Tengai Makyou: Ziria translation

[supper]

As some of you already know, I've been working on a translation of Tengai Makyou: Ziria for some time now. After various twists and turns, I'm happy to say that, through the collective efforts of our translation group LIPEMCO! Translations, it's finally complete and now available!

Download it here: stargood.org/trans/tenma.php

The translation is by TheMajinZenki, testing was done by cccmar, and I did the hacking. Hope you enjoy it.



For a change, this is a game you've probably heard of that I don't really need to introduce, but in case you haven't: Tengai Makyou was the first RPG released for the CD-ROM² system, and also the first RPG released on CD period. It was specifically designed to showcase the new technology by featuring an expansive plot and luxurious visuals and sound. At the time it came out, it was an experience you could get nowhere else, and its success led to Tengai Makyou becoming a major series for Hudson and Red Company in the years that followed.

The story goes like this: In the distant Far East, there lies a mystical land called Jipang, whose tranquility is one day shattered by the arrival of a demonic foreign religion, the Cult of Daimon. The invading Daimonists seek to revive the sealed demon Masakado and destroy the country so they can rebuild it in their own image. Only Ziria, Tsunade, and Orochimaru, the three Fire Heroes descended from the legendary Fire Clan, can vanquish the invaders and return peace to the land.

That description might make the game sound pretty serious, but it's actually all kind of a joke. Tengai Makyou is meant to poke fun at foreigners' misperceptions of Japan: "Jipang" is an old foreign misnaming of the country, the game's world map is based on unrecognizably distorted European maps of Japan from the 16th century, the story is a chaotic mishmash of characters and events that in reality happened centuries apart or were entirely fictitious, etc. The name "Tengai Makyou" itself loosely translates to something like "a faraway and mysterious place," the joke being that, to the intended Japanese audience, Japan is obviously no such thing.

Though this translation has technically been in development since 2021, I only really began working on it in earnest at the start of this year, and it wasn't until August that things got squared away so that we could start working on it through our usual group. It took a bit of time due to the game's large-for-the-era size, but overall things went about as well as they could have. Big thanks to everyone for their hard work on the project.

If you're really interested in the game, you might want to check out this page on The Cutting Room Floor that I put together to collect the unused content I found while working on it, because there's a lot of it. The game was complete remade twice during development, with the gameplay and story radically changed, and the final version was basically built on top of a completely different one. If you want more details on how that came about, I also made a page collecting coverage of the game from old Japanese magazines that gives some insight into its development.

Many people seem to have been interested in seeing this game translated, so I hope that those of you who play it will enjoy it. Do be prepared for a very old-school RPG experience, though!

[exodus]

Great work!! So glad this is out there for folks to play!

also the cutting room floor stuff you did is fantastic - I love seeing all these easter eggs, had no idea they existed!

[keithcourage]

Wow, I never thought I'd see the day. Fantastic work!

[acidourico]

Congratulations for everyone that was involved in this project. My sincere thanks!

[ccovell]

Supper, great work, and I'm most impressed by all the documentation you did about unused content, data sectors, etc. It seems to me like that was the bigger task... was it?

Thanks for the translation also!

[supper]

Thanks, everybody!

Dec 7, 2023 6:28:59 GMT exodus said:

Great work!! So glad this is out there for folks to play!

also the cutting room floor stuff you did is fantastic - I love seeing all these easter eggs, had no idea they existed!

Well, apparently no one had any idea the easter eggs existed until we did this, or at least I couldn't find any mention of them on the Japanese internet. The activation method is very obscure and specific, and permanently disables itself if you mess up any of the steps, so I guess it's not that surprising that no one came across it even though it was a pretty popular game.

Dec 8, 2023 4:10:57 GMT ccovell said:

Supper, great work, and I'm most impressed by all the documentation you did about unused content, data sectors, etc. It seems to me like that was the bigger task... was it?

Thanks for the translation also!

It probably wasn't more work than the main translation, but yeah, the sheer volume of content made it quite a task. There are so many unused maps I ended up having to write a one-off program to convert data from the translation spreadsheet to wiki table markup, and also made a map dumper specifically for showing the unused maps. For all the work that went into it, though, this isn't even close to comprehensive coverage -- thanks to the game's primitive structure and horribly protracted development cycle, there's just so much unused material that trying to find and properly document everything most likely would have been as much work as making the translation.

[sunteam_paul]

Well I know what I'll be doing over Christmas...

