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kaiowut99 · 3 months

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A Special Announcement~ | Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V Tag Force Special Re-Translation Project!

I've been itching to get around to posting about this for a few months now, but wanted to wait until I'd worked on enough for it, but also had the idea to create an announcement trailer to go with it for added good measure--after recording and editing clips for a couple weeks and leveling the audio last night, heremst we are! (For some clips, I forgot to turn off the PPSSPP emulator's DevMenu option so that shows up in the top-left, buuut I didn't feel like re-recording those, lmao.)

Details worth reading below the cut here, but tl;dr work has been in progress for over a year in between things, work will continue to be in progress for a while, and the release will happen when everything's ready, but stay tuned, fun's getting started etc etc~

So, I'm sure most of us are familiar with the as-yet-unlocalized-by-Konami TFSP, the seventh and last entry in the Tag Force series on the PSP that came out early in ARC-V's run (featuring the first five series which was a cool first), as well as the current translations out there originally worked on by the guys at XenoTranslations (omarrrio and ScrewTheRules/ClickClaxer01 at GBATemp handling the card and story/etc translations, respectively) and how there are... some issues with what's out there. Everything from the DM story mode being loaded with YGOTAS references (no shade to YGOTAS and much respect to LK/Martin for his ongoing work on it still making me laugh sometimes, ofc) to the off-the-cuff edginess of 2014-2015-era internet culture and the problematic (in some cases, derogatory) language that permeated it--though to its credit, some parts do have some level of translation attempted, but taken as a whole, it can definitely turn people off from giving the game a try and seeing what it brings to the table (which is still a good amount despite the corners Konami cut here/there compared to prior TF games).

I actually did attempt a translation of my own back in 2015 (if you've been following me for a long time, you might remember it lol), tackling the GX story text starting with Judai's heart events, but eventually put it on the backburner as I focused more on my GX subbing work and beginning to finalize everything (which I'm still doing). Sometime in 2022, a friend over on NeoArkCradle (the "anonymous YGO fan" in the opening screen) was poring over the story text and patching it up the best he could to remove the references and inaccuracies with more coherent work, and after a while of seeing what he was working with in the Discord, I was a bit blown away by just how inaccurate much of it was--so alongside him, and using the better tools available since then (including some really awesome work from both nzxth2 [who did a proper re-translation of 5D's TF6 not too long ago and was kind enough to release his tools for it] and our coding helper Xan1242 who we eventually reached out to for some help), I decided to *cracks knuckles* get involved and help give everything a more accurate and professional translation, much like I do with my GX subs, working directly off the Japanese text and files. I've been taking cracks at everything in between the GX episodes I've been finalizing going back to at least last January (and I'd used my little hiatus after finalizing GX Season 2's subs to really get at some other stuff throughout the game), starting with re-translating DM's story text but also properly translating other aspects of the game, from the character names (using the original Japanese names, including those of the TF-exclusive characters, partly since Konami made a whole mess of them in English TF1-5), in-duel dialogue, pack descriptions, and more to images with Japanese text (such as localizing the in-duel cut-in onomatopoeia as you see in the video above, or other little images throughout) using some Photoshop skills I've picked up. And it's been a joint effort, as said NAC friend and I have been bouncing off how we'd like to see this go between us to stay on the same page and all, while also checking with other translators there for second/third opinions as needed.

Our plan is to release two versions of a translation--one which uses the OCG [translated] card names in Story Mode, in-duel, and other text but not in the game's card system (mainly to deal with story-relevant notes like Osiris vs Slifer with the Gods or things like not-Utopia Hope being symbolic between Yuma and Astral, akin to how I do my GX subs), and one which uses the TCG card names in everything (like how the official subs go about it). While we're mostly working with the Japanese game files due to how the Xeno team went about decoding everything, we'll be using the card-system-related files from the fixed ISO provided by FLSGaming which fixed some issues that had been present there. And Xan has helped us with a plugin that will be used to apply our translations to the system files that were hard to edit otherwise (things like the character and recipe names, as well as the pack names pulled from for the Card Description screen), but more on how that'll work once this is ready for release, lol. At some point, I'd like to also look at HDifying textures and things, but that's definitely a bonus-level thing for after the main work here is done.

SO.

