Ten questions with the guy chiefly responsible for the (nearly complete) English fan translation of Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love

You're all waiting with bated breath for the English fan translation of Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love to be released, right?

Don't tell me this is the first you're hearing of it. I wrote about it back in May--in a post titled, "Coming soon-ish to a DS near you: a fan translation of Irozuki Tincle no Koi no Balloon Trip"--for crying out loud.

Unfortunately, we've still got a bit of a wait before the patch is finished and made available to the hand-wringing masses. In the meantime, here's an interview with the guy who not only got this project off the ground but is seeing it through to its release.

I can't share his name in this post for reasons that should be obvious. I can, however, share the handle he tends to use for his fan translation work: joesteve1914.

With that out of the way, let's get to the 10 questions I recently asked joesteve1914 about this tantalizing project as well as his responses to them.

The Gay Gamer: Why did you decide to translate Irozuki Tincle no Koi no Balloon Trip? Are you Tingle fan from way back? Or maybe you're more of a general DS, Nintendo or Zelda fan?

Joesteve1914: I'm a big Zelda fan. I've loved the Legend of Zelda series my entire life, and I've played almost every game in the series. When I learned of the Tingle series, I was instantly intrigued since Tingle is one of my favorite characters. (Not many people share that opinion!) I played Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland and liked it, so I wanted to experience its sequel as well.



The Gay Gamer: When did you start this project? You launched its blog in early 2013, but based on your first posts, it sounds like the project began before that?

Joesteve1914: Yeah, the blog was something I thought of a few months after I started working on the game. If we're being really technical here, I suppose the project started on July 31, 2012, at around 5 pm EST. That's when I posted in the RHDN forums asking for help with hacking the game, since I had never done ROM hacking before. I basically spent the next two years trying to learn about ROM hacking in my spare time. I didn't have the help or the knowledge to start a long-term project like this until the beginning of 2014. So realistically you might say the project started “for real” in 2014.

The Gay Gamer: How many people have worked on or are currently working on the patch? Also, can you explain what each person on the team has worked on or is working on now?

Joesteve1914: In total, around 13 people have contributed to the project so far. At the moment, our team consists of five people. First up we have our translators, waldrumpus and DaVince.

DaVince joined in early 2014, right around the time a major development occurred that made the translation of the script a realistic possibility. He translated the first “page” and some other miscellaneous stuff in the script. He also sometimes stops by our Slack channel and helps us with localization decisions (names, how to translate puns, etc.).

As for waldrumpus, he joined in August of 2014. Like me, this was his first time working on a fan translation. Despite this, he went on to translate nearly 90 percent of the very lengthy script by himself. The dedication waldrumpus has had over the last few years has been amazing. He also is going to be involved in the editing process and will be there to assist the other editors if they have questions.

Next up we have chir-miru, who's been helping out here and there since 2012. At the beginning of the project, chir-miru and I both worked on hacking, which included figuring out how to edit the script and the graphics in the game. We parted ways for a while, but chir-miru came back in 2016 and helped out with some graphics editing.

Zell0s joined in July of 2016 as a graphics editor. He’s been a great help to the graphical side of the project. He did, by my estimate, nearly half of the graphics in the game himself before he left the project this year. We also have masterofzoroark on the graphics side of things. He joined in June of this year. He's been a great help in recent months, too--especially as we near the end of the graphics editing. Finally, we have Pandamanu, who very graciously did the English graphics for the chapter scrolls in the game. There’s around 44 of those, so this was a big help and sped the project up a lot.

And then we have our script editors. We’re still assembling this team, so that work hasn’t really begun in earnest yet.

Although not part of the team, these next few people have also been a huge help to the project. There’s DarthNemesis, who coded the awesome script dumper and extractor (I can’t even imagine editing the text manually), as well as FShadow, who created the new English title logo.

There’s also Auryn, Kelebek, Normmatt and FAST6191; they have given advice and assisted me with some of the more difficult (at least for me!) hacking.


The Gay Gamer: What has been the biggest stumbling block to the project so far? Or what has been the biggest problem you've encountered since you kicked it off?

Joesteve1914: For me personally, the biggest stumbling block in general has been my inexperience with rom hacking. When I started this project back in 2012, I had no experience whatsoever in hacking; in fact, I decided to learn rom hacking for the purpose of translating this game.

