Aside from Revival of the Golden Witch and another project of mine, I decided to adopt the translation of a Umineko fan VN.
In 2010, a doujin circle named RA/MNESS released the demo of a fanmade VN as an April Fool’s joke, it’s name “Cradle[Dolly's Dreaming Awakening -Cradle Song-]“. The joke is that they never released a full version like they promised to do in the next Comiket, leaving the game abandoned as a trial version.
Yet, that fanmade trial VN was never translated. Why? I dunno. Either way, I know I’m already busy with Revival of the Golden Witch and another side-project, but I decided to translate Dolly’s Dreaming Awakening -Cradle Song-. I simply cannot let Umineko-related things (even if this is essentialy fanfiction) untranslated.
The VN takes place in a high school setting, with the characters being Battler, Amakusa, Beato and Ange. Battler and Amakusa are best friends, Beato is an american transfer student and Ange studies in the same school, but not in the same grade as the other three.
The plot is simple: Battler begins to have strange dreams, and it seems like he’s forgetting something. What is it? Does it have any relation to the transfer student Beatrice?
The story lasts 3 looping days, and has some choices with two endings. The trial can be downloaded for free at the circle’s website here, but I’ll also include it in my patch (it’s a free VN after all).
The art is beautiful and the story is good. In fact, just the art is enough to make someone read it: whoever drew the characters is a <VERY GOOD> artist.
I’ll be frank: I’m not fluent in japanese at all. I’m using translators and dictionaries to translate, but I’m getting satisfatory results. I’ll be posting translation updates here.
I started translating it today, and I’m about halfway through the first day. That makes it… roughly 65% of the first day and 15% overall. Pretty impressive for just one day. Either way, I’m creating the patch as I translate, meaning I have some screenshots already:
TRANSLATION STATUS
Update (25/11/12) - I’m not dead! Sorry, but school kept me busy all these months so I did not make much progress. But I’m officially free from school now (graduated from High School) so I’ll try to finish this until the end of December. Anyway, The Second Day is 10%-ish translated and The First Day is also 100% done, with complete Quality Check.
First Day: 100% (done)
Second Day: 0%
Third Day: 0%
Image Editing: 45%
Quality Check: 33.3% (First Day done)
Overall: 20%-ish
