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Script Changes

Script Changes

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It has come to our attention that Capcom has decided to restore DGS1+2 as well as Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice to PlayStore and iOS, the latter also getting a refresh of Ghost Trick, which we recommend you to play if you haven’t done so yet. As of the time of writing this, DGS has not been restored on 3DS eShop. Update May 26, 2021: both games have been restored to the 3DS eShop with the same changes.

Both DGS1 and 2 have also received what Capcom calls a “minor bugfix”, but when we looked a bit closer we found something quite interesting. For the first time, an update for either of the DGS games involves changes to the script. Not just small typos, it looks like specific words have been removed, 野蛮 (barbarian) and サル (monkey). Of 13 changed passages, 10 are said by Jezail and nearly all of them are said in a racial context. As the small number suggests, this certainly doesn’t cover all instances of racially charged passages in the game, and one instance of 野蛮 remains in DGS1 in which it appears the context isn’t racially charged but could be taken as such. Many other cases remain in the game, mostly remarking on the appearance, intelligence or honor of Japanese people in an insensitive or insulting manner.

This makes us wonder why they did make these changes. If the objective was to tone down racist rhetoric, then they failed to do their job right, since equally bad or even worse passages remain in the games. Someone theorized it could be a change in certain rating board rules which could force higher ratings on games that feature specific words. We do not know at this point and welcome any input from someone who does.

It stands to reason that these changes will also find their way into the upcoming Chronicles version for PS4/Steam/Switch, which we are very much looking forward to. Hope you all managed to place your preorder on time!

Since only 13 passages were actually changed, we documented them all so you can see for yourself and come to your own conclusions. For your convenience, we added our current translation and a rough translation of the changes.

The Return of the Great Departed Soul

The Return of the Great Departed Soul

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DGS23

Art by qosic

“My friend’s wiry arms were around me and he was leading me to the chair.
“You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake say that you’re not hurt!”
It was worth a wound -it was worth many wounds- to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay beyond that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Three Garridebs

What a year it has been. A year full of surprises, good and bad – but mostly a year where you all where starving for new content. The long-awaited, extra-long Episode 3 is finally here.

The last year hasn’t been normal in any shape or form, for any of us, and many a plan we had didn’t quite work out the way we had hoped. This release will not include the long-awaited Android fix some of you have been waiting for and meanwhile, Capcom has removed both games from all digital storefronts. We are still commited to rectify this, people who have bought the games on PlayStore still spent their hard-earned money trusting that we would come through and I promise, we will. Here’s to hoping Capcom will restore the games eventually.

Many of you have read the news about the leaks, and so have we. There seems to be something big on the horizon, and you have questions. So do we. If the rumors turn out to be true, we hope you will join us in supporting Capcom finally bringing this gem to the west. Niche games like DGS need all the support they can get. Let’s show them that localizing these games is worth their time. It will definitely be interesting to see where the official translation will differ from ours, but as we said on twitter, we do not intend to comment on the situation further until Capcom chooses to make a public announcement.

As always, enjoy this new Episode and let us know what you think in the Comments, on twitter or on the Fan Translators International Discord (link is on the Contact page), if you do find any mistakes in our script, please do let us know on our bug trackers (links are on the Download page).

Hopefully, our Android users won’t have to wait for much longer, and we will see what else the future brings. A big thank you to d0k3, Dj_Mike238, Wolfvak for helping us fix some technical issues and qosic for the beautiful art for this release post!

Happy Easter!

Note: Please start Episode 3 from the Chapter menu, not from a save you made from the preview, or the Save button will be hidden.

PlayStore updates

PlayStore updates

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Art by Tryphena

CAPCOM has pushed updates for both DGS1+2 on PlayStore today to address changes in the GooglePlay service, screen issues on certain devices and unspecified further issues. This breaks our patch, please don’t update and/or patch until further notice while we investigate.

The Adventure of the Runaway Room / The Adventure of the Clouded Kokoro

The Adventure of the Runaway Room / The Adventure of the Clouded Kokoro

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Art by Tryphena

“What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence… The question is what can you make people believe you have done.” ― Sherlock Holmes

It’s been almost 9 months since we released our last episode, much longer than we planned. But we have quite a lot to show for the time we spent, and the double release is only the beginning: as some of you may already know, you can now play The Great Ace Attorney on your Android phone or tablet! This is mostly thanks to our new member, an-error, who worked like a machine to get this ready in a remarkably short time while also allowing us to improve our 3DS version with his findings. Of course, he was not the only one hard at work…

Through a joint effort, nearly all of the graphics and art already touched by our translation have been revisited and polished up to a whole new level of professionalism. Most notably, we can’t thank the Fan Translators International team enough for their reverse engineering efforts – because of them, we were able to design a wonderful typeface that blends readability with a touch of 20th-century classicism.

The title of Episode 4 might confuse you. Kokoro is the Japanese word for mind, heart or spirit – so why did we not translate it as that? Kokoro is also the title of one of the works of Souseki Natsume, the very first actual person to appear in an Ace Attorney game. Souseki is often considered one of the greatest writers of Japanese modern history, famously being featured on the ¥1.000 note. Since the word means more than just heart and was also untranslated for the English adaptation of the novel, we felt it best to keep it the way it was for our translation.

