******************************************************************************** * Chou Soujuu Mecha MG (Super Control Mecha MG) * * English Translation Patch * * v1.1 (27 Sep 2019) * * * * Supper -- Hacking * * Phantom -- Translation & Art * * cccmar -- Testing & Editing * ******************************************************************************** In a world where giant robots known as Marionation Gear, or "Puppets", are artisanally handcrafted in workshops, a certain boy serves as an apprentice at the Galouye Workshop, dreaming of becoming a "Puppeteer" (mecha pilot) and opening his own workshop with best friend and fellow apprentice Kay. But their peaceful daily life is shattered when the autonomous Puppets known as the Automen begin going on berserk rampages around the world. Together with new apprentice Anne-Marie, the hero and Kay are pulled into a conflict that could change the course of Puppet history... Chou Soujuu Mecha MG (Super Control Mecha MG) is a 2006 mecha action game for the Nintendo DS developed by Sandlot, the studio behind the Earth Defense Force series, and published by Nintendo. It combines the developer's aptitude for larger-than-life spectacle with one of the most innovative and fun uses of the touch screen in the DS library: in addition to standard movement with the D-Pad, each of the game's 100+ playable mecha has its own unique "cockpit" controlled with the touch screen. Players can pull levers to swing their robot's arms and hurl buildings at the enemy, flip a switch to transform into a car, punch in launch codes to fire missiles, and countless other imaginative setups. It's quirky, it's gimmicky, and best of all, it's loads of fun. This patch fully translates the game into English. **************************************** * Table of Contents * **************************************** I. Patching Instructions II. Known Issues III. Authors' Comments IV. Translation Notes V. Version History **************************************** * I. Patching Instructions * **************************************** You'll first need a ROM image of Chou Soujuu Mecha MG. Your ROM should be decrypted (if you don't know what that means, it probably is). It should match the following specifications: No-Intro filename: 0547 - Chou Soujuu Mecha MG (Japan).nds CRC32: 288F5E78 MD5: CCD7052931E3AE09CB4505D19D16C738 SHA-1: 7150167E394074F43F71325204E6346B6F50A274 This is an xdelta patch (specifically, xdelta3). Use a patcher to apply the .xdelta file to the ROM. You can do this with Delta Patcher: https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/704/ **************************************** * II. Known Issues * **************************************** While this patch has been extensively tested on real Nintendo DS hardware and contains no known bugs, please take note of the following: *************** * Multiplayer * *************** Due to the fact that no emulator currently supports DS wireless features, this game's item-trading multiplayer has not been tested with the translation patch applied. While all the relevant resources are theoretically translated, we simply don't have the necessary hardware to see if they work. There's a high probability that they won't display as intended, and may not even function at all. ***************** * Emulator Bugs * ***************** As of this writing, the current official release of DeSmuME (0.9.11), as well as the latest revisions from its Git repository, induce several bugs in the game that don't occur on real hardware. These include: * Some text may have columns of pixels missing or "doubled" on certain screens, such as the file select and character album. * Mecha names on the Switch Puppet menu will "pop in" as the screen is scrolled instead of appearing smoothly. These issues are caused solely by inaccurate emulation. They do not occur when the game is run on real DS hardware. **************************************** * III. Authors' Comments * **************************************** ------------ -- Supper -- ------------ Man, how did this project ever even happen? I still don't get it, but I couldn't be happier it did. I came across Chou Soujuu Mecha MG around four or five years ago, completely by accident -- I was picking literally random DS games to play, and this one happened to come up. I knew essentially no Japanese at the time, but got hooked immediately and managed to stumble all the way to the end. I had absolutely no idea what was going on most of the time (and had a very painful experience trying to defeat the Ruins Giant with the Godfried G4, since I couldn't read the text telling me to use a Circle Workshop Puppet), but boy did I love it. Two years ago, when I was looking to get into the fan translation scene, I thought of this game again and decided to do all the necessary hacking needed to support a translation, despite the fact that I had no translator for such a project. I managed to put the whole thing together -- it was only the second translation project I'd ever worked on and the first DS game, so I had to do a lot of learning along the way -- and in November 2017 I released a minimal "essentials" patch that "translated", via