Alka Translations Monthly Status Report: July 2020

Hello everyone! Rinny here. Summer is finally upon us. I don’t know about you guys but where I’m at, the sun’s shining and the temperature has risen to unacceptable levels. The heat sucks! However, with the coming of Summer, comes the next Key visual novel, Summer Pockets Reflection Blue. Many of you already know we plan on doing something with that, but before we get into that, I’m gonna catch you guys up on our other projects!

A Sky Full Of Stars: Fine Days is nearing completion. Everything’s been fully translated, the editing is ALMOST done, and we’re gonna try and get it out to you by the end of the month, if not within the first few days of July. We’re proud of the job we’ve done on it, despite how much trouble it caused us initially to get the darn game working. We hope you’re excited to read it as much as we are to release it.

Kud Wafter has been going smoothly. The All Ages version is mostly done, and from that point, it’s just a matter of moving most of the text over to the 18+ version since the majority of everything is the same, and then just translating the text exclusive to the 18+ version. So even though it says we’re 0% done with the 18+ version on the progress table, that’s not entirely true. I’d say we’re probably 60% done with Kud Wafter as a whole, we just can’t give a pinpoint accurate number because we haven’t begun moving the text over. However! Editing on it will continue for a time, but translating it is coming to a temporary halt for now, because it’s time to move onto our primary focus.

Summer Pockets Reflection Blue. It’s all hands on deck for this one. Both translators, both editors, our talented tech experts, our slew of testers, even my lazy self. It just released in Japan, and we’ve already begun taking a preliminary look at the technical details. We’ve cracked the script open and have a line count for all the routes, and we’ve discovered a tedious-but-doable way of moving our current translation of vanilla Summer Pockets onto the Reflection Blue script. This puts us at over 50% done with Reflection Blue before we’ve even actually begun, which is pretty cool. And don’t worry about Kud Wafter, once we’re done with Reflection Blue, Kud Wafter will be following closely behind! However, there’s one serious thing I want to bring up to you all, in the effort of transparency.

I had a difficult decision to make. Myself, many of the team members and testers, and even some friends of mine played the Steam release of Summer Pockets when it came out. It wasn’t bad, it was actually kinda good. However, there were a few glaring issues that almost everybody noticed. Lots of typos. LOTS of typos. Flat out untranslated text, or leftover Japanese characters in the text. There’s even one line where the wordwrap is broken in the text box. I don’t even know how they managed that, because Siglus Engine has automated wordwrap. And there were a lot of translation choices that we felt really weren’t that great, and lacked a lot of “color” or “flair” if you will, especially when compared to ours. And with the way the release itself went, it felt very sloppy and borderline unplanned. Even taking the random factor into consideration, a lot of people both on the team and outside of it were rather dissatisfied with the Steam release, many of which preferred our translation. So if an official localization of Reflection Blue is announced, I have made the decision not to stop work on our translation of it. However, as our issue is with the quality of the work itself, what we will do in this hypothetical situation is make our patch exclusively for the official release. We all want to support Key, as I’m sure all of you do. So this meets in the middle-ground where Key still gets all the support, while readers have the option of using our translation as an alternative. Obviously, if no official localization is announced, we will release our patch as-is and provide many ways to acquire the game, and if we are cease-and-desisted we will of course honor that. I understand the decision to keep going if an official localization is announced may rub some of you the wrong way, but I hope knowing we plan to make our translation only work with the Steam version will relieve your concerns, and I hope you look forward to it!

So that’s about it! A summer of fun awaits everybody. I look forward to spending it with all of you. Ciao!