I think I’ve already discussed some of the features that will be added to Tales of Hearts as part of the optional Translator’s Cut edition of the game, but I’m not so sure I’ve discussed the features added to the base game. These features, are, of course, not optional.
I suppose some of the features are essentially just hacks to deal with the fact that we don’t have access to the source code and development toolkit the original programmers had. For example, dialogue boxes within the game tend to hold three lines of text. While we did expand the width of these text boxes, we did not expand the height to include more lines. Usually, if a particular line of dialogue has need of more than three lines, a new “page” of text can be added–this is nothing new, as the Japanese game did the same.
However, what is new is the option to continue a voice clip across pages. The original Japanese game would end the current voice clip when advancing to the next page of text, as each voice clip was presumably designed to have corresponding text that could easily fit into one page of text. This is not the case for the English translation; sometimes, a single Japanese voice clip will require more than three lines of translated text. Thus, a new feature was added wherein a duration can be specified, and after that duration elapses, the voice clip is paused until the player advances to the next page of text. Upon doing so, the voice clip is resumed. Essentially, this allows the voice clip to be broken into two logical parts–something the original development team could probably easily have done the usual way, by actually splitting the audio file into two, using the tools they had available, but which we didn’t really feel like figuring out how to do.
Not all the features are stopgap measures to make up for our lack of the original development environment, however. Some are intended to aid in making the text presentation more palatable to the eyes of English speakers. For example, the game now implements automatic linebreaking, which dynamically analyzes the text and inserts line breaks where appropriate. The Japanese version of the game did no such thing and simply had the script writers manually insert a linebreak where they deemed it appropriate. This would be just as good a solution if not for the existence of dynamic text expansion: for example, inserting player-customized names into the dialogue. Imagine the following dialogue:
Great! As the text reaches the end of the box (indicated by the dashed line), it moves to the next line. This is what we want. But now imagine that we rename Shing to Al:
Hmm… now there’s suddenly an unsightly gap at the end of the first line. The “are” really should be on the previous line. Still, it’s not so bad. But what if we rename Shing to Sieghart?
Uh-oh! Now the “you” is running outside the bounds of the text box! To avoid this situation, we’d have to move the “you” over to the next line, like so:
Whew! Much better. We also had to move the “time” to the next line to make it fit, but it’s okay. We’ve successfully allocated enough space in the line of text for a long custom name. But wait, what if we rename him back to Al?
Now that is just plain ugly. The right edge of the text is all over the place for no reason. Why isn’t “you are” on the previous line, with “time” remaining on the second line instead of being pushed to the third? The answer is that since the linebreaks are manually inserted, they are fixed in place and cannot be changed. Oh no! Of course, this is where Tales of Hearts: KAJITANI-EIZAN’s Patch Site Edition comes in. With dynamic linebreaking, it doesn’t matter what you name him, it will linebreak as appropriate:
It looks nice in both cases. Success!
One other change I’d like to briefly touch upon is a grammar system for item names, similar to that used in Final Fantasy XII. The original game would simply have text like
Obtained Apple Gel x9.
or
Obtained Ultra Mega Super One-of-a-Kind Crystal of Plot Importance x1.
We felt this was somewhat clunky and opted for more English-sounding text:
Obtained 9 Apple Gels.
Obtained the Ultra Mega Super One-of-a-Kind Crystal of Plot Importance.
Of course, along with this comes various grammar issues. It should be “Obtained a Grape Gel”, but also “Obtained an Apple Gel”. Various words in the English language have somewhat unusual pluralization rules (e.g., -s vs. -es vs. -ies). Sometimes, it is inappropriate to pluralize an object directly; one should instead pluralize a descriptor of the object (e.g., “Obtained 9 sprigs of Lavender”, as opposed to “Obtained 9 Lavenders”). Done and done. All of this is accounted for and the text dynamically adjusts to match the item name and quantity of item being obtained, given, lost, or whatever.
There are probably other really awesome features I can’t recall off the top of my head right now. I can say without a doubt that Jadeite’s Higher EMOhgee is not one of them, as that is a Translator’s Cut-exclusive feature. Ah, well, perhaps for another time. For those of you with Playstation 3s, be sure to check out Tales of Xillia, coming to Western shores within a couple weeks, and keep an eye out for news on the localization of the sequel, Tales of Xillia 2!
July 25, 2013 at 5:37 am | Permalink
hahaha, Kajitani-Eizan, you are a funny one! we (well, those of us who found a hidden link to a full patch in your previous post) noticed these changes, all right! btw, i’ve already finished the game and going through the second play-through right now.
July 25, 2013 at 12:43 pm | Permalink
Kajitani-Eizan im really gratefull you are translating tales of hearts i look forward to this project
July 26, 2013 at 10:10 am | Permalink
Good call, I always hate when those kinds of details get thrown to the back of the sentence rather than in the order you would speak it. Who the heck would ever say “I bought tomatoes, four.” that is just really awkward.
July 27, 2013 at 9:17 am | Permalink
Darn you Ochu. You have no idea, NO IDEA how long I spent looking at the previous post because of you. :p this post almost made me go back and check again
July 27, 2013 at 3:57 pm | Permalink
Isnt it just a demo patch?