A briefly considered title change

This release also marks our change to UK English. Not only did we move to BE spelling rules, we also tried to use UK proverbs, figures of speech and even gave some characters distinctive accents. Our British members made sure that we didn’t botch this limeyfication, so we wouldn’t bring shame to Queen and country.

Some of you might be disappointed that we don’t support the iOS version of DGS for iPhone/iPad. We would love to do that, and to be honest – this was the first version an-error got to work as a proof of concept (though it was never polished or finished). The problem was: how would we release it? End-users would need to jailbreak their phone just to dump the unencrypted binary and install the modified game. This is a big security risk and hassle most users will not take nowadays. The tight security model of iOS is just too inconvenient for a fan translation.

DGS DroidsArt by Tryphena

To make things easy for our new Android users, we made an app called IrisMobile. After you’ve bought the game from the Japanese PlayStore (tutorial here), you only have to download and install IrisMobile and it will download the patch and install it for you automatically. For your convenience it will also display our translation notes. We had to remove the Play Games cloud saving feature from DGS because it stops working once the binary is patched. To remedy this, the savegames are now redirected to the internal SD card, in the ScarletStudy folder, so you can back them up yourself.

Despite all the work going into the Android port, we certainly didn’t forget our 3DS users – you’ll be happy to know that we have streamlined the 3DS installation process to be just as easy as our Android releases. As always, you can find the updated translation notes in the E-Manual for your convenience.

You can download the new release here on our Download page – please do not rehost or publish pre-patched versions.

At the very least, it’s a sure bet that we won’t need another 9 months to release Episode 5 – the case may be extra-long, but our new translators have already put in an exceptional amount of work! Enjoy the preview for it while you wait… and watch out for more surprises!

We’re still alive!

We’re still alive!

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TL;DR: The translation is not cancelled, in fact we’re making great progress on future Episodes, but we need some more time.

It’s been half a year since our last release. Some of you have been asking us through different channels whether or not this project has been cancelled. It has not, in fact we’ve been very busy and have some surprises in store for you guys later this year. We’ve hinted on this very page as to what they might be.

So what’s the holdup?

Well, to be frank: we were about to release Episode 3 about a month ago. It has been polished and beta tested by some of our friends and we even went and fixed many errors you guys reported (and some we found ourselves). We’ve improved the interface further and some screens look much nicer now than they did before. While working on one of our surprises to release along with Episode 3, we’ve encountered some issues that were not easy to fix with our resources. This confronted us with the choice to either delay Episode 3 until we were able to fix this or release Episode 3 and turn the users of our patch into “beta testers”.

Before we were able to reach our decision, a dear and valued member of our group disappeared. It has only been two weeks and other members have disappeared before; but even though we would be able to make a (slightly bumpy) release without him, it just wouldn’t feel right.

Obviously we still hope he’ll return to us soon and in good health, but until then we’ve decided not to release Episode 3 for now and instead concentrate on Episode 4 and some other things we’ve put aside for a while now:

  • We’re currently in the process of changing the fonts in the game, which sounds much easier than it is. We will have to fine-tune and adjust UI and dialogue to make it fit. This is to remove the requirement of the Dual Destinies font and to finally give DGS a more fitting typeface.
  • Preliminary work on the (optional) dub has begun. More on that in a bit.
  • Our toolset needs to be improved to better support our translators/editors in their work and to streamline our testing procedure for all of our new projects/platforms.
  • An alternative to our current patcher for 3DS is close to being ready for public use.
  • Some additional editing to give the characters’ lines more personality (we’re not rewriting what they say, but try to match their personality better in how they say it).

This will keep us busy until our friend makes his return. Translation and editing is chugging along independently from this, as different people are working on that. Episode 4 has recently passed 50% status and we’re strongly considering a double release, since Episode 5 is very long and will take considerably more time to finish.

As mentioned, we’ve begun preparing for the English dub for DGS. This will be optional for the player, you don’t have to use it if you prefer Japanese. We’ve already reached out to some people we’d like to voice certain characters, but we didn’t have much luck yet. If any of you guys knows how to best reach ProZD besides e-mail, we’d absolutely love to talk to him.

We know some of you would love to participate in the dub and DGS has much more lines than AAI2 did. That’s why we’ll hold a casting in which anyone can participate, but we mostly need people who can do a convincing British accent (native speakers have an advantage, of course). Not all characters are British though, so others can certainly apply. The conditions (like having a decent mic) and manner in which we’ll conduct the casting will be announced shortly.

Last but not least, we’re re-opening member applications for some positions (if you’ve applied to us before, you can try again now):

  • We can always use people with skills in reverse engineering, specifically ARM assembly. If you don’t know what this means, you don’t qualify.
  • Translators. Since DGS has some tricky passages, you should be at least at N3 or equivalent. Applicants will be tested.
  • A Creative Writer. As mentioned, we’re trying to match the character’s personality better in their dialogue while still remaining true to the original. If you’re interested, we will give you a sample passage to improve to assess your skills and determine if you’re what we’re looking for.

That’s it. Sorry to disappoint the people who expected this to be a release post, we promise to deliver as soon as we can.

Update July 24th: We’ve recruited enough Translators and Creative Writers now, thanks! Oh, and our friend returned safely.