Translation Line Attack Heroes English translation for Wii

Brand Newman

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UPDATE (11.03.2021) :

Line Attack Heroes English Translation Patch is released!

As usual, I'm very grateful to the little community here, thank you for following my progress and being so supportive!

You can watch the trailer at the following address:


And of course, the patch can be downloaded at RomHacking.net here:
https://www.romhacking.net/translations/6343/

-----------------------------------------
Good day everyone, and welcome to (another) thead about a Japanese exclusive for the Wii that I intend to translate in English.

Some of you may know me from my previous work, of which you can watch the trailers at the end of this post, but for the rest of you let me introduce myself briefly.

So, I'm the proud translator of four Japanese exclusives for the Wii already ("Zangeki No Reginleiv" being a team work with @Kaiser_Gummi), and after doing all these translations for retail discs in a row, I thought I could go for something a little bit different this time.

People on the Internet have asked me for several games to translate for my next project, and "Line Attack Heroes" caught my attention.

Please find below a little video of the first mission I've translated so far, as well as some elements of the menu.



I'll try to keep you informed of my progress regularly, in the meantime why not try my other translations?









Wishing everybody a nice day,

Yours truly.
 
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wiiAdventurer

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Could you potentially do giftpia next? The translation is done. http://kirameki.altervista.org/eng/giftpia.php

Noo, gotta keep this Wii exclusive train going :D

Dragon Quest X offline, Dragon Quest Battle Road Victory, Sorcery Blade , or maybe Ougon no Kizuna ! (I'm sure there are others but I like my RPGs).

---

More on topic. Brand, I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd get to play this in english. I remember seeing the official english build and being so excited, only to be so let down that the game never appeared outside of Japan. i can't wait for this one!!! Thank you for all the work you put into these.

It does remind me a bit of Wonderful101. I wasn't a huge fan of what I've played of that. Probably a huge part of it was due to the controls! (I want to like that game though, the designs are great).
 
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Brand Newman

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Noo, gotta keep this Wii exclusive train going :D

Well... technically the Wii is more or less an overclocked Gamecube that sold considerably better!

But for the time being I still have a lot on my plate: people keep suggesting games I had never heard about, and I must admit some suggestions are pretty interesting.

But anyway, one thing at a time, tonight I'm on for more "Line Attack" translation!

Thank you everyone, for all these suggestions.
 

Brand Newman

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Things are going smoothly, and "Battle" part seems to be almost done (although I'll have to play the game to be sure).

I tried to keep both the general idea and humor of the Japanese names for the arenas by using alliterations, and even recycled my homemade icons from "Takt of Magic" for "Time" and "Rules".

Below are some screenshots if you're curious.

Good night to you all.

rPjE8Df.png


G1u2eRm.png
 

wiiAdventurer

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Nice! I had read about the battle mode and was curious how many stages and options were available in the Wiiware version (as everything I saw was about the defunct retail version). I'm curious if you'll find any unused content in this game, considering it used to be scheduled for a retail release (still sad about that!)

But this is great. The stage names are indeed fun and I like how the time value has the "min" kinda slanted, that gives the text a bit more personality.

Can I just add that I'm glad they have a random stage button? Too many games forget the random option.

Keep up the good work!
 

Brand Newman

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I'm curious if you'll find any unused content in this game, considering it used to be scheduled for a retail release

Well... so far the only things I have found that seem to be unused are the descriptions of the battle modes (they're pretty self explanatory anyway, except maybe for the "fight of the flags", for which you'll need about 3 seconds to figure out the first time).

All in one, the game seems to have been shortened a lot compared to what was planned: the missions are all located in a "events" folder in the 00000002.app file, and there are about 20 subfolders, so...

That being said, the battle mode seems super fun and has a bit of a "bomberman" feeling: it's just too bad you can only do local multiplayer, or so it seems.

On a personal note, I'd like to share the happiness of finally having found the "manual" deep within the "system" file. It took me an entire day, but this part will be translated as well!

aVdvCHo.png


AmXiOjX.png
 

Brand Newman

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Translation is getting slowed down a lot by the NPC names...

The game features thousands of characters that are basically small variations of an "ally", and need to be rescued, vanquished, etc., between missions.

The thing is they basically threw the entire phone book, which forced me to create an Excel file where the number of letters for each Japanese name would get counted.

Then I had to write down a formula to prevent double names and/or using more letters than affordable, hence the green color you can see in the screenshots below.

xsa06Ak.jpg


1Q2TfL4.jpg


Notice the last line of the file is number 3820...

