Grandia: Digital Museum Gets a Translator

At last, a translator is on board the effort to turn Grandia: Digital Museum’s script into English, according to the project lead.

TrekkiesUnite118 posted Wednesday on SegaXtreme that Wiredcrackpot has agreed to translate Grandia: Digital Museum, a Saturn-exclusive disc released by GameArts only in Japan in May 1998.

The disc features a gallery of production artwork, a radio drama with a new story that’s not in the original Grandia, a bestiary and save files that can be used to replay the original game’s most famous moments.

Saturn fans know Wiredcrackpot’s work well — over the last few years, she’s worked on many translation patches, including Silhouette Mirage, Death Crimson 2, Jung Rhythm, Mobile Suit Gundam, Tama and Hissatsu, as well as the in-progress Sword and Sorcery patch.

“If I had to take a guess about 75% of the game’s script is translated now in a first draft state,” Trekkies said in the post. “I want to be clear here this is my best guess, DO NOT TAKE THIS TO MEAN THE PATCH IS 75% DONE! There’s still quite a bit of work to be done.”

He said he’s injected about half of what Wiredcrackpot has translated so far into the game and it appears to be stable.

“Wiredcrackpot has also been at work translating a lot of the museum content such as the monster books, the arcade games, the concept art menus, etc. I’ve been working on getting those inserted as they get translated,” Trekkies said. “The two remaining technical hurdles for this content are the Audio Dramas and the Save Data descriptions.”

Trekkies, as many know, is no stranger to Saturn translation projects. Besides the Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers patch he’s been working on for a few years, he also hacked the official English script into Grandia, he was on the team that brought the community the Sakura Wars and Sakura Wars 2 localizations, and he released translations of the Floppy Disk Operator Disc and Sega Ages: I Love Mickey Mouse/I Love Donald Duck Collection.

Grandia: Digital Museum’s title screen logo was edited into English by Trekkies’ fellow Sakura Wars collaborator, Joqu, who worked on those patches’ art modifications. Trekkies said Joqu will make new logos for the minigame title screens and edit any other art that needs it, too. Here’s how the work-in-progress title screen looks:

“For those thinking this might look a bit plain, this is actually based on the official English logo for Grandia Digital Museum,” Trekkie said. “This logo is used on the spine of the original Japanese box:”

Racing the AI

Trekkies is full speed ahead on Grandia: Digital Museum in an effort to finish it before a rival project does. That rival project uses Claude, a large-language model AI often used in coding tasks.

AngelouCurator posted July 6 on SegaXtreme about their attempt to hack a translation into the disc using Claude and uploaded an Xdelta patch to GitHub. It’s unfinished and hasn’t been updated since July 13.

“I recognize that this may be controversial and if a more polished community effort comes together I will be happy to reference that as the canonical approach,” they said in the post.

Despite that, community reaction in the thread was overwhelmingly negative.

“Going to be honest, this patch comes off as very bad faith based, not even commenting on the AI portion of it either,” Londonbeckett said.

“It’s OK to use AI as a placeholder and to test the behaviour of your hacks but I don’t think many would be interested in a full release like this,” Ardiloso said.

Trekkies’ effort to translate Grandia: Digital Museum predates this new AI-led one by four years — it was started in July 2022. In last month’s thread, Trekkies said AngelouCurator hadn’t reached out to him. He also pointed out that AngelouCurator used tools Trekkies released on GitHub for translating the game and took umbrage with it.

“That means I am the sole copyright owner of that code,” he said in the thread. “That means you can’t use it without my permission. Your repos are clearly downloading my GitHub repo externally and referencing it with Java calls in your python scripts. You are also clearly feeding my code and documentation into your Claude prompts.”

AngelouCurator did not respond publicly.

So now Wiredcrackpot is helping Trekkies to finish his patch before AngelouCurator finishes theirs. Unfortunately, Trekkies is sacrificing time that would have been spent on his Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers patch to work on Grandia: Digital Museum instead.

“My intention was to focus all attention on Digital Museum and getting a translator after Soul Hackers was done since Soul Hackers was making more progress,” Trekkies said in his post. “Unfortunately the AI slop patch threw a wrench at that, as like it or not I’m now in a race with it to get the game done. While I’m happy I now have a translator, it also means all my attention is now on Digital Museum and Soul Hackers is going to the back burner.”

Before setting Soul Hackers aside, Trekkies said it recently hit some major milestones, such as being able to fully complete the game without crashing. A couple minor issues remain before proceeding with implementing a variable-width font, the last thing he intends to do before releasing the patch.