Sakura Wars 2 English Translation Announced, Preview Demo Released

On Friday, January 6th, 2023, we had a surprise announcement LIVE on SHIRO! SHOW that the English translation for Sakura Wars 2 ~Thou Shalt Not Die~ on Saturn was well underway, having been worked on secretly for nearly 19 months!

Noah Steam, The Opponent, Crouching Mouse, CNguyen, CJ Iwakura, SegaFanatic5188, BowlOfLentils, Matt B & TrekkiesUnite118 have all had a hand in this massive project, and the community is thrilled and thankful to them for making such an effort for our collective enjoyment.

In honor of this project, they released a translation of the original preview demo disc (released in Japan to promote the game) to SegaXtreme’s 28th Anniversary SEGA Saturn Game Competition.

Original LIVE Announcement:

Preview Demo Playthrough:

Here’s what TrekkiesUnite118 had to say about the project…

While the script translation is mostly done at this point, there’s still a bit of technical work left to get the translation actually into the game. So the release date is still very much TBD.

But in the mean time we decided to translate the original Demo Disc that Sega made back in early 1998 to give the same kind of teaser to English fans that Japanese fans had back then. This demo includes a short trailer as well as a short visual novel portion of the game that introduces new characters and dialogue mechanics. While this is from the entire team a lot of the work was done by the following:

==DEMO PROJECT LEAD==
TrekkiesUnite118

==PROGRAMMING==
NoahSteam
TrekkiesUnite118

==TRANSLATION==
MattoBii

==GRAPHICS MODIFICATION==
Joqu
Mattobii
NoahSteam
TheOpponent
TrekkiesUnite118

==FMV SUBTITLES==
Programing: TrekkiesUnite118
Translation: MattoBii

==PROOFREADER==
Bowl of Lentils

Some of the more difficult work involved getting the lip sync data just right so that the text could all be properly displayed, without desyncing the lip animations. In the final game all the text will draw on it’s own when characters finish speaking. But in this demo the text completely stops drawing when the characters finish speaking, requiring the player to press a button to see the rest. To fix this we had to do a lot of tedious work to add more text draw commands, without disrupting the lip animations as they’re stored in the same data.

So while this syncs a bit better than the first game’s patch, there are still some spots where there was no hope in getting it to sync properly without ruining the lip animations. So those lines had additional draw commands slapped at the end of the animation sequences all at once. However I must point out that in the final game this will most likely be more like how we handled it in the first game simply due to the extremely tedious nature of trying to fix this without the original dev tools and source code Sega had back in the 90s.

The other challenge was getting Joqu’s beautiful new logo to work in the game’s title screen. The title screen in the 2nd game is mostly done on VDP1 through hand drawn animations. So that required us to recreate that which Mattobii gladly did for us. It was then a task of cutting up the logo and animation frames to fit into the original VRAM space, and then modifying all the VDP1 draw commands to properly draw the new graphics on screen in their correct spots.

Finally, the last challenge we had was recreating the trailer at the beginning. The original trailer had Japanese text overtop of it, and showed off scenes with in game dialogue, as well as the battle hud. We wanted to have that footage show off those same scenes from the early patch builds. So Mattobii painstakingly played through the demo builds trying to capture like for like shots from the original trailer, while I captured some shots with the English battle HUD and went through the PC version’s FMVs for the pre-rendered footage. While the final trailer is not 100% 1:1 in shots, I think it’s a very good approximation.