ROM Hack Suggestion Change Astral Chain's Voices to Japanese when starting New Game

RisingHopperZeroOne

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Astral Chain doesn't allow changing voice settings when starting a new game only allowing after the tutorial, hopefully there is a way to fix this so whoever wants to can play from the beginning with Japanese voices instead of the American ones.
 

RisingHopperZeroOne

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Usually you need voice pack, so probably wait until there is one.
I don't understand. The japanese voice files are included in the nsp, it just doesn't let you change them because you get access to the main menu after the tutorial, there should be a way to mod it to change the voices to japanese when starting a new game.
 

Hayato213

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I don't understand. The japanese voice files are included in the nsp, it just doesn't let you change them because you get access to the main menu after the tutorial, there should be a way to mod it to change the voices to japanese when starting a new game.

Well your system language is English, I would assume you need a voice pack if you want to play in Japanese audio.
 

RisingHopperZeroOne

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Well your system language is English, I would assume you need a voice pack if you want to play in Japanese audio.
No, it has dual audio, it just doesn't let you choose which one you want because it prevents main menu access until after the tutorial, it's not the first game to do this but it's annoying nonetheless. Since mods are easy on the switch, it should be possible to either change the voices to Japanese or load the options menu before starting a new game.
 
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rsc-pl

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I don't get why they are forcing people to dub. Is it that hard to add a simple option like "choose voice language" before intro?
Edit:
Start the game, skip intro to character creation. Turn off the game, start the game - now you have an access to game menu.
Edit 2:

13P8WHe.jpg

Well, that's a surprise. All games should have options like this to be honest. I always wondered why western publishers are removing original language from Japanese games in most cases.
 
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Trice

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Most of the time it's either because there's no space or because of licensing issues. In Japan it's often the case that voice tracks or even vocal songs are only licensed to be used in Japan and not abroad.
 

Nazosan

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There is never not enough space. Voiceover data is maybe a few hundred megabytes at the most. Even videos can just use a separate audio track with no need to do a whole separate video for each. This actually is the most efficient and effective way to do it from the start anyway because the game was originally done in Japanese with plans from the very start to have dubs in other languages.

Usually it really is licensing -- though that's actually a really bad excuse too as they can just do it properly to begin with instead of making a mess. But this is usually what it is. This game has both in there though, so that isn't the issue. The issue here is they just wanted it to have a flashy opening and forgot that if people are diving for their volume knobs as voices they don't like come on mispronouncing names and etc it ruins the atmosphere and ruins the effect they were going for there. NeiR:Automata started out with a mini-game action scene as you're heading into an unknown situation and etc too, so I think this is no coincidence. (However, it let you access the menus first and asked you which voices you wanted.)

Can this game be modded to run 60fps
It may be possible. Probably is. However, I may be wrong, but I think they've heavily optimized this game to run exactly as-is and I suspect that even if no problems crop up from forcing a higher framerate on its own, it will probably end up running pretty close to the same rate except with a lot of hitches as it speeds up and slows down at times instead. Of course I could be wrong about that, but I really honestly think you shouldn't bother putting in a lot of effort to try to get 60 FPS.

Maybe if you overclock. No guarantees even then though. (Plus, don't forget, the more you raise that clock, the more you cut into the lifetime of a component that isn't really designed to handle that sort of strain very well. Even if you improve the cooling with better thermal paste and etc it can only help so much.) The Switch is no powerhouse. I honestly find it amazing it does as well as it does.

BTW, screaming a question at people is generally not very useful and more likely to make people not want to answer. Ask like a normal person for the best results.

I don't get why they are forcing people to dub. Is it that hard to add a simple option like "choose voice language" before intro?
Most games that have the option built in offer that very option upon selecting a new game before the intro starts. IMO there is no excuse that this one does not. They were going for a certain effect and just made a really big sweeping assumption I think, but one single question before starting wouldn't have killed anyone. (Or better still, just go ahead and give the user the settings before starting like NeiR:Automata did. Then you can set controls and etc before beginning. Then even if you're going to be a jerk and block off the settings during the tutorial part of the game it doesn't matter.)


EDIT: I did get a bit curious about the game's moddability. I'm seeing a lot of .pkz files that have the string pkz1 at the start of the files. Based on the file structure I'm thinking maybe once people crack this file format this game might just have a decent amount of moddability. These are probably relatively simple archives. However, right now I don't think a lot of heavy modding will be possible. The first sound files are .BNK (they say BKHD in the header) so maybe moddable, but probably not worth the effort to try to repack for this. The second ones are named .wem but the header says RIFF WAV (however, simply renaming them doesn't work, so maybe they have some slight change to the format.) Someone would have to figure out the change there to crack this, but that probably wouldn't be hard if they set out to do it. I think maybe someone could swap the files from the /sound/Japanese into a /sound/English(US) and for the same named folders in /sound/stream/ though your guess is as good as mine as to whether these files actually match up 1:1 or if they may be different as they are in many games. This probably isn't worth the effort since the exit after first save trick is quite effective, but that's a possibility if one just had to mod (and this is why I don't even bother testing that myself.)
 
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Bigkahuna28

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Bnk files can be extracted but not repacked

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

And there is a wim to ogg converter by the way the files in the bnk are wim files like wim 1-300 and so on
 

Nazosan

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Yeah, it looks like people have figured out a lot along its lines: https://gbatemp.net/threads/astral-chain-rom-hacking-bible.547050/ I could have sworn there was something out there to repack BNK files, but don't quote me on that. (Of course, that's assuming these are the same type of BNK files as those...) Either way, that thread is the best place to go for future considerations of modding the game. The game has not been out long at all and frankly it's actually amazing how much has already been worked out for it as far as extracting data and such.
 

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