I considered erasing the names and rephrasing the dialogs accordingly for a while, but that would leave an empty space over the head of the characters, so I'm not a fan of the idea (which, let's be honest, would probably have been the solution officials would have gone with back in the days! :lol:)

So I guess I have a lot of dull and uninteresting work to do, translating names my best with a limited amount of characters, trying not to ever use the same name twice... This might end in some weird shortened names now and then, be warned!

Have a nice day you all!
 

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Translation is getting slowed down a lot by the NPC names...

The game features thousands of characters that are basically small variations of an "ally", and need to be rescued, vanquished, etc., between missions.

The thing is they basically threw the entire phone book, which forced me to create an Excel file where the number of letters for each Japanese name would get counted.

Then I had to write down a formula to prevent double names and/or using more letters than affordable, hence the green color you can see in the screenshots below.

xsa06Ak.jpg


1Q2TfL4.jpg


Notice the last line of the file is number 3820...

I considered erasing the names and rephrasing the dialogs accordingly for a while, but that would leave an empty space over the head of the characters, so I'm not a fan of the idea (which, let's be honest, would probably have been the solution officials would have gone with back in the days! :lol:)

So I guess I have a lot of dull and uninteresting work to do, translating names my best with a limited amount of characters, trying not to ever use the same name twice... This might end in some weird shortened names now and then, be warned!

Have a nice day you all!
Man you're such a talented translator and programmer, I hope you get interested in the super robot wars series one day
 

wiiAdventurer

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Translation is getting slowed down a lot by the NPC names...

The game features thousands of characters that are basically small variations of an "ally", and need to be rescued, vanquished, etc., between missions.

The thing is they basically threw the entire phone book, which forced me to create an Excel file where the number of letters for each Japanese name would get counted.

This is crazy. I wonder if that's why the English release got cancelled, maybe too many names to translate.

I feel bad for you having to deal with these oddball things each translation. However, I guess that is what makes each project pretty interesting! It's a cool feature regardless.

Thank you for your continued work. Happy weekend to you!
 

Brand Newman

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This is crazy. I wonder if that's why the English release got cancelled, maybe too many names to translate.

I feel bad for you having to deal with these oddball things each translation. However, I guess that is what makes each project pretty interesting! It's a cool feature regardless.

Thank you for your continued work. Happy weekend to you!

Could be the reason, yes, although it wouldn't have been that difficult to simply remove any reference to these random characters' names (I would have had, if it hadn't left an empty tile over their heads, but professional programmers wouldn't have had the issue).

I know I digress, but that kind of takes me back to the 90s, when West (especially Europe) used to get "botched" versions of games for that kind of reason (Dynamite Headdy with all its dialogs removed, Fatal Fury Special and its removed characters, Pocky and Rocky, showing nothing but dark in PAL, whereas the US version had its story translated...)

More than often this was due to the cost of translating the game / keeping the number of megabytes in the cartridge, and I guess that's where my fascination for Japanese games all started (that and the censorship issue, which was particularly strong for Nintendo boys like me by the time).

Don't feel bad for me, overcoming the obstacles one way or another is part of the thrill (for example; I still am considering using an icon for allies instead of names, all the options are still on table), but whatever happens the game will end up translated no matter what! This will just take a little bit longer :shy:

Have a nice WE you too!
 
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Brand Newman

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Hello everyone.

I thought I might keep you on track about my progress regarding the "names" issue.

So, I had started to translate them the best I could, but sadly there's a lot of "two characters" names that don't leave me enough space to translate them in a satisfactory way (I mean, there isn't much anagrams you can do with two letters).

Then I discovered the number of NPC isn't that much by extracting their portraits... that is until I started a new game, which confirmed what I had suspected all along : the game actually gives a random name to the NPC, meaning the same character can have different names depending on the save file.

That also means their names aren't important at all, contrary to the characters that are "storywise" involved.

So I went back to the "remove the names" solution, and looked deep within the files for the tile that would show empty.

Finally, after days of research and "try and error", I was able to make that tile invisible (deleting it would have affected all the dialog windows as well, so I didn't want that).

That means that the (sort of) thousands of NPC won't be showing anything above their heads.
Before:
JZqsy5q.png

After:
IngSqOl.png


The only counterpart is that the characters that DO have a permanent name won't have the tile above their heads either, but frankly it's not that much of an issue, especially considering their names would disappear immediately anyway.
Before:
hj4yUsk.png

After:
Iwztmc5.png


Of course I'll have to modify the sentences that refered to these random names ("XXX" has joined you) in favor of something like "You've got a new ally", etc.

