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| Bulk Slash English localization project 1.001 |
| Danthrax - Mar 31, 2021 |
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Danthrax | Mar 31, 2021 | ||
 Announcing an English localization of Sega Saturn cult classic action game Bulk Slash! Developed by CA Production and published by Hudson in 1997, Bulk Slash is one of the Saturn's best games, combining impressive 3D graphics with fast gameplay that allows the player to switch between a bipedal robot on the ground and a fighter jet in the air at will. But one of its most distinctive features is the ability to find navigators in each mission and bring them aboard your mech. They speak to you throughout each mission — giving directions to the next target, cheering on the player for destroying a swath of enemies, informing the player how many mission-critical objectives remain, even yelling out when the mech takes damage. Each of the seven navigators has different personalities and provide different gameplay benefits when they level up through repeated playthroughs. But there's one problem for non-Japanese speakers: The navigators speak Japanese, and there are no on-screen subtitles for their lines. Much of the game's on-screen text is already in English, from the in-mission user interface to the options screen to graphical elements on the stage select and mission briefings. This has allowed English speakers to get through the game without too much trouble, but none of the mission briefings or navigator introductions are in English, and a lot of the game's charm is lost without knowing what the navigators are saying during each mission — choosing one you like and hearing how her lines change as you level up your relationship is a big part of Bulk Slash's unique appeal. Besides, the ability to read each mission briefing in English greatly increases this game's accessibility, allowing English-speaking players to understand the situation — no more referring to an online FAQ to figure out what the hell you're supposed to do! Greg, Mampfus and I have been working for the last month to make this game as accessible as possible to English speakers. Thanks to Mampfus, we have the ability to swap any in-game Japanese text with English fonts that I created, and we can swap any Japanese voice file for a new one from an English speaker. Thanks to Greg's translations, we've got all seven mission briefings in English, all seven M.I.S.S. navigators' introductions in English, and soon we'll have the controller configuration screen and the end credits changed over to English in game, too. Greg is still working on translating all of the in-game voice lines but he's got nearly half of them finished already. But there's one thing we can't do on our own, and that's record voiceovers for all the navigators in the game. We need eight female (including the player's childhood friend) and one male (the player) volunteer voice actors to finish this localization project. Each navigator has about 100 lines, although many of them are very short — things like "behind us," "one remaining" and "target set." The player and his childhood friend have just a handful of lines of lines each. There are also a number of smaller roles for the ending cutscenes, should we go forward with dubbing over those instead of simply adding subtitles to the Cinepak video files — a male narrator, a female child, several male children, etc. So if you're a voice actor or you know one who would be willing to help, please let us know here on SegaXtreme or by emailing us at Bulk_Slash_translation@online.de... — we'd love to hear from you! We also hang out on Sega Saturn Shiro's Discord server, and we can be reached out to on Twitter @lacquerleaks (Greg) and @Danbo_4 (me). To be clear, this is an unfunded fan project and we're relying entirely on volunteers. But that also means it would be perfect for aspiring voice actors looking for more experience, or for voice actors who would love to help bring this awesome game to a wider audience. Special thanks to Knight0fdragon for technical assistance to get us started with poking around the code, to Malenko for his suggestions with the on-screen English fonts, and to Ghaleon for providing editing assistance. We really appreciate the help they've given us. And thank you to Sega Saturn Shiro for bringing all of us together in the first place! | ||||
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Amiceli1983 | Mar 31, 2021 | ||||
This is great news!!! | ||||||
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Ardiloso | Apr 22, 2021 | ||
| I'm impressed with all the work you guys and girls are putting in this. Stoked to see the results. | ||||
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Danthrax | May 21, 2021 | ||
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Hi everybody! Here's the latest on how the Bulk Slash English localization is going: We've chosen voice actors for several more roles! I'm happy to announce that Diana Allocco will voice navigator Rupia Rude, PandaMonium will voice the narrator heard in the game's general ending, Luuzine will voice Riesen, and Jonathan Boncher will voice the player character! Speaking of the player character, we've decided to localize the player character's name as Chris instead of Cress. The Japanese does seem to indicate that "Cress" was his intended name — or rather "Chres" if you go by the files in the original Bulk Slash website. But that's not a normal name for English speakers to see or hear, and it's so close to Chris that we decided to just go ahead and change it. We made this decision ahead of recording Riesen's lines with Luuzine, since that character says Chris' name several times. Going with Chris instead of Cress also meant updating the one time that name appears on screen outside of the credits, which is Leone's introduction when you find her at the beginning of Stage 1. Anyway, Luuzine already recorded his lines under Greg's direction on Wednesday, and the session went great. We're recording Jonathan's lines later today and then recording Diana this weekend. Mastering of Riesen's lines already has begun and Mampfus expects to replace the original Japanese voice clips with them soon. As for the first set of lines we recorded, DarkMysty's performance as the navigator Metical, Mampfus and Greg tag-teamed on mastering those lines. They finished them up and inserted them into the game. It feels amazing to play Bulk Slash with English voices during gameplay and the team is really excited for everyone else to experience it. Here's a little teaser for what Metical's English voice sounds like in the game...
