I confess, I was inspired by the opening to “Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne”, one of the most memorable monologues I’ve ever encountered. I even went to the trouble of digging up the original Japanese version.

No longer satisfied with a straight translation, which I have posted numerous times elsewhere (my DevBlog’s first post has something fairly close to what I was originally planning to use), I tried hunting down some official material I could use in place of the original…failing that, I tried - and succeeded, with a fair bit of help - in writing what you see here. I’m particularly proud of the first line, which is probably the most accurate to the original text.

Atlus’ work on the Shin Megami Tensei franchise - namely, the removal of the mahjongg game in Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army - inspired me to make another alteration, more for expedience than anything: the original game featured an item called the “Uranaihana Jiten”, or “Flower Reading Encyclopedia”. This would have been called the “Flower Dictionary” in my version: you input your birthdate and the game gives you your “birth flower”, a brief description, and a sort of fortune blurb. Since this involved assembling 366 different combinations of flower, description and fortune, not to mention a further 132 or so entries for the Compatibility Fortune (or “Matchmaker”, as I would have called it), I decided it was too much work for the use it would probably see and removed it. The sidequest that you originally got it from is still there, but the rewards are different. (Theoretically, it should be possible to still obtain it by hacking a save file, though I would have no idea how to go about it, and on a further note, the whole thing would be in Japanese save for the interface.)

As for why all the trouble…the “Project Background” on the translation page (or alternately, the April 1st entry on my DevBlog) has most of the story, although I believe I left out the most important part: not just “why at all?”, but “why like this?” I originally planned to do a straight translation, just to test my skills…perhaps it was this reason why fate slapped me in the face and scuttled my effort for half a year. It was a while after I quit on the project the first time that I came to a horrible conclusion: after all my complaints with Tokyopop’s underresearched work on the .hack manga and novels, ADV’s work on the Zone of the Enders anime and - worst of all - Dark Horse’s work, or lack thereof, on the Trigun manga, I was doing exactly what they did. I was translating with no regard for previous work, and I was a hypocrite. So this is why the protagonist of the game is “Aster Dandelion” instead of “Ivory Rabbit Girl” or some such; I couldn’t get a lot of confirmation on location names, but the character names are based on the official English-language material, and for the better. (In the original, they don’t really HAVE names, as you can see: just family and position, like “Bear Father” or “Squirrel Mother” or “Cotton Rabbit Boy”.)

Sorry for the rant. ^_^ I won’t claim the Sylvanian Families games are anything noteworthy, but they’ve become sort of my niche in the fan translation world. A lot of my “firsts” with translation have been thanks to these games: proportional fonts, compression, self-made utils, etc.

Keep an eye out for “Sylvanian Melodies” in the future!

Aha! Someone pays attention to their visitation logs.

Truth to be told, I didn’t really say anything about your work per se. The title of this post translates to something along the lines of “perhaps we only live for the sake of these odd moments”. This was the first thing that popped into my mind while reading your charmingly poetic translation of the intro to this game. Game translators usually don’t bother going this far while writing their scripts, especially when the game in question doesn’t seem to be all that deep or emotional in the first place (do note that I’ve only played a little of this game before posting those pictures).

And the small gray text is just me moaning about spam and lack of activity here, both of which should soon be rectified.

So there!