Is There a Way to Play Translations on Original Ps1 Hardware
How the fan translation of Squaresoft's utterly bizarre Racing Lagoon came together in merely 6 months
In 1999, Japanese RPG programmer Squaresoft was on top of the world. Last Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8 were blockbuster successes and every other quirky RPG it released seemed destined to get a cult classic. But even at the peak of its popularity Foursquare was notwithstanding releasing games information technology decided were too niche, besides difficult to interpret, or too Japanese to release in the west. Ane of those was Racing Lagoon, an RPG that blended trendy street racing and bizarre, almost poetic writing into a game that near defies description. Imagine if E.E. Cummings wrote the script for a Fast & Furious movie and you'll be on roughly the correct track.
22 years later, Racing Lagoon is finally playable in English—and we have a fan translator who goes by the name 'Hilltop Works' to give thanks for channeling its atypical manner into English, in the process coining the all-time gaming diss since 'spoony bards.'
"This lady who'south the boss of Chinatown throws an insult at you, and I wanted to use 'green beans,' an insult no i's used before, I don't remember," he says. "Merely you hear information technology and you kind of empathize what it means, you know? 'Dark-green beans' ways someone who'southward kind of immature, non fit to be where yous are. The line was: 'Get it, green beans? Chinatown has rules.'"
In Japanese the insult is something simple similar "deviling," only the goofy localization works in a game that's famously quirky even in Japan. Hilltop says Racing Lagoon has had something of a rediscovery at dwelling in recent years, considering fifty-fifty there there's aught else similar it. "They call the speech communication Lagoon-go, 'become' meaning emphasis, where every character adds in random English words and speaks very poetically."
That unique language has made Racing Lagoon a challenging translation process, but it's as well happened at a shocking pace in the earth of fan translations. These projects oftentimes accept years equally volunteer writers and hackers come and go. Many are abased and never finished. Simply Hilltop announced Racing Lagoon'southward translation on May 23 and released the finished patch on Nov 11, simply shy of half dozen months later.
"When I announced the project and when I released the prologue patch, nobody else had worked on it. I did the programming, I did the editing, I was planning to do everything on my own until people reached out to me," Hilltop says. But he didn't conceptualize how many people had had like reactions to Racing Lagoon over the years as he had when start discovering it.
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PancakeTaicho cites Racing Lagoon'due south music as the main reason he vicious in love with the game. "The soundtrack is a world unto itself that I just wanted to hang out in all the time," he says.
If you want to buy a super rare CD of the jazz fusion saxophone wailing over techno, exist prepared to pay as much as $i,000.
"I merely want people to see this game. This game is wild. This game is admittedly nutters crazy. There is just nothing like it, at all, and people need to come across it," he says. "I think of this game like a beautiful diamond. Information technology's a pure crystal—no part of it could really ever be recreated."
The late '90s street racing artful is intensely cornball for xxx-somethings who grew up watching Initial D, playing Gran Turismo, and lusting after Nissan Skylines. All of a sudden at that place was a risk that this cult object could be playable in English, and people who loved the game jumped at the opportunity to help.
"My friends have been having to suffer through me talking virtually it non-stop for the past decade," says Syd-88, who joined the translation project not equally a translator, just every bit an automotive consultant. Syd outset played Racing Lagoon in 2011 and has wanted to help make information technology easier for other people to play it for years.
"The game dives into Japanese tuner culture as a whole in a style that I've never seen annihilation else earlier or after," Syd says. Gran Turismo was its gimmicky, but but for legal racing. Tokyo Xtreme Racer tapped into street racing, simply was more grounded, without Racing Lagoon's story or unique language.
Translator PancakeTaicho currently lives in Nihon, where he offset saw a copy of Racing Lagoon at a used game store on a trip in 2009. He loved Initial D, so he bought the game and unexpectedly found himself obsessed with the soundtrack. "I've listened to information technology more than than anything in my whole life, I call up," he says. PancakeTaicho actually tried to acquire ROM hacking a few years ago and worked on Racing Lagoon, but didn't have the technical skills to go far piece of work. When he saw Hilltop's tweet, he jumped at the chance to assist translate. Earlier long, Hilltop'due south solo project had grown into an eight person team endeavor.
