Shiren the Wanderer 2 N64 Translation

[nuu]

Funny you should mention that - back when I first found the Controller Pak Menu, I was looking for the same thing so I tracked down the check for press start.  I haven't tested it when there is no Controller Pak inserted.  It might just crash if that's the case, but I'm hoping it has a separate check for that.

Here's a version of the patch from a few posts before that always boots to the Controller Pak Menu first: Download

Thanks! I tried it in Project 64 and it boots up Shiren 2 if you don't have a controller pak inserted.

[ozidual]

A week or two ago the translator ran into an interesting bug.  With the current hack (Shiren v0.2.040DebugSaveHeaderDebug2), taking the cart to the Summit turns the Summit into a dungeon.  It's easiest to tell if you have the map up:



But you'll also notice in that 2nd image above and the one below that you can fight monsters too:



It's equivalent to the 2nd floor of a dungeon (as you can see from the 2F along the top).  Otherwise the area acts like normal.  You can build castle parts and talk to everyone like normal.  There is no staircase that I can find and as soon as you leave the Summit it reverts back to normal (no dungeon).  Pretty cool.  It's a very huge maybe, but someday I'd love to purposely enable some of these errors and release a patch with them.

The translator has been working like crazy this month on Shiren and a Shiren related project - more on that another time.   For me December was a wasted month.  Between illness and holiday activities I got next to nothing done.  I'm hoping January will be a catch up month for me.

EDIT: Fixed it, but I also figured out how to change what floor it thinks you are on.  Fun stuff.  I'm still not 100% sure how to make it happen elsewhere, just for taking the cart to the Summit at the moment.  Here's a cool view of a Pumphantom coming after me over the water on a 85th Floor Summit dungeon:

[nuu]

Does it happen with the translation only or with the original rom as well?

[ozidual]

Good question, I should have mentioned this - no, it's entirely from the text changes.

I think I mentioned earlier that one large section of text is filled with command characters.  Well some of those command characters are used to jump to different spots in the code (like GOTO in BASIC).  Those same commands are also used to define values used by other things.  In this case, I blanket identified hundreds of these as GOTO statements when a few of them were not.  That changed the value here from 0x0B to 0x0D.  0x0D made it a Dungeon level 2.  0x11 makes it a Dungeon level 6, etc.  This has caused problems a few times before and I'm sure we'll run into more, but we're pretty good at catching them.  I think half of my fixes have been identifying these as GOTO (which may need recalculation for longer sections of text) or not GOTO (which should not be changed). 

This is the first time it's messed with Dungeon levels.  In the past it's changed the displayed image (turning characters or items into other characters or items), made characters walk across the title screen or just plain crashed the game.

[ozidual]

No news except that we hope to have the translation done by the end of 2020.  Everything is still progressing nicely!  This is more of a reminiscing post   You see, it's now officially one whole year since I made the first post in this thread.  It's also a perfect time to look back at the year in general.



I started the year by consolidating my previous work on Shiren and having another go at making a translation hack.  You can see the first couple posts, but Shiren had a few false starts since 2017.  The more I dug into it, the more I doubted it would ever be translated.  That was fine by me at the time.  I liked hacking Shiren!  It came with a built-in VWF, and after doing some digging with the letters, it was a very simplistic ASCII hack.  Though I knew the 2nd text section (called the "Everything Else" text) was going to be a beast to hack.  For fun I threw the 1st text section (called the "Dungeon" text) through a machine translator and learned how badly even that simple text could come out.



A couple of months later I put Shiren on hold because I had a translator contact me about translating Getter Love.  By the way, GL is still being translated, just very slowly.  Life overtook the translator, but I do occasionally get updates.  Getter Love's hack was barely there so I had a lot of catchup to do on that.  It is NOT an easy game to hack.  I don't know a good way to explain it, but it's like GL has it's own game engine that takes in only command characters and spits out the game you see.  The majority of the hacks are going through the exact same loop of code over and over to trace out a byte here or a byte there that need fixing.  That was a solid few months of work on GL until May.



That's when Shiren's translator contacted me.  I took a little time off of GL to get Shiren's text a little more ready to translate.  My time was still mostly spent on GL trying to get the Name Screen just right (It's about 98% done right now, I just need to fix deleting on the re-name Name Screen - the max # of characters is even VWF based now).  Towards the end of the summer, the translator hit that solid wall that is real life and the translation hack itself felt pretty good.  So things shifted mostly to Shiren.



