The technical aspect of these subtitles is actually pretty interesting. Unlike the battle subtitles, I couldn’t use sprites here. The 2D hardware was completely turned off, so I had to change the actual video frame to insert the subtitles. This is all done at runtime, of course.

Naturally, the ending song will also be subtitled. This means that not a single Japanese word remains untranslated. Every voiced part of the game has a corresponding subtitle.

You may not notice it when you’ll finally play it, but we have also changed many smaller things to enhance the game. Most are just to support English text (a/an detection wherever it is necessary, redesigned menu screens, etc), but we also changed some things beyond the normal text. The game seemed pretty rushed in quite a few aspects, most notably the menus. The battles are awesome and fluid, but the menus were very unrefined. The (very object oriented) menu engine is really well done, no doubt about that, but they didn’t take real advantage of it.

One of these changes is shown in the second screenshot. The stat numbers originally displayed the difference between the old and the new stat, but we thought it wasn’t very intuitive. So now we changed it to display the actual new stat, making it easier to compare weapons and styles with each other. In addition to these and similar changes, we have also fixed a few bugs. The game doesn’t crash if you encounter an invisible enemy in a guild dungeon anymore, and you will also get the displayed amount of money when selling a weapon with bonus parts.

I think some people might be interested in a few stats about this project. Aside from the text, there are 150kb of assembly code, several hundred changes to the original code, and 160kb of C++ code to dump and insert all the necessary data. Everything has been changed to work with the translated text in a very natural way.

And finally, throughhim already posted it in the comments, but some people don’t seem to understand it. There will be no release this year. We planned to and we wanted to, but it ultimately didn’t work out. It will most likely be released early next year, and no, this does not mean the first weeks of January.