Front Mission Translation Project

Happy Easter!

Wow, I didn’t realize the project was approaching the 5 year mark so soon! It wasn’t a long time ago that all of us on the team were chugging away at making Front Mission 5 ~Scars of the War~ less Japanese and more English. Time sure does fly fast haha! The more I look back at it, I’m surprised we actually managed to get that project done at all. What we did feels less like reality and more like some fable these days…

First off, I want to thank each and everyone of you for supporting the project since day 1. Although I don’t spend much time anymore with the Front Mission projects, it means a lot to me that what I helped start back in December 2007 is appreciated by many. Everyone on the team shares the same sentiments as I do, and they will do their damned hardest to bring out the Front Mission 2 translation to completion. The text work was actually already done back around the release of Front Mission Evolved, but we were stonewalled by the game’s advanced encryption methods as Tyler already mentioned months ago. As much as we would love to just release the scripts and be done with it, that wouldn’t enhance the gaming experience now, would it?

Anyhow, I’m writing for today to tell you about something that all of us on the team were working on for a few months now. As you may already know by now, Front Mission was never just about the video games. For as much as they are awesome and wonderful to play through, the video games only represent one piece of a greater whole. The team had this feeling that we were missing out on so much more, and having gone on an adventure to explore the rest of the brand since fall 2009, that feeling was validated in huge way. As we started to uncover the comics, the novels, and even oddities like a radio drama series, all of us were taken aback at the true scope and vision of the franchise. Front Mission was no mere series of video games. Nope, it transcended video games and was something on a whole other level…that level being transmedia. Upon this realization, we all decided that everyone outside of Japan deserved to know the true nature of Front Mission.

Thus, we set out to write a massive 50-plus page analysis of the franchise that would explore what was underneath the tip of the iceberg. With assistance from sources who truly live and breathe Front Mission, we are very proud to present to you our analysis of this transmedia entity on our project website. I strongly urge each and every one of you to read it, because what you’ll learn will truly blow your minds away.

For those who read the analysis and remembered a year ago that we would do an article on the similarities of Front Mission and 24, I will just do a quick summary here. Since if you already read it, you would know that we made a few 24 comparisons in that analysis…

1. Front Mission and 24 pioneered the art of transmedia storytelling in their respective mediums.
2. Both brands were intentionally designed for the mature, adult audiences.
3. Front Mission and 24 featured very strong Western overtones, from cast to settings.
4. The stories were penned by a team of accomplished writers, all handpicked by their creators.
5. Front Mission and 24 exceeded the expectations of their creators, still existing in some form today.
6. Western fans want access to all of Front Mission, while Japanese fans want access to all of 24.

That’s about it for quick comparisons of the two franchises. A major comparison between the two would be how both employ transmedia storytelling creatively, in that the viewpoint of the story is told differently between the media platforms. In this sense, Front Mission video games (the original source material) focus on the world, whereas the other media focus on the individuals. In the case of 24, the television show moves at a fast pace telling the story in a 24-hour time period, whereas the other media moves at a slower pace telling the story over longer periods of time (involving the numbers 2 and 4 – 24 days, 24 weeks 2.4 months, etc.). It’s hard to describe this, but if you try watching a 24 season and then dive into say one of the novels, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Whew, I think I’ve said enough about the topic of transmedia. That was more tiring than I thought. Well, I hope all of you learned something about all of this because as they say, don’t judge a book by its cover!

Happy extra February day to all!

As you might have already seen, we have a bunch of neat items for all of you to check out at our project website. Most of these pertain to Front Mission: Gun Hazard, which certainly deserves more love from us Front Mission fans. If you haven’t been there yet, I’ll sum up what the team has released:

1. An updated Gun Hazard Radio Drama Series, now with information on its conception and never-before-seen Yoshitaka Amano artwork of the radio drama cast. If you haven’t seen it yet, go do so now!
2. A very rare “behind the scenes” insight into the making of Gun Hazard film! Many thanks to Kyle for going on a secret mission for us during his recent stay in Japan, acquiring these details from insider sources we cannot name. You’ll never find this kind of top-secret information outside of the country, so we hope you enjoy it!
3. A new article on the “Engrish” advertisements of the Front Mission franchise in Japan. We could have added more examples of this, but I think all of you will like what we have covered.
4. 50 Faces of Front Mission character collage. It doesn’t show the complete recurring cast of the video games, and this would have been much bigger if we threw in the expanded universe media. Still pretty neat nevertheless and it’s done in a timeline-styled manner!

