For anyone here who also reads the PC 98 Appreciation thread, you may have seen
me talk about playing untranslated Japanese adventures after discovering RetroArch's "AI Service" feature. To briefly summarize, you hit a button and it places translated text atop your game screen. It was, surprisingly, not total shit and I wasn't expecting that. Looking further into things, I got even better results using Google's translate app on my phone and later on even better results with
an app called "DeepL."
The first game I tried out was an obscure PS1 adventure game named Aconcagua. I chose it because Aconcagua, according to what I've read, was Sony's attempt to capture the Argentinian market where the PS1 had become a surprise hit. For whatever reason because of this the game has full English VA for all its cut-scenes (you'd think Spanish, but I guess Argentina has a high English speaking population). I figured this game would make a good test case because even if the machine translations failed me I'd still have a decent idea of what was going on from the English cutscenes.
Well, as it turns out, the translations didn't fail me and were 80~90% easily comprehensible, with an unexpected number of them reading pretty naturally to boot. As it turns out, Aconcagua is actually a real hidden gem of a game. If Resident Evil is like a campy Japanese take on 80's American horror movies, Aconcagua is the same for action movies of the "Die Hard" or "Every Liam Neeson movie" variety. You just blow up a glorious amount of shit in this game. It also has some depth to it, featuring a Maniac Mansion-like character switching system, where you need to think about who does what or coordinate people at various hotspots to pull off team actions.
(some clips I took showing off Aconcagua's gameplay)
Well, after briefly clawing my way out from this rabbit hole with a Yakuza 0 playthrough (that game kicks ass btw), I'm back on my bullshit. Returning head-first into those depths, this time with no safety net, playing through the PC98 horror classic: Isaku.
Isaku is a game about 9 high school students who have been trapped in an old abandoned high school building that's located in the woods behind their actual school by a psycho janitor, aptly named Isaku. After being lured to the delipidated building with personalized anonymous letters, the students find the doors locked and occasionally notice a shadowy figure darting around, just out of view. You play as Kenta (a slacker everyman type, of course, slightly pervy), there's you best friend Jinpachi (a student reporter who has hidden microphones set up in faculty offices), Miyuki (who's sister was assaulted amidst rumors that Isaku is to blame), Akemi (friend of Kenta and Jinpachi who prefers older guys), Kotomi (the girl Kenta is desperately crushing on), Munemitsu (arrogant son of the administrator and Kotomi's childhood friend), Rika (a small, timid, girl who's desperately crushing on Kenta) and Mrs. Takashima (who was teaching their summer class).
(the whole gang, sans Kenta, who is off camera)
The game kind of reminds me of 999 without the over-the-top science fiction elements, to the point where I wonder if Kotaro Uchikoshi was directly inspired by this game. The common American point of comparison is Saw, but Isaku predates it by a good margin and it's probably more likely he played this. Just a thought. So far I'm having a lot of fun with the game. It's entertaining to see the characters slowly start to loose their cool, speculate how they could have wronged Isaku, and start to grow suspicious of one another. One scene in particular was really amusing. Mrs. Takashima recollects lending Isaku a handkerchief then quickly throwing it out because she wouldn't use it again after gross ass Isaku touched it. Akemi speculates Isaku would have noticed the handkerchief while cleaning the staff room and taken it as an insult, so
that must be the reason why he trapped them all lol.
Munemitsu is a favorite character of mine. He's your archetypical arrogant and spoiled child of privilege, but how hard he freaks out over the smallest things is hilarious. At this point I've solved two floors worth of Isaku's riddles (3 to go) and have basically been the only one helping the helping the group escape. Despite that, Munemitsu gets so triggered when anyone says so much as "thank you" to Kenta that he'll go from taking credit for it, accusing Kenta of lying, lashing out Kotomi for no reason, to randomly growling about the futility of trying anything at all within seconds. I kinda wish there was more variation to the artwork during these parts but it's still hilarious.
(what if "the thinker" was really Isaku painted bronze?)
The puzzles have been decent so far and are ramping up with each new floor I unlock. The artwork is some of the best I've seen from the PC-98 era of Japanese computer games and was one of the biggest initial reasons I became curious about this game. It's developed by Elf who also made YU-NO and many other notable games of the era. Despite the dark subject matter, it's actually tame by comparison to YU-NO, there's been no 18+ content so far. There's the occasional gratuitous panty shot, of course, but nothing beyond that so far. There's, apparently, also multiple endings depending on the choices you make/if you can save everyone. I haven't had anyone die so far, so fingers crossed. One big let-down is the OST, for all of YU-NO's faults the godly OST was a major saving grace. So far in Isaku it's just one "eerie" ambient track that's not very memorable.
On the translation front things have been going way better than I would have thought. Especially after finding out about the DeepL app I mentioned before. It uses a different method of machine learning than G-Translate. Won't pretend to know the science behind it but in effect it's more interpretive, much better at parsing the context of a passage, and avoids common mistakes like messing up pronouns which G-Translate is prone to do. It also has a feature where you can click on any individual word and see likely homonyms. Which is crazy useful when somethings just a bit off. Some crucial features are missing compared to Google's app, like scanning an image for characters with your phone's camera. But between the two of them I've gone from the 80~90% understandable in Aconcagua to basically 99% perfectly understandable in Isaku. With the bulk of translations reading fairly natural.
(example of a particularly bad Google translation that was much better in DeepL)
I'm really impressed that the technology has come to the point where I can play stuff like this with relative ease. Just an extra button press or two (or four for the instances where I tab into DeepL) with my phone on its stand and I'm off to the races. Obviously it's not perfect, but it's actually pretty damn good and I imagine these apps will only get better over time. Honestly for how useful they are, it's a bit ridiculous they're both free. Not that I'm complaining.
In any case, Isaku is a fun game so far and it looks like things will start to get a lot crazier from where I'm at. Miyuki's been setting off some alarm bells.
www.gog.com