Currently, Story-Mode-wise, I've gone through everything up to Yusei's events--so Dark Yugi/Kaiba/Jounouchi/Ishizu/Mai in DM, Judai/Manjoume/Asuka/Misawa/Ryou in GX, and Yusei in 5D's have been fully retranslated, though I took initial cracks at Yuma and Yuya's events to get content for this video lol (I've also been intentionally holding off on as much ZEXAL as I can until I've properly watched the whole show so I have context). I haven't tackled overworld text yet, though (like pre-duel or the tournament-related text, which is all in the same file as all the story text). I've also been handling the in-duel dialogue as I go through the character stories, so also just up to Yusei, though I did take initial cracks at Aki's, Yuma and Shark's, and Yuya and Yuzu's for the video.

Other things tackled that were sprinkled into the video, along with some other notes:

Pack names and descriptions have been retranslated, though the descriptions may see minor edits closer to release for a little variety between worlds given the different characters at the shop. Character recipe names were also retranslated, with Yugipedia's translations for them used as an occasional second opinion, though ones based on pack names had to be abbreviated in spots.

Menu text, from the Options to Help screens and stuff in between, has been retranslated, as have in-duel text strings (so, you'll see a full "Activate Effect" instead of "Activate" or "Switch to Attack/Defense Position" instead of "Switch to ATK/DEF Position", etc--also fixed the "BATTELE PHASE" graphic typo, and NAC friend created a new translation for the "Turn Change" graphic for accuracy since ENG TF1-5 made that into "Next Player's Turn").

Database stuff, such as the Sound Test, Tutorials, Duel Missions, etc., have been retranslated closer to the Japanese text; originally I retranslated the Tutorial text via hex editor, with compromises done on quite a bit of it due to the space limits, but as Xan recently updated a text extractor tool of theirs to more cleanly pull out and reinsert that text, I've been going through and fleshing out those translations more (on my commutes to/from work mostly, to be productive lol).

As mentioned, I've been localizing/translating Japanese-text images throughout the game as I come across them, like with the in-duel onomatopoeia that come up during cut-ins or images in the shop/duel/etc screens using Japanese text, to make sure the game is fully translated.

The series logos, used during the title sequence and in the Series Select screens, were updated with translated fan edits shared on Deviantart (which we'll credit in the final release) for DM and GX, while the 5D's-ARC-V logos were edited to enlarge the "Yu-Gi-Oh!" text on them that was pretty hard to see originally.

The game's original opening sequence starts on an anti-piracy message before going into the Konami logo and then a "From Yu-Gi-Oh!..." screen before the opening animation for each series logo--the original team decided to use the first image to vent their frustration at Konami for not localizing this game, and while that's valid (to some extent), we thought we'd use the opportunity to dedicate this project to Kazuki Takahashi for inspiring our love for YGO and the place it's had in our hearts for all these years.

We'll be updating the names of cards that had TCG releases after the original patch was worked on/updated by FLSG to those corresponding names.

Xan has been working on many UI fixes for us to apply with this, among them 3-line dialogue box text as is used in the ENG TF1-5 games--once implemented for TFSP, I'll be going over everything to make full use of that extra space where needed, so things might not look as they do in the video by then.

Character bios will be worked on after I've done the story stuff, though I've taken initial cracks at it for Yuma and Yuya's bios for the video, along with translating the location/affiliation names ("Domino High School," "Satellite," etc).

Currently no release date is planned, as I'm working on this between my GX-finalizing work and actual IRL work, though we'll see how later this year looks as more work gets done--but as noted in the video, all things being equal, it will be released when everything is ready. I'll try to post regular updates or rambles now that this announcement's been made, lol, but do try not to constantly check in on a release date. 🙏🏽

All that said, I think that covers just about everything I wanted to put out there with this, lol. It's been fun to work on this so far and getting to see what I've re-translated in-game is definitely neat; looking forward to us being able to release everything when ready.

Stay tuned for more; the fun's just getting started!

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textfromthelookout · 1 year

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if you have the time, I wanna know what makes vegeta so compelling to you, whole ass character arc stuff and what not. I wanna hear you go off on your short king.

Anon do you understand what you’ve unleashed? I don’t think you understand what you’ve unleashed. Or if you do understand, I can almost guarantee you aren’t prepared. This is almost 3000 words of me frothing at the mouth. I hope you know you asked for this. Like the reason I was so late answering was because I wanted to do it justice and could not figure out what I wanted to yell about first.