a dictionary and Google Translate, the bare minimum of text needed to play the game. I was hoping someone might appear out of the blue to offer to do a translation, but unsurprisingly, no one did. Turns out "could someone please translate a novel's worth of text from this obscure game for some nobody on the internet" is a bit of a hard sell. Eventually, I shrugged and, as is my habit, went off to work on a Sailor Moon game instead (which worked out much better). As an afterthought, I uploaded the unfinished project to Github. Fast forward to this year, and... well, Phantom appeared out of the blue and offered to do a translation. Or rather, went ahead and started translating the game before I'd even responded to the initial message about it, which bowled me over, to say the least. So, I ended up doing the hacking for Phantom's already-translated script for D.Gray-man: The Apostles of God, while Phantom worked on translating this game. That all wrapped up several months ago, but due to me being a terrible, terrible laggard, I only got back to this project again last month. I'd hoped the remaining work would go quickly, but of course problems came up one after another: we needed to make more room on screen to fit in the mecha descriptions, the game was crashing when text boxes were certain sizes, etc. etc. etc. So aside from editing the enormous script, I had to fix a bunch of new issues and repeatedly test to make sure things were actually working this time. But things finally did come to an end, and I'm immensely pleased with the results. Personally, I'd rank this game among the best on the DS -- it's innovative, it's imaginative, and it has a sense of self and style that sets it apart from the competition. The sheer size of the game made it quite a challenge, but I think our translation did it justice, and I hope you'll enjoy it. Major thanks to cccmar for testing the patch (and catching a bunch of typos that slipped by me), and to TheMajinZenki for the occasional bit of advice. And needless to say, thanks to Phantom for translating this long, long game -- and double thanks for drawing the kickass new icons for the workshops! (And sorry, again, for being so terrible at responding to messages -- at this point, I'm pretty sure everyone who's ever had the misfortune of trying to contact me online has had the experience of waiting weeks, months, or possibly forever for a reply. Talking's never come to me naturally.) I'd also like to thank the people behind the tools that made this project possible: Kingcom, creator of armips, without which I'd still be limping along with GCC; CUE, creator of the NDS compression tools; and all the developers of ndstool and desmume. Also, thanks to everyone who played the original, incomplete version of this patch and left feedback on it. You're far braver than I am. ------------- -- Phantom -- ------------- It’s been a pleasure to work on this patch with Supper. I hope you will enjoy it just as much as we have. **************************************** * IV. Translation Notes * **************************************** This section was written by Supper, who didn't actually do (much of) the translation, but did do the editing and make the final decisions about naming and terminology. --- So due to some bad experiences in the past, I like to be as forthright as I can about the localization process in the translation projects I work on. I haven't really had a chance to write extensive translation notes for a while, but this project seemed like a good opportunity. While I can't possibly hope to go over every single editing decision made over the course of this project, I'd at least like to cover the most important stuff for anyone curious. I'll start by noting that the only official translations related to this game come from Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Since Mecha MG was published by Nintendo, a few of the game's mecha made cameos as stickers and thus had their names translated for the international versions. While technically "official", I chose to disregard these names because (a.) it was such a minor appearance that I doubt any real thought went into the localization, and (b.) supporting my first point, the translations used are really, really bad. The game's unique "Puppet" terminology was replaced with the generic term "mech", names were miswritten due to ignoring obvious namesakes, and for no apparent reason, one mecha's name was even written out in romaji instead of actually being translated. So, that left us on our own as far as localizing things. Here's a brief explanation of some of the terminology used in the Japanese version, and how we approached it for the translation. =========================== Super Control Mecha MG =========================== Originally 超操縦メカMG (Chou Soujuu Mecha MG). "Chou" is simply "super", but "soujuu" is more complicated: it's a rather vague term that basically encapsulates the concept of maneuvering or piloting a machine. It doesn't translate especially well to English, but of the possibilities, "control" probably sounds the least bad. If the game had gotten an official localization, I suspect the name