME?! ITS FREAKING 2023!
BAMCO, CAN YOU PLEASE REMASTER YOUR DAMN GAME SERIOUSLY?
YOU'VE REMOVE THE ENG DUB, NOW THIS?
(*end of rant*)

Rant aside, I know Helsonium been working hard for the dub mod already, so I won't bother him more. So, what causing those immersion breaking "glitch" so to speak.View attachment 399006

It's actually pretty lame on their part, it's not that different from using the wide-screen hack or wide screen fix AR code on dolphin. You'd expect the company that took on the project (logicalbeat.jp/english) to have properly decompiled the game using the Source code and redo such pixel limited parts from grounds up. I mean if they weren't quite up to the task, they should have given it to Backbone Entertainment, have you seen how they too many old 16bit 4:3 game and did a proper remaster, I'm talking about Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. It's possible, just logicalbeat being lazy.

Post automatically merged: Oct 13, 2023

It's not really a glitch. The game uses 2D images for its overworld map/town/dungeon backgrounds. These were not remade for the remaster, only upscaled. That means they were only able to achieve 16:9 on screens that were able to scroll horizontally in the original game. Screens that didn't scroll horizontally just don't have enough pixels to the left and right for a 16:9 display. There's no real solution for that other than completely redrawing these screens.

But I agree that they chose a particularly ugly method of letterboxing.

By the way, nice work on this dub restoration, I shall be donating via your PayPal.

Regards

 

[Helsionium]

It's actually pretty lame on their part, it's not that different from using the wide-screen hack or wide screen fix AR code on dolphin. You'd expect the company that took on the project (logicalbeat.jp/english) to have properly decompiled the game using the Source code and redo such pixel limited parts from grounds up. I mean if they weren't quite up to the task, they should have given it to Backbone Entertainment, have you seen how they too many old 16bit 4:3 game and did a proper remaster, I'm talking about Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. It's possible, just logicalbeat being lazy.

It certainly would have been possible, but it would have required actual artists (or the artist who painted the original maps mostly by himself, but he's still with Monolithsoft). I think logicalbeat isn't really to blame for anything other than the bugs the remasters have. The main issue is clearly that Bandai Namco didn't want to spend a lot of money on this remaster. logicalbeat just gave them what they asked for - a mediocre remaster.

Speaking of bugs, have a look at what I encountered today while testing the dub mod...
My Gibari got replaced by a second Kalas after the battle in Algorab village.
This probably (hopefully?) already got fixed, but I'm testing the game on version 1.0.0 for now.

 

[bambangtales]

If there's anyway to edit the game files, I would prefer a stretches 16:9 upscaled ugly texture everytime rather than letterboxed to 4:3. Sure it's not a perfect solution, but at least we have an option a.k.a another mod.

Post automatically merged: Oct 14, 2023

It's not really a glitch. The game uses 2D images for its overworld map/town/dungeon backgrounds. These were not remade for the remaster, only upscaled. That means they were only able to achieve 16:9 on screens that were able to scroll horizontally in the original game. Screens that didn't scroll horizontally just don't have enough pixels to the left and right for a 16:9 display. There's no real solution for that other than completely redrawing these screens.

But I agree that they chose a particularly ugly method of letterboxing.

If there's anyway to edit the game files, I would prefer a stretches 16:9 upscaled ugly texture everytime rather than letterboxed to 4:3. Sure it's not a perfect solution, but at least we have an option a.k.a another mod.

It's actually pretty lame on their part, it's not that different from using the wide-screen hack or wide screen fix AR code on dolphin. You'd expect the company that took on the project (logicalbeat.jp/english) to have properly decompiled the game using the Source code and redo such pixel limited parts from grounds up. I mean if they weren't quite up to the task, they should have given it to Backbone Entertainment, have you seen how they too many old 16bit 4:3 game and did a proper remaster, I'm talking about Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. It's possible, just logicalbeat being lazy.

Post automatically merged: Oct 13, 2023

By the way, nice work on this dub restoration, I shall be donating via your PayPal.

Regards

So, there is a way on their end! Then why they've not gave the project to more capable studio to not pissed fans like this.