The team promised to unveil the secrets of Front Mission’s expanded universe to the world  (sans Japan) back in 2010, so we hope that you enjoy these details about the Gun Hazard universe. I know some of our team members are appreciating this, as they now have a more complete grasp of the Front Mission: Gun Hazard story, from events leading into it to unexplained mysteries in the video game. You can imagine how this unveiling of the story happened in Japan, where the fans were first introduced through its radio drama series and the film, followed by the video game itself, then a novel, and finally the manga series. This is what transmedia storytelling is all about, and is what Front Mission really is. Even Toshiro Tsuchida coined it as such in several interviews! We’ll explain all of this in a new, upcoming article about Front Mission and transmedia. For now, take a look at this…

If you think the above list of recurring characters looks impressive and tight-knit for a transmedia, you haven’t seen anything like the one for the main Front Mission universe! Can you guess how massive and crazy the list would look!?

Happy 2012, everyone! We hope that the new year has been good for all of you! It sure was for us when we found out that right on New Year’s Eve of 2011, our website had registered over 600,000 unique visitors since February 2008! It’s quite a milestone and one that very few of us ever thought we’d reach haha!

Anyhow, onto some Front Mission news!

Gun Hazard Radio Drama Series Released!

As some of you may already know, several of our team members were engaged in localizing the Gun Hazard radio drama series from Japanese to English. A small pet project that one of our team members was very passionate about, if only because they LOVE Gun Hazard! Well, now we’re pleased to say that this project is done. Check out our project website for the links to this nifty holy grail that expands on the world of Front Mission: Gun Hazard, released before the video game came out in Japan!

Front Mission Dog Life & Dog Style Invades France!

Are there any Front Mission fans living in France? If they do, feel free to check out the first volume of Front Mission Dog Life & Dog Style (including a nice motion comic trailer of it!)…now in the French language! French publisher ki-oon has also released a sampler of the first chapter of the omnibus, which can be found here. If you’ve never been exposed to what Front Mission is like outside of the video games, then you’ll be in for quite a surprise! Be warned though; this seinen manga is deliberately made for the adult audience (much more so than the other expanded universe media) and is NOT for the faint of heart.

Front Mission Dog Life & Dog Style Lives On In Japan!

Still a heavyweight in the seinen manga realm and in Square Enix’s own manga line-up, Front Mission Dog Life & Dog Style will continue to have new chapters well into 2012. The ninth volume is already confirmed for release and according to Kyle (who was in Japan for the past few weeks), it’s very likely that the series will continue into 2013. So while things don’t look very good for Square Enix Co., Ltd. in the future, at least Front Mission remains defiantly alive with continued support from its Japanese base.

That’s all for now. Happy 2012 again!

Today is the four-year anniversary of the Front Mission: Series Translation Project! It was December 17, 2007 when this whole shebang started, and now it’s December 17, 2011!

So anyone who’s been following this blog and our website might notice that there’s been practically NO updates since June of this year. And maybe that there were new people running the whole gig…this is correct. Oh, and maybe some people are wondering if the Front Mission: Series Translation Project is dead or alive. Well, speaking on behalf of the founders (since I did help co-found it with Angelo, Imran, Kyle, Wilson and the others – see the About page on the website), I’ll make this as straight and clear as I can.

On the “New” Management…

Basically, around fall of 2010, some “fans” of Front Mission were sucking up to us and saying how they wanted to help contribute to the project. After about a few months of this suck-up job, the team decided to let these people take over the mantle. The main reason for this, in my opinion, was that all of us who had been here since day 1 were moving on to new things…and we didn’t have the time to dedicate work on the projects. I myself can’t dedicate much work because I’m in the process of starting up a small, “indie” game development studio and that’s been eating up all of my free time. I know that Imran, Kyle, and Wilson have all had new jobs since spring of 2011, but I’m not in the know of what they’re doing. And my good pal Angelo (we go way back since university) has been bogged down with software localization in his new job, only now he’s being paid to make it happen. Not sure what everyone else is doing, but I’d assume they’ve moved onto new things as well.

So with everyone’s productivity dropping like a rock because of new jobs and other real life issues, we thought it would be a good idea to pass down the torch. Around June-ish, we gave the new team all the materials and notes we had, and wished them well in progressing the Front Mission projects. Finish up Front Mission 2 (the translation and editing were long done by spring of 2011), going further into Front Mission Alternative, and doing the side projects too. Now with December’s arrival, it is disappointing to say that the new management did not fulfill their end of the deal. No monthly updates, no reported progress on Front Mission 2, only minor changes to the web pages here and there, and quite honestly, no real interest in getting the job done! As a game developer in real life, this reinforces my point that game development of any kind should remain in the hands of those who actually want to see something done.