But now that I found a solution I can be satisfied with, I can go back to actual translation!

Next step is.... oh my.... weapons again...:wacko:
 

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Hello everyone.

I thought I might keep you on track about my progress regarding the "names" issue.

So, I had started to translate them the best I could, but sadly there's a lot of "two characters" names that don't leave me enough space to translate them in a satisfactory way (I mean, there isn't much anagrams you can do with two letters).

...

So I went back to the "remove the names" solution, and looked deep within the files for the tile that would show empty.

Well, I understand why you went with the solution you did, I don't blame you. Though, depending on close you were for your other solution, just personally, I'd rather keep the two character names as untranslated (or random letters) and still get the satisfaction of having the other character names. Though it seems like there are quite a few "names" that could be used. (then again, with 3'000 entries, it could easily surpass the 66 listed there)

Again, I totally understand it's a great deal of work and not really worth the effort. But I do feel like that was part of this game's uniqueness (how many games do this?). Still, I'd rather have a translated game sooner than a frustrated translator and no translation. I just wanted to mention my thoughts to provide feedback and also to raise some discussion.

Thank you again for all your hard work! Looking forward to hearing about weapons.
 
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Brand Newman

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I'd rather keep the two character names as untranslated (or random letters)

Mmm... quite the opposite for me, to be honest : I don't like leaving untranslated things in a game (with the exception of "artsy" or very specific assets, like I wouldn't translate the texture of an inscription on a shrine for example).

Fun fact : when I translated Earth Seeker, there were some French in it (a "work rules" - "règlement de travail" - behind Bereta's desk). That is the kind of thing that I believe should remain untranslated, since the creators wanted it to be in foreign language anyway.

Moreover since Japanese and French people have a long history of mutual culture adoration. :)

But apart from that, I'm not fond of untranslated / random letters words.

And then there's the combination issue : for a name to "look real", you need to use a vowel amongst the two letters (6 letters in the alphabet), and the combination with the consonant musn't look "weird" (believe me, I tried, and all I could read ingame with combinations like "Do" was a verb :lol:!)

I mean, names like "Aw", "At", etc., were kinda out of the question to me.

But don't worry, I'm being particularly careful about making this change unnoticeable to anyone who hasn't played the Japanese version.

And on a brighter side, searching through all these files turned out to be very handy, since I found the textures for all the equipment, and could translate them better knowing what they looked like (yes, Brand, this equipment was actually a parabola...)

Thank you for your support and message, I'll leave some new pictures when I make some more progress, but right now I'm heavily tweaking the font to save some letters for the weapons' descriptions by reuniting small couples of letters in one character ("ff", "er", etc.)

Have a nice WE!
 

Brand Newman

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Pfewww...

After two whole days, I'm finally done with the NPCs' weapons (or am I?)

As evidenced by the screenshot below, I had to rely heavily on font alteration to add extra letters whenever I needed it.

c7y7n8f.jpg


(Don't wanna brag, but "irl" in a one-character slot is my masterpiece :lol:)

Of course some compromises and changes had to be made ("cup-and-ball game" became "toy", "efude of dream" is now a "feather"), but I think I managed to stay as close to the original meaning as possible... and things can always be altered a bit more later, if it turns out some of my translations went totally wrong!

Well anyway, now I can go back to ACTUALLY translate the story, but I'm leaving you with a little screenshot of the NPC (aka "allies") selection screen : the lack of names doesn't seem to hurt so far, let's hope it stays that way!

PS: Will you be able to see which part of the weapons' names is an altered character? :unsure:

NU06c3G.png


Everybody has a nice WE, good luck about the week to come!
 
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Brand Newman

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Hope you can tweak a bit the text boxes spacing.

So, I've been translating "cutscenes" dialogs (the ones that show before you help allies) all day, but there's still a lot to do.

On another subject, I succeded in tweaking the text boxes spacing, as @stranno suggested to (helped a lot that I had to deal with xmlyt files on my "Zangeki No Reginleiv" project).

I'm quite satisfied with the result, which undoubtedly looks more "professional", so I wanted to share it with you.

Japanese (you can see a "simplified" line above the dialog - probably meant for younger players - makes the line go lower on the window).
AvJIThZ.png

FgjpdsK.png


Translation (previous window position): the disappearance of the simplified Japanese line makes the text look too low.
j6drz8O.png

ZqQyJqT.png


Tweaked line position:
nLGOhV4.png

8YHJ6oP.png
 

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