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I’m sure many of you have seen this screenshot floating around by now. I know we did a really great job of hiding it, but yes, Kingcom and I made it.

First, let me apologize. Things kind of ended up going the opposite way of what I wanted. I had hoped that a screenshot like this might help drum up some support for an official English release of Tales of Hearts. Instead, it became some kind of weird viral marketing that not only gave the wrong impression, but probably disappointed a lot of people since it wasn’t official.

Second, let me state this clearly, WE ARE NOT WORKING ON A PROJECT TO TRANSLATE TALES OF HEARTS! We’re currently working on Tales of Innocence (among other projects) and it would be too difficult to manage all of these projects at once with just the two of us. Also, Tales of Hearts has literally just come out. We are strongly opposed to Day 0 translation projects. Those sorts of projects are irresponsible and can do serious harm to developers. That’s the last thing we want to do for a series that we love. Buy Tales of Hearts in Japanese. Beg Namdai to bring it over here. Don’t just pirate the game and pray for a fan translation, that’s not why we’re here. If you love the game, get the word out about it. That’s the best way to get the game in English.

Third, just because we are not working on a project now does not mean that we never will. The screenshot was real, the translation was real, and the work was real, but that’s as far as it goes for now. We are still hopeful for an official release and we do not want to do anything to hurt the chances of Hearts being released in English. When the companies fail to provide legitimate options for their fans, that’s when fan translators step up. However, it’s far too early to make that call.

Again, I apologize for any trouble this caused. We never intended to deceive anyone or pass our work off as an official translation. We wanted to get people to pay attention to Tales of Hearts and to ask for it in English. What we didn’t want was for people to ask Kingcom and I. So this kind of backfired…

Finally, I want to say one thing as a translator – if I translated this game, the default names would appear just as they do in this screenshot. Kohaku and Hisui are not just randomly selected names. They are meant to fall in with the many mineral references in the game and as such, they should be translated to maintain that reference. Kohaku is Amber. Hisui could be Jade, but in order to keep him unique within the series, I chose to go with Jadeite. I know there are many of you who disagree with these choices, but I will not change my position on this. However, Tales of Hearts does feature a naming option, so if you hate seeing Amber and Jadeite, you are free to change their names as you like. (Also, Kohak is the worst romanization I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine a responsible translator using a name that fails to capture the intended reference in both Japanese and English.)

That’s all I’ve got for now, but there will hopefully be an Innocence update coming soon. ^_^

• Level Up +10 300 Points
• Level Up +5 200 Points
• Character Skill Sets 80 Points Each
• 300,000 Gald 300 Points
• Synthesis Materia Set Lv 1 100 Points
• Gummi Set 100 Points
• Camp Set 100 Points
• HP Recovery Recipe Cooking Set 100 Points
• Parameter Up Recipe Cooking Set 100 Points

This could usher in a new era of gaming – laziness beyond description. However, since gamers don’t tend to be the wealthiest individuals in the world, I could certainly imagine this having mixed success. Plus I like to think that most people would probably want to play the game that they’ve bought, instead of paying to have it played for them… In the end, it’s up to individual users whether they take advantage of the DLC. I won’t be, at least as long as I can still have everything in the game without it. I’m fine with DLC, my issue is when things that should have been in the game from the start are sold to me later. So far, I don’t feel like that’s what’s happening here, so we shall see.

EDIT: It should probably be mentioned that nothing like this has been announced for the NA/EU versions YET. However, given the emphasis on international releases for Vesperia, I expect that we’ll see similar DLC for the international versions at some point.

As I’m sure most of you quickly realized, the Tales of Rebirth post was an April Fools joke. At current, Gemini and I are not working on Tales of Rebirth PSP. Gemini is quite busy with Persona and I’m working on my own projects as well. That being stated, I hope you’ll take a moment to read the following. The photos in question were partially faked. The text was all created using ToR PSP’s internal variable width font. I had to copy that text using GIMP to the actual text boxes, but the font and such is authentic. So are we working on Tales of Rebirth right now? No. Do we intend to work on Tales of Rebirth at some point? Absolutely.

1. I thought the April Fools thing would be fun. It was. It was also stupid. There were comments both amused and annoyed. Some people had a good sense of humor about it, others surprised me with how personally they took it.
2. April Fools wasn’t as fun before Rickrolling came around.
3. The original plan was to also create some menu shots, but Gemini didn’t have time to hack them. Even before that, we wanted to do this with ToD2 as a joke. We thought it would be quite funny since no doubt people would assume we had some personal vendetta against Phantasian Productions. We don’t, of course, though it would have been amusing. Unfortunately, the text format in ToD2 PSP didn’t allow it, plus we were short on time.
4. It was really obvious that it was a joke. I mean, it was supposed to be obvious. I never intended to hide it well. I mean, in the first place, nobody actually goes around looking for real announcements on April 1st, do they?
5. This ‘joke’ was partially a test of interest on my part. It worked well in that regard. ToR, as expected, has a lot of, er… passionate fans. The interest is definitely there. ToR is a project that I want to work on down the line.
6. I am working on translating a Tales game right now. It’s not yet time for me to announce which one it is, though it’s not like there are that many left untranslated…
7. I do have Tales of Rebirth for the PSP. Gemini has Tales of Rebirth for the PSP.  I do like Tales of Rebirth.  I like the PSP.
8. The first game that Gemini and I discussed translating after Tales of Phantasia was Tales of Rebirth. He and I are both too busy right now with other projects to work on it, but we hardly intend for ToP to have been our last Tales translation together. Tales of Rebirth PSP was at the top of our list back then and little has changed since.
9. Given Namco’s current localization policy, I think I can confidently state the following: within five years, there shouldn’t be a single Tales game untranslated (whether by fan project or officially).

So, there’s my “every cloud has a silver lining” post. Seriously, don’t get so tense, guys. I mean, we’re all just talking about games. As long as I am willing and able, I intend to continue working on the Tales games. I love them as much as any of you do. If that doesn’t inspire your confidence, perhaps some of the following will: Phantasian Productions is still working on ToP and ToD2. I know that Cless doesn’t intend to stop there either. Kajitani-Eizan is ever the stalwart guardian of Narikiri Dungeon 2 and 3. Even the games without ongoing translation projects have well documented story and menu guides. The newest games are going to be receiving top class localizations. This is the best time it’s ever been to be an English speaking Tales fan. I mean, what possible reason do we have to be so negative?

Thanks to those of you that made this fun. I was glad to see people laughing it off. I know what it’s like to yearn for Tales games in English, so I couldn’t help but poke fun at that. And even those of you who had harsh words for me, I thank you. Translating Tales wouldn’t be the rewarding experience that it has been if there weren’t passionate fans. Finally, I ask your forgiveness, especially the Tales of Rebirth fans. What I did was all in fun, but I hope I didn’t crush too many hopes with this. With my apology, let me once again state that I would have never done this if I didn’t actually intend to work on Tales of Rebirth some day.

Good day to you all.

- Your friendly neighborhood Tales translator, throughhim413

Current View Count: 226

Current Rickroll Count: 50

throughhim413 killed in Rickroll Riots

Tales of Rebirth, a title that has long excited import Tales fans has recently made its debut on the PSP in Japan (along with practically every other Tales more than a few years old).

The PSP game itself has been around for only a few weeks, but as you can see, we’re already progressing. Gemini and I have both been busy and we hope the results will speak for themselves.

These two shots were chosen because we feel they really sum up all of Tales of Rebirth in two simple words. In fact, it could be said that after seeing these, you don’t even NEED to play the majority of the game. We’ll keep you up to date as much as we can, but for now, I’m afraid this is all we have to show.

EDIT: I almost forgot the most important part! (Well, I did forget it…) We have a short clip showing off some of the progress we’ve made with the menus and such on YouTube. Link

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m working on translating the Japanese version of the game that was known here as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. In Japan, it was called Akumajou Dracula X: Gekka no Yasoukyoku (Demon Castle Dracula X: Nocturne in the Moonlight).

Gemini (the person who really did all the work) has his thread over at Romhacking.net. If you’d like to visit there and make a comment or thank him, I certainly encourage it. His thread can be found here. Most of what he’s done in the thread has been related to his original Italian release of the patch, but even so, you can see the awesome quality and skill of his work. He’s put a ton into this project, and I’ve been glad to have been able work with him and help bring this to an English speaking audience.

Once this project is done, I’ll be working on other things, but that’s my number one priority right now. The translating is very nearly complete. I hope to have it wrapped up by the end of the weekend, if not the end of the day. After that, I want to give it a thorough once-over, but I’ll be sure to give an update here when it’s complete. If I can, I’ll try to offer the patch for download here on Absolute Zero as well.

Tales of Phantasia: Present, Past, and Future

So here’s what you need to know. This script IS complete through the end of the game. But it is NOT the final product. I ran short on time, thus, editing of the translation has only been completed up through SECTION 2.21. Anything after that part (and even stuff before it) is certainly subject to change. Also, you may have noticed that I cut out SECTION 3.33, the sidequests. I didn’t have enough time to work on them, so despite the fact I consider them absolutely essential to the game, I took out the section. So here’s the other news, I will be attempting to updated this file within two wees, so before March 28th at the latest. So, look forward to that and I apologize that it wasn’t all ready for today.

In any case, this translation represents the culmination of nearly a year of work on this project. It’s been a blast and I’m looking forward to seeing it through to the end. Thanks for everyone who has shown interest in this translation here. Regards. – Matt

I’m about 90% done with what I want to post up in March.  I need to fill in some gaps that I’m missing and fix some glaring mistakes that I made in the stuff I’ve already posted.  But that’s not the main thing I want to say.

Over this vacation, I had a chance to start playing Tales of Phantasia ~Full Voice Edition~.  This is it.  This is the ultimate version of Tales of Phantasia.  So here’s my thinking…  I really want to work on this version.  But I don’t just want it to be a .txt file.  As I’m sure anyone knows, this isn’t the way you should play a game.  So I really really really want to get into contact with someone who has some PSP hacking experience.  I want to work on doing a full patch for the Full Voice Edition for the PSP.  But I know NOTHING about hacking, much less PSP hacking.  But this game is worth it.  So I don’t know how to do it, posting this won’t get the word out… But that’s my goal.  Nothing would make me happier than being able to provide a full translation of the PSP version for people.  So please, if anyone has any interest, any at all, or if anyone can point me to someone or point someone to me, that would be awesome.  So that’s my dream for this.  Maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t.  But I hope it does.

My plan is still for the final version of this translation for PSX to come out in March.  It’s going to be my 21st birthday present to myself.  However, I do plan on updating before then.  Hopefully within the next week or so I’ll be posting a better version of the translation of Present and Past.  I made some mistakes, I’m not perfect, I admit that readily.  But I’ll keep getting better.  So that’s what’s up.  Look forward to the things to come and thanks for the support!