Hilltop works in videogame QA by 24-hour interval and on the Racing Lagoon translation in his spare time, divvying up the hefty script between volunteers and hosting editing sessions where they talk through scenes line-by-line. "Hilltop is like, I don't want to say jack of all trades, because that means it sounds similar he's not practiced," PancakeTaicho says. "I recollect he's more like a 1-human army. There's all the programming stuff, just I think he'due south also a really expert localizer. He has a knack of helping observe the correct line, the right turn of phrase."
Racing Lagoon is actually only Hilltop's 2d-always translation project after Dr. Slump, a PS1 game based on the comedic manga Akira Toriyama created before Dragon Ball. He studied informatics in higher but never became a total-time developer, and started learning Japanese years agone by listening to tapes on his commute.
"What could I do with these two skills? Information technology was fan translation," he says. "I wanted to exercise something with my life. I was unemployed at the time, not actually doing very well. And I had never really produced anything—ever, really—for public consumption."
Learning PS1 romhacking was difficult. For the first three months he was just trying to understand how to hack into Dr. Slump and wrap his head effectually information compression, a field of programming he didn't have any experience in. His notebook from the commencement of that project is filled with pages of assembly language code that he was trying to debug. Finally he understood it and was able to extract the script. On Racing Lagoon, the aforementioned process took only two days.
Though he at present has a day job in gaming QA, Hilltop has found fan translation "hugely" fulfilling in a manner no paying job ever has been. While virtually fan translators seem content to care for it purely as a hobby, and others are professional person translators who take on the occasional passion project, Hilltop is somewhere in the centre. He started a Patreon for Hilltop Works, which states that if he can get 600 monthly backers, he'll quit his job and work on translation patches full time. When we talked midway through Racing Lagoon'south translation, he hoped that the flurry of involvement when information technology was finished would bring with it more than Patreon backers. "If I could do this forever, I would 100%," he says. "I would much, much prefer this to merely most anything."
The question now is whether the group that came together on this project will stick around for whatever Hilltop decides to translate side by side, or if Racing Lagoon was an irresistible anomaly. It really is rare to find a game with a history as rich as Racing Lagoon's, that ties and then directly into the broader culture of when it was fabricated.
"Somebody went around Japan and light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation scanned a lot of the locations for information technology," says Syd-88. "So somebody had a lot of passion and wanted to capture that moment in fourth dimension. Hell, I'm not sure you could recreate something like that today. It wouldn't have the aforementioned charm or effect."
Hilltop adds that there's a running theme in Racing Lagoon about how parts of Yokohama, where the game's set, are being westernized—that things that were one time written in Japanese lettering are existence written in English lettering equally part of the "21st century shift."
"A direct translation of the script would exist gibberish," he says. "Half of it is weird, random English words—half of information technology is poetic nonsense, half of it is just obtuse ridiculousness. Nosotros accept to cobble that together into a script that not only makes sense simply still has that flavour, that however feels like y'all're playing a Squaresoft JRPG from the '90s… I wonder if really the whole thing is some sort of wild commentary that went over anybody's heads, in a style, near how the local culture, the local scene, was slowly getting overwritten by these western influences."
It's perhaps ironic that it took a full English language translation to bring Racing Lagoon'south commentary dorsum to the surface afterwards ii decades. Even if the Racing Lagoon fan translators go their separate ways now, Hilltop has plenty of other ideas for PS1 games to work on adjacent, and the promise to someday motion beyond fan translations altogether while even so remaining independent.
He loves the whole process: writing, hacking, reworking graphics. "The absolute dream scenario is I would actually work on, say some company wants to re-release a PS1 game, they'll hand me the disc and say 'give me this in English,' he says. "That would make me… that would be a dream come up true."
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