I always find myself reflecting when a new year comes around.
As a little girl, I didn't initially have much exposure to even the idea of Japanese. When I was growing up, it was nigh-impossible for a kid to accidentally happen upon subtitled anime, or clear untranslated Japanese text. I had some idea of what anime was and got into it from renting VHS tapes from Blockbuster, most of which were completely misplaced: they were in the "Adult Videos" type of section.
My first exposure to Japanese as a language was probably watching completely raw RealMedia video files of Sailor Stars when researching the not-yet-dubbed Sailor Moon series after R. Even getting a hold of the parts of R that had been dubbed was a pain and required ordering a VHS box set, but sites like "Save Our Sailors" existed to inform people about what they were missing and to promote activism to try to get the rest of Sailor Moon released in the west.
That's probably what got me more interested in Japanese media with an understanding of what it actually was, beyond just "this is a cartoon from some other, far-away place". I loved Sailor Moon! And I wanted to see more Sailor Moon! The idea that there was over twice as much of it but we weren't allowed to see it made me really sad.
It was after a while browsing Sailor Moon fan sites through web rings (remember those?) that I discovered emulation. I ran across a Sailor Moon fan site that was focused on Sailor Moon video games, and provided roms and emulators for basically every Sailor Moon game that had yet been released. Of course, this was entirely illegal, although they'd tell you back then that if you only kept the files for 24 hours, it was perfectly fine.
I didn't know this would be one of the most important moments of my life.
There were a bunch of different Sailor Moon games that actually required Japanese knowledge to play through them. Of course there was the RPG for Super Famicom, Another Story, but there were also a couple of different Game Boy games that similarly weren't really possible to get through without knowing Japanese.
So of course, I pushed my way through them with brute force regardless, because that's what kids do. I eventually got through them completely. They don't let little details like that stop them when they've got something new and exciting right in front of them.
And that was the start of my journey with Japanese.
The thing is, there actually was a fan translation for Another Story at the time, but it only covered a small portion of the game, and the rest was in complete gibberish, what fan translators of the day called "cave speak".
One way or the other, this introduced me to the world of fan translations, and I would go on to discover further fan translations, but one of the most important was the fan translation of Final Fantasy V, another game that meant something to me, in kind-of the same way Sailor Moon did.
You see, I had only really played Final Fantasy "III" for Super Nintendo as well as Mystic Quest, but I'd several times rented the VHS tapes of "Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals" and I really loved it. I imprinted somewhat on Linaly, the lead character of those OAVs. So when I discovered Final Fantasy V, I was drawn into its world immediately, and there was no going back for me.
From that day on, I started trying Japan-only games through emulation. I couldn't understand them, but I found explanations of them online through rom sites that did things like presenting games that they thought were interesting alongside blurbs of information on them. I got deep into games like Princess Maker: Legend of Another World, Tokimeki Memorial, and Dai-4-Ji Super Robot Taisen.
I didn't understand them at all, but I started to learn to navigate games extremely well whether I could understand them or not. In hindsight, I probably developed a strong intuition about games' designs during this time that enabled me to better guess what each menu option in a game was for, and where they probably expected me to go, because most games follow an overall template that makes sense when you look at them alongside their peers in the same genre.
And then I decided I really wanted to play Seiken Densetsu 3, the sequel to Secret of Mana. Few games had the same mystical allure to me as Seiken Densetsu 3 did. There were a few different reasons for this, but one reason in particular is that I had owned the soundtrack to Seiken Densetsu 3 for a while already.
I had convinced my family to import a couple of video game soundtracks (bootleg, of course) from a magazine ad, and while we had correctly gotten the soundtrack to Chrono Trigger as I'd asked for, they incorrectly sent the soundtrack for Seiken Densetsu 3 even though we'd ordered the soundtrack for Secret of Mana, AKA Seiken Densetsu 2. This confusion was probably caused by the way their listings were set up, with Final Fantasy Adventure listed as "Secret of Mana 1", Secret of Mana listed as "Secret of Mana 2", and Seiken Densetsu 3 listed as "Secret of Mana 3". My odds of getting the correct OST had been rigged from the start.
There's no nice way to put it, but Seiken Densetsu 3, AKA Trials of Mana, is an obtuse game that defies a lot of the normal logic you come to expect from video games. It does guide you from place to place, but the cause and effect are not clear just by looking at what's happening in the game. You can't progress in the game just by talking to every NPC ad infinitum until something unlocks or something happens, and even when you're told where to go, you may easily get lost. This is something I was strongly reminded about not that long ago when playing through the game on stream with my friend swirlDrop.
Anyway, Seiken Densetsu 3 defeated me. I absolutely could not progress in the game without knowing the language, and while there was a fan translation in the works by one Neill Corlett, it was taking forever, and constantly stalling. Having seen all these fan translations, some of which were half-assed and incomplete as it was, little brat as I was, I called him out for not releasing anything and insisted that surely it couldn't be that hard.
