Hi everyone! I’m Greg, known in some circles as “Lacquerware,” and I was the project lead for the Bulk Slash unofficial English localization patch. The good guys at Shiro have offered us their blog as a platform to speak in more depth about the project, so now that the patch itself is out the door, I thought I’d kick things off. Here goes!
Shortly after I moved to Japan in 2007, a friend convinced me to buy a Sega Saturn. I’d only been vaguely aware of the Saturn as the pallid and short-lived rival to the almighty Sony PlayStation, but my friend quickly allayed my initial skepticism. For one thing, he noted, the Japanese library of Saturn games was several times the size of what we got, and full of unsung masterworks. He added that the Saturn could display beautiful 2D graphics—a shrewd talking point to use on me in particular.
It’s only slightly ironic, then, that after several years of devoted Saturn library mining, my favorite Saturn game turned out to be Bulk Slash, a game so 3D you can strafe in an airplane. While the game stands practically alone on the Saturn at the center of a Venn diagram with circles labeled “3D,” “Aesthetically Coherent,” “Fun,” and “No, actually 3D,” it also epitomizes (my subjective view of) the Saturn’s inherent vibe.
It’s the ultimate hidden gem on a system whose gems are all hidden, a condensed and unloved morsel of colorful graphics, popping action, ear-candy synths, and way too many mechanics, all wrapped up in a ribbon of genre-mashing nineties anime tropes. Catchier than a Morning Musume tune, it’ll make you momentarily forget all about Crash Bandicoot or even Omega Boost, or at least it did me in 2007, ten years after the party was over. Part of me has always suspected the Saturn is far more attractive in hindsight, where it has only to compete with your unfair memories of it, and you have only to compete with other eBay bidders. But in any case, I took an early shine to Bulk Slash, and, for a good fourteen years, enjoyed it in solitude.
Getting the band together
It started with a poll. By now we’ve told that story numerous times. In recent years I’d had a growing interest in fan translation projects, and Bulk Slash was always at the top of my list. Saturn players wanted it, and I could think of no better showpiece to represent all that the Saturn had to offer. I also knew the game was light on text and simple on story, so it made sense as a rookie project. So I said, “Let’s do it.” Only later, following discussions with new teammates Danthrax and Mampfus and other members of the Shiro Discord server, did I bother to assess what that would entail.
Anyone reading this may know by now that the bulk of Japanese language content in Bulk Slash takes the form of spoken voiceover (VO) that triggers dynamically during gameplay as your on-board navigator directs you where to go, who to shoot, and where not to land your very expensive-looking robot. There are also eight voiced ending FMVs. Text only accounts for the remaining twenty-four percent or so of Japanese content in the game—pre-mission briefings, UI stuff, and the end credits. Meanwhile, the game is straightforward enough that you don’t really need to know any Japanese to get through it. Mission briefings provide helpful info, but hardly anything critical to progression you couldn’t otherwise discover on your own. The charming navigators’ VO is similarly non-critical to progression, since the game also gives you nonverbal cues, like arrows and radar displays. You can even choose to play the game without a navigator. Foremost, the navigators are there for ambience—to trigger your empathy and remind you what you’re fighting for. But arguably, this ambience is the point. The navs are the soul of the game.
When I realized this, I realized there would be almost no point in translating the game if we didn’t fully translate the VO. But what did “translate” mean?
Subtitles?
A number of people have asked us about the possibility of a subtitled version of the patch, so I wanted to address this topic as thoroughly as possible. The preference for subs over dubs is valid and prevalent, and in fact is one I share, to the point that I played The Witcher 3 in Polish and Remember Me in French. Unfortunately, we had to rule out the subtitle option very early in the Bulk Slash project.
The short explanation is, we don’t know how to implement subtitles into Bulk Slash.
The longer explanation is, we’re pretty sure implementing subtitles would be both impractical and technically impossible. Below are a few select facts about Bulk Slash and its English localization patch that I hope will illustrate how we arrived at this conclusion. Please keep in mind that none of the members of the core team for this project come from a software development or advanced coding background. We’re just the people who showed up.
