Notes and Musings on the Hacking and Translation of Magical Doropie

by Shih Tzu





Note: This document assumes you have already played through the
translation, and as such it contains SPOILERS.












No, I'm serious.  SPOILERS.  For like, the game's plot.  Which I went
to all the trouble to put back in.








So, don't read any further unless you already know the story or just
don't care.  You know, 'cause like, SPOILERS.






Eh, whatever.  I tried.



I consider the translation a decent success despite my having to
accept some rather obnoxious limits.  Gideon Zhi tells me some had
thought Magical Doropie's script to be compressed, but nah, it's just
stored slightly unconventionally.  12=ka, 13=ga, 14=ki, 15=gi, 16=ku,
etc.  A bigger problem surfaced once I found the script, though: every
line is hardcoded in, and there's no way to add new ones.  I could use
pointers to adjust the length of each line, and that's it.  And even
if I could add lines, there was hardly any extra space to do so.  I
ended up using all but ten or so available bytes as it is.

Thus, the translation had to be a bit...streamlined.  I did my best to
capture the salient points of each line and eliminate redundancy and
yet avoid crammed writing that had a bunch of characters breathlessly
shouting information at each other.  The result is a translation that
necessarily had to take the occasional liberty with the original.
Still, while it's not ideal, I still think it's pretty good.  If you
couldn't tell that there were hideous limitations on the final
product, I'd call it a success.

Another problem was that I couldn't even save space by using pointers
to reuse similar lines, because the damn game already does that!
"Uwahh!" and "Kagemaru!" and so on only show up once in the script.
There was a particular problem with one short line that was used three
times in two different contexts.  "Ha!" in Japanese was used in one
place to mean "Yes, Your Highness." and two others as sharp intakes of
breath by Doropie.  Fortunately, the scenes all flowed perfectly with
the line simply cut.

One thing that had to be left implied was that the Empress had been
"stirring up storms" (or something) in the spirit world, which is why
Doropie banished her and sealed her in the human world.

Speaking of the Empress, her full Japanese name and title is "Gokuraku
Kijintei," or, roughly, "Machine-God(or Soul)-Empress Paradise."

Kagemaru's name in Japanese sort of means "Shadow-Circle."  The shadow
part also has implications of assistance or backing, which I think
fits.

Akudama actually means "villain" or "bad guy," as in "I played the
villain in 'The Matrix.'"  I honestly was going to translate "Akudama
Teikoku" as the "Badguy Empire," and yes, I had corroboration on this
nuance from three native Japanese speakers, one of whom laughed right
away when I said it.  But as I played along I saw all the "A"s in the
background art and decided to leave it, though I suppose I could've
changed those to "B"s if I'd cared.  I notice Vic Tokai didn't pick up
on this for The Krion Conquest, leaving a bunch of random "A"s
floating around.

The Japanese version did the cutscenes using quotation marks, but to
save space I went with little subtitle marks instead.  I hope they
don't suck.  Believe me, this change freed up at least a hundred bytes
for script.

I don't know why Kagemaru is surprised magicians exist before Round 1
and then goes on about magicians being sealed by the Empire after
Round 1.  I might have interpreted the line slightly wrong; I
considered that he might instead be surprised that there really was a
magician sealed in the Rod he made off with, but either way there's
some kind of discrepancy.  My theory is that he hadn't REALLY believed
all this magician crap he'd heard rumors about, but once Doropie
appeared he had no choice but to conclude all he'd heard was true.
For those who want to take me to task, the original line in romaji is
"Odoroita na. Masaka hontou ni mahou-tsukai ga iru nante."

The problematic line I mentioned in the readme is the last line,
Doropie's "Roger!"  The Japanese was "un!", a casual affirmative along
the lines of "Yeah!" or "Okay!"  It sounds sort of like "uh," or "mm"
if you have your mouth closed as she does.

No, I don't know what the hell is up with the "MESSAGE FOR YOU FROM
YOUR FRIENDS" bit.  It was like that in the original.

I like to think this game was made by hippies, what with the pagan
imagery, the feminist gender-reversal on the Ninja Gaiden plot, and
the sudden environmental twist at the end.  Except I don't think there
are hippies in Japan.  Hey, maybe the friends are the hippies.  I
should change it to "MESSAGE FOR YOU FROM THE HIPPIES".  There's space.