Xiados wrote:
I'll just leave this comment here. :]
Thank you to all, that put in work toward translating Mystic Ark. Growing up with a SNES, I was always a bit obsessed with my RPGs. I still remember purchasing my first import of Seiken Densetsu 3 back in '97 or '98 (I only recall being in middle school, really). Back then, it wasn't so simple. Calling up a company I saw in the back of a Gamefan magazine (I think the company was JapanVideoGames). It was at least $80 for the game alone. Those were good days, though.
7th Saga was always a favorite of mine. The different world music still lures my attention away to new ideas and fictional places. Thankfully, in just those few years when I discovered Mystic Ark, I was well versed in the ways of emulation and roms. And even by 2001, it was significantly easier to find imports on eBay. It's still one of two SNES games I've never attempted to part with, though I traded the system away back in 2006 (the other game being Brandish 2: The Planet Buster). And besides these other two mentioned here, MA is still one of the only games I've ever tried to play in its entirety despite having no idea what I was doing. I must have spent countless hours just in the first world, interacting with every NPC and object hundreds of times. I was only ever able to make it to where I currently passed in the translation: the third world. Specifically that simple forest! How many times I tried to find a walkthrough for... well, technically only two real directions. Yet, just those were never enough. I could still never get through it (after doing it, I would imagine it had to deal with being unable to realize I had to talk to certain NPCs yet again and find that page!).
This translation and being able to completely understand it (without trying to use the five years I "studied" Japanese with instruction from a shoddy college teacher) has truly become the highlight of these last few years. It hasn't been a great time: the burden of college (six years, "done," and I'm worse off than when I started), a serious relationship that fell apart suddenly, and the complete depression that has lingered continuously since late '06. Randomly looking on romhacking.net yesterday, I couldn't imagine how much of a positive effect finding this was going to be. I missed the part of my life where playing RPGs brought me genuine joy.
Again, thank you.
It sounds as though all of your experiences wrapped together match what some of us have gone through from time to time. Back in 2008, when I had a tough family situation for a while, initially, I turned away from an opportunity to help with
Lennus-II again. Later, when I rejoined the effort with Draken, Bongo`, and eventually Taskforce, I found this work to be part of the medicine I needed to deal with an issue that has since been resolved in a positive way. Heh, I wish NES/SNES RPGs had been around when my first wife and I split up years earlier! Maybe it would have taken my mind off of those worries for a while!
At any rate, you have a friendly place to come visit and talk about this activity you love doing. We have discovered that the magic still exists in these vintage games - in more ways than one. And, if you want to put that Japanese training to good use, I'm sure we can find something interesting to help you (and us) out, hee-hee...! Anyway,
MA is indeed a super game. When you get to the end, be sure to let the credits roll until you witness that final short scene that follows the credits.