Retranslation project?

[Alc]

So I've finally picked this up and I'm about five minutes in. This translation is every bit as bad as you all mentioned. Earlier in life I was a PhD student, so I've got a decent amount of experience writing and assessing English texts. I'd be up for editing the existing script, fixing spelling mistakes, terminology, tone, etc, but I've no idea how feasible it is to insert a new script, or what the limitations around this would look like (I'm thinking character limits per sentence, that kind of thing). Anyone got any desire to work on this?

[imgibbon]

What would be involved? I'd love this to get the localization it deserves heh

[Alc]

Don't really know. Primarily I'd be after technical assistance. It does need doing though, the translation is a joke and the comedy wears thin before too long.

[CyanideBlizzard]

I've run a few translation projects before, so I could definitely scout around to see how doable it is.  The biggest thing we'd need is to be able to unpack/repack the files that house the script(s).  Been meaning to pick up the PC version anyways, so this is a great excuse to see exactly how its all set up.  There'd be two approaches we could take from that point.  Simply working with the English that's already existing and tightening it up, which I don't mean to presume but I believe that's the current goal, or work with a translator to re-translate the game from Japanese.  Unfortunately, as I've only ran the projects I would be useless in that area so I can't say exactly how well the game was translated to begin with.

[Alc]

Simply working with the English that's already existing and tightening it up, which I don't mean to presume but I believe that's the current goal

That's my goal, yes. Honestly, I don't like the game enough to want to create/manage a full translation group. There's only a relatively limited amount of English in the game anyway so I'm really hoping that someone's tackled Fresh/Bazooka and that their tech is broadly unchanged - it certainly looks of a piece.

[Alc]

Just had a quick look. I can find the file that contains all the localisations, it's in
Steam\steamapps\common\MYASTERE\fsroot\common\game_strings.rson
I did get waylaid on my first attempt by "script_tat", which seems to instead be the game script in the sense of "the flow of game logic via scripting".

The file "game_strings" is where the game stores localised text. There are null characters between most characters that make it difficult to parse what's actually written. I did a proof of concept edit, changed the string "there are four elements" to "there are nine elements" on the intro screen and it worked, but I'm definitely not working through the script in a hex editor. I picked "nine" instead of "four" because it's the same number of letters in the word, I'd expect the game to break if I just start inserting characters. Opening the file in Notepad does hide the null characters but I'd expect using Notepad would add characters or otherwise break.

Incidentally, I don't think it can be a machine translation, or at least, not entirely, because there are multiple spelling errors that a machine simply wouldn't make. I was reminded of this just now on the intro screen, which has "exsit" instead of "exist". Elsewhere as someone else mentioned there's "portion" instead of potion, "granade" instead of grenade, and so on. The number of these errors makes me think that someone had to type in a machine translation line by line for some reason. There's the appearance of machine learning nonsense-speak elsewhere, I guess it's at least partially based on an ML translation. I wonder if they were using a mobile-based translate utility and typing it into a PC? That's a crazy inefficient approach, of course, but I don't really understand how else you get those typos.

I'm really hoping that someone's tackled Fresh/Bazooka and that their tech is broadly unchanged - it certainly looks of a piece.

In fact someone has taken a look at a game that uses the same file system tools, weirdly it was an otome title called Jakou no Lyla ~Allure of Musk~. So if anyone ever goes looking for a way to extract the contents of this game, take a look at aluigi's BMS script for QuickBMS.