Tracker change. The old BitTorrent tracker we were using has been having problems since yesterday
so we switched to a new one. So if you were getting errors trying to get connected…
If you were seeding when the torrent was tracked by the old tracker, it’d be extremely helpful if you
continued doing so here.
Posted by Cless on 12/11/2004
Hey look! After nearly 4 years, Phantasian Productions actually releases something! Yep,
that’s right. After a week of delays and holdups, epsiode 1 of Tales of Phantasia: THE ANIMATION
episode 1 is finally available for your consumption.
Our only means of distribution is BitTorrent, so if you don’t have a client here’s a nice little list of some the more popular clients. After you’ve got your
client…
Download and run the episode 1 torrent here
If you’re new to BitTorrent, please keep your torrent open to help spread the file for as long as you can, even after your download finishes. This
helps keep the torrent alive.
We hope you enjoy our first ever fansub.
Posted by Cless on 11/28/2004
Just some commentary on the ToP OVA (presently the project is 60% timed and translation is in the
early stages)
If you are not familiar with the game, you may be disappointed with the anime, despite its high
production values. There are two parts in this episode, from very different arcs. The first part
takes place early in the game storyline, but the second part is a sudden huge leap to another major
plot point with NO details in between. That’s right, the pacing is totally whacked out, and a ton
was cut out in between the two events. So, those not familiar with the game may find this incredibly
confusing. Heck, there aren’t even any character introductions. It pretty much expects you to already
know who everyone is.
On the other side, there are a number of noticeable differences between the events presented vs.
the game, some perhaps even seemingly contradictory. There are also some scenes could easily fit
perfectly well into the game, but aren’t there. So it sheds a bit of light into some other things.
At any rate, it’s nice to see some fresh material in the show. It would have been a little
boring if it followed the game too closely.
Aside from the storyline, the art is gorgeous and presented in anamorphic widescreen. The animation
isn’t as smooth as the PSX game’s opening, but the quality of the art more than makes up for it. It’s
drool-a-licious.
Posted by Cless on 11/26/2004
I thought I would post some info the ToP OVA sub. It’s well on-track, and I just got the
shipping notice from CDJapan for the DVD of the first episode.
I should mention that what we are going to do may put off ultra-hardcore otaku anime
purists. We do not intend to leave things like name suffixes (-san, -chan, etc.) in like a
large portion of fansubs do. We are shooting for a look that reads and understands well in
english. We will of course try to convey as much of this stuff as possible through writing.
As Tales of Symphonia is theoretically a true storyline prequel to Tales of Phantasia, we intend to
translate various Japanese terms used in common between both games the way they were translated
in Symphonia US to preserve continuity.
Also, to warn those who are very used to the Dejap translation of the SNES ToP– you can expect
there to be differences in some character names and other types of names (provided they are
present in the anime). The team consists of members who have deeply analyzed the plots and world
history of the ToS/ToP universe through obscure items such as official novels and drama CDs. There
is also quite a bit of mythological research since ToS and ToP are loaded with Norse references, and
the occasional reference to other mythologies.
At any rate, we intend to put out a release that gets most long-time Tales fan’s approval. The sub might
not come out immediately, we want to make sure what we do is as good as possible.
In fact what we are doing should be quite reflective of how the PSX ToP is going to be translated.
Posted by Cless on 10/13/2004
Two new project announcements, but none of them are game translations.
Firstly, I’m trying to capture/screenshot the new stuff in Tales of Symphonia PS2. A serious,
dedicated translator for new dialogue is really wanted for this.
This
thread on Tales of Forum showcases this new stuff as it’s found.
The second project is a serious anime fansubtitling of the upcoming
Tales of Phantasia anime OVA. The first
episode comes out on DVD in Japan on November 25th. While this series is already owned in
part by Geneon USA, it’s completely unknown whether or not they will actually localize it for
US release. If they ever confirm an official distribution, the project will be dropped
immediately.
Posted by Cless on 9/16/2004
The time’s just about up for this pseudo-ToP PSX menu site design. It’s starting to look and
feel pretty dated, and the HTML on this site is a serious pain to work with. I’m working on
a whole new fresher look with some CSS to simplify things. How long until the new site is
unveiled depends on motivation.
By the way,
Play-Asia
now stocks brand new copies of Tales of Phantasia PSX for the lowest price you’ll find anywhere.
Posted by Cless on 9/8/2004
I’ve finally truncated the news after all this time.
