User blog:Gemini Sunfall/Main Story and Sidequest Translation is Done, Now What?

It's been some time since anything's been said here, so I felt I might as well give an update on the progress our translation team has been making.

If you've been following our translation efforts since April, you may have noticed that everything pertaining to the main story, sidequests, and all of the other map text has been translated. To put it simply, with the exception of a couple areas of flavor text, Monster Girl Quest: Paradox is pretty much all translated now, and you can play the game from start to finish and even dive into the postgame without running into walls of moonrunes.

However, our work is not quite finished yet.

Some of the more observant players may have noticed parts of the translation to be of questionable quality. And not just the final stretch of the game, but some earlier segments as well that Dargoth had translated. To that end, the more competent and Japanese-versed translators among our team, yom and Upthorn, have been doing thorough playthroughs of the game to catch any awkward or unusual text and polish up the translation and writing to ensure the quality some have come to expect our of this project. This is currently taking priority.

I also mentioned those exceptions of flavor text earlier. To sum it up, here's what still needs to be translated. And as far as Dargoth is concerned, he's still missing-in-action. He's responded a couple times in one of the MGQ Disords, but until he actually does anything beyond a simple "I'm still here", I can't say he's back.
 * Labyrnth of Chaos gear enchant effects.  A lot of them are already translated, but some still are still in Japanese.  There's also some untranslated boss text.  Soul is supposedly working on these.  Aside from those, the entire LoC is translated.
 * Panty Sensei.  Okay, technically the one sidequest that's not fully translated, if you can call it a sidequest  Sparkles is currently working on translating this.
 * Giving Presents in the Pocket Castle.  We've actually begun work on this, though progress will be slow until the story translation is done being polished.
 * Skill Words (AKA, what characters say in combat upon using skills).  This hasn't been started yet, I imagine this is going to be the last wall we climb before our work is truly complete.

So yeah, that's the situation. You can expect a more polished translation within the coming weeks for starters, so if you've been rather dissatisfied with parts of it (particularly near the endgame), you'll be glad to know it's getting fixed.

With all that out of the way, here is the translation patching guide once again!

Step 1: Have the latest version (2.23) of Monster Girl Quest Paradox
This is important: you must be patching a 2.23 game of Paradox. You can tell what verison you have by the number that appears on the top-left of the title screen when you run the game. If the version number is anything other than 2.23, you're playing an outdated game and need to acquire the latest one. If you've purchased this game before on DLSite, you can redownload the latest version without having to buy it again.

At this point, your MGQ Paradox folder should only contain the files you extracted from the .zip package it came in--nothing else, not even save files. If you have save files, please move them out of the folder until you have successfully translated your game.

Step 2: Obtain the RPGMakerVXAce Translator
Now we need the program that will allow us to apply the translation, which is the RPGMakerVXAce Translator. You can find it at Dargoth's Bitbucket repository.

https://bitbucket.org/dargothtranslations/mgq-paradox-2/src/master/

Click the Downloads tab, and you should find "RpgMakerVXAce Translator 0.10c.7z" among the available downloads. Save it, and extract its contents wherever you like--preferably in a new folder outside of your MGQ Paradox folder.

Step 3: Run the Ytinasni.RpgMaker.GameSelector.exe
There should be a file called "Ytinasni.RpgMaker.GameSelector.exe" among the files you extracted. Run it, and it will prompt you to input the directory of your MGQ Paradox Game.exe file. If you don't feel like typing it all out, a simple method is to right-click Game.exe, click Properties, copy the file path shown there, and paste it into the prompt. Press Enter, and let the program run its course--during this time, it will generate a bunch of files, most notably a Blobs folder. This might also be a good time to mention you should have some disk space available--as the Blobs folder can grow quite large--mine is up to 10GBs in size, so that should be about how much disk space you should set aside. You'll need to set aside a few GBs more later once you actually run the translator a few steps later...

As the GameSelector nears the end of its process, a folder called Script should be generated. This is where the game's text script is located, and what really matters when it comes to translating your game. Once the GameSelector is done, it should tell you to press any key to exit. That means it's time for the next step, which is...

Step 4: Replace the Japanese scripts with the translated ones
The Script folder contains all of MGQ Paradox's text inside of it. Right now, all of the scripts are in their oriignal Japanese state. The way we translate our game is by replacing all of these Japanese scripts with the translated English scripts from the translation team. You can find all of the translated files at our bitbucket, which is in the following link: https://bitbucket.org/ArzorX/dokudoku-amateur-translation-team/src

Click the Downloads tab, and click "Download Repository" to acquire all of the scripts in a single zip package. Once you've download the script package, unpack the contents into the Script folder that was generated by the GameSelector. Click Yes whenever asked to replace the existing files.

Step 5: Run the Ytinasni.RpgMaker.Translator.exe
Once you've replaced the Japanese scripts with the translated ones, it's now time to translate the game by running the "Ytinasni.RpgMaker.Translator.exe". Just run it, and wait a while. It will check all of your scripts first to ensure there are no errors (and there hopefully shouldn't be any, or our translators have really screwed up), then begin compiling them. You'll know it's done when you get the "press any key" line.

Your translated game will be generated in a folder called "out" along where your RPGMakerVXAce Translator is. Look inside it, run Game.exe, and you should now be playing a (mostly) translated copy of Monster Girl Quest Paradox! If you had moved your save files out of the original Japanese Paradox folder, you may now relocate them into your translated Paradox folder to pick up from where you left off.

If you ever want to update your translation later on, you can skip the first three steps and go straight to Step 4, no need to generate another Blobs folder or anything. Just download the latest script files, replace the old ones with the new, and run Ytinasni.RpgMaker.Translator.exe again.

''One final note: If you are continuing from a save file, note that your save retains map data from the time you saved your game. Meaning, if you saved in an previously-untranslated location, the NPCs will still be giving you Japanese messages. Don't panic:all you have to do is exit the map, then re-enter for the game to "reload" the map script with the translated one. Simple as that!''