In late summer/fall it looks like I went from one Name Screen to the other.  I did some initial work on Shiren's Name Screen (It's currently at a good point, though I'd like to make the max # of characters VWF based as well).  I spent some time fixing the 's' for multiple items and 1'st', 2'nd', 3'rd', 4'th'.  Throughout it all I kept tweaked the "Everything Else" spreadsheets.  One of them has had 26 revisions and is currently on v3.7je, the other has had between 20 and 60 changes and is currently on 'v3.6d with 5C calcL'.  At least a few of those revisions required the translator to adjust to a new spreadsheet.  He has patiently withstood it all and for that (and many other reasons) he is amazing!  I also did more work on the Name Screen and fixed one or two minor things not related to the "Everything Else" text.  Oh, and learning all about Controller Paks and a few weeks figuring out how to decompress and dump all the textures.




That brings us to December which pretty much brings us to today.  December was full of sickness and vacation.  I started January with a couple Shiren fixes, but the time since has been very similar to December.  In a week I hope to take things up again and get back to it all though. 



Throughout it all Shiren's translator has moved steadily forward, tweaking old text and translating new text with multiple playthroughs.  I knew it was going to be a beast of a translation, but even with the translator making leaps and bounds, it has been a long road.  It is all worth it though to see this game in action.  I'm really excited to share it with you all later this year.

EDIT: Added images because it's more fun than a wall of text.  Please excuse the GL images here.  I didn't want to update two threads with a review of the year, and I am very proud of the work done so far on Getter Love even if it isn't my focus.

[ozidual]

I thought I'd give a little peek behind the curtain of the Shiren translation today. I've been dealing with illness (not corona-related) and a busy work schedule for most of the year so not much hacking unfortunately and not much news from my side.

About a month ago I was checking out the Shiren 2 OST and I noticed that the main village was translated as Natane Village. I asked the translator about it because our translation calls it Napus Village. You see Natane means either rapeseed or rapeseed oil (called Canola Oil here in the U.S.).  In fact, if you google translate the katakana for Natane (ナタネ), it comes back with Rape. He decided Napus might be a better option since that is the name of the plant.  You can debate these kinds of changes all you want, but it's what we went with and it ended up working out well for a different reason. Napus takes up less screen space.

You see, the past few months have been spent going back through the translation and making everything fit. Especially the "dungeon text" since you get 2 lines total. In fact, one of the few hacks I did was to extend the width of that window to give us more space.  We chat in discord and the vast majority of the feed is the translator asking me about text and then a back and forth as we try to figure out text that both fits and matches the original text/intent as closely as possible. I would regularly get messages like:

42) How does this sound?

All water on this floor evaporated! (164)

Where 42) is a way to find the text later and (164) is the number of pixels the text takes up. I think we have around 174 pixels per line for this text. I have to admit that it is fun wracking my brain for synonyms and ways of rephrasing sentences so they fit one line instead of two, but it can take a lot of time. Eventually, I did another hack that removes the auto-line break. The breaks were happening somewhat randomly depending on the text, and it gave us a few extra crucial pixels.

Warning, the next section discusses male, female, and everyone in between slightly explicitly.

At the end of January the web exploded because a translator used the word "tranny" in a Goemon translation. For good or bad, I'd rather not discuss everything that happened here, but it led to Mato creating an interesting article here (https://legendsoflocalization.com/okama-in-game-translation/). At about the same time, Shiren's translator brought up that Shiren 2 uses the word Okama regularly in a section of the text and was worried about how to translate it without offense. The character in question is intersex, truly intersex in that they have both fully functioning organs. We could have used intersex, except for another Mato article here (https://legendsoflocalization.com/game-localization-and-nintendo-of-americas-content-policies-in-the-1990s/) that we try to follow as much as possible. Yes, Shiren 2 is a game from 2000, and yes Conkers was released the next year, but we wanted to stay within these guidelines to keep the game as close to what a translator might have done back then. We feel "intersex" (which I hope I read correctly as the proper term right now) which includes the word "sex" in it would not have fit in a translation done back then. Pages and pages of discussion later, we decided to keep it as "Okama". While it wasn't a term used back then, it is a term that is known now. Read the article - it's a good read. It is not just thrown into Shiren 2.  It is used purposely to tell the tale of a character who overcomes adversity not unlike many good movies.

I want to say that the okama discussion lasted a week or so with some research in between. I think we normally spend a minute or so per line and up to 30 minutes on the difficult ones. Is it perfect? No, but revision revision revision. I do hope you like it when we release it. I should mention that we also have some time consuming side projects that will tie into the release. We aren't revising all the time.