I guess to understand why Vegeta’s development is so fucking staggering to me, you have to understand who he starts as when you meet him.

Vegeta is around 4 or 5 when Freeza destroys Vegetasei. He’s roughly 30 when he comes to Earth for immortality. In between are two and a half decades of being taken from, which he suffers only because he believes wholeheartedly that he will grow strong enough to kill Freeza and take it all back from him. He lands on Earth with little to his name beyond his pride in who and what he is, and power that, while paltry compared to Freeza and the people in his inner circle, surpassed and still surpasses every member of his race.

Right?

One of the biggest things about Vegeta in Z is that there is A Way Things Are Supposed To Go and when they go any other way, he cannot let it go. Losing to anybody other than the people he has known for years can kill him is unacceptable. Even more so if it’s to another Saiyan. Even more so when this Saiyan is such a disgrace to the blood in his veins. The loss is an impossibility and has to be rectified. Vegeta limps off of Earth with two big driving forces now: kill Freeza for vengeance, kill Kakarot to mend his pride (or at least beat him so far into the ground that his superiority is unquestionable).

Namek is where Vegeta gets really interesting. He’s fresh off a stinging defeat that put a couple cracks into his sense of certainty and self. He knows a way to get what he wants (the Dragon Balls on Namek). He’s in a race against the powers that be for it. He has something of an ace in the hole in that he worked out how to sense ki while he was flying half dead through space, so he’s no longer forced to rely on a scouter—on Freeza’s technology. He intends to make a clean break, and for a while it goes according to plan. Zarbon’s a stumbling block, but he makes it work in his favor, takes all the Dragon Balls Freeza collected and escapes with his life to boot.

And then another repeating theme surrounding Vegeta in Z comes into play. He’ll be a hairsbreadth from getting everything he wants before it all comes crashing down around him, largely due to things entirely outside his control. He couldn’t have used the Dragon Balls even if he had decided to press Gohan on what he was doing in the middle of nowhere with a ‘watch’, because he doesn’t have a password. The Ginyu Force thrashes him, Goku shows up stronger than ever. It’s fine though, because now he knows how to get the Dragon Balls to work, so he’ll never suffer defeat again—it’s a moot point.

…Right?

I think that the point in the story where Vegeta well and truly starts to come unraveled as a person is pretty immediately after Porunga dies and Freeza starts cycling through his transformations. Because like, rudimentary or no, Vegeta’s ki-sensing ability still works. He’s suddenly faced with irrefutable proof, that he can feel in the entire essence of his being, that his power is nothing to Freeza. And he lies to himself, because he can’t accept that he’s outclassed by the magnitude he is. Because this isn’t The Way Things Are Supposed To Go. He’s supposed to avenge his people and embody the legend. He refuses to bend, and so, he breaks.

And it’s sad, y’know? The way he just… stops fighting. For his whole life, he sweats and bleeds and swallows his bruised pride for the sake of survival and hope and what does it get him? I think all the goddamn time about the anime’s interpretation of this, where Vegeta being broken for Piccolo/Gohan/Krillin to witness up close is a deliberate choice on Freeza’s part*. In fact, I may never stop thinking about it. It’s not enough that Vegeta loses his will to fight, he has to know that others know that he gave up, that he can’t do anything against this monster even if he hadn’t. It’s a stunningly cruel blow precisely because he’s so proud and strong.

The man who dies on Namek crying at the feet of both of his bitterest enemies, begging one of them to kill the other for the sake of their race—who in that final moment lets his helpless frustration, his grief, his pride in his people supersede his own personal pride as warrior and prince—is not the same man who fought Goku on Earth. That man is in pieces, and Vegeta will spend every moment for years afterward trying to put him back together with saltwater and desperation. We meme on how death means basically nothing in Dragon Ball, but I go nuts thinking about how, intentionally or not, Toriyama managed to twist that to work with Vegeta’s development.

Because now Vegeta has to reckon with his many abject failures for longer than the few minutes before sweet oblivion, you see. Now it all matters again. As long as he’s alive, he’s still being taken from.

(Bulma’s one of the few—if not the only—person to simply give him something without coercion, or prompting, or obligation. Certainly the first we see. She had every reason to tell him to fuck off, really. She didn’t have to offer him a place to stay.)

