Radical Dreamers Week
Welcome to Radical Dreamers week, starting January 22, 2006! This week, we celebrate the completion of the Radical Dreamers encyclopedia as well as the game itself. Radical Dreamers holds a special position in the Chrono series mythos; originally a sidestory to Chrono Trigger meant to tie up a loose end, its main scenario later served as the basis for the first few chapters of Chrono Cross. But in no way is playing Cross sufficient enough to experience Radical Dreamers; play it for yourself! The game unfolds like a storybook, using rich, detailed language to colorfully characterize its main adventurers and featuring some of Yasunori Mitsuda's best ambient and soft pieces. The main scenario will only take a couple hours to complete; additionally, you can sample six more scenarios (including two bonus features). All the extra stories contain interesting divergences from the primary story; some also have new graphics (such as Magil powering up in ''Kid and the Sunflower''), and all contribute further to round the characters and set the scene of the dark Viper Manor. Have fun playing Radical Dreamers, and don't miss the interview with its translator, Demiforce!
Goodies
To play Radical Dreamers, you'll need the ROM and a translation patch. The Compendium cannot provide the ROM for legal reasons. However, if you need a patch, stroll over to Patches (Radical Dreamers) and download the latest one. Plug and play!
A huge Radical Dreamers fan named Macha has allowed us to host four pieces of fanart that formerly appeared on Radical R's site. Enjoy!
Many thanks again to Machan.
If you're looking for a quick summary of all the scenarios in the game, check out the Condensed Plot Summary article for the game.
A True Radical Dreamer
An Interview with Demiforce
by Zeality, January 22 2006Come with me to the year 2002. Back then, Radical Dreamers was known as a sidestory to Chrono Trigger -- and that's about it! The game remained untranslated at this time; Chrono fans could merely guess at what potential secrets and stories filled its text, and the only glances at the game were provided by those who guessed their way through the Japanese lettering. Fan theories ran wild that Radical Dreamers was a mythical "link between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross," perhaps relating the Fall of Guardia or telling the story of Magus and his search for Schala. Those who wanted to play the game and delve into its rich world had a single hope: the translation of Radical Dreamers by Demiforce. An avid fan of Chrono Trigger, in 2000 he learned of Radical Dreamers and its billing as a direct wrap-up to a story in Trigger. Already working on his Japanese, he immediately checked out the game and explored what he could. It was only a matter of time before he gathered the troops and began a full-fledged translation. It would take three years, a lot of assistance from contributing translators, and a never-say-die grit before the translation patch was completed. On April 15, 2003, it was released to much fanfare, and the secrets long sealed up by another language were free to know.
But that's ancient history now; three years later, the Radical Dreamers translation has seen four fixer-upper patches, while the game has been penetrated by ever zealous fans who have explored every nook and cranny. With the full bounty of Radical Dreamers extracted, organized, and illustrated in the Chrono Compendium's encyclopedia, it's time now to look back at the long process that produces the translation. Demiforce gracefully provided an interview for my inquiries, resulting in a full detail of the events that shaped the English Radical Dreamers. Let's get started!
1. As usual, let's start at the beginning! When did you first become interested in the Chrono series, and play Radical Dreamers?
Shit... this is actually a pretty big question. The Chrono series is actually what got me started with RPGs, Demiforce, and all that! I was just starting out in my senior year in highschool, so that would put it at about 1995... I'd played Nintendo all my life, but had always shied away from RPGs. Up until then, I thought they were so intimidating, with all that leveling up and stuff. I mean, who wants to sit through all that nonsense, right? I knew the stories were probably deeper than any other genre of game I would find, but something always kept me away those things.
Anyhow, a friend of mine at the time, Josh Tonies, started talking to me one day about this game he'd played at a friend's house called Chrono Trigger. Josh was always a bit dramatic, but I'm glad he was this time -- he kept going on about how this game was SO COOL, about how it was about time travel, how the main character died in it, how you could play after it ended, and most importantly, how the battles were much more interesting than your average RPG... the picture Josh painted in my mind of CT was very different than the game I would eventually come to love months later, but nevertheless, I was sold the moment he started talking about it -- there seemed to be so much in there that I thought I'd love, and sure enough, I was right.
Getting hardcore into Chrono Trigger (and afterwards, Final Fantasy) got the ball rolling for a number of things in my life. My introduction to emulators came later on that year with Super Pasofami for Windows 3.1 & WinG. The next year, while I was a freshman in college, I started the Demiforce group and got into translating games (Final Fantasy II was out first).