I’ve had a lot of problems in terms of hacking that I’ve had to overcome, but the most major one would be figuring out the game’s text engine; specifically how to fit in more text, since English takes up more space than Japanese most of the time. Thanks to the help of Kelebek, we now know that the game uses an unconventional way of determining the length of text. Long story short, it ranges from extremely painful to impossible to expand the amount of text displayed manually. Fortunately, DarthNemesis’s text editor makes editing the text as easy as editing a .txt file.



The Gay Gamer: Have you been pleasantly surprised by anything while working on this translation?

Joesteve1914: I think what surprised me the most was the support and encouragement we got from people. Seeing hundreds of people view the blog every day, as well as the comments that people leave, is very encouraging. I’ve even received a few offers to donate money to the project! Unfortunately, if we accepted anything we’d be asking for a cease-and-desist letter from Nintendo.

Two more reasons to back Indivisible on Indiegogo this week: it's being made by a gay guy and it's going to include LGBT content

First, the "gay guy" in question is Peter Bartholow, CEO of Los Angeles-based Lab Zero Games.

Second, Indivisible, in case this is the first you've heard of it, is a two-dimensional action RPG--inspired by both Valkyrie Profile and Super Metroid--that Bartholow and his team hope to release for PS4, Xbox One, PC, Mac and Linux in 2017.

For that to happen, though, Lab Zero Games has to raise $1.5 million. As of now, its related Indiegogo campaign has garnered just over $1.2 million, with less than five days left until its Nov. 24 deadline. (Go to indiegogo.com to learn more about Indivisible and to make a contribution.)

If you're still on the fence as to whether or not to hand over some of your own hard-earned cash for this intriguing effort, the following tête-à-tête--about Indivisible's origins as well as the gay content mentioned in the header above--with Bartholow may help nudge you toward the "yes" side of the equation.



The Gay Gamer: Indivisible's Indiegogo page describes the game as being inspired by Valkyrie Profile and Super Metroid. Why those two games? Were they simply games you enjoyed playing back in the day, or is there more to it than that?

Bartholow: Indivisible actually began as a pitch for another publisher--they requested something along the lines of Child of Light. So we all played it, and our main takeaway was that it was a hybrid platformer-RPG. We thought about other platformer RPGs, and Valkyrie Profile immediately came to mind, since it’s one of our favorite games.

As we thought more about Valkyrie Profile, we thought about what we’d like to change. The first thing we decided to do was remove the time limit so that players had more opportunity to explore and enjoy the game as they saw fit. And that got us thinking--RPGs typically have a strong exploration component, so what are platformers with a strong exploration component? Naturally, Super Metroid came to mind. The addition of new progression abilities and weapons fit nicely into Indivisible’s nascent story, and so we started heading down that route.



The Gay Gamer: You've also brought up Chrono Trigger in past interviews about Indivisible. How does that Squaresoft classic fit into all of this? Or to put it another way, which aspects of Chrono Trigger will be seen or heard or felt in the final version of Indivisible?

Bartholow: There are subtle touches here and there influenced by Chrono Trigger, such as how the enemies are in the environment and you fight them right there. But probably the main influence is our approach to the story. In Chrono Trigger, each era was sort of an episode focused on a particular character or characters who, in addition to being involved in that era’s story, also served as a guide for Crono and Marle to help them settle into the events they’ve stumbled into. So our goal is to give each region of Indivisible’s world and its story a similar feel, with interconnected episodes anchored by strong characters.

11 questions, 11 answers and 11 supposedly interesting facts about myself

About a week ago, my blogging friend YvoCaro, proprietress of A Lady in Gaming, let me know via Twitter that she had nominated me for something called a "Liebster Award."

Apparently, "liebster" is German for "loveliest" and is a tag commonly used by that country's bloggers to highlight works they find especially appealing.

Anyway, according to YvoCaro, those who are nominated for a "Liebster Award" have to answer 11 questions and also share 11 interesting facts about themselves. Oh, and at the end of it all they have to nominate a few others to do the same.

I've always been an agreeable chap, so here are my responses to the 11 questions YvoCaro came up with for me, followed by 11 supposedly interesting facts about myself.

1. Can you tell something typical about the country you live in?

I'm going to take a few liberties with my answer for this one, if you don't mind, as I live in the US and I doubt I could share anything "typical" about my country that isn't already known by everybody and their brother.

So, I'll say something typical about the city in which I currently live: Seattle. (Which is in the state of Washington, on the northwest coast.) Anyway, something that's typical of Seattle is that it rains a lot, as you've likely heard. In fact, it rains on and off for about eight or nine months of the year.

