Anyhow, chapter 40 is out, with chapter 41 in the works. At this point the Lone Moogle would like to ask if anyone has high quality scans of chapter 42, because the ones available at his usual source are low res, grainy, and watermarked (or MSPaintmarked) to high heaven.

See you next release!

I love this chapter so much.

If anyone was wondering abotu the delays, this chapter proved a bit more emotionally draining (and talky) than I was perpared for, so it took longer, and everyone wondering if I had died made me care even less about finishing quickly. This is a really depressing chapter, and I can’t wait to be done with this arc so I can work quickly without fearing for my soul. It’s done now, and the next chapter is much lighter, so that sort of delay won’t happen again.

Also, translation notes have been added for chapters 38 and 39, as well as the series in general. Not much there for now, but they’ll fill themselves in.

Firstly, Natsuki Takaya’s excellent (and hoo boy angsty) Hoshi wa Utau. Since the (one) group scanlating it is MIA (but still releasing raws) the Lone Moogle has taken it upon himself to continue their noble work, whether or not they want him to (which remains to be seen). First chapter by the Lone Moogle is here (Chapter 38). As he did with Crescent

[insert moment of silence for the departed]

there will be detailed notes and a project page up later. Expect releases weekly until he catches up with the monthly chapters in Hana to yume.

The second most excellent manga the Lone Moogle will be working on is White Knight Chronicles: The Dogma War, a prequel to the critically panned PS3 RPG, available online in Japanese since 2007. As each chapter is significantly longer, this one will be relesed much slower, starting with (a somewhat redundant) Chapter 1 next week.

No, there are no limits to the Lone Moogle’s ADD, so son’t even ask.

Rather than decry the capitalist tyranny keeping me from distributing a free patch, I personally think it’s actually pretty fantastic that Crescent is getting the treatment it deserves (a commercial localization). From my sparse correspondence with a Rockin’ Android translator, and their track record, I’m pretty sure it’s in capable hands.

—

As for my other projects:

Crucis (chronologically the last update I made…) is probably canceled, unless anyone particularly cares (which means comment, people)

Still ASM hacking Klonoa, slowly.  Again,  it’s really just a personal project, since there isn’t much demand for cat-rabbit-things (as Namco-Bandai will be quick to tell you. Poor Klonoa Wii…)

Everything else (my so-called “future projects”) is purely hypothetical also, unless I make a significant breakthrough. I’m just one moogle, after all.

—

I’m also thinking about posting my general translation-related musings. Lord knows I might actually update more often that way. Kupo for your thoughts?

This is me, editing the string table. The line I’m changing originally read “Ninerives blade works” and served no real purpose other than as a pointer to the rest of the table. (Quite cleverly, the strings that show up as button combos are in standard numpad notation. Just something I noticed.)

I’ve been browsing the wide world of doujinsoft, looking for a(nother) game I could feasibly translate on my own. I’ve been playing Crucis for a while, but only recently have I gotten back into it (mostly because of my new self-built gaming PC) and I find I like it well enough to waste my time cracking it.

The good news is that, like Crescent, it is a simple enough job. The string table is uncompressed in the game’s EXE file, and all the game data is tar-balled together but otherwise uncompressed. Because of the magical TGA format, I can manually reinsert files into the archive without pulling my hair out.

There’s no story mode to speak of, though, so this will probably take the form of a text-only hack, followed by replacing the images where needed (mostly just fixing typos they haven’t caught themselves, though there is a little bit of Japanese text in places).

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In other news, the 1.1 translation patch for Crescent is in progress. There are some things in the current translation that merit fixing, and some images that need touching-up and so on. I’m aiming for a symbolic Halloween release.Other Crescent related news includes updates to the Translation Notes, and a translated Item Collection Guide pulled from the eastern end of the interwebs.

Also, anyone waiting on the Klonoa hack shouldn’t hold their breath for the moment. While translating it is easy enough (it’s written for fifth-graders), I’m still working out how best to go about reinserting, and I really don’t want to have to shuffle data around. The easiest path so far seems to be converting the message scanner from the space-inefficient dual-byte reader (it has only 256 symbols in it’s character table, which a single byte reader would handle better). Which is a chore beacause my ARM7 assembly skills are only novice level. That, and I need to write a variable-width hack, also a chore. The alternative is worrying about string length every two seconds while anglicizing the script.

Expect updates every now and then. The first item on the list will, in all likelihood, be the config EXE, as that will help people tweak their settings while they wait. We’ll see how long that takes.

Crescent Pale Mist English Patch 1.0:
MediaFire

I’ll mirror it later. Maybe. I’ll also be posting translation notes for the next week or so, on certain points of interest in the localization (it can hardly be called a straight-up translation after how I butchered edited it). For now, I am going to take a quick rest, then go break the news to /jp/.

Feel free to leave comments to tell me what you think. (Translation: comment or I might cry.)

UPDATE: Translation Notes have been added. Expect updates to that page every now an then.

UPDATE 2: A quick-patched translation of the demo is now available for people without the game.

The script is completely translated (has been for a while now), including a (possibly) deleted scene and the alternate epilogues, making there one per difficulty level (except Easy). Every test run I make reveals some new typos and formatting glitches which I’ll try to have ironed out by release time. As it is, editing is the only thing holding up the release, but I want to make sure it all reads well.

All image text has been done, including all 98 item notifications, which had to be converted by hand to the game’s format. Fun times. The translated credits screen images don’t seem to want to show up for the moment, probably due to a picky BMP reader. I may have to hold off on that if it takes longer to fix then the last of the event scripts.

The executable has been completely translated,  including some custom error messages I didn’t even know were there. All the modified pointers are working, with the exception of the aforementioned credits screen (for some reason). Item/Artifact descriptions are still in beta as I figure out how to reword the text to fit in the allotted spaces and keep them accurate. Some of them are clues to item locations, so I need to make sure that they make sense in context. I don’t want to have to rewrite the string pointers if I can avoid it.

All that said, there’s only so much more work to be done, so it’ll probably be ready for this weekend.