I had my sight on “France Shoujo ~Une Fille Blanche~”, and this thread only increased my interest for it. Shall wait for the first few reviews before I acquire it, though. 
I’ll write a few paragraphs myself once I’ve played it - can’t really promise to finish it first, though! =P
I see what you did there. And this would be an eroge I approve of, if John was the name given to a girl, because she’s so hawt she could have a boy’s name and get away with it. 8) :twisted:
Took me awhile to figure it out, but I just realized it when I started translating a file for work just now. Japanese can be “wordier” than English. It takes more to convey something in Japanese than it does in English. [u]Lord of the Rings[/u] is almost 10 times “longer” in Japanese than it is in English. It’s not accurate to compare the file size of a Japanese eroge’s text dump to the file size of an English epic’s text dump. Translate that eroge into English, then translate that epic into Japanese. You’ll get a much more accurate comparison.
Use more than one translation as well, and calculate a mean average from that, since some translators are minimalists and others are embellishers. Neither are wrong: just different methods of translations.
The other deal is multiple routes and/or alternative choices. Imagine if LotR had the same. All we got was a Frodo and Aragorn route. What about a Gandalf and Gollum route? Story would explode by incredible magnitude, even if the main plot remained exactly the same, because each of these characters had their own adventures not even covered - not to mention a totally different prospective of how events played out. The Silmarillion (the LotR fandisc 
) is proof of that. Because the presentation methods are different, it creates a huge variation in the content.
To use that cliche phrase: comparing apples to oranges (which is a logical fallacy 
).
Someone should make a LotR eroge, eh? :twisted:
There are a lot of fanfictions, and they do include all kinds of SomeCharacter’s routes. :roll:
There are how many eroge RPGs out there? The ‘stock fantasy setting’ everybody is so fond of is basically ripping off Lord of the Rings anyway, right?
But your point does address why the scripts would be so enormous, except that it doesn’t seem to jive with my own (limited) experience with the language, and my experience when I was editing Tsukihime - the translated line was right next to the raw text in the files I was working on, and they were roughly comparable in size most of the time. Certainly not 10:1.
Still, either that is the explanation, or these numbers don’t mean what we think they mean, and it DOES include stuff that’s not actually text.
Doesn’t have to be 10:1 ratio - just pointing out that it can be that extravagant. There’s a reason why Speed Racer and Gigantor cartoons, as well as old unedited Japanese cinema, wasted so much time talking about nothing or repeating the same thing over and over in the English versions (which Mojo Jojo from PPG makes fun of).
No idea how the Type-Moon engine works: but were there text limitations? For example one of my first translations with console gaming, involved making things fit. If the Japanese dialog file had 10KB of text, we couldn’t exceed that 10KB of text or the engine would error out. If a character explained something it 10 sentences, we had to explain it in 10 sentences or less. No one wanted to reprogram the game engine, since it would take too much time and money - and there was no source code provided anyways. Text size matched up, because we HAD to make it match up. The translation wasn’t as good as it could have been, because of this limitation. Therefore sometimes things were omitted, reworded, or resorted. I learned more about Thesauruses than I ever wanted to know.
Great number of 8bit and 16bit generation fanlations, run into this problem quite frequently. Then you get the whole problem of the Japanese cheating with kanji and character space. Futakoi is written with 2 characters in Japanese via kanji and 5 if hiragana; it takes 7 of them in English through just romaji, with an actual translation of Twin Love taking 9 with the space). You’ll still note how English version of a game can still accurately translate a story, with such massive problems, in the same amount of space. Try taking 1MB of an English technical manual, and properly translating that into 512KB of Japanese (kanji can only go so far), but pulling it off with only 384KB. Basically the same deal in reverse.
It’s really not a rule that Japanese or English is longer… not exactly… just that the two languages have enough differences to make direct comparisons of text dumps, worth examining closer.
I was referencing this comment. Apples to apples. I guess we can attribute these huge bounds in written productivity to cutting edge breakthroughs in writing technology? I knew I should’ve been an English major…
Sohachi Yamaoka still only has one “route” so to speak. How many does Elfen Blaze have?
I’ll get Elfen Blaze and do a text dump of dialog file. I’m going to bet the 17.3 MB includes more than just the script.
Are you a bad enough dude to reverse-engineer rUGP? =P
So long as it’s not encrypted. Most use something stupid like 0xFF XOR’ing or some offset trick. They aren’t the CIA or KGB.
Text dumping is surprisingly easy - packing the stuff back up: now that’s the hard part.
Plus it seems rUGP has been out there for a while, and people already have toys for it.
EDIT
Some random info about LotR in Japanese. Just for more reference. Again: things aren’t always like this. But it happens. :o
LOTR in Japanese - just too many volumes?
It’s not Japanese being ‘longer’ than English OR English being ‘longer’ than Japanese - the expansion of text is exclusively a product of the translation.
Japanese works flawlessly translated to English will generally be longer in the English form. English works translated to Japanese will generally be longer in the Japanese form. How much so seems to be mostly a product of the kind of writing - for example, Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, when translated to Japanese, filled 2,500 manuscript pages. That’s just one book, mind, and it was probably less than 600 in English.
Not necessarily. Its said that literature is translated under 8 linguistic methods: adaptive, communicative, faithful, free, idiomatic, literal, semantic, and word for word. Which of the 8 methods are used, generally dictates the product of the ultimate work (the systems already factors items such as embellishment and minimalist). Since translation is akin to an art, and not a hard science, there’s no hardcore means of measurement ¬ñ thus the 8 systems are fairly fluid. However they’re distinct and can be determined with comparisons.
In written context, Japanese uses both logograms and phonograms (with mandatory syllabic). English is purely phonogram (without strict syllabic). This inherently gives Japanese a space advantage, in regards to character space in written form. However Japanese is also more morphological: therefore [u]IT IS LONGER[/u] than English for expression and detailing. IIRC it’s agglutinative with a lot of synthetic properties… or maybe its the other way around… been awhile. It gets more complex than that, and I’d have to get my textbooks or hunt for links on the Intarwebs to break it down even further: but Japanese is “wordier” (this is a loose term and for lack of something better) than English during general translation between the two.
That’s just a property of Japanese in comparison to English. I’m told English suffers the same problems when compared to Arabic, and that Naskh can conserve space like nobody’s business. Although I doubt we’ll see an eroge in Arabic anytime soon, so I won’t be able to test that out for myself.
Yes, Japanese is an agglutinative language, and according to Wikipedia, classifies as “rather synthetic”:
where exactly is this game?
Its been a while and I dont see it on age’s homepage
Still no announcement for it, as far as I can tell, beyond the initial event and the first mention in the news thing on age’s site way back.
you know how age is with webpage maintenance though =P
I really don’t ,mind explaining…
I think Lancer-X means that age (as with Key, Type/MOON and possibly one or two other eroge companies) can get away with not updating their sites regularly (with useful information), for in some cases years.
http://blogs.dion.ne.jp/dee1208/archives/7995209.html
So,I guess this really isn’t going to be the Infinite Jest of eroge.
Oh well.
Really, 17mb is just ridiculous anyway. I’m not surprised it’s the script. Oh well, still looking forward to it because this writer wrote the Ashita no Yukinojou games.
I suppose the title of Longest Eroge Ever remains with France Shoujo.