That said, it rarely rains hard--it's usually just drizzle, or really light rain--and it doesn't rain every day. Instead, it'll rain (drizzle) for a couple of hours one day, be dry the next, drizzle a bit more the next day and then be dry for the next two or three days.

This probably surprises some of you, as Seattle's always had this reputation for being wet all the time. I can tell you it's not. That said, the fact that it's likely to drizzle on and off over the course of nine or so months each year can get on the nerves of us Seattlites, especially as summer approaches--which never really begins here until July 4.

Once summer finally kicks in, though, we get three solid months of sun and warm temperatures--and pretty much no rain at all. Seriously, it pretty much doesn't rain here from the beginning of July through sometime in October, which is another thing that's sure to surprise some of you, too.

2. Why did you take up blogging?

Although I had some friends who enjoyed playing video games when I was younger, as an adult I've rarely had friends (or even acquaintances) who had any interest in them. That's meant, of course, that I haven't had many opportunities since college to "talk games" with living, breathing humans.

So, in 2007 I started this blog in the hopes that it would be a place where I could "geek out" about all of the systems and games that cause my heart to race, bring a smile to my face and all that jazz.

At the time, I never thought anyone would follow me, or comment on one of my posts or anything like that. I just wanted to share my feelings and thoughts and obsessions with that void known as the Internet. As a result, it's been really cool to connect with so many people not only here, but on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and elsewhere over the last few years.

3. Do you set yourself a goal of number of blogs per week or month?

Oh, yes. I used to try to push as many as I could in a week--which sometimes resulted in more than 10 being published within a seven-day period. That wasn't all that sustainable, though, so a couple of years ago I scaled back to about five per week.

Now that I'm no longer freelancing full time, even five posts per week isn't always possible. I still try to publish at least three each week, though, and usually succeed in meeting my goal of publishing four or five.

4. Where do you get your inspiration to write?

I write about games and systems that interest me. Period. If I'm not interested in a system or a game, I don't write about it, even if I think it'll attract more attention to my blog.

This is why you'll sometimes see me temporarily focus on one system or company at the expense of others. Like anyone, I have periods where I'm obsessed with, say, the DS or the PSP or the PC Engine, and for a number of weeks or even months that's all I want to talk about in my posts.

Eventually, though, my interest wanes and I move on to something else. So, if you ever find yourself getting bored with my obsession of the moment, rest assured another game or system will steal my attention sooner rather than later.

5. Do you own more then one gaming device, and which ones?

Oh, boy, do I. Off the top of my head, here's are the systems I current own (in alphabetical order, naturally): 3DS, DS, Dreamcast, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance SP, GameBoy Micro, GameBoy Pocket, Game Gear, Genesis, Nintendo 64, PS2, PSone, PSP, SNES, Twin Famicom, Vita.

I have three 3DSes at the moment, by the way, and two DSes. I also have two of the original GameBoys (although the screen of one of them is in awful condition), two PSones (one North American, one Japanese--and both have monitors) and two PSPs.

6. What are your favorite kind of games?

When I was younger, I loved RPGs and platformers above all else. Now, my favorite games are puzzlers and RPGs, although I rarely have the time (or attention span) needed to finish games in the latter category these days.

I still like a good platformer, though, and I also really like "life sims" (à la Animal Crossing) and roguelikes.

7. What are your three favorite movies?

Oh, this is an interesting one! Also, don't hate on me too much if you think my answers are stupid or silly, OK? Anyway, I'd say the three movies I most enjoy watching are Aliens, Groundhog Day and Working Girl. If I were allowed to add a fourth and fifth, they would be the original Alien and The Evil Dead.

8. What is your go-to music when you feel sad?

Actually, I don't tend to listen to music when I'm sad. If I did, though, I'd probably turn to Sinead O'Connor. I used to be obsessed with her, and a number of her older albums provoke strong emotional responses from me. I love that so many of her songs are about love and loss and being treated like shit and then picking yourself up, dusting yourself off and moving on with your life.

9. Does your work or study match your blogging topics?

Not at all. As a writer, I've rarely gotten to write about video games. Actually, I had a few gigs early on that allowed me to write about them, but they've since ended. Oh, well.

Instead, most of what I write professionally is aimed at people in business world--executives and the like. Specifically, I've written a lot of articles for sites and magazines maintained and published by non-profit (or not-for-profit) associations.

