I'm thinking of playing Chaos Rings in the iPhone all the way through in Japanese, and am planning to sentence-mine it in advance by extracting the English and Japanese text with a script to a spreadsheet. Then I can just unsuspend cards as I encounter the dialogue in the game.

Can anyone recommend any other games, for any platform, which are fun to play, story-based and have good Japanese and English dialogue? I was thinking of a project where I make sentence decks from game translations.

I believe Chrono Trigger DS has options for both Japanese and English... I know the Japanese version does, at least. Pretty sweet that one of the finest RPGs ever made is bilingual, if you ask me!

I recommend playing games you've already finished in English translation, but with health/fast movement cheats to power through it. I did the new Zelda ds game over two evenings with just a fast-train cheat, since it moves so annoyingly slow. Even finding a cheat that worked on the Japanese version was a learning experience, cruising 2ch gaming boards.

I finished one of the castlevania games in 2 evenings with an increased experience rate cheat too.

Playing such long games that only have occasional dialog without cheating is a waste of time that is better spent studying or sleeping.

I didn't know Square Enix had games for the iPhone/iPod Touch which included an option for Japanese text. Cool !

Pfft. To me, life is a game. And I play for keeps.

(That never loses its style.)

nest0r Wrote:Pfft. To me, life is a game. And I play for keeps.

Do you know where I can download the dialog for that game?

Blahah Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Pfft. To me, life is a game. And I play for keeps.

Do you know where I can download the dialog for that game?

To me, love's just a game... like Starcraft.

Off the top of my head(not mentioning the obvious Square stuff):

Megadrive/Genesis
Phantasy Star 4

Super NES
Mother 2/Earthbound
Shadowrun
Star Ocean

Playstation
Arc The Lad collection
Tales of Eternia/Tales of Destiny 2
Tales of Phantasia
Persona 2

Playstation 2
Growlanser 2 & 3
Tales of Abyss
Persona 3 & 4
Digital Devil Saga 1 & 2
Devil Summoner 1 & 2
Atelier Iris series

Blahah Wrote:I'm thinking of playing Chaos Rings in the iPhone all the way through in Japanese, and am planning to sentence-mine it in advance by extracting the English and Japanese text with a script to a spreadsheet. Then I can just unsuspend cards as I encounter the dialogue in the game.

Would you mind sharing that through something like a google doc? I have chaos rings as well and have played about an hour in English. I'd be lost if i transitioned fully, but the spreadsheet would be great. (I did, however, import FFXIII in Dec of '09 and am still playing-and loving-it in Japanese). I have a source for all of the cutscene dialog and would be willing to work on putting it into a spreadsheet as well if you or anyone else is interested.

astrangerhere Wrote:Would you mind sharing that through something like a google doc? I have chaos rings as well and have played about an hour in English. I'd be lost if i transitioned fully, but the spreadsheet would be great. (I did, however, import FFXIII in Dec of '09 and am still playing-and loving-it in Japanese). I have a source for all of the cutscene dialog and would be willing to work on putting it into a spreadsheet as well if you or anyone else is interested.

Sorry I should have made it clear that my intention was to share the spreadsheets and resulting decks with the community.

I'd certainly be interested if you've got the FFXIII dialog - I think I read about a project on another forum to translate it. Is that what you've got? Have you got it in J & E? If so, we should put it in a spreadsheet and generate a deck from it.

Also thanks cracky for the great list! I'll work on unpacking the roms.

Ace attorney (DS) and Persona (psx-ps2) series would be my first choices if I had the means to do something like that.
Actually, could you explain how would you proceed in extracting the text from a game? Assuming that it doesn't require excessively specific knowledge of technical stuff, that is.

Blahah Wrote:I'd certainly be interested if you've got the FFXIII dialog - I think I read about a project on another forum to translate it. Is that what you've got? Have you got it in J & E? If so, we should put it in a spreadsheet and generate a deck from it.
Also thanks cracky for the great list! I'll work on unpacking the roms.

I imagine we're looking at the same place among others in FF (insane) fandom. I'll get started on it and get a google doc link going.

I haven't played it yet, but I'm pretty sure that Star Ocean: The Last Hope (International) for PS3 has both English and Japanese dialogue options, if you're into Star Ocean that is.

I've heard good and bad things about it from a few reviews, but that's a "to each his own" kind of deal anyway.

Wow I went into this thinking it would be a walk in the park - locate some text-based files, extract the dialog from each locale, match up the phrases and bam! No such luck. Turns out I'm going to have to crack and decrypt compression on binaries for every situation in the game, then go through a fairly complex extraction process to get the lines of text. And for Chaos Rings I can't even find any Japanese text in there at all (although I've located all the english).

I was initially just looking for a nice project to distract me from revising for exams next week, but instead it looks like I'm in it for the long haul. I love it when all my interests come together in one project (Japanese, games, hacking).

update: Just found all the Japanese, for some reason encoded in UTF-18 Little Endian NoBOM