Oh yeah, I was supposed to talk about Radical Dreamers, wasn't I. (I ramble sometimes, I admit! I'm a storyteller, what do you expect?) Yeah, a couple of years later when Chrono Cross came out, I was kind of let down. I mean, I knew it probably wasn't going to top Chrono Trigger, my favorite game of all time, but still! So anyhow, a while later when I saw an article by Ike Sato (I think?) detailing a game that was originally the "real" sequel to Chrono Trigger, my heart skipped a beat! For a Chrono trigger fan whose specialty was digging into unheard-of gems, this was too good to pass up!
So I checked my sources, and as it turned out, the ROM for Radical Dreamers had been dumped just a few weeks before I'd found out about it. A friend of mine hooked me up, and I immediately started to check it out. The rest is history...!
2. Do you have a favorite scenario? Additionally, what do you like the most about the unique Radical Dreamers?
As for the first question, I'd have to say it's a tie between the first scenario (Le Tresor Interdit) and the fifth one (Homecoming: Shea's Light). The first scenario because it's really the meat of what RD is. In other words, I think it's safe to say most people playing it because they want some sort of continuation or elaboration of the other two Chrono games. Since scenario 1 is the closest thing to a canonicalized story in the game, it holds the most weight with me. On the other hand, coming from scritftly a literary standpoint, I like the fifth scenario because I feel it's the strongest of the extraneous scenarios. They really went a different directino than the other stories in it, and I think it worked well considering the dark nature of the mansion and characters. Who knows, maybe it was originally the intended story for the game, back before they turned it into a CT sequel?
As for the second question, I love the music the most. As I mentioned in the readme, I'm a big fan of soft music (especially piano sonatas), and of course, I own just about everything Yasunori Mitsuda's composed. So naturally when I came to realize RD had a soft score by Mitsuda, it was like pairing peanut butter and jelly for me.
3. Now, when did you begin learning Japanese? Did you immediately have translation of some of your favorite games in mind, or did that come as you developed skill in the language?
Oh yeah, of course. I got into Japanese to play these games. Kind of a silly reason to study a language for so long, don't you think? But then life is pretty silly when you think about it. Yeah, I took Japanese from the first day I set foot at college, and learned katakana ahead of time just to play Final Fantasy V, hehhe. My studies eventually led me to Japan, where I lived there for a number of months, studying intensely... a great time in my life, definitely. I wholeheartedly recommend studying abroad to anyone thinking about it.
4. Before we move on to the game, have you had any success in finding translating work? Are you still at a university?
Nope, I graduated in Spring '02 with a BA in Japanese from Ohio State. I hardly use it though -- I've had much more luck in the software development industry ever since I've graduated. I've been programming since I was a kid and it always seemed like a fit for me. Japanese was something I did in my life for a while; it was interesting to learn the language and reflect on the culture differences, but frankly now that most of the good games have been translated, I'm doing other things in my life,
5. What brought together the project to translate Radical Dreamers? Did you have any assistance from the onset, or did you have to scout for help? What were your initial expectations for the project?
Well, after I'd played the ROM for a bit, I talked to some translation groups and realized nobody really wanted to tackle something as big as RD. So, it was kind of like "Well, here this is in front of me; I seem to be the driving force behind it already. I have most of the skills necessary to tackle it, and I can probably learn the rest as I go along. Besides, even if I decide to not do it later on, the momentum I generate should probably be enough to make SOMEODY finish it". So, I gave it a shot!
I had a bunch of help with the project. It was a great collaborative effort. I really can't take the majority of the credit for it because there were a number of times that my coworkers and the fanbase pulled me out of a rut and kept me working. A bunch of people (recounted in the readme) were there to help from the beginning, and it was great fun doing it. Most of the time, whenever we seemed to need help, help would arrive. In the rare event that none did, the project would go away for a few months, and then one day I'd say, "hey, I think I'd like to work on that again". Having no initial expectations of a final product gave the translation a very casual "come and go" feel like, that, and while I would exactly recommend that kind of methodology for a professional project, it worked for us because we didn't really have the time commitment for much else. However, during the final eight months, when we had gotten the script and were translating hard, it did eventually turn into serious work. It was one of the most intense, scrutinizing projects I've ever put myself on, but we all worked hard and hit our deadline square on.