That probably sounds boring, but I really enjoy it. I get to interview a lot of people who are passionate about what they do and in the meantime I get to educate myself about all sorts of topics I'd never know about otherwise.

Calling all present and future Vita owners: here's a Q&A about DanganRonpa that's worth a peek

I'm going to have a very interesting decision to make once Sony finally gets around to announcing the Vita TV's North American release: am I going to buy one of those sleek (and cheap) micro-consoles--along with a handful of games, of course--or am I going to buy a regular ol' Vita?

Regardless, I think the writing is on the wall that I'm going to buy a Vita in some form over the next 12 months or so--thanks in large part to the release of delicious-looking games like Spike Chunsoft's DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.



Speaking of which, DieHard GameFan's Joshua Moore recently picked the brains of two Nippon Ichi Software of America staffers about their employer's decision to localize this enhanced remake of the first DanganRonpa title, which achieved a respectable amount of attention from Japanese PSP owners all the way back in 2010.

A few of the passages of this Q&A--with Phoenix Spaulding, the NISA editor working on the project, and David Alonzo, the company's marketing coordinator--that particularly stuck out for me:

Spaulding on why NISA decided to work on this title--"We’d been doing a lot with the Vita and wanted to do something that was a little bit outside of our normal wheelhouse. The tone is really different from anything we’ve done and the gameplay is different, but we saw with 999 and Virtue's Last Reward that there’s an audience [for this type of game], not just in Japan, but an establishing audience here as well."



Spaulding on DanganRonpa's being like 999 mixed with Phoenix Wright--"In terms of style, I guess that closest thing that a lot of people would know would be the Phoenix Wright games, where there’s sort of two components: the research and investigative part, and the trial portion. It’s sort of an information game where you have to keep track of a lot of details and look for those little points in the game." Also, like 999 and Virtue's Last Reward, the tone and style are "very dark, where you can’t really trust anyone and your life is on the line, while you’re sort of under pressure to figure out what’s going on."

Spaulding on the title's "hardcore gameplay"--"A lot of people tend to describe [the game] as sort of a visual novel, or that kind of thing, but I think people will be surprised that there’s a lot of hardcore gameplay elements that people don’t realize: there’s a lot of timing-based stuff, once you get to the class trial you’re not just sitting there. It’s very active, you have to be paying attention. There’s a lot more than just sitting there reading a lot of text."



To read the full comments of Spaulding and Alonzo, direct your browser of choice to diehardgamefan.com.

DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc will be released in both Europe and North America--and in both digital and physical formats, I believe--in early 2014, courtesy of NISA. Pre-order the boxed US version here.

Want to know a bit more about Bravely Default? This interview's for you...

Attention everybody who is interested in the western release of Bravely Default (gosh, I hope that's more than a handful of gamers): last week, the guy who runs the lovely KameDaniRyuu tumblr published a translated (from Japanese into English) Famitsu interview with the producer of this impressive-looking 3DS RPG series, Tomoya Asano.

The interview is chock-full of intriguing comments and information, of course, I found the following questions and responses (about Bravely Default: For the Sequel, the follow-up of sorts that will be released in Japan at the end of this year and will be the version localized for other regions) to be the most interesting:

Famitsu: In addition to four-times battle speed and auto input, are there any other changes that have a large effect on gameplay? 

Asano: Another improvement for this game is the ability to change your encounter rate. This is an important point and when you think, “I just don’t wanna do any random battles now,” you can set the encounter rate to zero. When you think, “I’m gonna level up here,” you can then instead make the encounter rate high. You’re able to do that in this game. Players are able to match the game up with their play style and play. That’s really convenient.

Famitsu: I didn’t think you could set it to zero. 

Asano: Of course, if you leave it at zero and progress through the game, you won’t gain any levels, so I recommend fighting when it’s necessary.

Famitsu: It’s something like making it the player’s responsibility or like leaving it up to them to balance as they see fit. 

Asano: We were able to make it so “you can match everything and anything to your play style.” Of course we are concerned with balance and the recommendation is to not mess with the encounter rate and not run from battles. The concept is that experienced players can play more effectively by changing around the encounter rate. With the last game it took me over 70 hours to beat it, but in this game we’ve made it so you can beat the game in around 30 hours or so.

Famitsu: What! Only 30 hours without transferring over your levels and starting from the beginning? Cutting the time in about half is amazing. 

Asano: True. We want everyone to beat this game.

