Amayui Labyrinth Meister - English Dialogue Patch

This is a post announcing the release of the English Dialogue Patch for Amayui Labyrinth Meister. This consists of the following:

• All main and side story dialogue, excluding H scenes.
• Append 1 and 2 dialogue, excluding H scenes.
• Approximately 22637 lines, or 84.74% of all the game's dialogue.
• This was "translated" over a period of 140 days.
• Various, probably minor text errors that I definitely added intentionally to maintain reader attention. Please see below on how to report these issues among others. This is primarily why I currently consider the patch to be in a beta state.

This is not to be confused with the MTL patch released by Ars_Arcanum. The methodology for the translation of this patch will be explained in further detail below, but the simple version is it uses edited machine translation that, among other things, fixes obvious mistranslations and translation errors such as the following:

Download and Install Instructions

Download Link

For players who already have the game installed, follow only step 6 and 7 of the install instructions unless you also need to install Append content. Step 6 and 7 can be done in either order.

Note that updating the dialogue files at all (which this patch does) will probably make any save in the middle of a dialogue sequence unplayable. This issue appears to be unique to this Eushully game. Please do not save during a dialogue sequence.

Install the game and its components in the following order:

1. Install the base game.
2. Install Append 1
3. Install Patch 1.03
4. Install Append 2
5. Backup all BIN and AGF files in the game folder by copying them into another folder.
6. Unzip the folder with the Interface Patch and copy its contents into the game folder, overwriting as needed.
7. Unzip the folder with the (Beta) Dialogue Patch and copy its contents into the game folder, overwriting as needed.

As always, remember to install Japanese fonts and run the game while your PC is in Japanese locale (or use a locale emulator). Do not enable the Unicode-8 compatibility option if you set your system locale to Japanese!! This should address most common issues with running the game.

Credits

This specific patch would not have been possible without the help of many people:

• Asmodean and SaintLouisX, for developing the tools that allow data files to be accessed and edited.
• Zoltanar for the Interface Patch (which was also worked on by myself, Syuya, and Danielson) and also for providing a vital tool that greatly improved the efficiency of the translation process and will make future proofreading easier.
• Beetz for providing the screenshots showing off some highlights of Ars_Arcanum's MTL patch (note that the fault for these MTL gaffes is due to DeepL, Ars_Arcanum should be acknowledged for finding a way to mass replace the text without using the existing tools that are available).
• The Eushully Crew Discord for providing moral support and a platform to promote the patch. As always, they have also been very helpful with bug reports for this patch and other patches.
• Rhapsody Translation for also providing moral support and a little translation help, among other things.

Below are some additional details regarding the patch and future plans. I strongly recommend reading the next section if you plan to report issues with the patch.

TL Notes and Bug Reporting Instructions

I have made some changes to my translation style due to various personal increases in standards and some notable differences in the game's script. Here are some random stray thoughts:

• This game's script seems to be a lot more dense. I found myself hitting the character limit of 150 (50x3) very often. In fact, I sometimes had to omit details in order to make text fit.
• Kuna's childish manner of speaking wreaks havoc on machine translators. It was great for learning some Japanese vocabulary though.
• Kuna and Ior both refer to themselves in the third person. I ignored this in Castle Meister, but opted to acknowledge this manner of speaking this time because I felt it matched their more broken manner of speaking better.
• Many characters seem to refer to themselves in the first person in more different ways than usual. I wasn't really able to acknowledge that too well in English, but it's worth pointing out.
• I tried to acknowledge formal manners of speaking better by using fewer (or even no) contractions for some characters. I also indicated breaks in such behavior by using more contractions.
• I generally capitalized a lot more things such as titles and names that I reasoned should be capitalized.

Because of these thoughts and more, I have a few recommendations on how to report issues with the translation. As always, I will fix typos, obvious translation errors, and the like. However, I would like to provide some points to consider before reporting (I may add more points here as I receive reports):

• As I mentioned before, this game's script is dense and I had to strip details from some of the longer lines. Please do not just send a report saying details are missing from a long line that very obviously reaches the character limit. However, I will gladly accept suggestions that include more details if they can fit the character limit.
• Some honorifics were ignored this time around or translated into multiple forms. Please note that some of these are intentional and are mostly done to match character personalities. If anyone has better suggestions on how to handle these, they can feel free to suggest it.
• The same also applies to various language puns. I will admit I struggled to handle a lot of these but some could go on for nearly half a scene and I reasoned it was better to take the translation more literally in those situations. If someone is witty enough to come up with a good pun that fits the spirit of the original language pun, I'll consider such a suggestion.
• Specifying the exact error and providing a screenshot will make it easier for me to fix the issue, which will the fix faster. A lot of people have been great about doing this, but it is worth pointing it out again as a reminder.

Translation Methodology

As I mentioned above, the translation is edited machine translation, which is apparently a relatively newer term I wasn't aware of before that more accurately describes the type of work that myself and some others do when "translating" a game. However, edited machine translation quality can vary due to the many different methods that can be used. For example, some may only slightly edit the machine translation but largely allow it to stand on its own. For Amayui Castle Meister, I did this initially but shifted towards editing text more heavily due to the high amount of grammatical errors and failure to recognize terms correctly compared to using a English-Japanese dictionary.

For Amayui Labyrinth Meister, I used a more advanced version of this method with many resources. The general method for translating a line in Japanese to English went as followed:

1. Run the Japanese line through both Google Translate and DeepL, since one often handles certain lines better than the other (Google Translate handled a lot of Kuna's lines surprisingly well, for example).
2. Read the romaji of the Japanese line using Google Translate. (This, again, was especially handy for Kuna's lines and has even allowed me to more directly translate lines without using machine output.)
3. Run the line through ichi.moe to get some dictionary definitions. It is worth mentioning it doesn't form the words correctly sometimes.
4. If I'm having trouble with kanji or need more help finding words out, I run some terms through Jisho.
5. If I'm having issues with various terms such as onomatopoeia, I used resources such as Nihongomaster or TheJadedNetwork, among others (to be more specific, I just looked up individual terms on Google).
6. Using all the information gathered above and possibly, I write out a line that is hopefully accurate that fits character limitations based on my reasoning and the machine translation output. I also try to account for future and past context, character personalities, and so on.

This method is subject to change, but has served me fairly well so far. Hopefully this provides some insight into how thorough (or not) this edited machine translation work is.

Upcoming Plans

Now that the dialogue for Amayui Labyrinth Meister has been translated, I have a few ideas of what to do next. When it comes to Amayui in general, the project ideas are as follows:

• H Scene translation: This is obligatory and will be done at some point, but I probably won't translate it at the same pace as I did for the dialogue patch, which was over 160 lines per day.
• The H scenes total approximately 4078 lines.
• Censor patch for Amayui Labyrinth Meister: Since it's possible to turn off H scenes in the options in Amayui Labyrinth Meister, it is a prime candidate for trying to make an all-ages version of. It would require what I hope is some simple image editing and, depending on the circumstances, could take as little as a week to complete.
• Censor patch for Amayui Castle Meister: While DDRJake and his community have made a censor patch of their own and I personally find it quite amusing, it's probably not suitable for general use in its current form. I do, however, want to try to make the game a bit more approachable for people who aren't into the lewd elements of the game and maybe even make it feasible to stream it so that I can encourage many vtubers to play it and cringe at my horrible translation work. This would require more extensive image editing, however.

In addition, I have other non-Amayui plans such as streaming and, for the sake of full transparency, I am considering putting up a donate link in a few spots. I will try not to do too much shilling on this blog though (except maybe the donate link) since I want it to serve as a repository for download links and installation instructions.