Alka Translations Monthly Status Report: September 2020

Greetings, all! Translator the Saitou here with Alka’s September update, because yes, August is apparently already over! I’m not entirely sure when that happened but I’m just gonna roll with it.

First and foremost, I’d like to take a moment to congratulate the Fine Days team for an astonishingly smooth release! Considering how many technical challenges were involved in getting that game out I’m genuinely impressed by how little troubleshooting’s had to happen, and judging by the access logs on our downloads page quite a lot of people are trying it out, too! The FD project ended up way bigger than expected in all sorts of ways, but it’s really nice to see that we can now count the size of the audience it reached among them.

With that out of the way, let’s more on to the elephant in the room: Reflection Blue, and the fact that we’re currently sitting just shy of 90% translation completion! As you might expect, we’re almost certainly going to hit 100% at some point in September unless something goes very, very wrong. Buuuuut, before you get too excited, I unfortunately have to make it as clear as possible that 90% TL completion does not mean the game’s 90% ready for release. Far from it, in fact—there’s an awful lot that needs to be done before the RB patch is ready to go live.

What all needs to be done, you don’t ask because you’re not here in my room as I write this post? Excellent question! First and foremost, editing! Bish and Kitaro have already begun working through the new RB content—you may have noticed already, but our progress page now includes stats for editing along with the TL work, so even after the translation’s done you’ll still be able to track our progress in real time.

You’ll also notice another table that will hopefully be up by the time this post goes live but isn’t actually finished at the moment that I’m writing it: the Summer Pockets Reflection Blue – Old Content table! In short, now that team TL is done (or in my case almost done) with our work on the new RB content, we’ll be pivoting back to go over the old stuff! Summer Pockets is a huge game, and at this point four translators have worked on it over the course of two years, so some smoothing and adjusting for the sake of consistency (in terms of character voice, running gags, in-universe terminology… a lot of things really) is definitely in order.

There are some new lines that’ve been added into the old script files, too, though I should definitely clarify that there aren’t all that many of those, so don’t get your hopes up too high. You might notice that the line numbers for the old routes are notably larger than those we have up for the original game, but that’s mostly because we’re using a different method to count them this time. That said most of the original routes have new CGs and the ones that I’ve seen are really, really good, so you should totally replay them anyway! We’ll be updating this table as we read through and rework the old scripts, same as always, and while I have no clue how quick it’ll go since I’ve never actually done this before I think you can at least expect it to go a bit faster than starting-from-pure-Japanese TL work!

So, that’s editing and touching up the old files out of the way—what else is left? Testing, of course! That’ll be kicking off as soon as editing of the new routes wraps up. Given how huge this game is and given how complex some parts of it are (I expect Shimapong alone to take ages to go through) it’s probably going to be a pretty lengthy step, but our testers are like typo-sniffing bloodhounds and I cannot possibly overstate how much the final script will be improved by giving them the time they need to go over it with a fine toothed comb. This is the part where I would mention the remaining image work, buuuut the image work is actually already done and has been for ages because Danshi chewed through it all at a jaw-dropping pace right after the game came out.

So, that’s the current state of RB! Super solid progress across the board, and while we’ve still got a good long ways to go before we’re done we’ll keep updating the progress page and keeping you as in the loop as possible. As a side note, if the TL progress chart doesn’t get many updates in the next week or so it’s probably because the vast majority of the remaining lines in RB are in one single, massive Shimapong file and I’m sure as heck not wasting time counting my progress line by line when I could be using it to proselytize the gospel of Tenzen.

I mean translate.

…Smash chaaaaance.

…Oh and because I’m the one writing this I get to be self-indulgent and talk about Kud: yes, it’s still happening and yes, I’m super excited to get back to it and wrap it up! You can expect to see the numbers start going up again on that game as soon as the old content reworking on RB’s finished.

That’s about all there is to report for this month! I leave you with a couple (non-spoilery) screenshots to preview the new content. Hope you enjoy these last few precious weeks of summer, and see you again in October!