天下制覇

Happy Birthday, Seiha.

Another year, another state of the union address.

Uh, things are going fine! Although I might actually have to graduate (again) in 3-6 months, depending on how much I slack off with my thesis and whether or not there continue to be more student jobs than real jobs. The real world is scary. It has bears.

Great speech, Aroduc! Yay!

Before we get to the annual Seiha tradition March 32nd tradition and how I almost missed it due to things actually seeming to function for a brief time, it’s time for a little story. As I finished up working on Moonlit Lovers, I started rooting around for a new project. Duel Savior was one of my first VN loves. It’s your typical fantasy adventure about a boy and his stepsister that get brought into another world and told that they’re the Messiahs that need to save it. Well, she is, or at least one of the possible people who could save the world. Her brother Taiga just got pulled along for the ride, since all candidates to be the savior are women. He ends up displaying the same powers as them though, so he gets incorporated into the "Class to Save the World" and it’s off to fulfill his dream of making all women from ages 1-39 into his harem and/or saving the world.

The Savior engine is a lot like Super Smash Brother’s engine. It’s a mix of a fighting game engine and a beat ’em up, simple to learn, good luck mastering it. One button for normal attacks, one for specials, press them together for a super. Then we get into the fighting engine, which like many, could fill a small pamphlet. There’s parrying, different ways to cancel attacks, wall and ground slams, relaunchers, prorating, etc. Here’s a 108 kb guide to it, which doesn’t even cover character movesets or the unique variations that many characters have on normal cancels.

Back to reality. Some tools were discovered that could unpack Duel Savior’s script with a little poking. Wonder of wonders, there were also tools that could decompile the PS2 port’s script. The two had a basically identical format, so if the resources of the PS2 version could be pulled out as well, all those added bonuses (one route being expanded to include one of the best (routeless) characters, better VAs, and a voiced MC) could be added in as well. Well, there are some weird changes too, like "boobs" changed to "breasts" and Taiga’s goal being a harem of women from ages 9-29 instead. I’m not sure that’s an improvement. *ahem* Anyway, with a little help, things seemed to repack just fine too, so I strongarmed a coder into working on a way to combine the PS2 and PC scripts to create one superscript and he appeared to succeed.

About that time, I finished chapter 1 of the superscript, inserted it, and started testing things. That was when I learned that any change… ANY CHANGE AT ALL, messed with the internal indexing and crashed things. Any conditional statement, any skipped lines, any changes, and the whole thing explodes when it hits that. Since the game has an exploration phase like Galaxy Angel where you can do things in basically any order, that’s kind of a massive issue. Of course, this doesn’t happen until almost the end of chapter 1, so my early tests were all for naught. People poked and prodded at it, but couldn’t solve the problem. I brought it up when I made the Moonlit Lovers post, but nobody bit either. And thus the the Duel Savior project has basically come to an ignomious end.

However, our story then takes a slight turn. I discovered that the same tools work on Xross Scramble, the self-proclaimed "Team Baldrhead Perfect Collection," and it was short enough so that if I busted my tail for three weeks, I could ‘finish’ it for the annual nonsensical Seiha translation party. I’m not exactly sure why it’s "perfect", but Xross is basically a fandisk for Duel Savior including two new sidestories (Xross Savior and Two Princesses) and a compilation of every single character that Giga has put out fandisks for using the Savior engine (Scramble Savior). Since the stories in Xross are completely linear, the indexing problem doesn’t come up (but does still exist). Baldr Force Re-Action is also part of Xross Scramble, but its files are in the Baldr format which is similar, but not enough that I can actually do anything with them.

So here we are… at possibly the least intelligent end to what has been a completely disastrous affair all around. Xross Scramble is about as translated as it can be with the tools I have. There are still some issues, like the indexing problem meaning scene replays from the gallery don’t work and various chunks of code that needed to be moved around to keep things functional, but it’s playable, which is more than I can say for Duel Savior. It could be worse. I could have done Otome Crisis. Two Princesses isn’t completely edited (like my releases ever are), and I don’t have a proper linebreaking tool, but eh! Whatever! This extended bit of dealing with Giga’s irritating programming has robbed me of my patience. Maybe it’ll be enough for someone to take interest and get me some working tools for Duel Savior, although at this point, I think I’m just moving on to Eternal Lovers.

Download the patch here, pending Giga’s legal team swooping in.
Xross Scramble English v1.0 Patch
Assorted other stuff

I do really love the game’s engine and there aren’t any major spoilers for Duel Savior in either of the stories (unless you count an antagonist who has been completely rewritten so that almost none of her original personality remains or the ‘surprise’ twist that the obsessive character with a dissociative personality disorder who is also prone to fits of rage just might have a little evil in her), so I see few issues with putting it out there. Scramble Savior though, since it has every single character, enemy, boss (including last bosses), etc… It’s a bit more spoilery despite having no actual text associated with any of it. Also, remember the whole "draining my will" bit. That has a big part of it. Well, if you’ve watched any combo vid for any of the Savior games, you’ve probably been about as spoiled as you’re going to get.

Xross Savior is my favorite of the two stories and is much closer to Duel Savior’s writing and feel than Two Princesses is despite containing characters from literally half a dozen of Giga’s other games. Two Princesses is a tad, well… angsty… and written in a much weaker style than either DS or XS. Xross also has actual combat, although if you’re playing on anything below Hard, I’ll make fun of you and ask you if you’re wearing your training bra yet. Play it, enjoy it, bug your coder friends to take a look at the indexing problems and maybe in the far future once my disgust with this has waned (and if Giga hasn’t C&Ded my face off), I’ll have another go at Duel Savior. Maybe for my next "moronic project," I can translate everything but the sex in Beat Blades Haruka. That’s only like… 3,000 lines I think. Just about anything would have been an overall more pleasant experience than dealing with the technical issues herein.

I am taking a well-earned week or two off though. Well, I’m doing that anyway since EL uses a different script format from the previous two and the tools aren’t quite ready yet. Maybe I’ll kick some horses in the face… Here’s to another year.