Concerning graphics updates, I haven't tileset the 200 lines of credits as quickly as I wanted, but part of that was because I had my biggest project of the year at my real job, so I went about a week without being able to do much on Bulk Slash. Oh, and the PSO2 New Genesis closed beta test happened last weekend ... not gonna lie, that took up some of my time, too, heh. Nonetheless, I tried to make up for it in the last couple days and I'm now halfway finished with tilesetting the credits. Hopefully I can get back on track and have them finished in the next couple weeks. Mampfus inserted the first few lines of the translated credits into the game as a test and he's working now to get a save state with Yaba Sanshiro where the credits are rolling so we can continue to see how the credits look as we insert translated ones into the game. I also identified two signs in Stage 1's city that we wanted to edit. The first one says "Braune," which is what the developers named the Stage 3 planet, but we've changed that in the Stage Select screen to "Braun" to be more grammatically correct. Hence, we had to change this sign, too, of course:  The other sign says "Crean! Tokyo" which certainly was meant to say "Clean! Tokyo" so that was a pretty easy fix. Let's ignore the lore-breaking fact that this game's solar system isn't our own so Tokyo shouldn't exist at all, but whatever:  Knight0fDragon would be proud of me — I used CrystalTile 2 to edit those textures instead of finding the hex code, copying and pasting it into a Word document, editing it there, then copying and pasting it back into the code, haha. It was indeed much easier, even though I didn't bother setting the correct color palette when editing — I could have pulled it out of the game using Yaba Sanshiro and the CRAM2PAL utility but I didn't really need to. They were pretty simple edits to make. We also fixed a typo we discovered in the on-screen text of Stage 2's briefing. (It said "Lila" instead of "Lira" ... whoops.) My last bit of news is that we tried out making a patch with everything we've finished so far using Knight0fDragon's Sega Saturn Patcher. We had a bit of a hangup — the patcher refused to apply the patch it had just made because it allegedly was the "wrong version" even though the patcher itself just made it, heh. Knight's workaround was for us to manually edit the patch's version number by opening up version.txt within the SSP file, which worked and was easy enough. I'm sure he'll figure out what's going on there for a future version of his patcher. In any event, we were very happy that we could make a patch so easily! We'll definitely be able to use the SSP to make the final Bulk Slash patch once we're all done. | ||||
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derek (ateam) | May 21, 2021 | ||
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Keep up the great work, team! This is going to be such a pleasure to play one day. And remember... keep it crean. | ||||
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Danthrax | Jun 9, 2021 | ||||
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OK, I'm excited to announce several more VA roles cast! Edobean will voice Leone, the navigator found in Bulk Slash's first level! The role of Naira, the fourth stage's navigator, will be played by Raycher — and we've already recorded all of her lines! She did an awesome job. Two roles will be voiced by Cargodin (who, incidentally, is a big Bulk Slash fan!). She's been cast as adult Kina in Kina's ending cinematic as well as the computer voice heard after beating Bulk Slash's last boss. And lastly, Saskia will voice Colòn Steiner, the sixth stage's navigator! She'll help bring the character to life with her natural German accent — and a little broken Spanish. (It'll be great, you'll see.) Mampfus and Lacquerware have mastered and implemented the newly recorded English voice lines for Chris and Riesen that are heard near the end of Bulk Slash — with a few tweaks here and there remaining. Now the drama surrounding the last boss will be understandable to English audiences. A couple weeks ago, the Shiro Show was kind enough to feature our localization patch in its then-latest state, showing off our first fully voiced navigator, Metical, as well as all the on-screen translation we've implemented. They archived that livestream here:
A few days later, Lacquerware streamed a playthrough of the game with Metical on his Twitch channel, including reaching the end to show off the new English lines for Chris and Riesen. He uploaded an abridged version here:
The patch we generated for the Shiro Show using Knight0fdragon's Sega Saturn Patcher worked perfectly for them. In the days leading up to the show, we playtested the patch to make sure there were no crashes or bugs. This was essentially the project's first alpha sprint! I made some last-minute graphics fixes before the Shiro Show, including changing an icon above the royal ship you protect in stage three from "Difense" to "Defend."  I also changed "BOM" to "BOMB" in stage four and its briefing as well as "BOM SHIELD" to "BOMB ARMOR" when you're carrying a bomb in stage four. (There wasn't enough room in the sprite to just add a B to the end of BOMB and leave SHIELD, so we had to get creative.)   As for Bulk Slash's credits lines, I'm still working on tilesetting them and I have about 50 to go. Mampfus has implemented everything I've done so far into the font file but still has work to do on referencing the new tiles in the code. We found that the config menu's BACKUP SELECT screen had some Japanese text in it — whoops! We'd never looked in there before, heh. Greg has now translated it but I have not yet drawn English tiles for Mampfus to insert into the game.  Back to some audio news, we've recorded all of Rupia's lines with Diana and the narrator's lines in the main ending cinematic with PandaMonium and we're working on mastering Rupia's lines now. We'll be able to try inserting PandaMonium's narrator lines into the ending cinematic once Jiggle85 and his brother finish recreating the music for it, which is what they're working on now. That's it for main project updates. Thank you to everyone for your support! | ||||||
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Danthrax | Jun 23, 2021 | ||||
