Segagaga Has Been Translated into English

For those unfamiliar, 99% Invisible + Hidden Levels did an episode about the backstory of development of Segagaga that is really worth a listen. I really enjoyed it... and without having listed to it months ago wouldn't have even known what this headline was about!

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hl-06-segagaga/

This is the first time Dreamcast owners can play it in a more understandable way (and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point). Playing SGGG, we can all see how brave Sega was at the time. I'm still shocked that Sony had such good marketing around the PS2 launch, so users could trust them to wait - and NOT buy - a Dreamcast. The Dreamcast had already great games (Jet Set Radio! MSR! Shenmue! RECV! and many more!), great online features, and its architecture was so well thought out.

On one hand, I'm happy this got translated and love the dreamcast. On the other, this game is so weird I doubt the translation holds a candle to the original

So excited for this - have been dying to play it for at least a decade.

Now if we can just get a fan translation of London Seirei Tanteidan (PS1 RPG set in victorian England).

Amazing technical achievement, and also a very unfortunate situation with the reliance on AI translation. I'm not privy to the details of the actual translation process (whether AI translation was really just a technical placeholder or actually the draft for the real translation), but the criticism online has been scathing.

It's a shame to see all the pearl-clutching about the use of AI. I've been playing ROMs and fantrans since the early aughts, and we were content back then when some of our desired games just got menu translations. I've watched a ton of projects spring up around the games people wanted to play, only to stall or die out because the majority of the project people were programmers, and the one translator was a college student enrolled in Japanese 102 who flaked out.

Human translation should obviously be the end-goal, particularly in a text-heavy game from the 32-bit era...but that shouldn't undercut the technical achievement of this hack, even if the MTL text becomes little more than placeholder. Put it all up online, make it easy for someone to pick up the script and translate it independently in chunks, and then insert it back in later. That's how a number of fan-trans were done in the past, if memory serves.

This is absolutely amazing and I can't wait to deep dive on this.

> this really was the white whale translation of the Dreamcast library, there was a lot riding on this project

I don't understand... what is riding on this?

I have never heard of this game, but based on this blog post I can see why it's a "white whale". It's precisely why I don't think this was a good use of AI at all.