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.

The Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band

The Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band

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Asougi

Art by Tryphena

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Sherlock Holmes

As the year draws to a close, the Great Detective makes his grand debut in this tale. We here at Scarlet Study are proud to announce the release of Episode 2 in our Dai Gyakuten Saiban fan translation, The Great Ace Attorney: The Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band! As before, we’ve also included a special teaser for the next episode.

Here’s a quick summary of the changes: a full release of Episode 2; the teaser for Episode 3; fixes for dozens of bugs and typos present in our initial release; and the removal of anti-piracy measures from the patch, which will now also allow eShop buyers to use the patch. Our staff spent countless hours polishing this release to ensure that it is as high-quality as possible – in fact, you may be surprised to hear that initial translation for this episode was completed quite some time ago. Since then, our tireless team of translators, proofreaders, and editors have rewritten the entire script to preserve quality and consistency. Above all, we strived to find the best balance that we could between accuracy and clarity.

We have high hopes that you will all enjoy this game as much as we’ve enjoyed bringing it to you. May we meet again in London for the release of Episode 3!