・Each navigator has about seventy-five lines of in-game dialogue. Accounting for the fact that the navigators’ lines change as you level them up, that means the game would need to be able to display fifty to sixty possible subtitle graphics at any time during play, per navigator. Presumably this would hog up a lot of VRAM.
・Each navigator only has a handful of different animations, which are recycled profusely to mouth those seventy-five lines of VO. This leads us to believe VRAM is already a hot commodity. (Side note: This also means the lip-flap never matched up perfectly with even the Japanese VO, which took some of the pressure off during the dubbing process. ^^;)
・VRAM limitations prevented us from even including the names of the localization team and contributors in the credits as we’d originally intended, despite many hours of trying various approaches.
▲These credits were meant to go in the game’s ending staff roll, but they overloaded the VRAM no matter what the team tried.
・Everything in the patch works by co-opting existing elements of the game. For example, we were able to add English VO because the “slots” already existed for the Japanese VO. We simply swapped the original audio data with our data, taking care to adhere to the same size limits for each voice clip. There were no existing “slots” for subtitles, as there might have been if, say, the game had Japanese captions.
▲Each navigator’s VO was extracted and replaced, line by line. Subtitles would have had to replace…the game graphics, maybe?
・The English text used in this patch was not easy to implement. Because written English is less spatially efficient than Japanese, Danthrax had to smoosh roughly two letters’ worth of text into every one graphical tile. This means he had to hand-draw unique tiles for every pair of letters and/or punctuation that appear anywhere in the game. A Herculean task just for the mission briefings alone, to say nothing of the nav intros and the credits! Mampfus then had to insert these tiles into the game code, and then we had to test them. Because of how the game loads the text, we didn’t know of a way to test the text using save states until the last week of the project—yes, that means we had to play through the game every time we needed to test any text. We’re talking about many months of hard work and coordination, on top of our day jobs and other personal commitments.
▲This is an example of Danthrax’s made-to-order text tiles. In the Japanese version, each one of these squares would have contained one Japanese character.
・If we were to create subtitles for each of the navigators plus the two in-engine cutscenes, that would have been roughly 560 more lines of text for Danthrax to hand-draw, tile by tile. Even if the Saturn had infinite RAM and Danthrax infinite energy and kindness, this would have SEVERELY delayed the patch, all to facilitate…
・…a user experience the team unanimously believed would have been significantly worse. The core concept of the navigators is that of a Japanese car GPS—even their wording is often similar to that of real-life GPS units. Like a car GPS, they’re designed specifically to be a guiding voice in your ear that allows you to keep your eye on the action. (One reason the game gets away with recycling animations is that you mostly only see the navigators in your peripheral vision. Clever!) So in our view, adding a feature that constantly draws the user’s eyes away from the action actually would have been a much larger deviation from the original Japanese user experience than replacing all the VO. It would have been like subtitling your car GPS.
So yeah, although subtitles and dual language tracks are standard features in modern video games, we quickly determined these features to be far beyond our reach, and this determination was continually validated over the last ten months. I know this will be a deal-breaker for some prospective players, and to those people I still recommend trying out the original Japanese game. It’s still a fun action game and you will likely still absorb some degree of emotion even if you don’t understand the words.
Alternatively, the readme file included with our patch download gives instructions on the simple steps required to undo our VO swap. This will preserve our translated text and the Twin Stick implementation, but all VO will remain in Japanese (and untranslated). We debated the possibility of releasing this “undub” version as a separate patch, but ultimately nixed the idea to mitigate confusion, and simply because we didn’t think it made sense to “officially” release a fragment of a translation.
▲The simple steps to perform an undub. This will result in a user experience I don’t feel is remarkably different than simply playing the unpatched game, unless you’re playing with the Twin Stick. But you will get those briefings.
All that said, if anyone out there is confident that they could implement a subtitle patch, I welcome you to reach out to us so we can share our knowledge. Here’s our Discord server!
So…dub?
In the next blog I’ll talk about how we auditioned, cast, recorded, and implemented the voices of all our fantastic English-language actors. Look for it next week!
I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into this patch. As a big fan of the original game, even after playing it dozens of times I am still very excited to finally have a 100% understandable version for English speaking audiences. Many thanks to all that were involved in the creation of this patch, you have done such a great service for the Saturn Fandom and community!