If you're at all curious about Bravely Default, I highly recommend checking out the entire Q&A at kamedani.tumblr.com.

A fascinating look at EarthBound's localization

I haven't finished it yet (I know, I know), but that hasn't kept me from professing my undying love for Shigesato Itoi's EarthBound (aka Mother 2) anyway. As such, I tend to glom onto any article I come across that's related to this treasure of an RPG.

Few of them are as fascinating as the one Wired published yesterday, though. That's because this one features a Q&A with Marcus Lindblom, the man who translated--and in many cases, re-wrote--the game’s text from Japanese to English.

Here's my favorite passage in the piece--in which Lindblom chats about the difficulty of this particular localization--although there are a number of other sections that are just (or nearly) as compelling.

"We had to go back and forth and figure out what would be the best thing to do in some of the stranger situations in the game.

I believe this illustration was created
by the person behind this tumblr.

"For example, you know the part in the game where there’s an iron pencil and eraser statue blocking your path, and you need to get an item called the 'pencil eraser' and the 'eraser eraser' to progress? In the original version, the pencil was an octopus and the eraser was a Japanese kokeshi doll.

"So those two objects, I knew just wouldn’t play in the U.S. I mean, I couldn’t do an octopus because people here don’t really care about octopi (laughs). Whereas they’re really important in Japan and they’re this… You know there’s a group of people in Japan where octopus and sealife is a big deal in their life and culture.

"Then the kokeshi doll was more of a play on words in Japanese, because the word keshi means to erase. So Mr. Itoi did this clever pun in the Japanese game where you get an item called the 'kokeshi keshi.'

"So when I was trying to figure out how to handle that, the guy from Japan was like, 'I have no idea what you want to do here. You can make it weird if you want.'

"Then I said 'Well, there needs to be something that’s an eraser,' and I thought, 'Well, if the item is called the ‘pencil eraser’ then it’s kind of funny if there’s just a big metal pencil.' So that worked and then the next thing was like, okay let’s just call it the 'eraser eraser.' Which ended up playing off the 'kokeshi keshi' idea.

"It worked out but that was one of those cases where I had to come up with something odd that didn’t really have all that much to do with the original Japanese."

Another series of questions and answers reveals that Itoi himself wasn’t all that involved in the localization process, which I find more a bit shocking considering how much the game has always seems like such a labor of love for the famed writer.

Ten questions with the makers of THE 'DENPA' MEN 2: Beyond the Waves

You may have heard the news, revealed yesterday, that THE "DENPA" MEN 2: Beyond the Waves will hit the North American (and European) 3DS eShops on May 30.

If not, well, you've heard it now.

Anticipating that announcement, I recently reached out to the company behind this series of portable RPGs, Genius Sonority, and asked if someone there would be willing to answer a few questions about it. Surprisingly, someone agreed--with that someone being CEO Manabu Yamana.

Before I get to the meat of our little tête-à-tête, I have to point out what Yamana said when I asked if he and his colleagues at Genius Sonority were happy with the first game's North American sales. "We’ve had a lot of positive feedback from users and the media," he shared, "but unfortunately, we had some trouble with PR and getting the word out, so we were not able to tie the positive feedback into sufficient sales."

Thankfully, the company decided to localize THE "DENPA" MEN 2: Beyond the Waves despite the original's seemingly disappointing sales.

Speaking of Beyond the Waves, read on to hear what Yamana has to say about this soon-to-be-released (with an $11.99 price tag attached to it) digital title--including whether or not this iteration will feature a few more female characters than the first and whether or not it will allow gamers to scan QR codes created in other regions.



The Gay Gamer: I've read that you made quite a few changes while creating THE "DENPA" MEN 2. For instance, there's an overworld this time around and also at least one town for players to explore. Why did you decide to make these changes? Also, are there any others that you hope people will find interesting?

Yamana: We were already thinking of including an overworld in the sequel when we were making the first game. We created the first game with the aim of getting people acquainted with the series, so we didn’t include too many complex elements and we used a simple and fun system that consisted of battling monsters.

This time, a lot of the players will be familiar with the first game, so we included an overworld map to walk around on, in order to create the sense of a bigger world.

We’ve also visualized equipment this time, so you can have fun dressing up your Denpa Men any way you like, and you can even take pictures of them. You can also enjoy fishing in the sea and in rivers, and cultivate plants this time.

We’ve also added dungeons that use the StreetPass function, and you can fight other players on line as well, so there are a lot of new things for everyone to enjoy.