I’ve also come to notice an extremely annoying bug under Mozilla Firefox that affects this page.
Sometimes news entry tables will be expanded out to 100% width. Other times it will be 90% (like
they should be). Reloading the page or resizing the browser window usually corrects it for some
reason.
Project progress has been a little slow since I got Tales of Symphonia. I’ve been putting a great
deal of free time in gaming lately (now playing Star Ocean 3).
I’ve begun placing small text ads around the site. If successful they will help pay for the site’s
webhosting, and perhaps hosting upgrades. The product links go to
Play-Asia. Aside from the link on the
table contents (which points to their front page), there will be some links here and there on the
site pointing to particular products. Thanks to their neat affiliate system, I can make these links
point to products that Tales fans should actually be interested in. If you have any interest in
buying anything from Play-Asia, it would be much appreciated if you enter their site through the links
on this site. To get things kicked off, here’re several links:
Pre-order Tales of Symphonia (PS2) Pre-order Tales of Rebirth Buy Tales of Destiny 2 (ignore the erroneous screenshots and description) Buy Japanese PlayStation 2
I’ve also added an affiliate link to this site’s awesome webhost at the bottom of the page. If you’re
looking for a good host, it doesn’t get much better than this.
I hope these ads won’t be intrusive. They’re all just harmeless text, after all. I’ll have you all
know that there won’t be any pop-ups, banner ads with misleading text, flash ads with sound or content
overlaying. I hate super aggressive advertising just as much as you do. 😛
Posted by Cless on 8/28/2004
satsu, our board host, has returned and as posted on his site, yuudachi.net
the reason boards are gone is:
Recently, this site was defaced thanks to an ikonboard exploit, and as a result, the boards have
been disabled. I’m currently tracking down files uploaded by this exploit.The boards will be disabled until further notice. Sorry to do this to you, but we can’t put
them back up until this security hole is taken care of, either by upgrading or replacing the
board software.
Yeah, so some jackass thought it would be funny to use our board and also deface satsu’s site in
the process. Yeah well, many middle fingers to him, even though I’m sure these little acts of
retaliation just make him smile even more.
So anyway, I’m still thinking about what to do. Chances are we’re gonna switch to a whole new board
system, which is 99.9% likely to be a phpBB. I can’t seem to find a database converter so… we’re
gonna have to start everything anew.
Posted by Cless on 8/27/2004
The forums are presently down. Somehow they’ve disappeared from the server. Mr. satsu is on
another continent right now so I can’t ask him what’s going on. It may just be a temporary
glitch, and a similar one happened recently, so hold on to your butts.
Posted by Cless on 8/10/2004
Just a quick note that I am contemplating the revival of the Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri
Dungeon project. However, for this to happen, we absolutely NEED someone who can handle the
task of doing Gameboy Color assembly work.
As it stands, the game needs a lot of cosmetic changes, and I mean a lot, to make a
translation look good. Some examples of things needed are a variable-width font and expanded
item/monster names, etc.
Posted by Cless on 8/5/2004
The homepage has been largely quiet the past month, but fear not. If you’ve been following the forums, you’d see that
things have been going VERY smoothly, and a LOT has gotten accomplished in the last month. I do have some unique news
to post tonight, so read on…
You like variable width fonts? Yes? Well, there you go. What that screen doesn’t show is the fact the game still automatically
wraps the text to the next line after 16 letters are printed. That’s currently being worked on.
Other early VWF screens that still need work:
The 8×8 (small) variable width font is yet to come. It’ll be in there eventually.
Klarth is back with us (when he’s got the time, anyway). He made a very significant discovery last weekend– the dialogue pointers.
Yes, finally, the thing that eluded us for so long. And he found them only after a mere minute of looking over the data. I guess me
and Orphis suck :P. Text insertion won’t be such a worry anymore.
Since Klarth’s discovery, he’s been working on a dialogue inserter in his free time.
And for the biggest piece of news most people are concerned about, the script is now being translated.
Since so much stuff had been focused on dialogue-related things, I took the time to finish the dialogue table and created
a final script dump, and sent it to our translator, Xero. It’s 650 kilobytes in size, and probably about 600 kilobytes of pure
text without all the control codes and variables. That’s a lot of damn text, and it’s going to take awhile to translate.
That’s not even everything in the game, either.
So, it’s very possible that we will soon be seeing the first screens of actual translated dialogue running in the game.