This is how I first got banned from a community, and how I got my start as a romhacker. I had really convinced myself that it couldn't be that difficult, so I started looking into romhacking, and began trying to hack Seiken Densetsu 3 myself. Needless to say, this was completely and utterly impossible. Of course, Neill was completely right to be taking so long with the work, but children are impatient and don't at all understand hard work.
Even so, I worked. I slaved over roms trying to get something to happen. I edited fonts and sprites in DOS-based graphics editors, trying desperately to get games to bend to my whims. I put together teams that would never go anywhere, totally frustrating the people I'd gotten on board, because I was so self-sure and truly believed I would be able to effortlessly do it, despite all evidence to the contrary.
This came down to banging my head against the wall non-stop until I actually did, at last, start to see some results. I successfully replaced fonts. I started to learn how to edit the text, even if I didn't understand the language properly. I started getting into level editing and banged out a few level hacks for games, including one really awkward low-effort Mega Man 2 level hack that I still have on hand, which I collaborated with someone close to me at the time on.
Eventually, the code of SNES games started to make some level of sense. The only idea of "programming" that I had was scripting in DragonScript to make maps for Furcadia, yet I dived face-first into the assembly of roms and things started to work out. I eventually, years later, apologized to Neill (although I doubt he even remembered me, or the incident with me, in the first place), and told him that I hadn't at all been able to appreciate how much he went through to get the translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 out there.
I continued for years and years to play Japan-only games via emulation, and worked to do romhacks and fan translations with varying success. It eventually got to the point that I did finish some translations. I was big into RPG Maker and similar titles because I really wanted to make a game myself, so a lot of my efforts focused on tools like that.
Due to my interest in such toolkits, the translations I finished but never released would end up including RPG Maker 95, Simulation RPG Maker 95, Romantic Love Sim Maker 2, and what people called Network RPG Maker 2000, from Nedango Works. I really miss that last one, its servers long since defunct. It allowed easily making action RPGs you could play online with others, and it was exceptionally fun.
After becoming one of the founding members of a Megami Tensei fan community, I went on to work on fan translation efforts for SMT-related titles such as the Japanese version of Persona 1, although that game was extremely temperamental to me at the time, and I ultimately abandoned the project. Here I would meet long-term friends in the fan translation community such as Gideon Zhi, however, and my romhacking efforts would continue.
One day, I was thumbing through the instruction booklet that had come with an import copy of Tales of Phantasia, and realized I was actually reading it. It feels like a completely stupid moment in hindsight. How had I absorbed so much Japanese and not even realized that until then? Of course I'd been working in fan translation for ages, but I'd done most of this with extensive help from dictionaries, machine translators, and other resources. I didn't know my がある from my がいます, yet I had inadvertently learned a huge amount from osmosis after all my efforts with romhacking and brute-forcing my way through Japan-only titles.
I realized it was time to get serious. It was something I actually could do, so why the hell wasn't I doing it already? Back then, we sadly didn't have the resources we have now. There weren't sites like Tofugu, Wanikani, Bunpro, etc. that you could learn with. Of course I probably could have taken classes, but that wasn't a real option where I lived. No such classes were available, and I was a drop-out, besides. I didn't get very far in school. If I recall correctly, I basically only finished 5th grade before getting expelled for my absences; I was just too sick, too often, to properly attend school.
What I did have available to me were a lot of dictionaries, and a handful of really basic do-it-yourself resources, especially a flash card utility similar to Anki. This was notably well before Anki released, so I'm no longer sure what utility this actually was, but it used a very general presentation, although it depended pretty much entirely on the user to guide themselves through it and motivate themselves.
I don't think I could have done it today. I have autism and my self-motivation for learning new things that are that level of tough and intimidating has been damaged through bad experiences. But I was still young and I somehow managed to keep on myself. I had nothing else to do with my time but play games on my computer or my consoles, after all, and I wanted to learn despite how I couldn't properly attend school. So learn I did.
My life went along, and when 2003 came, I was playing Ragnarok Online with friends during the open beta of iRO, the international, English servers for Ragnarok Online. Ragnarok Online was a game I truly and deeply loved, and then the beta ended. I had started a guild during that beta, and we were pretty tight-knit. But my family wouldn't let me subscribe to a service like that, so my time with RO was at an end, and I was very sad.
Well, until one of the guild members and a dear friend of mine (who I miss quite a bit, to be honest) told me a month or two later that she had found and set up a server emulator and gotten it working, to allow playing RO in private. It wasn't perfect, extremely far from it in fact, but all I really cared about in that regard was getting the band back together, so I did so, the best I could. Some would never return, but we managed to find about half of the guild members and bring them to this private server.
Angelic Ragnarok Online began.
All of this might sound completely unrelated to everything, but it ties in to my localization story, I promise. You see, as we went along, we realized how unmaintainable the server was. It wasn't at all something we could manage to play 'sincerely' on, as it was too outdated and missing too many features. You couldn't even form a guild, and huge amounts of skills didn't work properly.
For a little while, we tried having one of my friends, Kayla, maintain the code and try to fix the crashes and bugs. She quickly became overwhelmed, as the server emulator code was a nightmare to work with, but she passed it off to me with some basic instruction in how to get it to compile. As far as I was concerned, I was absolutely not a programmer. I hadn't done any programming before. This was untrue, of course. All of my romhacking, working with assembly, WAS programming, but I didn't think so. I just saw it as childish tinkering.
So to me, AngelicRO was the start of my forays into programming. Pretty soon, I got a strong grip on how the server emulator worked internally, and had made the server far more stable. I started moving us on to newer versions of the emulation software, which was a Japanese software called Athena. There existed an English branch of Athena called eAthena, but at the time, eAthena was severely outdated and was frankly a far worse choice than the Japanese versions, which were under active development.
I didn't have any trouble understanding the Japanese Athena software because I had learned so much Japanese and was developing my knowledge more and more every day. I would go on to join the eAthena team for a little while, sadly during one of its most dramatic periods, and participated in efforts to bring it more in line with the Japanese software, which we did, gradually, until the Japanese Athena sadly ceased active development, while eAthena continued for a long time.
During this time, I also began to learn Korean actively, and discovered a game called Arcturus that was the predecessor on many levels to Ragnarok Online. I really loved Arcturus, and still do, and this, along with wanting AngelicRO to be as up-to-date as possible, spurred me into a frenzy for learning Korean. I seriously picked up a huge amount of an entire language just to maintain my RO server and fan-translate Arcturus.
My fan translation of Arcturus got very far along, done from a mix of the Japanese and Korean versions of the game. AngelicRO meanwhile was often kept bleeding-edge in terms of updates, outside of stuff that was A Lot to figure out, like new classes, which took significantly longer to implement. Sometimes I look back on these days with a little bit of regret, because although I learned so much Korean, I basically have surrendered all of that knowledge to disuse, except for how to read hangul 'at all' and some of the most important parts of grammar and vocabulary.
Let that part be a lesson to any of you who want to learn a language: You need to have a constant use for it. It WILL degrade if you one day stop using it. I didn't have a huge interest in Korean culture or media outside of these games, and a couple other online games like Survival Project that I played. Spending years away from stuff like that let my knowledge of Korean degrade from very strong, to practically useless.
Anyway, during my time with Ragnarok Online, I did a fan translation of a doujin game called Ragnarok Battle Offline. This was one of the first translations I ever did from scratch, without relying heavily on any sort of crutch, after my proper intensive study of Japanese.
It's a big embarrassment to me nowadays, having done stupid weeb stuff like insisting that "w" does not translate to "lol" because you just can't understand the different, deeper connotations, fool. So I left all the wwww in the script untranslated. It's all SUPER shameful, but people remember that translation fondly, so I try not to be too hard on myself over it. I was just dumb and immature, after all!
Eventually I worked on the fan translation of a doujin game called SUGURI, a really cute and heartful horizontally-scrolling shoot 'em up. I wasn't sure about it at first, having done just some basic proof-of-concept stuff, but my friend Regris really pushed me to keep at it, and with some help, including that of another translator who volunteered to help me get it finished (they continue to work with Fruit Bat Factory to this day, if I've understood correctly) when I started to lose motivation too much, it did get done. Everything had led to this.
That cute, unassuming little shmup, now mostly known for its connections to 100% Orange Juice, ended up being the thing that kicked off my entire career.
A company ended up announcing that it was bringing SUGURI over to the west officially, and I recall feeling heartbroken at the news. It hadn't been that long since the fan translation had been released, as it was. Their announcement was very soon after my release, and I wasn't mature enough to accept it gracefully.
But! By happy coincidence, it turned out that Regris had met the person leading that company previously, and still had his contact info. He recommended me to them, and on April 30th, 2009, taking his recommendation quite seriously, they reached out to me and began negotiations with me. Soon, I had officially joined that company as their programmer and one of their translators, and the fan translation of SUGURI became the official translation.
That's something I'd like to briefly touch upon: they had another translator on staff, but I believe she was probably Japan-native, as her translations came out rather unnaturally. You should always have a native speaker handle translation into a language, if possible. If I were to try to translate a game into Japanese, I believe the results would come off much less satisfying, for example. I actually did this, once; I translated one of my RPG Maker games completely into Japanese as a challenge to myself. I was never satisfied with the result, even though it was completely comprehensible.
You should reach for your dreams. Whether it's learning a language, programming a video game, or making beautiful music that makes people cry at the end of their new favorite story. These things can seem like huge mountains to climb, but please remember that no mountain is climbed in one step. If you have a real motivation to do it, you'll get there. And if you want to learn a language, please take in media in that language and talk to people of that language. As long as you stick to it, you'll be there before you know it.
Anyway, from there, I went on to work for a wide variety of companies, and got quite a lot of credits under my belt as both a Japanese to English translator, and as a game programmer. Eventually, thanks to a recommendation by Carpe Fulgur's SpaceDrake, I landed at XSEED Games and got to work on Ys. To me, my work with XSEED is some of the most important stuff I've ever done, and helped revitalize the mainstream Japanese PC game industry.
And it's all thanks to the fact that I visited Sailor Moon fansites back in the 90's.