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Here's how the Bulk Slash English project has been progressing... Greg and Mampfus finished mastering Rupia's English voice lines and added them to the game. That makes two (out of seven) navigators' audio in the bag! I made a patch last week for the Shiro Show to debut Rupia's English dialogue, courtesy of Diana Allocco's voice talents. You can find that steam at
Greg then livestreamed it on his Twitch channel yesterday, with Diana providing commentary. You can find an archive of that stream at
We recorded Leone's lines with Edobean last week. It went really quickly and smoothly. Greg is mastering them and inserting them into the game now. We also asked Edobean to record one of the bullies' lines in the general ending and she obliged. (We still need a few more kids' roles for that ending video, though.) Greg also recorded with Cargodin about a week and a half ago. Her lines are for adult Kina (in Kina's ending) and the computer voice heard after defeating the final boss. In graphics news, I FINALLY finished tilesetting all 196 lines of the credits in MS Paint. Mampfus is still working on implementing the English credits in the game. He's gotta first convert all my image files to be palette-based in CrystalTile, then drop them into Bulk Slash's KANJI.FON file, then make note of the addresses where each line begins in that file and replace the existing addresses over in the END.ALL file with the new ones. For as big a project as it was for me to tileset these credits, it's just as much work (if not more) for him to get them into the game! Lastly, Jiggle85 and his brother Patrick are still working on remaking the general ending's music. They expect to be finished in the next couple weeks. Then we can work on redubbing a cinematic in the game for the first time! Things are going to be a bit slower over the next two weeks because Greg will be tending to real-life stuff, but we'll see how much the rest of us can get done in his absence. The project should pick up again in mid-July, and we hope to have the whole thing finished by the end of summer (so ... late Septemberish). | ||||||
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Danthrax | Jul 9, 2021 | ||
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Time for another update on how the project is going. Greg mastered Leone's English voice lines (performed by Edobean) and inserted them into the game. They're going to debut live next Friday on the Shiro Show! Leone is the first navigator most players encounter, since she's right in front of you when you start Stage 1, so getting her English lines into the game is big step.  We identified another bit of Japanese in the game that we needed to translate — the icon on the high score table when you end the game without any navigator on board. Instead of a face, it's a kanji that essentially means "hero."  Since there isn't much space to write the English word "hero" in that icon, Mampfus suggested we use Chris' face there instead. He copied Chris' face from the communication screen before and after the end boss, then shrunk it down to the appropriate 24-by-24-pixel size and pasted it into Bulk Slash's RANK.ALL file:  Then I used CrystalTile to clean up the sprite's colors a bit and voila! I think it looks like it fits in with the other icons.  Mampfus has inserted code for about 12.5% of all the translated credits graphics into the game. It's a big project so it's taking him some time. He got very organized by using a spreadsheet to reduce errors going forward, which should speed up the process. He's also has set up a virtual Mac OS 9.2 environment to work with Bulk Slash's video files. We need to use '90s software to convert them into something we can redub and then convert them back into files the game can use. He's been figuring out how to do that this week with Trekkies' help. I fixed a bug where Leone's home planet wasn't showing up on the Navigator Select screen. It was caused by me putting a 00 byte instead of a 20 byte to represent a space — the game interprets a 00 to mean carriage return, which made it skip the next line completely. The bug has been there for like three months — I know a little more about how the code works now than I did then, heh. Knight0fDragon poked around in the code and found that there are two more controller presets hidden in the game that are not selectable from the options menu's controller screen. (One of them seemed to just be a reversed Type B.) Greg has wanted to add Twin Stick controller support to the game and suggested a new button layout that would work well with the Twin Stick. So Knight managed to change one of the hidden controller presets to match Greg's Twin Stick configuration and then made it selectable from the in-game menu as a fourth option! We might have to release Twin Stick support as a second separate patch to make it work properly, though. It's exciting to add a new feature to the game nonetheless!  We haven't created new graphics for that Twin Stick option yet, so it still looks like a gamepad and instead of saying "Type-D" it displays a black 0 for some reason. We'll work on that soon. In case you're wondering, these would be the Twin Stick controls: Forward/Reverse/Strafe: Left Stick Attack: Left Stick Trigger Navigator: Left Stick Thumb & Right Stick Up Rotate: Right Stick Left & Right Morph: Right Stick Trigger Jump/Throttle: Right Stick Thumb That's all we've got for now. Next up, we need to tileset the English translations for the Backup Select screen, hopefully figure out the video stuff, and master and insert the English lines for Naira. | ||||
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Ardiloso | Jul 9, 2021 | ||
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The twin stick is an amazing adition. Maybe you consider releasing this patch for the original jp one for the jp players? Question: shouldn't rotate be on the right stick and strafe on the left? Just like any modern dual analog shooter. | ||||
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Knight0fDragon | Jul 9, 2021 | ||||
he has it backwards. Rotate is on right stick. | ||||||
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Danthrax | Jul 10, 2021 | ||||
Sorry about that. I’ve edited my post to correct it. | ||||||
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