Hello,

I'm a big fan of the game called ...Iru! for psx. It's a survival horror game for PSX in the vein of Echo Night and Clock Tower that only got released in Japan. While it's still unknown in the rest of the world it seems to have rather famous there since it got re-released under the "The Best" edition (the equivalent of our Platinum).

Here are a few screenshots of the game:



There is the problem though: there are a lot of dialogues and the storyline is important. I was able to complete the game anyway without knowing a single word of Japanese but it took a lot of trial&error. I'm also almost done writing a full walkthrough of the game.


However, a friend who does understand Japanese started working on a translation. But there is another problem: we don't know anything about PSX coding. So he's just using screenshots and translating under it which is rather silly and not convenient.


So I'm making this thread for two reasons:

1) Show progress on the translation as it's being made. The translation can be checked on the link below, just keep in mind that so far it's just notes and everything will need to be get back to later on to improve it and also to check for mistakes.
http://www.iowad.co.uk/

2) Ask for help. If we could get a PSX coder to help us extract all the text from the game it would help a LOT. Getting somebody to code the translation back into the game would be a dream but just extracting alone would be already fantastic.

...Iru! is really a great game and it's a shame that it's remained unknown in the rest of the world.
Hopefully we can get this done and help make it as known as it deserves to be!

...Iru! was made by Takara and Echo Night 2 by From Software.

However like I said the game is reminiscent of Echo Night so perhaps it's based on the same engine indeed... I'll try to look into that, thanks.

However, doesn't Echo Night 2 have many fonts to choose from anyway?

I've seen that font in other games.

That reeks of "included in the SDK."

You mean, expensive to design a custom font?

Expensive to license an existing font, too. There are a small number of Japanese fonts you see everywhere, and a large number of Japanese fonts you see in one place. The reason is obvious: a single professional typographer can add about 12 kanji to a font a day. With a small number of exceptions (e.g. Adobe’s offerings, the Hiragino family...), a valid license for a single decent Japanese font family will generally put you out about $1000. There are a lot of free Japanese fonts out there that suck monkeys (and MS Mincho, despite technically being something you pay for, is only good for the bitmaps; the outlines look awful... and I really hope MS/Ascender will put out a mincho analog to Meiryo sometime for yummy Windows goodness, but for now I’ll sit in my OS X ivory tower with my Hiragino Mincho Pro and scoff at you commoners).

The custom jobs you see in video games are often technically copyright infringement, or put together by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing (globbing together strokes in places that don’t make sense, for instance), and so forth. It’s usually A-list games that get something both decent and custom (and even then, you’ll probably only see the characters that get used...). Using an SDK font is a good thing in that respect; keeps the budget down, won’t piss off too many people.

Names please?

Wait, MobyGames has japanese stuff too?

Closest thing I could find to the script files on the disk is a bunch of text compressed in LZSS format.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/worvv1

I have no programming skills to speak of to decompress it or decipher it, sadly.