6. Before you could start translating, you had to lay some technical foundation. How did you set Radical Dreamers up to receive the new text? How did Square encode the script?
Oh man, I don't even know how Square encoded it! Isn't that a pisser? :D We sorta cheated in that regard -- I can be such a lazy assembly hacker sometimes. Per Darkforce's recommendation, all we really did to "decode" the script was to run the game in an emulator. See, the first thing RD does when you start it up is it decompresses its script into the SNES' RAM. So, we just took a RAM dump and pulled the decompressed script right out.
Mind you, this was after months of speculation on how the LZ compression actually worked. I tweaked and tweaked and tweaked my code to get it to decompress right, but it would always turn out like nonsense. In the end, about a year after we'd gotten the script decompressed using that workaround, I think I actually figured out the compression one day! Funny how the answers always seem to come to after you stop trying...
Recompression wasn't much of an issue either; we expanded the ROM and simply told RD to look in the expanded region instead of RAM for the script. So, recompression wasn't really necessary. I suppose we could have, but seeing as how expanding the ROM allowed us enough space to fit the uncompressed script in there some 700 times over, I felt the time could be better spent elsewhere. ;)
7. Once the work got underway, how did you divide up the scenarios? Were the random battle strings common for all of them?
Oh man, this is one area where it wasn't so easy. Initially it was all nice and neat, and we had a good supply of translators. We sent work off, and got very very mixed results.... most would send back a few sentences and offer false promises of more to come. In the end, most of the help had dropped out, and only a few translators stayed around to offer a good amount of help. But for those guys -- Datenshi, Haeleth, MO -- I thank them from the bottom of my heart... they were worth their weight in gold.
And oh, the battles... oh man! Don't get me started! Is profanity allowed in this interview!? Ah, I'll spare ya... but you should know, those battles were crazy, man... crazy. I can remember those days, I would just get up in the morning and say to myself, "okay, I need to be done with the skeleton battle today". And I would just sit there, numbingly translating line after line of whatnot... a bone getting thrown across a room, a bone being caught, a bone being tossed back, a bone knocking the skeleton over, a bone hitting Demi on the head and causing pain and suffering and translation woes, etc etc etc... and no, none of the strings utilized the least bit of reusability. I owed a lot of thanks to my boyfriend at the time, Ben -- he was very patient and understanding with me, and let me have all the time I needed to work.
8. You released a teaser patch in 2002. What was the general reaction to it?
It was hot, I mean, we got what we wanted out of it. We originally agreed on releasing a teaser for three reasons: to show a proof-of-concept, to raise public awareness about the game in general, and most of all, to lure translators in to help us out once we'd extracted a translatable Japanese script. When we released the teaser it went over very well and I felt we accompished all three, but unfortunately, it was about a year before we actually had such a script in our hands ready to ship off to said translators. By then, most of them were unavailable, so we kind of shot ourselves in the foot with that one! Still, it was a fun little thing to do. Demiforce has never been the type of group to release all kinds of alphas and betas to the public -- I feel that just confuses people more than anything else. But, once in a while, a little tease is okay by me. :)
9. Did you find anything interesting or out of the ordinary while poking around in the game? Additionally, did you have any idea that SuperXtreme Alphacosmos Police Case EX Ultra was going to be so wacky before beginning its translation?
Super Police Mega Whatever Whatever... yeah, we'd heard different things from different sources... again, the preconception didn't entirely match up with what the end result would eventually be, but it was a fun ordeal nonetheless :)
As for nuances of the inner workings of the ROM, I'd have to say no, it was a pretty simple game from what I can remember. I mean, how complex do you have to make something like that? It was just a storybook game.
Oh yeah, there was one thing! There were a few ambience music tracks that noone had ever dumped before that I got because of the adaptability script commands. Not much to brag about, but again I love RD's music so it was a big find for me. :)
10. There were also rumors later that the project had been abandoned. What was the hardest part of it for you? The easiest? And when did you add the All Your Base bonus? Were you surprised when people found it?
Abandoned? What? This is the first I've heard of that. No, even if such news came to us, I don't think it would have got us down. Whe you're on to something, and your team's good, there's no stopping you. A project seems to complete itself once you've hit that sweet spot.
