Once upon a time, a young boy of a mere twenty-seven years played an obscure otomege that he could only get by downloading the russian-language release and disabling the patch. He found it strangely charming, even if it had its weak points. So he decided he’d maybe translate it in like 2035 or something lmao.

The name of that game was Ichigo & Kyuugo.

So okay intermission, what the fuck is I&K about? Well basically Ichigo really loves Kyuugo, to the point where she’s proposing marriage to him during everyday conversation out of some desperate desire to get him to not diss her. Kyuugo, however, is having none of it. So naturally, Ichigo escalates even further – in one of several ways. There’s quite a lot of amusing quotable lines, and hopefully we’ve kept that aspect intact in our translation…

…That’s right, we’re releasing a translation riiiiight now. You can download it using this extremely large link that looks like it belongs on a warez site, if you missed the other one up top.

Rama tells me I have to say it had 4 endings and a 10-15 minute playtime so uhh consider that information delivered… Oh yeah this also has the russian patch file in if you happen to want that one, consider it preservation because I think the release is only available from the Internet Archive these days. If it not be like that, it’ll happen with time anyway.



Okay, end intermission, it’s time for TRANSLATION HISTORY.

So fast forward a few years and Hata keeps bugging me about translating shit so I half meme half seriously get the scripts out of the game and in order and put up a translation sheet. Because Hata is an ADHD-ridden wreck he does precisely 0 out of like 300 lines (sasuga).

Some time passes, and I mention my predicament of having put in like an hour’s work plus into this shit to my good friend and fellow memer Ramaladni. He expresses interest in translating, I pick up the TLC slack to cover for his lesser experience in moon-rune decryption, and not being Hata he actually does his job. Being Zaka, I eventually actually also do my job, though it takes a fair amount of time. In the meantime I’ve brought on a certain anonymous person to edit the thing, which he finally does after waiting for approximately 6 months or something. Never let it be said that I am not patient. Also never let it be said that I am not a patient. I have diabetes. And autism. And I think I might have pernicious anemia or some shit rn but let’s not get too depressing okay?

Anyway, the most frustrating part of this project was actually a weird text alignment problem because of a misdesigned button template, combined with our general image editing incompetence. Blood, sweat and tears were shed to stop the text from jumping northwest when moused over.

The most satisfying part was completely disregarding the original INTENT of the creators and lowering the ear-splitting volume of the bgm. That or fixing their godawful ending screens that display for like 0.5 seconds for no reason. Can nobody in doujin vns script their way out of a paper bag? Honest fuckin question I swear to god.

But enough about me. What does my sla… translator friend have to say about the experience?

Hi, I’m Ramaladni and I am the translator for Ichigo & Kyuugo. Even if it’s a short game, we worked very hard on it, so I hope you’ll enjoy it. Finally I can be free from Zaka’s tyranny…just kidding…haha. While Zaka was moderately strict on me, it was also a great learning experience, so I’m grateful for it. We did our best to make it the most enjoyable experience, so do have fun!

Okay, the editor tho?

hello I’m <censored> and I am an alcoholic

fair enough, dude.

Patch credits:

TRANSLATION TEAM

Ramaladni – TL, Image editing, QC

Zakamutt – TLC, “Hacking”, Project lead, Autism, QC

HMN – Palestinian TLC

ホモ達くん – Editor

Deep Blue – Image editing some of the harder stuff

UtenaBabe (Michelle) – QC

SPECIAL THANKS

Beatrice – you know what you did ❤ looking forward to that story you’re never writing my man

Konoko, whatever the fuck his actual name is now – tips on how to do some tricky text editing

Jay Riley @jayrileymusic – Much like me, you will never know just what this man did for this project, but his music is p. cool so have a listen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vLEDUQzLiU

The russian TL team – converting all the system files to utf-16 LE so I didn’t have to also maybe word wrapping code idk lol

RESOURCES

UI Font – Wagnasty (http://www.jlwagner.net)

The kami BGM 夏の思い出 – DOVA-SYNDROME（http://dova-s.jp/）