Issue #1: Translating Boku
A beloved Japanese franchise has so far eluded English localization. But a group of fans has begun translating one of its most cherished entries.
This is the first issue of Fan Service: a newsletter about fan communities that are preserving, remixing, and mythologizing their favorite games.
In the summer of 2000, Sony Computer Entertainment released Boku no Natsuyasumi on the Sony Playstation. The game’s title translates in English to My Summer Vacation and follows the adventures of the titular nine year old boy Boku visiting his uncle's house in rural Japan. Although that game and its sequels have developed something of a cult following outside of Japan, an English language translation — official or otherwise — remains unavailable for Boku and its sequels. Today, you’ll learn about the ongoing journey to translate one of those games.
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Boku no Natsuyasumi is a game defined by minutiae and nuance. In journalist Tim Rogers’ excellent (and verbose) six-plus hour YouTube review, he argues that there are few, if any games, quite like it. “Boku no Natsuyasumi shows us a game where the most violent event occurs in a samurai TV show you can only hear — not see — if you happen by the television in the family living room.”
The game and its three direct sequels are devoid of action setpieces or emotionally manipulative moments. Instead, a gentle narrative unfolds over 31 in-game calendar days. In that time, the player will wander through the wilderness, catch bugs, solve very basic puzzles, and learn about the lives of everyone in the immediate circle of the titular nine-year old Boku. As Rogers notes, this is a game with very little gami-ness. “Boku no Natsuyasumi shows us a game whose unlockable-achievementless, modest expanses, deepest mysteries…involve making your two female cousins -- one older, one younger -- trust you enough to open up about their insecurities.”
While the original Boku was a modest hit in Japan, its lack of an English localization could probably be attributed in equal parts to its clear lack of market-tested appeal (this is still a difficult game to categorize) and its cultural specificity. For years, a group of fans have been working on an English translation of the original game’s PSP port. That project is still ongoing; but another translation team led by a creator known as Hilltop has set out to translate the Playstation 2 follow-up to that game, Boku no Natsuyasumi 2: Umi no Bouken-hen.
“Boku 2 is the best game in the series,” says Hilltop. The game takes place in a small Japanese coastal town; Hilltop himself lives on the West coast of Canada. “A lot of the little sights and sounds are nostalgic for me personally,” he says. “And nostalgia plays a big, big element in these games.”
Hilltop is a relative newcomer to the fan translation scene, releasing his first project in 2021. But for as long as he can remember, he’s had an interest in games with bold, colorful art styles, citing Megaman Legends as an early inspiration. Many of the games that interested him were unavailable to play in English. His first project was the translation of Dr. Slump, a game based on a manga from Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama. The project wasn’t just Hilltop’s introduction to fan projects, it was also a crash course in game development. “ I spent maybe a month making no actual progress, but learning just how video games work in general,” he says. “Video games are difficult. They’re complex…they might be some of the most complicated human inventions ever made.” Hilltop’s Dr. Slump translation, and subsequent work translating games like Racing Lagoon and Harmful Park, were well received by the translation community.
While games like Animal Crossing or maybe even Stardew Valley share some of the appeal of a series like Boku no Natsuyasumi — a reverence and appreciation of nature, a fascination with the pedestrian — its the series’ setting and nuanced writing that looms so large in the mind of those who have played it. “The series’ main charm,” writes Eduardo Baccarini, “resides in the way it gives players the liberty to have a personally crafted summer experience, be it that they base it on their own childhood experiences or that they, much as I did, get to live the mundane magic of Japanese summer for the first time.”
Hilltop says the writing and dialogue share that kind of subtlety — making this a particularly challenging translation. “The writing in these games is extremely, extremely strong, and is the primary thing that pulls you through these games,” he says. “You want to know what happens to these characters and how [they] intersect.”
While the term “fan translation” conjures images of writers pouring over text files, some of the most challenging work happens on the programming side. One early obstacle on Boku 2 was central to the success of the project: making readable English text appear properly on the screen.
In the original game, Japanese characters are displayed vertically at the edge of the frame:
“The way the text originally works is… after every letter, you jump down, let's say, 20 pixels, and then you jump down another 20 pixels, then you jump on another 20 pixels,” he explains. “Well, say you change that to go from left to right. So you have a letter, and then you jump 20 pixels to the right, and you have another letter — and so on and so forth. Your text would look terrible if you did that.”
“If you're going to want to translate this game, you're going to have to dive deep into the assembly code and rewrite the way that this game renders text, says Hilltop. “And that's what I did.”
A similar reconstruction needs to happen with other kinds of text in the game. Much of a video game’s text is embedded in its art assets, which means translating that text requires altering the actual images. Take, for example, the drawings Boku composes at the end of each day. There are about 120 images in total. Because these are images and not text, this is a photoshop job rather than a changing-the-code job. You can see how the team has tackled that below, taking great care to preserve the game’s “handwritten” text aesthetic.
A translator is also tasked with the job of localization, meaning making culturally specific references legible for your intended audience. There are lots of examples of commercial studios scrubbing away cultural specificity in order to better appease an American audience, especially in the early and mid 2000’s. But specificity defines the aesthetics and narrative beats of Boku. Hilltop says many of the game’s branded food products are actually real world licensed products. “That's the kind of stuff that we've been diving into and making sure that we're really translating correctly,” says Hilltop.
Boku 2’s beetle wrestling mini game is another example of the kind of hyper-specificity the team has to be careful about properly translating. They realized that both the aesthetics and language of the mini-game mimicked the presentation of a broadcasted sumo match. “All the language that they use with the insect sumo are real sumo terms,” says Hilltop. “So we're actually making sure that that presentation and the style of how those techniques are named, and how the fonts are presented as well, is just like how sumo is broadcast in English.”
There is currently no time-table for completion of the Boku 2 translation project: another sign, to me, that it might actually be finished. During a recent Twitch stream, Hilltop showed off his progress on the project. The stream included a showcase of the game’s fully translated opening FMV sequence, as well as the way the game displays its new text horizontally at the bottom of the screen.
He also made a big announcement: there will be two English patches released for the game when the project is finished. One will be written in a more localized English style. The other patch, referred to as the “Japanese immersion” patch, will incorporate Japanese honorifics and generally be more liberal with cultural specificity.
You can follow progress on the project on Hilltop’s Twitter and the project’s official Discord channel.
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MORE:
✨ Read writer Ray Barnholt’s Scroll #10, a zine all about Boku No Natsuyasumi ✨
✨ Watch Tim Rogers’ review of Boku No Natsuyasumi✨
✨ Read Wes Fenlon’s write-up of another Hilltop translation, Racing Lagoon ✨
✨ Play Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation, often referred to the “spiritual successor” of Boku No Natsuyasumi ✨
If you want to share a project with me or talk to me about this newsletter, email me at vracovino at gmail.com.