Aitakute is talking in English

Since the last update, Aitakute has gone from reinserted Japanese to actual English on screen.

The font

Aitakute was built for Japanese, where every character gets the same square space. English squeezed into those squares looks oddly spaced and runs out of room fast, so Claude and I rebuilt the game's text drawing around a variable-width font. Letters now sit at their natural widths in dialogue, name boxes, menus, and pop-up messages.

Seeing the first line of proportional English show up in the emulator was a dream I've had since this game came out!

The script

Every scenario file on both discs now includes English: roughly 78,000 lines of preliminary draft translation, which I'm going through and editing by hand. About 60 lines are still too long for their space and stay in Japanese for now. To make room, common letter combinations get packed into single bytes, and the English ends up about a quarter smaller than the original Japanese.

Menus and screens

In English now:

The title screen and the file screens, stat names included Name entry, birthday, blood type and the confirmation screen The personality questionnaire before the prologue Disc swap and memory card messages Item names, and the nicknames the girls call you The whole prologue This week's fixes

I sat down to play Yurika's route and found things to fix right away:

A memory card message still had a line of Japanese at the top. That line and about 20 more like it are English now. Name entry was holding typed letters as "pending" text, a leftover from the Japanese input system, where you type hiragana and then convert it to kanji. Letters go straight into your name now. The Yes highlight on the name confirmation screen was too small for the word. Menu boxes size themselves to the English text now. The nickname change screen, the loading messages on the title screen and the save prompt after an ending are in English too. What's next

More playing. I'm working through Yurika's route and polishing the translation as I go. There's no patch to download yet; when there is, it'll be announced here on Second Button.