Vegeta has a transitive hierarchical logic on strength, which comes up again towards the end of Cell that I’ll touch on when we get there, but for now it will suffice to say that in order to keep moving forward, he has to readjust his purpose in life to focus solely on beating Goku. If he beats Goku, then he beats Freeza, since Goku beat Freeza. Step one, obviously, is attaining Super Saiyan. And he’s so fucking committed to that that he unwittingly locks himself out of it, up until he leaves partway through the three year gap before the androids.

I could write another entire essay on how Super Saiyan can be read as a trauma response and how it differs between all the Saiyans in Cell saga (and especially about Goku on Namek), but this is surely already more than you bargained for when you opened this can of worms, so, Vegeta. When I think of Vegeta’s awakening to Super Saiyan, I tend to default to the original dub’s take (ep129), because it has lived in my head rent free since I saw it and it will not give me peace.

Take this part of my rambling with a grain of salt, I know I’m about to get a little ‘it’s not that deep’ about it, but. Here’s my interpretation of this. Vegeta only attains Super Saiyan once he has done away with distractions—not entirely because now he can focus on nothing but his training, but because he’s inadvertently given himself space to even begin to process all the shit from the last 25 years of his life, even if he fights it every step of the way as weakness. All the self-hatred, yes, but also the aforementioned frustration, the grief, the anger. The helplessness. ‘I didn’t care if I lived. I didn’t care about anything.’

Ultimately the trigger to Super Saiyan is a single moment of all-consuming emotion, so whichever thread of canon you personally subscribe to, the facts are that something happened in Vegeta out there in the middle of nowhere space. And he returns to Earth riding high. I’m not gonna lie, he’s rocking some seriously manic energy when he shows up to waste Android 19, and honestly why wouldn’t he be? He’s latched onto this new power and he doesn’t have to feel anything else. Things are finally going right. He’s invincible. He’s the king again. This is The Way Things Are Supposed To Go.

…

…right?

Super Saiyan is supposed to be a solution for Vegeta, and instead it eventually turns itself into a problem during Cell and the androids. To be fair, he can’t misestimate the strength of an opponent he can’t sense in the first place, but even so, he’s so blinded by the euphoria of succeeding for once in his goddamn life that he can’t imagine that anything can be stronger than him. Androids 17 and 18 are a rude fucking awakening. They are the ultimate pulling-the-rug-out-from-under-you vibe check. All those pieces that he struggled so hard to put back together, kicked apart again without thought or effort. He has a bit of a crisis over it, understandably.

In the interest of brevity, I’m glossing over the intermediary parts between Vegeta coming out of the time chamber (wish we had more info on what transpired in there, personally) and the tail end of the Cell saga, because it’s something of a repeat of what he did with Freeza, except he’s using Goku’s ‘let Freeza power up to 100% to hammer home his superiority’ logic. I made a previous post on my main blog about the post-Cell part of Vegeta’s character arc, which I’ll copy down here with some minor revisions:

The hell of Vegeta swearing to never fight again is that he actually follows through, at least in the beginning.

There are seven years between Cell and Buu. In every version of the media I’ve gone through—English manga, uncut dub, uncut JP, Kai dub—Bulma says that Vegeta has trained the last five years before the tournament. Which can only mean that there was a two year gap right after the Cell Games where he didn’t train at all.

And like. Can you really blame him. His purpose in life has been cut out from under him not once but twice, first by Goku attaining Super Saiyan and avenging their people by killing Freeza, and then by Goku’s decision to stay dead and deny him the opportunity to surpass him. His strength has proven insufficient time and again no matter how hard he works, overshadowed by that of a boy half his age, who doesn’t even like to fight. His pride hinges on both of those things and even before that was mercilessly trampled on. He has no people. No planet. No purpose, power, or pride.

I really do think the only things keeping him going by this point are inertia and spite. Almost without doubt, this is the absolute nadir of Vegeta’s existence: at least, the nadir for the man he thinks he has to be, or can’t reconcile not being. If he has nothing, if the last things tethering him to his supposed innate nature (to borrow a line from this fic, shameless plug,) are torn away from him, what is left for him to do but accept defeat and submit to change?