July 28, 2013 at 7:50 am | Permalink
Nice to read some actual info for a change, I look forward to the final patch.
August 1, 2013 at 9:15 pm | Permalink
You are not just translating the game, also you are improving in giving a high-quality patch. Surely this will be one of the best works of this kind when it will be finished.
August 3, 2013 at 7:41 pm | Permalink
So did you write an algorithm for the use of “a” and “an”, like “if item quantity=1 AND item name’s first letter = “a” OR “e” OR “i” OR “o” OR “u” , then use “an”, else use “a””?
Or did you have to go across each item individually and specified them whether to use “a” or “an” manually?
August 3, 2013 at 9:16 pm | Permalink
Manually. Writing an advanced parser that can deal with all the ludicrous rules and exceptions of the English language in ARM assembly isn’t my idea of fun 😛
August 5, 2013 at 11:14 am | Permalink
Jeez, how many items were there, and how long did it take you?
August 5, 2013 at 1:00 pm | Permalink
About ~375 items, but it really didn’t take very long. It definitely took a lot longer to design and program the system. Once everything else was done, going through and choosing the appropriate values for each item (essentially, pre-calculating the result using a pre-existing advanced English parser: my brain) probably took something like half an hour, total.
August 12, 2013 at 6:29 am | Permalink
Wow, never imagined that a hacker had to deal with stuff like that….
I assumed that most of the work was just extracting text and hacking text-images back in.
Nice read.
I’ve been playing Tales of Xillia since I received it on Friday. I’m hooked on the new DR-LMBS. I love switching up characters AND their partners, yay more replay-value.
And to add a playable character is also pretty sweet. Looks to me though that Millia is the protagonist and Jude is just a doctor, this is her story not his. Maybe the Namco thought the Tales audience wasn’t ready for a female protagonist?
August 13, 2013 at 9:04 pm | Permalink
I agree that Millia is the main protagonist, although the other playable characters are protagonists to a lesser extent. It certainly is her story, and I do wish that the story was focused on one character … it would of given Namco more time to polish and flesh out the rest of the game. However, I think the game is a lot of fun, waaaay better than Graces. Look forward to Xillia 2 next year.
August 13, 2013 at 11:40 pm | Permalink
This is awesome. I can only imagine how much work this could have given you.
Looking forward to this amazing patch, which will lead us further in the list of Tales of we can actually understand haha.
Thanks a lot!
August 14, 2013 at 5:33 pm | Permalink
Holy crap, I’m am as usual quite impressed with the lengths that are being taken for this patch. How many programmers do you have working on these types of enhancements?
August 20, 2013 at 2:40 pm | Permalink
Why everyone says that this game is the ” Symphonia of the handhelds”?..
BTW i have symphonia and is the best tales ever. Took me 3 months and 80 hours to finish it.
August 23, 2013 at 7:24 am | Permalink
Wow. I see that there is a lot of work in this translation. i wonder how far you guys are in Percentages. i see the Progress Bar but i just wonder how much of the game is done in percentages. i still have Phantasia, Symphonia AND Graces F to complete. But having a 2nd translated DS Tales of game would be pretty nice to have so i can play it before going to sleep
August 23, 2013 at 9:14 am | Permalink
Actually this would make the 3rd and final DS Tales game translated, as both Innocence and Tempest have been completed. Hearts is the final one till DS is off the list of untranslated Tales titles.
August 25, 2013 at 3:25 am | Permalink
hope the complete translation release soon before i fucking sell my ds nyahahah!!
August 27, 2013 at 8:27 am | Permalink
Hi there! I’ve been keeping up with this translation project for a long while now, and I get the feeling you are finally nearing the finish line on this one ^.^
Anyway, I eagerly await the final translation. Innocence was beast, so im sure Hearts will be no different! Im praying for a speedy finish. 🙂
August 30, 2013 at 11:42 am | Permalink
What would be great is if they edited in Trololo to play a couple seconds into the intro animation, and left it untranslated, then released the actual patch a couple days later. 🙂 The rage, I can see it, would be a beautiful thing.
August 30, 2013 at 7:02 pm | Permalink
HOOLY Damn, that would be Perfect, But i think that a Ds Rom can’t handle that.
September 1, 2013 at 4:09 am | Permalink
in 7 months….
September 1, 2013 at 6:06 am | Permalink
nope, releasing in 50 years later..
September 6, 2013 at 1:38 am | Permalink
@Leviathain: actually, there are four Tales games on the DS.
Keroro RPG was released after Tales of Heart and it has essentially the same battle system, and even some locations from ToP. It’s essentially a (re-branded) improved Tales of Hearts.
Unfortunately there’s no interest in this game in the translation scene. Found the text and images and it’s definitely editable, but without translators I doubt this would be of any use (just like with the Ninokuni DS project)
September 11, 2013 at 3:21 pm | Permalink
Keroro isn’t a Tales of game. Its a Sgt. Frog game. Just because it has Tales of quality, doesn’t make it a Tales title…so there are only 3 as far as official Tales lineup is concerned.
June 20, 2015 at 6:44 pm | Permalink
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