Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Amayui: Castle Meister - A Route and more now available in English*

As the title suggests, I have been working on translating Amayui Castle Meister on my own and submitting subtitles using VisualNovelReader (which will be referred to as VNR from this point). Some may be aware of this because of my activities on sites relating to the game or because they have tried playing the game with VNR lately. This is a post formalizing the completion of a major milestone that, as far as I'm concerned, makes huge portions of the game playable in English for those who have an interest in its story.

Before summarizing what has been done so far and how to access and use the subtitles using VNR, there are some things I would like to say:
  • My translation job is far from being one of good quality due to my lack of knowledge of the Japanese language. In fact, I was often more trying to make sense of the machine translations provided by VNR.
  • VNR also has its own flaws that may make it difficult or at least annoying to play the game (for example, it sometimes lags and crashes). 
  • If you want to avoid VNR and/or want a better English translation of the game, wait for ZAP to release their patch.
  • Feedback is welcome, especially in the case of fixing typos and grammar fails that I inevitably made. Specifying the lines where there are errors will make it easier to find and fix.
With that said, here's what's been done so far:
  • All major story events and side quests needed to progress from Chapter 1 to the "best" A Route ending have been translated.
  • All New Game+ dialogue, including from append events, has been translated.
  • The B route version of chapter 6 has been translated.
  • In total, over 22,000 lines have been translated so far.
Here's what's not been done so far (or why the title has an asterisk):
  • The prologue, since it's already available in English thanks to ZAP.
  • All remaining B route dialogue and other dialogue associated with it, including "altered" A Routes.
  • Dialogue from one-time events that don't seem to occur in New Game+.
  • Dialogue from minor missable events, such as unique game overs or failure states.
You may notice I didn't mention translating the sex scenes in the game at all (another reason the title has an asterisk). This is because I have no plans on translating them for a variety of reasons such as a personal desire not to and to encourage people to play using the ZAP translation patch in the future.

Here's how to access and use the subtitles through VNR:
  • After installing Amayui Castle Meister, preferably with the ZAP Interface Translation patch and Prologue patch, download a working copy of VNR from here (or here if you don't want to register an account).
  • After running VNR, it should be able to recognize the game. If it doesn't, add it manually using the Game Wizard. 
  • Click on the game icon in the Spring Board, then click "Sub."
  • Click "Update" at the top right and wait for a bit. VNR will need to download thousands and thousands of entries.
  • Open the game, preferably through the Spring Board, and go to the Options.
  • Go to "Text Settings" and set the Display Speed to 0. This will prevent VNR from fragmenting sentences and potentially prevent my entries from showing.
  • VNR should automatically detect dialogue and show my entries (in purple) along with the machine translation.
I hope everyone enjoys the game as much as I did.

2 comments:

  1. Hi, not sure if you're still active, but in case you are... I think VNR is dead and this doesn't work anymore :( is there any way to get your subs through another channel?

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    1. VNR still works for me. Unfortunately, it's not exactly the most consistent piece of software. What sort of problems are you running into when running it?

      As for getting my subs another way, I've actually been looking into developing a patch or working with ZAP. Not sure if it'll amount to anything and unfortunately, it's unlikely I'll be doing anything major soon.

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