Illusion of Gaia Re-Translation

[Steppolo Steppi]

Hi all! I am posting here to let everyone know that I am working on a re-translation of Illusion of Gaia, since I have already re-translated Soul Blazer and I am waiting for admins approval to release the patch in this forum. So I just did up until the first location of the game, but I have retouched the items, the dark power names and all the characters names and location names. I still have lots of dialogue to edit but I am working on it pretty nicely. What cannot be translated sadly is the intro cut scene text, since that text is actually a tile and tile maps are heavily encrypted, decrypting the tiles is beyond my current hacking knowledge ATM, thou I do know of a tool been in current development that allows to manipulate such, sadly ATM the tool cannot write such changes into the Rom image...Big thanks to Shiva Indis for his amazing job at translating the Japanese text and posting it in this wonderful forum, without his notes all I did would have not been possible. Anyhow here some screenies I took:











































































Still a WIP by the way so I apologize for any grammatical mistake that I might have made. I will keep posting as soon as I make more progress with this, hopefully there will still be interest in my work.

[Steppolo Steppi]

So I have noticed that the interest for such games seems to be near to non existent, but I am working on it anyway since I believe that they are really good games, if it wasn't for the suck ass translation that completely ruined and butchered these amazing piece of arts they might have been way more popular and acclaimed. Anyhow here is a video of my current progress on Illusion Of Gaia, still a WIP but in my opinion eons better than what they delivered back in the days, so enjoy!
https://youtu.be/r3ym76jWvLY
https://youtu.be/INTUvjSKNGs

For some odd reason Snes9x captured footage in two separate parts...

[psychokind]

if you manage to finish it I'll give it a try I'm more of a Terranigma fan, but it should be a couple of years since my last Illusion of TIME (germanys translation if you didn't know) playthrough.

[Steppolo Steppi]

Not sure when It will be completed exactly , but consider that I work at it everyday, so it shouldn't take very long, besides I have already revamped Items names, Skills, Characters, Locations and descriptions of Items and Skills and Menu texts. By the way, if you do not mind me asking, how well was translated the German version of Illusion of Time? I am extremely interested in it, since German language contains many words with tons of letters, the programmers/translators must have re pointed the text and expanded the Rom image size to allow bigger sentences to fit in the image. I am asking because myself I've used few names from the Spanish translation and French one few examples are the Red Jewels that I renamed to Fire Rubies or the Mountain Temple which I called Sacred Grove, thanks to the French version that names it respectively Wheat grass forest. Almost forgot ,do not worry because after this one is done I will retouch Terranigma too, and from what I have gathered the translation is pretty solid already so I think it will need only few tweeks here and there, a breeze essentially!

[psychokind]

Steppolo Steppi wrote:

Not sure when It will be completed exactly , but consider that I work at it everyday, so it shouldn't take very long, besides I have already revamped Items names, Skills, Characters, Locations and descriptions of Items and Skills and Menu texts. By the way, if you do not mind me asking, how well was translated the German version of Illusion of Time? I am extremely interested in it, since German language contains many words with tons of letters, the programmers/translators must have re pointed the text and expanded the Rom image size to allow bigger sentences to fit in the image. I am asking because myself I've used few names from the Spanish translation and French one few examples are the Red Jewels that I renamed to Fire Rubies or the Mountain Temple which I called Sacred Grove, thanks to the French version that names it respectively Wheat grass forest. Almost forgot ,do not worry because after this one is done I will retouch Terranigma too, and from what I have gathered the translation is pretty solid already so I think it will need only few tweeks here and there, a breeze essentially!

I don't remember the german translation, I play english versions for at least 10 - 15 years on emulator now. the german translations where known to be bad.

there is a legendary interview with Claude M. Moyse, the german translator for secret of mana. he said he did it with a buddy at home while being stoned and built in translations that made references to real world german things that had nothing to do with the game - just to see if he could get away with it.

[Steppolo Steppi]

WTF! While they were stoned... Man than Illusion of Time German translation must be a s**t fest as big as the US one, heck if they got stoned during the process, the heck with the text re-pointing and ROM expansion my a**. Similar thing did the "criminal" translator called Robert L. Jerauld, criminal because should have been arrested for how bad his work was. I read an interview they did with Him, year 2015 circa I think, where they asked him how did he go about translating SB, IOG, Actraiser 1 and 2 and Slapstick , well he stated that he literally sat down and rewrote the entire script, using events from his life... You played Illusion of Gaia so you must have seen that nothing that's written in there follows grammar rules neither make any f*****g sense what so ever sadly.