would have been changed entirely since it's rather undescriptive in English, but I generally don't consider it the role of a fan translation to make those sorts of fundamental changes. =========================== Marionation Gear =========================== Directly from the Japanese version (マリオネーションギア). This is presumably derived from "Supermarionation", a term coined by Gerry Anderson, co-creator of many well-known puppet-based TV series like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, to describe the style of puppetry used in those shows. =========================== Puppet =========================== Originally 人形 (ningyou), which typically means "doll" or "puppet". There are some suggestions that this game's intended interpretation of the term in English was "marionette", a word that's occasionally used in the game and in promotional materials, but I rejected that for several reasons: * This term is used in several other compounds and coined terms (explained below) that sound much more natural when "Puppet" is used. * This word is meant to be short for "Marionation Gear". While "ningyou" is far shorter than "Marionation Gear" and has significantly different phonetics, "marionette" is comparatively long and ends up sounding very similar to the original word anyway (arguably a plus as far as abbreviations go, but I feel it doesn't match up with the sense of the Japanese). * Most importantly, almost every robot in the game has "ningyou" in its name. There's only so much room in the menus for the translated names, and I could barely get some names to fit even with the comparatively short "puppet". Trying to somehow cram "marionette" in would have made me cry. As previously noted, this term was "officially" "translated" as "mech" in Smash Bros. While I'd appreciate the space that would free up in the menus, I think it's way way way too big a compromise, considering "robots are puppets" is the game's central conceit. =========================== Puppeteer =========================== Originally 人形使い (ningyou tsukai), "puppet operator". =========================== Puppetmaker =========================== Originally 人形師 (ningyoushi), "puppet maker". =========================== Galouye =========================== This name is pronounced "Galoy" (ガロイ) and was written as such in old versions of the patch. However, Phantom pointed out to me that it's actually derived from the name of Daniel F. Galouye, a science fiction author who wrote such stories as "Reign of the Telepuppets", in which a crew of worker robots develops sentience. I really should have known better on this one, considering the name is repeatedly written out in English as "Galouye" in the game's internals, but all's well that ends well. =========================== Mokuyou =========================== The name of the Tree Workshop's owner literally means "Thursday" (モクヨウ), and was translated as such in old versions of the patch, but I decided to revert it to the Japanese name for the final release. It's an untranslatable pun: the "moku" (木) in the Japanese name for Thursday (木曜日) uses the same kanji as the Japanese name of the Tree Workshop (木工房). Note that the "moku" in "mokuyou" is actually referring to "wood" rather than a "tree"; in Japanese, the same kanji is used for both concepts. By the same token, the Tree Workshop's name could also have been translated as the Wood Workshop. There's nothing in the game that really points to one interpretation or the other, so I selected "Tree" because I liked it better and it was easier to come up with a logo for it. =========================== Karakuri Puppets =========================== The original game has occasional references to karakuri puppets (からくり人形), a type of traditional mechanized puppet made in Japan from the 17th to 19th centuries. The most famous of them were designed to serve tea. I ended up editing most of these references to use more general terms, since "karakuri" doesn't mean much to most people outside Japan, but this is what Ellie's character profile is referring to. =========================== The Workshops =========================== In the original game, every workshop has a name consisting of a single kanji followed by "koubou" (工房, workshop). The original game used stylized versions of these kanji to represent them in menus, but since it didn't make much sense to try to "translate" them directly, we replaced them with icons for the translation. The stylish icons seen in this version of the patch are thanks to Phantom; the original ones I drew were much more MS Paint-esque. Also, since kanji can have multiple meanings, there was sometimes a bit of ambiguity as to how the names should be translated. Here are some notes on the original names and the translations we went with: * Wheel Workshop/輪工房 -- 輪 = wheel, ring, circle. Possibly meant to refer to a steering wheel rather than a tire, judging by the patch on Augiust's vest, but we used a tire for the logo anyway. * Heavy Workshop/重工房 -- 重 = heavy. Presumably short for 重機, heavy machinery. * Tree Workshop/木工房 -- 木 = tree, wood. Rather ambiguous since the workshop actually makes insect-themed mecha, but I went with "tree". * Shinobi Workshop/忍工房 -- 忍 = shinobi (conceal, sneak), and is also the "nin" in "ninja". * Bow Workshop/弓工房 -- 弓 = bow. * Bomb Workshop/爆工房 -- 爆 = bomb. * Bullet Workshop/弾工房 -- 弾 = bullet. * Circle Workshop/円工房 -- 円 = circle/round, and is also the Japanese symbol for the yen currency. This is another ambiguous one, since the workshop's theme is actually non-electronic mecha, but we went with "circle". Its relationship with the Special Workshop also suggests that the name is a joke based on tokusatsu production company Tsuburaya Productions, whose name (円谷) uses the same kanji; see the notes on the Special Workshop. * Special Workshop/特工房 -- 特 = special. It's also the "toku" in "tokusatsu" (special effects), a term that's become familiar in the west in reference to tokusatsu television series like Super Sentai (adapted in the west as Power Rangers). This ties in to the mecha they produce: Zester is a tokusatsu-style transforming robot, Terrest seems to be based on the Magma Riser from the Ultra series or similar "subterrene" concepts, and Spectra is basically a maser cannon from Godzilla. * Fang Workshop/牙工房 -- 牙 = fang, tusk. Fortunately, the game's storyline makes clear that this is meant to be interpreted as "fang". =========================== Mecha Names =========================== Because menu space was a limiting factor, I sometimes had to shorten mecha names to get them to fit. I'd be writing this for weeks if I tried to go over every name in the game individually, so I'll just cover the somewhat interesting ones. * Knifehurl Puppet series -- originally 投刃人形, "Knife-Throwing Puppet". * H.M. Puppet/Heavy Machinery Puppet series -- originally 人形重機, "Puppet Heavy Machinery". This is the one and only cue I took from the "official" Smash Bros. translation; in the original incomplete translation patch, this was translated as "Industrial Puppet". * S-Elemag Puppet Zester-A -- originally 超電磁人形ゼスターＡ, "Super Electromagnetic Puppet Zester-A". And the A is short for "Ace", just to top things off. You know things are bad when even the Japanese version has to abbreviate the name. * Puppet Beetle Veegle -- this is an accurate translation of 人形甲虫ヴィーガル, but I'd just like to note, again, that this name was directly transliterated as "Ningyou Kouchuu Viigaru" for Smash Bros., even though the other mecha names were "properly" translated. Why??? * Bolt Puppet series -- originally 電光人形, "Lightning Puppet". This was "Thunder Puppet" in the old patch, but given that they're straight-up maser cannons from Godzilla, that didn't make much sense. * Multi-Gunslinger series -- originally 複合銃士, which literally means something like "composite musketeer" (referring to the multiple guns it carries). * Nuclear Puppet series -- originally 核撃人形, "Nuclear Attack Puppet". * Skysplit Swordsman series -- originally 裂空剣豪, "Sky-Splitting Swordsman". * Beast Emperor Listar -- originally 人形獣帝ライスター, "Puppet Beast Emperor Listar", more clearly linking it to the Puppet Beast King Lifaun. There just wasn't room for the full name, and I didn't want to compromise on Lifaun's title since it plays a prominent role in the storyline and gets mentioned over and over, so I decide to shorten this less-important name instead. * Swordgunner series -- originally 剣銃士, "Sword Musketeer", though the game actually does refer to it internally by the name "swdgun", for whatever that's worth. * Nu-Galeen, Nu-Lambolt, Nu-Spectra, etc. -- all of these were originally [name]改, meaning "[name] Revised Edition". I wanted to use "Neo", but it was too long. * Everything by the Shinobi Workshop -- "Kugutsu" is another word for "puppet". Presumably, it sounds antiquated and ninja-like. **************************************** * V. Version History * **************************************** v1.1 -- 27 Sep 2019 * Fixed a bug that could sporadically cause crashes when leaving a shop. Thanks to Delta for reporting this and helping test the fix. * Kay's warning message when a Puppet is on the verge of needing maintenance had a formatting oversight that caused the text to nearly overflow the dialogue window if the Puppet's name was extremely long. This has been fixed. * Minor script revisions and typo fixes. v1.0 -- 20 Sep 2019 Complete translation patch release. v0.2 -- 1 Jan 2018 Minor update to the "essentials" patch which fixed a few bugs. * Changed the file extension of the patch from ".xdelta3" to ".xdelta" because Delta Patcher will only accept patches with the latter extension. Thanks to NANASHI89 for bringing this to my attention. * Fixed a dumb mistake at the start of Mission 4 where what should have been a player-name opcode was instead hardcoded to the name of my testing save file. For what it's worth, my name isn't "Jon", and I'm not really sure why I picked that in the first place... * Fixed the objective text for Mission 82 so the right part of the font outline doesn't wrap around the box. * Fixed a typo in Steam Puppet Dover-F's name. * Minor edits to various bits of text. v0.1 -- 1 Nov 2017 Initial release, an "essentials" patch by Supper alone which translated, often not very well, the menus, mission objectives, and other text required to play the game.