What he doesn’t know yet is that that’s okay. He doesn’t know yet, but the seven years that Goku is no longer a presence in his life is perhaps the best thing Goku could have possibly given him. Without Goku physically there to be actionable on (for lack of a better phrase), new things can grow in the spaces where his animosity and aggression burned holes in him. Even if Vegeta is still nursing the embers of that blaze and ignoring the encroaching growth as hard as he can, he is still beginning to care about things that the old him wouldn’t. (coming back to Vegeta’s logic on strength: to Vegeta, Gohan’s victory over Cell is also Goku’s victory, and Trunks’ loss is his own loss. Bulma mentions to Gohan that he’s dead set on making Trunks stronger than him, and why would Vegeta care about that goal specifically unless Trunks’ victory over Gohan is also Vegeta’s victory over Goku?)

And then.

And then all of a sudden, Goku is back in the picture. And when he comes back, so does the Vegeta from before, like a relapse.

Because as much growing as does, he still has seven years to gnaw on the same question he has been for ages now. Why is Goku so much stronger than he is, being what he is? Why is he so inadequate? There is now a window, fleeting as it may be, for Vegeta to get some answers he had no reason to assume he’d ever get. There is now the terrible possibility that he can make things go The Way They Are Supposed To Go. And Goku’s willing to let him take that shot and get those answers, right up until the whole business surrounding Buu disrupts everything and then he isn’t anymore.

Because the thing is, they were scheduled to fight each other before anybody else. Vegeta was not supposed to see the gap between himself and Goku until he was experiencing it firsthand. Picture for a minute the timeline in which the tournament plays out normally. Goku and Vegeta fight, Goku wins, and then Vegeta’s only recourse is to demand answers from Goku—who would surely give them, to the best of his ability!—or to come to his own conclusions and act from there. Either he makes peace with affairs, uneasy as it may be, or he blows up immediately, and Goku is there to stop him before he gets too out of hand. Instead, what happens is that he’s given the opportunity to realize that he’s still inferior, he still doesn’t understand why, and most importantly, that there’s a third option open to him. At the cost of his will, there is a way.

Submitting to Babidi to force Goku’s hand and close the gap is the act of a man who knows that he is running out of time. Whatever pride Vegeta still has would not possibly have allowed this unless he was so desperate for closure that he couldn’t see another way. For ten years he’s been trying to rebuild a sandcastle below the high tide line, and it’s not that he’s too stupid to move farther up so he isn’t freshly shattered at every pass—it’s just that trying to power through in the face of futility is literally all that he knows to do. He has been coming apart stitch by stitch ever since he met Goku, his worldview and his preconceptions of destiny and self dissolving in slow motion under his feet. Goku will only be here for a day. This is the last chance he has, and he knows it. He knows he’s not going to see Goku in the afterlife, even before he asks Piccolo.

What the fuck else was he supposed to do?

The music in the background of this scene is ‘Trapped Between Past and Present’ and if that doesn’t sum up the backbone of Vegeta’s arc in Z, then there’s nothing that does.

The beauty of his sacrifice is that he still has the mark of evil on his forehead when he dies, even though he’s bucked Babidi’s mind control by that point. He chooses the present. He chooses to symbolically and very literally raze his old self to the ground for the sake of all that his new self cares for. That is why the impermanence of death in Dragon Ball works for him. That’s why I go insane over the Majin arc specifically. New growth roots in ashes, phoenixes and sapling trees both.

Super (and end of Z) is where you get to luxuriate in that growth and watch it pay off, and oh my god does it ever pay off. Without going deep into spoiler territory (formally begging all of you to read the manga here), the later arcs begin to address Vegeta reckoning with his personal sins against the Namekians, and those of his race, who destroyed countless worlds under Freeza. Vegeta and Beerus have a conversation in chapter 69 of Super where things I’ve described in this here essay are worded explicitly into the canon. I think of it to this day. I think of all of the things Vegeta does in Super and I think it’s incredible just how far he’s come.

Before creation comes destruction.

Alright that’s enough pretentious meta. Here’s Vegeta being very happy about a well-earned victory. Isn’t he so fuckin’ cute.

*ep85, or 41 if you prefer Kai

#vegeta #dbz #dragon ball z #dragonball z #wanna hear me talk about dragonball characters? WANNA HEAR ME TALK ABOUT EM SOME MORE?#drop an ask or smth bc boy have I got things to say about Things.#i swear to god i didn't send this ask to myself #basia and breezee if it was one of you you better fess up right now #long post #text from the mod

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