The hardest part of the project... hm... well, I'd have to say the hardest part was realizing that I was the one who was going to have to take on the bulk of the work. My Japanese was far from fluent, and and I knew I wouldn't be nailing a lot of the stuff verbatim. But the public was expecting quality, and Demiforce has always stood by its work, so I put my nose to the grindstone. When it was all said and done, I had a few of the translation scene's translators come and audit it it for accuracy. To my surprise, they didn't come up with that many nitpicks! I was really overjoyed.
the easiest part.... hmm... I don't know what to say -- I don't really think like that! Everything of merit is a challenge for me. If it's not a challenge, I'm not thinking about it.
For the All Your Base bonus, I wasn't surprised that they found it. I was surprised, though, by how quick they found it! I think it was only a week before it was all over the internet. I had no idea players were so comprehensive. To me, it's a testament to the whole collective conscious of the internet.
11. Were there any cosmic setbacks, aside from any lack of assistance, that delayed the project or discouraged your team?
Work :) I mean real work. I would basically work on Radical Dreamers in my "in between jobs" times. *cough*
But really, translating / editing / proofing Radical Dreamers was a fulltime job in itself. I needed a full eight hours a day just to get myself into the flow and find my writer's voice. I don't know how long it would have taken if we had put only an hour or two a day into it.
12. How did it feel in early 2003 to look at the finished product? How early did you finish it before April 15?
Really good. It felt even better to dedicate it to my mom for her birthday. We were working on it right up until that day (a bad thing, I know, in terms of project management).
13. And how did the effort improve your Japanese? Were you able to absorb information from your referencing dictionaries in some cases?
Yep, defintiely. It was the single biggest boost I'd gotten in my skills, outside of being able to live in Japan. I'm a big learner when it comes to application -- I need to see something demonstrated to me before I can really absorb it, as I expect a lot of people are out there. Funny though -- while it increased my reading comprehension, I don't think my speaking ability really went anywhere. By the end of things, I really felt confident in my reading ability, but whenever friends would come over and designate me the translator for a Japanese movie we all would watch, we would always be shit out of luck!
14. Do you have any further plans for Radical Dreamers, or would you call it done and done? What other projects have you been supporting or translating for lately?
We just released version 1.4, and that's probably going to be it for that one. As for the future goes, I really couldn't tell you, unless someone out there eventually decides to retranslate it (to find out if we really did do a good job after all and make sure Crono isn't explicitly mentioned, or something). Hahahah...
As for Demiforce in general, I don't think we'll be doing many more fan translations. We've all kind of moved on in our liives and although it's fun, I personally just don't much freetime anymore.As for Demiforce, I've recently incorporated it as a Nevada LLC and we plan to offer enterprise-level .NET consultancy services under the moniker. http://demiforce.parodius.com/ will most likely remain for hosting our "scene" stuff like translations, art, and that sort of thing, while http://www.demiforce.com/ will be remodeled into a corporate-facing site.
15. The Chrono Series Community is in your debt for making available Radical Dreamers to English speaking fans. Do you have any words to the Chrono fans, or shout outs you'd like to give to the former Radical Dreamers team?
Well thank you! I'm humbled. When I think about where I'm at in my life right now, compared to who I was back when I was heavy into translating, I suppose I could try to offer some advice for someone who's in the shoes I once filled.
So, a word of advice from a guy a few years out of college: If you're an aspiring hacker, programmer, artist, writer, or whatnot, and you find yourself taking up projects like I did back in my younger years but don't know if it's worthwhile to work on anything that isn't necessarily in your college curriculum or immediately accepted by the mainstream, go for it anyhow! My hacking experience is the single biggest influence in where I'm at in my career today. You bet your ass I've got my hobbyist work listed on my resume, and surprisingly, I get respect from many of my coworkers for having spent my past freetime on projects that have furthered my skills through capturing my heart. You might be surprised at how many Software Architects, Project Managers, and even CIOs who are nothing more than grown up hobbyists like us. So go with your heart! You really can make it work for you if you know what you're doing.
(Addenduim: Just for the record, I am not telling you to drop out. Get your degree. That is very important too. hehehe)
Thank you; it's been a pleasure!
Pleasure's mine!
What a long and tough process; major thanks to Demiforce and the crew for laboring the hours necessary to produce such a high quality and thorough translation. As stated in the last question, we're all thankful for you, Demi! Well, now that you've read the interview, have fun playing Radical Dreamers or checking out the encyclopedia as part of Radical Dreamers week! And if you want to make a name in fan translation, remember that the CT Retranslation is always accepting contributors. The more help we have, the faster a truthful and originally faithful version of the scritp can be produced. Thanks for stopping by, and have fun this week!