Greetings.
As some of you may know, the western version of Yakuza 3 had a lot of changes made to it due "cultural differences".
Various sidequests and cutscenes were cut, some side activities like Shogi or other minigames were cut.
Hostess clubs were cut. Product placement was cut and plenty more things.
There has also been some censorship applied to the game as well.
You can see full list of changes here:
http://forums.sega.com/showthread.php?322120-Full-list-of-cut-content
http://forums.sega.com/showthread.php?320111-100-Completed-List-of-Cut-Side-Quests
So we decided that people in the west should also be able to play the definitive version of the game rather than the cut and butchered one.
The author of the work in progress Ryū ga Gotoku Kenzan translation (check out his blog here: http://yakuzapatch.tumblr.com/ ) decided to team up with me so we can fix Yakuza 3.
At first we thought about modifying the western version to try and "restore" the cut stuff but as we dug into it, it turned out it has also been butchered deep down to the code level and it's more or less unfixable within reasonable amount of time and without some serious knowledge of PS3 debugging and assembly language.
That's when we turned our attention to the Japanese version of the game and came up with the idea to port all text from English version to it.
Barring some snags and bugs which SlowpokeVG (the guy behind Kenzan translation) is currently ironing out the progress is going relatively smoothly.
We have pretty much all English text implanted in the Japanese version right now, but here's where we need help.
First and foremost, we require a translator who would be able to translate the remaining content that wasn't in the English version (so the cut sidequests, minigames, Hostess clubs etc).
We'd preferably like to request help of multiple translators so it would go faster and each would be given a different portion to translate for consistency.
A translator that actually played the the game (be it English Yakuza 3 releae or Japanese RgG3) would be preferrable.
Secondly, we need a good programmer who would be skilled enough to implement VWF (variable width font) in the game, as right now we don't have that so the text looks like this:
And for comparison, this is how it looks in the English version:
Not bad in any way shape or form, but you can still tell it has fixed width which might be annoying to read to some people, and besides it may result in text going out of borders (but in worst case scenario we can fix that in editing). While we haven't actually ran into an instance of that happening right now it's not out of the realm of possibility it may be occuring at some other point in the game and we can't test it all at once.
If said programmer was also able to help us figure out a way to extend the character limit for text in the executable itself (EBOOT.BIN) that would be amazing since we're not sure we'll be able to translate all text in the eboot properly without exceeding the character limit. Oh and possibly swapping X and O buttons for confirmation.
SlowpokeVG already did his fair share of coding for the project as well such as making tools to actually let us change the text, but unfortunately VWF seems to be out of his league.
If you're interesting in helping us, just respond to this topic or send me a PM or contact SlowpokeVG on his blog through the Ask Me Anything form.
PS.
It's worth noting that as of now everything except the translation part and VWF (we really need someone versed with PS3 code to implement this, as we were unable to do it ourselves) has already been done, we only need a dedicated translator now, as one who offered to work with us few months ago just keeps making excuses and not doing anything so please, only serious offers for help.
We understand people have lives and stuff but if you're not willing to spend even 1 hour on this weekly then you're not who we're looking for.
All tools are already done and everything is set up for a relatively painless translation.
Our tool works in form of boxes where on the left you've got Japanese text and on the right you've got an empty box where you'd be inputting the translation. No need to worry about editing or line breaks as we'll handle that part.
With that said, we're dedicated to doing this and everything outside of the translation of the untranslated parts has already been done, all we're waiting for is a dedicated translator to help us out.
It's not an overwhelming amount of text since most of the game is already translated and like we said, if you can't sign up for Hostess Bars translation as well then that's fine as they have lower priority for us right now (but we'd definitely like to get those done eventually as well).
So please, we need your help.
Last edited by Canzah,