[paranoiadragon]

I didn't notice it but I've been trying to find a breakdown of all the different things that this game did first. Like the fact that it was the first cd/jrpg and really seem to set the stage for RPGs that came after it with the same cinematic quality. Is anyone aware of a list of the things it did first or was one of the first to do? I feel like this game is a keystone leading up to Modern gaming even though it never left the east.....until now!

[spenoza]

Oddly enough, the game is mechanically quite retrograde, even for the time.

[fusoya]

Dec 9, 2023 14:13:21 GMT sunteam_paul said:

Well I know what I'll be doing over Christmas...

Merry Christmas! I'll be doing the same.

Congratulations and thank you to all the team on what is simply a milestone achievement.

[ginoscope]

Good job and thank you for the translation I been really enjoying it I never thought we would get this translated so a nice surprise.

[keithcourage]

Just a report that both the 1.0 and 1.1 versions of the patch have random crashing issues on real hardware(CDR). Works great though via emulation or ODE options like the everdrive pro or Super SD system 3.

The game will just crash in between loading screens from time to time. Never in the same spot or dependent on how long the game has been played. It could happen in 15 minutes or after 1 hour. It's been tested on multiple systems with different brand of CDRs and CD burners. 

Thanks again for all your work on this. It's great to able to play this even if I have to use an emulator to do so. 

[supper]

Jan 3, 2024 3:40:39 GMT keithcourage said:

Just a report that both the 1.0 and 1.1 versions of the patch have random crashing issues on real hardware(CDR). Works great though via emulation or ODE options like the everdrive pro or Super SD system 3.

The game will just crash in between loading screens from time to time. Never in the same spot or dependent on how long the game has been played. It could happen in 15 minutes or after 1 hour. It's been tested on multiple systems with different brand of CDRs and CD burners. 

Thanks again for all your work on this. It's great to able to play this even if I have to use an emulator to do so. 

Yeah, I've had several people mention this to me, and I've been working on fixing it for the last several days. After a lot of searching, I've found one issue that involved the backup data track still being used when it wasn't supposed to, but I'm not sure that it's actually the root problem here. I'm quite puzzled by this, because while the fact that the game works fine on flashcards greatly limits the number of things that could potentially be causing the issue, I can't find anything that I can really believe would cause the "random" crashes that have been reported...

Anyway, sorry for the problems. I'm currently working with someone who reported the issue to try to figure out exactly what's going on and see if fixing the one other problem I've found improves things, so hopefully, I'll be able to get this resolved soon.

[gilbot]

I don't know about details, but I think the backup track is used when a read error (or some other things, like seeking for too long?) occurs.
Obviously when using a flashcard or running an image with emulators this won't happen (even if running a real CD in an emulator this probably won't happen because of better, modern drives).
This is a different story when you're using the old error-prone drive of a real PCE system.

[supper]

Jan 4, 2024 5:17:00 GMT gilbot said:

I don't know about details, but I think the backup track is used when a read error (or some other things, like seeking for too long?) occurs.
Obviously when using a flashcard or running an image with emulators this won't happen (even if running a real CD in an emulator this probably won't happen because of better, modern drives).
This is a different story when you're using the old error-prone drive of a real PCE system.

Certainly, and the fact that the untranslated backup track can be used will absolutely cause some kind of issue if it happens. But the thing is, the problem that people have encountered is that the game sometimes crashes while changing maps, and apparently at no other time. I know for a fact that the game only loads from disc one time during the map transitions where crashes have occurred. If a read error happens to occur there and the game loads from the backup track instead, it should simply load the untranslated version of the map, which will have gibberish text but should still load without issue (which is what happens when this is forced to occur in an emulator). No one has reported such a problem, just an outright crash when switching maps, which makes me think there must be something more to it. But I'm hard-pressed to imagine what, because I've spent many hours going over the changes I made to the map switching code and found nothing, aside from what I've already mentioned, that seems remotely relevant to CD loading issues.

I can't really imagine I've caused some kind of insane memory corruption that just happens to affect absolutely nothing but physical CD loading (and that only in one specific instance and only some of the time), but if I discount that possibility, there aren't many points of failure that could conceivably result in the reported problem. I'll just keep looking and hope that my unfortunate test subject reports that fixing the backup track problem actually solved everything. It's possible my understanding of how the BIOS uses the backup track is incorrect and it actually could somehow cause this crash; we'll just have to see what happens.