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V Gundam was my first translation for a video game hack, and it certainly was an interesting one. RedComet over at Twilight Translations
is the one who offered me the project and did all the hacking work.
This is good since I really can’t hack my way out of a paper bag.
Unless there are swords involved, but that’s a whole other story.
 V Gundam really is a simplistic game. You pilot the Victory Gundam (and
later the V2) through a series of missions that follow the events of
the anime (also, coincidentally, titled “V Gundam”).
It’s good that the game follows the show because there is
absolutely NO FREAKING CONTEXT for the majority of the dialogue
within the game itself. Throughout the entire project I found myself
having to refer back to the anime to figure out just what was going on
so I could translate random bits of non-specific dialogue. Knowing who
set up us the bomb is a rather important story point here.
The major killer for the translation, though, was
the line length. I was initially limited to three lines of 24
characters per line per displayed screen of text for the translation.
No dialogue screens could be added. Unfortunately, Japanese does not
usually compress down that nicely when translated into English. Still,
though, I managed to get the script to fit the display requirements. It
did, however, suck. There was a whole lot of meaning lost in places
simply because there wasn’t room to put it in.
Luckily, RedComet is awesome and implemented a VWF (that would be a
variable-width font for those who care) just in time for the script
editing process. That enabled me to go back to all the stuff I’d
had to leave out and work it back in. It also allowed for the script to
flow a bit more naturally and not feel like it was just stuttering
along.
As we went back and forth with script edits and polishing we came to the realization that the VWF was perhaps a little too
cool. There were places where there was actually a lot more room than
there was script. At that point RedComet and I went back through the
anime and found ways to slightly expand the script. We didn’t
remove anything, and we didn’t change any meaning—we just
made it possible to have a shot at following the game without actually
having seen the anime. I’m very pleased with the result.
 In
all, though, V Gundam was a fun project. It’s a decent game, and
a good way to kill some time one afternoon. Just make sure you play
through on Hard difficulty so you get to see the ending. The patch can
be found at ROMHacking.net
if you’re interested. If you’re a Gundam fan, give it a
shot. If you’re not but you like sidescrolling shooters, that
works too. Me? I don’t think I’ll be playing this one again
for quite a while now that the project is over.
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