[inferiare]

https://youtu.be/cfP9SQOdx9M

One more, from your PM.

[Steppolo Steppi]

Video Update divided into 4 parts because otherwise would take me an eternity to upload with the connection speed I got, sorry...
https://youtu.be/Nu_5HQOBNlY
https://youtu.be/KRtoVdeHivA
https://youtu.be/nLYkNecrjLM
https://youtu.be/5ZgE-BEomv0

I have added a brief explanation of what I did and why I did it. Also I gave my take on what so far I have understood reading the Re-Translation notes of Shiva Indis and other pages online who did a similar job confronting the original Japanese script with the shittylized Jerauldy script version. If anyone knows or would like to state some facts regarding the story please do so, I luv myself geeking out on some Soul Blader trilogy stuff...

[Steppolo Steppi]

Another small video update, up to the conversation part Lilly and Karen have before leaving for Itory Village...I really do not wanna go into details, on how embarrassingly bad and awkward it was... Why this game needs a complete text re-haul?! Why?! A quick and dirty text uncensoring fix wasn't enough uh?
Nope! All the in game dialogues need to be rewritten from top to bottom in order to give some sense to the otherwise brain less, tongue twisted sentences characters come up with. Anyway enjoy! https://youtu.be/Tp8Lv-zbbAk

[Steppolo Steppi]

Very tiny update, I have found out where the map names displayed during world map transitions are and how they are encoded, so I was able to change them accordingly, Yippi!
P. S. (I'm not dead and neither is this small project of mine, I've been having too much work going on recently that prevented me to focus on IOG, I still work on it when I do have time, and hopefully I will be able to work on it more in the future.)

[Shiva Indis]

You're making great progress! I could work on a script for you if you're interested.

[Steppolo Steppi]

Even if I do not personally know you, you must understand that without your IOG and SB notes you left here, my work would have never come to fruition, so for that reason I'm gonna "virtually" shake your hand to thank you. Anyhow I had never thought I would be able to get an hold of you, I thought that perhaps you must have been too busy in your life that you had to move on, so I started losing hope... Man I'm glad you are here. And yes your help will be much appreciated, before everything you must know that the re translation I am going with is not exactly super accurate, I am spicing up parts that were very dull and meaningless and also trying to insert better explanation of the whole plot and characters backgrounds, but since I do not know any Japanese sadly, and also the fact of space constrainment inside the game image,it prevents me to type longer and more descriptive and suggestive sentences. But if you will be able to provide any sort of help, even a simple TXT file with a more accurate translation I will gladly replace my less accurate lines with your yours and insert them as best as I can in to the game.

[Shiva Indis]

Thank you! It means a lot to me that you found my work inspiring. I spent a couple hours working on a script today, and I plan to have some post-worthy results in the next few days. Is there any particular part of the game you'd like me to work on?

[Steppolo Steppi]

Well.... Sadly almost the entire game even if written in English is difficult to grasp, with conversations starting with "I'm sad my dad died..." and ending with "My socks sure stink a lot these days." I mean there is absolutely no logic in what they say, making it almost impossible to figure out what the original script was like for that particular part of the game... Yes I could write what ever I want and call it a day, but I would prefer to stick to the original script as much as possible, with that said the most inconsistent stuff I simply have a very hard time figuring out are: what exactly are Shadow and Freedan (Got my own theory on it though.). what is the Comet meant to be, what is Gaia, is she or he the God or what?, what's with Tim dad talking thru the flute? ( I re-wrote that part making it so that the dad talks to him from the "far beyond", standard ghost stuff so to speak . What is wrong with the name of the techniques Tim, Freedan and Shadow uses? I also re written their names and fixed the description, since Dark fryer sounded to me like some kinda of french fries/burger combo you get from burger king... What the deal with Tim saying that he was the only survivor from the expedition to Babylon and not remembering how he survived? I re wrote that too. What's wrong with the Moon Tribe speaking utter non sense and making KU KU KU all the time, like they are some freaking sparrows?. What's wrong with the dude Gem, besides being Solid Arm? Well I guess I can keep going on forever with this, as I said before not even an inch of the Jerauldy butcherization makes any sense to me sadly...

[Shiva Indis]

Ok, busy week this week but you can find my efforts so far in the txt files here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hXTEHhAx1CQrdiYDlNbX0qrlHkk6NRHG

I read in the posts above that the attract sequence is formatted differently than the rest of the text, but if you come up with a solution for that I have you covered. It turns out that some of the vague parts of it are due to censorship, and it was supposed to reference the Mystic Statues.

Further updates to come.