Anyhow, we’ve fired those “fans” from their jobs and rightfully so. We’ve also switched to a new web provider because our original one was closing down. The website and this blog will be alive for at least another year. So what happens now?

On Front Mission 2 and Front Mission Alternative…

As I said above, Front Mission 2 from the pure text work is already done. The problem is getting past the game’s encryption…which pretty much has been our major roadblock since fall of 2010. Without getting too much into the technical jargon, Front Mission 2 has a unique encryption scheme that requires advanced programming knowledge to manipulate. When we tried to work around it, the game would spit out all sorts of glitches. An entire mission script could be fully inserted, yet when played in game may randomly spit out Japanese sentences. Another issue involved words mysteriously disappearing (or appearing garbled) from the text window, even when the script was double-checked for technical and linguistic errors! It’s a real pain to deal with, and solidifies my personal thoughts on why games localization isn’t an easy thing to do.

Front Mission Alternative on the other hand, is a more interesting case. The game’s language change option actually changes a little more than just the interfaces and game data from Japanese to English, and vice versa. It took quite a lot of testing for us to figure that out, but eventually we did. So like Front Mission 2, it’s obvious that this game was also meant to show up on English-speaking shores. (which wouldn’t be a surprise, since both games were being worked on at the same time) The main issue behind Front Mission Alternative is the game’s unique font coding. Unlike every other Front Mission, the font is synchronized with the in-game story events in that its appearance is timed with the presentation of the said event. So as the story plays out, the font slowly appears on the text window in a typewriter-esque fashion. Personally I think it’s neat, but this does present programming and linguistic challenges since there is no auto-scrolling of the text (can’t add new lines or a “page” in the text window). And everyone who is familiar with the Japanese language should know how many characters can be compressed into a mere kanji symbol!

So with the original team back in control, we will find a way to deliver the Front Mission 2 localization to all of you, the fans, in some form. Don’t expect us to churn it out quickly since we’re all busy bodies in real life at the moment, but in the words of Adam Jensen from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, we’re going to get the job done! At best, we can release a patch for Front Mission 2 with content equal to our Revised Patch 3 for Front Mission 5: Scars of the War because that’s all we’ve been able to crack…so far. We might try this and release a text guide for the non-mission story events, as that’s an option we were considering during the start of this year. Front Mission Alternative needs quite a lot more translation and editing before it would be ready, not to mention the font programming roadblock.

On Other Things Front Mission…

Frankly, I think the only thing that we can absolutely finish in the near future are the translations for the Front Mission Series: Gun Hazard radio drama series. It was something one of our members wanted to learn more about, so we managed to find the scripts after much searching…another nifty little “holy grail” of the franchise. Front Mission: The Declassified Documents (we changed it, Declassified sounds cooler and more 24-ish!) is pretty much 99% done in terms of data collection. The only thing that needs to be done is stitching it all together in some massive 500-1000 page tome (200 is too low a number, even if we were only covering the video games alone!). It’s pretty sick looking at all the data the team’s collected, and that data pretty much shows the all-encompassing power of Front Mission as a brand of various media, or a transmedia (Google that, it’s dead-on of what Front Mission as a whole really is). Maybe we’ll do a Mother 3 and sell these tomes haha! The video series…ehhh, I think it’s a lot easier to work on the big reference book. Too much effort to try and capture the whole thing in a show format. That’s just me though.

Speaking of other Front Mission things, Front Mission Dog Life & Dog Style is going to have French releases produce from publisher Ki-oon. This is in addition to the original Japanese and the fairly recent Korean translations of the comic series! The first volume is coming out on January 26, 2012, if you can’t read French. Maybe this means Square Enix Co., Ltd. might just release it in English some day…I hope.

Four-Year Anniversary Stats…

Visitors: 592,898

Downloads: 176,209 (162,682 for Front Mission 5: Scars of the War patches and 13,527 for Front Mission 2 patches)

Top 10 Visitors by Country: United States (1), Russia (2), Poland (3), Brazil (4), Canada (5), France (6), Germany (7), Indonesia (8), Philippines (9), United Kingdom (10)

5 Unusual Visiting Countries: Afghanistan, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Myanmar, Turkey

Money Earned if Front Mission 5: Scars of the War was Localized in English at a Price of $50 USD Per Unit: $8,134,100

Money Spent on Purchasing Front Mission Media: At least $500 USD

Time Spent on Learning Political/Military/ Scientific Concepts and Terminology: Too many to count…

Coffee and Energy Drinks Used: Too many to count…