I don't think knowing Japanese is obligatory to play Zeroigar though as it's pretty English speaker-friendly (it's a shmup).

August 10, 2015, 10:20:45 pm - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)

While I mostly agree on the surface level, the quality of the hacking required to get this fan-translation as good-looking as it got (The subtitles layed below the lossless video is something I wish could've been done for some parts of the Pia Carrot PC-FX fan translation, and something I hope will be the approach for future ones.) makes it exceptional regardless.

As a shmup ... you can certain force yourself to play through Zeroigar without understanding the story, not knowing the weapon names, and not having much of a clue about the Experience/Level system ... but it's a pretty hollow experience.At least, it was for me when I tried it and gave it up as something not worth the effort.I can only think of it as if you were playing the game deaf and color-blind ... you're missing a lot.But once you can actually understand these things ... and enjoy the story that the developers created, and why you're actually fighting ... then I think that this might be the most-enjoyable shmup that I've ever played.It's not the most challenging, it's not the most beautiful, it's not the most technically accomplished ... those particular honors can go to other games.But, to me, it is quite possibly the most enjoyable.When I could actually see SamIAm's translation and understand the story, I grew to love the game.I've not, personally, played another shmup that's anything quite like it.To then complete it, and so to unlock the delightfully strange Sakuraigar Mode, and to get a brilliantly different take on the story ... was magical.(BTW, we translated that, too, hacking in a complete soft-subtitling system where none had existed before.)I do hope that you'll find a lot more enjoyment in the game, now that you can understand it.We were getting a small, but noticable, quality loss when we recompressed the video with the subtitles, and we were also getting occasional noisy artefacts on the subtitles themselves.Those videos were also really straining the limits of the CDs bandwidth.It was necessary to understand the compressed mjpeg video down to the level of the individual matrix components in order to losslessly rearrange the existing video without any recompression, and to then add on the subtitle data.That wouldn't have been possible without the work done by David Michel in creating the Magic Engine FX emulator, and his generously passing that knowledge on to Rypheca for Mednafen.Even though there is no standardized container format for the video on the PC-FX, and so games have subtle or major differences in how they store their video, I believe that the basic knowledge, tools and techniques are now there to extract and hard-sub almost any PC-FX video.That doesn't mean that it will be easy ... or that it will be easy to rewrite a game's CD to put it back afterwards. But it should be possible.I certainly do hope that people who don't understand Japanese, will someday have the opportunity to understand the stories of a few more PC-FX games.