One last tale - the one that started this all. I noticed someone has some Shiren 2 merchandise on eBay right now. That led us to talking about Shiren 2's release competition (there will be more on that later), which led us to the 20th Shiren anniversary.  Incidentally the Shiren 2 OST is actually the Shiren 20th CD set.  3 CDs with multiple Shiren game soundtracks on them. At the same time, websites back then were discussing old Shiren games and I happened to see this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAf51-XXD_I - it's Shiren Monsters: Netsal. Basically a GameBoy Advance soccer game based on Shiren and it's monsters.  It was a fun night of chatting about random Shiren stuff.

Oh, and here's a sneak peek of the calculator we use for widths:

[daneeall]

So the major time at translation takes discussion?
Interesting.

[nuu]

Leaving it as okama sounds like a good idea. Back then googling words you don't understand wasn't a thing yet, and it's not a word that people easily could look up in a paper dictionary either. But now googling is very easily done by anyone that aren't familiar with it. It's probably not a word that players playing the translation have strong feelings for either since it's Japanese, so I don't think there will be drama this time.

Besides leaving certain Japanese words as is, is common in translated Japanese media nowdays and often preferred by fans. It gives an exotic feel. Shiren is a game heavy on Japanese jidaigeki culture, so it makes even more sense in this game.

[ozidual]

Shiren is a game heavy on Japanese jidaigeki culture, so it makes even more sense in this game.

It really is.  That's why I feel so lucky to have someone who grew up in Japan playing this game as the translator. 

There have been quite a few times where I suggested alternative sentences and got pushback because it wouldn't fit the theme.  I love it when that happens!  I get to learn so much more about the game and Japanese culture then.  It also means it'll take longer to figure out a good sentence that will fit in the space provided, but totally worth it.

[Datlantis]

Keep it up man, you're doing amazing work and i am looking forward to this more than any other release of 2020! Hope you are staying safe in these times as well.

[ozidual]

I thought it would be fun to pull an April Fools prank, like create a fake link to download the full complete patch and instead send everyone to be rick-rolled.  But with Covid-19 being a big bummer worldwide, April Fools pranks like that seem to be a bad idea.  Instead, lets do something fun! Let's start revealing all the secrets we've kept about Shiren.


First and most important - who is the translator?  Who is that mysterious person that was born in Japan, grew up playing Shiren, and eventually translated it!? 

The answer is... drumroll please... Sharksnack!!


Second, what are the secret projects sharksnack has been working on the past few months besides translating Shiren 2? 

The answer is.... A Full Shiren 2 wiki: https://sharksnack.github.io/shiren2/html/index.html
A subreddit for everything Shiren: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShirenTheWanderer/
A discord channel for everything Shiren: https://discord.gg/5y7UDFc


Third and the final reveal, why am I doing this reveal thing? 

The answer is.... to release a playtest patch for the Shiren 2 English Translation.


Sharksnack and I were chatting the other day.  The world pretty much sucks right now.  There's this pandemic going around and it's affected everyone's life in one way or another.  Some people are at home bored.  Some people are working around the clock.  There's also a lot of loss and sadness.  So it's no surprise that a lot of people are turning to video games to keep themselves sane. 

We wanted to release the full Shiren 2 patch in the hopes that it might bring some happiness to the madness.  I wish it could be the full patch, but that's just not possible right now.  I work in IT and supporting a remote workforce has taken all of my free time.  I have zero time for hacking until things calm down.  Instead, we decided to release what we have as a playtest patch.  We're hoping you can help us polish the text and find all the bugs, both known and unknown.  Shiren 2 is a gigantic game full of so much text and so many different combinations it's hard for two people to test it all.

Since it is a playtest, we're releasing the patch on our discord channel in the hopes that you'll join and help us out with suggestions.  I've used discord for chatting about patches since the first Zelda forums started moving to discord.  Sharksnack, a HUGE Shiren fan, already had the skeleton of a Discord to celebrate everything Shiren.  We're adding a patch feedback channel where you can post feedback on the patch and maybe help us improve on it.

We are NOT abandoning the Shiren 2 English patch.  Not by a long shot.  I have notes on hacks that need to be done, and I want to do them!  Sharksnack is still regularly making tweaks to the text.  There are more secrets to the Shiren 2 ROM that have not been revealed and if there is enough there, I hope we can reveal them.  There is more!  This is just a stepping stone on the way to it all

TL;DR: Go here: https://discord.gg/5y7UDFc to download the Shiren 2 English Translation Playtest Patch


EDIT: I should add that the Playtest patch text is 100% translated though not polished.  The textures are untranslated.  The bugs are fairly minimal in that the only game breaking ones can easily be avoided.