I hope maybe in a month at the most or so, but that’s no guarantee.
And for all you Tales fans, Tales of Symphonia is a must get. It was
released in english on the Nintendo GameCube in North America a few weeks ago. And to further sweeten the game, it’s a
(very distant) prequel to Tales of Phantasia– I won’t spoil it. Namco needs your support if you want to see more Tales games
released officially in english! It’d also take the load off of us. 😉
Since Symphonia is a (theoretical) prequel to Phantasia, expect a large deal of translated terminology from Symphonia to be carried over to
our ToP PSX translation for continuity purposes.
Posted by Cless on 7/10/2004
Largest update here in ages. Brace yourself.
For those of you who haven’t been following the forum, work HAS indeed started up on Tales of Phantasia again.
New screenies have been posted too. Here they are scaled down (click to view full size):
Yes, all menu commands are finally translated now!
Yes/No clouds
Sorting icons (may or may not be final)
In some old screenshots (this and this), not all the menu commands were translated. Why couldn’t we
translate them, but could do the others? ToP PSX stores the previously untranslated menu commands in
a compressed graphics file (with other menu graphics), not as a string of characters.
Why was that a problem? It’s not that we couldn’t find or decompress the file or anything… we had
a problem modifying it. The game refused to recognize it when we recompressed it (modified or even unmodified!).
The game would act as if there was no menu graphics file, so anything inside it wouldn’t be displayed at all
while playing.
This problem was actually one of my biggest beefs with the project, and had been bothering me since I discovered
it nearly 3 years ago. As you can see, it’s finally been crushed.
What was the problem? Turned out it was the file compressor frobnoid had coded for the project. It has a bug
somewhere in its code, although it has yet to be identified. The odd thing is, his compressor worked fine for
most everything else. A bugged compressor was one of the two things I had speculated being responsible (the
other being voodoo with ToP).
Knowing that Tales of Destiny uses the exact same LZSS compression scheme as ToP, I borrowed the compressor Orphis
had originally made for his ToD French translation project. Well… it worked! To me it felt like… the end of an
era or something. The Yes/No clouds as well as the item sort icons were also in the file, so as a bonus they are
translated as well.
All that remains to be done in the menu graphics are elemental orbs (that display when you see the weak point
of a monster, or the attack element of a weapon), and they are presently being worked on.
So what else is going on right now? Orphis and I are generally working on figuring out how this game points
to dialogue text. The game does not use a traditional pointer table for dialogue, so it will take some
time to crack. Once cracked, we may finally start seeing some real translated dialogue running in the game
shortly after!
Skeud will be implementing a variable width font routine when he has time (the old pic from before was
actually a savestate hack, but hard coding it into the game is just a matter of finding where the
routine is stored, and a little copy and paste magic).
If it’s not clear yet… ToP is back, and better than ever!
…But wait a minute. You’re all probably wondering why the hell it just suddenly came back with so much
energy. Well, here’s why: I quit the internet business that I had started nearly two years ago, which
put this project on the backburner and killed nearly all my free time (I had my fair share of 16 hour work
days). It was hell, I tell you.
I’ve finally found a new full time job (working for someone else!) to replace the business, so it’s going
to be like 2001 all over again around here!
Posted by Cless on 7/1/2004
Yo, I expect to get back to work on ToP very soonish, for real this time. I’ve had the urge
to do so, and I haven’t had much real-life work to consume my time lately.
I unearthed all the backups on the project the other day, and got my PS2 back yesterday
(which is now equipped with a mighty DMS3 modchip, and will make things much easier to deal
with).
Disgaea is an awesome game, by the way.
Posted by Cless on 4/29/2004
This is another quickie. ToP officially has a new script translator now. Welcome aboard,
Xero.
The site will likely be moving to a new hosting provider (hopefully within a month),
much better than this current one. The site may go down for a day or two sometime
down the line while the domain DNS updates.
Running even a small business on your own is hellishly time-consuming…
Posted by Cless on 1/5/2004
T A L E S O F T E R R A N I G M A is no more.
B E F O R E :
AFTER:
SPONSOR LINKS
Play-Asia.com
Play-Asia is an import store with with a large catalog that includes Tales games and merchandise,
as well as various other video game and anime-related goods.
Site designed, coded, and maintained by Cless.
All content (c) Phantasian Productions (unless noted) since 2001.
AFTER:
