Metroid Prime 2: Google Translate Edition

[kkzero]

NOTE: This mod was made for the original version of the game. If you're seeking a Trilogy version patch, see here.

METROID PRIME 2

GOOGLE TRANSLATE EDITION

Yes, it's finally here. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, but all the text is ran through several languages of Google Translate and back to English. The journey through Light and Darkness has never been better.

Download

[spoiler=Screenshots!]
[/spoiler]

[spoiler=Notice]Mods of this nature have a reputation of being extremely funny. While I cannot guarantee that this mod is objectively hilarious, please be prepared for the case in which you lose your breath, cause your face to hurt, etc.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Patching]Two options exist for patching;

1. The xdelta option -- An xdelta patch for the North American Metroid Prime 2 is included.
This was from the original release of this hack in 2019, and works with clean, unscrubbed isos only.
It was made using xdelta UI. Use any other xdelta variant at your own discretion.

2. The batch file option -- It's 2021 now, and my code/hax skills have drastically improved.
As a result, I've made a patching option that will work with pretty much any usable North American Metroid Prime 2 iso, scrubbed or not.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED FOR OPTION 2
-Your iso dump of the game.
-The contents of the "patch" folder in this zip.

THE STEPS FOR OPTION 2
1. 1. Launch step1-extractfiles.bat, and enter the name or path of your iso. Proceed to 2 if nodtool reports a Success.
   TIPS:
   -Enclose the path in double quotes ("") if it has spaces.
   -In fact, it might be more helpful to just move the iso to the folder this is in so you can just type the filename.
2. Launch step2-patchfiles.bat. If all goes well, you're good to proceed to 3. Optionally, you may just launch main.dol in Dolphin to play if you're emulating.
3. Launch step3-reinsertfiles.bat. If all goes well, then "mp2-gte.iso" will appear in the "patch" folder, and you can now play this hack.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Changelog]Version 1.0 (No changes, rerelease) - August 18th, 2021
Added new batch patcher. Woohoo!

Version 1.0 - February 17th, 2019
Initial release. Have fun![/spoiler]
[spoiler=Q&A]Q&A

Q: Wh-what is this?!
A: I just told you, Metroid Prime 2 scrambled through several iterations of Google Translate

Q: Why...?
A: Because I can.
Also it was quite anticipated after I did Prime 1.

Q: You WHAT?
A: Yeah.

Q: Give me a little bit of background as to how you got into this.
A: It all began last year, watching Vargskelethor stream Leurak's Google-Translated Pokemon Yellow. It inspired me to try this sort of thing out myself. Thus, I decided to tackle Metroid Fusion, because a) it's not very text-heavy, and b) I felt like a nobody just sitting in the Metroid hacking community not doing anything.
The people who played it really liked it. This encouraged me to do it again. My next target was Prime 1. Trying to get that started was rather painstaking, but I eventually got onto it, and spent much of the summer working on that.
I released that to an even bigger success. 5+ people have streamed it as of the current time. Positive reactions were flying in. It was beautiful.
With that, I knew people were gonna be waiting for a Prime 2 translate.

Q: So apparently you started this back in August. How come it took so long to make this one?
A: Various reasons. For one, I felt rather unhappy with how the GUI text turned out comparted to Prime 1 at the very beginning. Additionally, school started soon after I began Prime 2, so that took even more time out of doing this. Also, interests were shifting left and right from this time, from more traditional romhacking to trying out new games and more.
But, eventually, I picked up the pace on the project, and drilled through all the text. And now, it's finally here.

Q: What happened to all the good lines from Prime 1 like Kill the Battlefield?
A: That ain't how this works. I do totally new translations every game, even for one so similar to its prequel.

Q: You changed the Warning Health/Safety screen? But...Prime World Editor can't import textures!
A: Yes, it can. It can do .dds files with no mipmaps. But this was a pain to figure out. Eventually, I got my way by using a program called DXTViewer to export pngs as dds. Event then, though, I had to change a byte in the exported file so that PWE's importer would accept the texture for conversion.
Oh, and I also had to flip the image upside down for its ingame orientation to be correct.

Q: There's things you still didn't translate.
A: Oh, you mean the FMVs in the menu and all? Yyyyeeeeaaaaahhhhh, that's outside my skill level. Sorry.

Q: This isn't Google Translated.
A: Stop.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Special Thanks]Nintendo and Retro Studios - Creation of this childhood favorite game of mine.
Metroid hacking community - Providing the plethora of documentation and tools on how to modify these games.
Aruki - This guy's the MAN. He's done quite a lot for Metroid Prime modding, with the creation of PakTool, STRGEditor, and Prime World Editor. Without any of these, this would not have been possible.
SkaillZ - His Text Obfuscator was utilized for some of the translations.
Employees Have Moved / RNG Source's Book of Mario community - This new community encouraged me to push foward and finish this translate in the end. [/spoiler]

[eN-t]

Thank you so much for these. I've played through both MP1 and MF Google Translate Editions and I loved them - especially Metroid Prime, because in Fusion it seemed to have translated most of the lines separately which lead to less in-depth texts.

Can't wait to play this one.

I have a question for you: do you think it would be possible to mod more games like this? I'd love to see Zelda titles because of their massive amount of text. If you could share your ways and tools, I'd gladly give it a shot myself, even though I have near zero experience in modding games. The most important part would be how you translate the texts. Do you have a tool to Google Translate, or a script so it's now done by hand? That'd seem like it'd take months per game. Which languages do you run it through, roughly?

Thank you again!

[kkzero]

Thank you so much for these. I've played through both MP1 and MF Google Translate Editions and I loved them - especially Metroid Prime, because in Fusion it seemed to have translated most of the lines separately which lead to less in-depth texts.

Can't wait to play this one.

I have a question for you: do you think it would be possible to mod more games like this? I'd love to see Zelda titles because of their massive amount of text. If you could share your ways and tools, I'd gladly give it a shot myself, even though I have near zero experience in modding games. The most important part would be how you translate the texts. Do you have a tool to Google Translate, or a script so it's now done by hand? That'd seem like it'd take months per game. Which languages do you run it through, roughly?

Thank you again!

No problem. It's the players like you that have kept me doing these.

To answer your question, yes, it's definitely possible to do Google Translate mods of other games. Text files in games generally aren't too hard to take apart and modify, and there are plenty of times where they're even just regular .txt files. Some games might even have tools already if that's not the case.

In doing my translations, I often throw the texts into vanilla Google Translate and throw them through multiple languages manually. I generally find this method better able to create consistently good bad translations. Another tool I sometimes use is Text Obfuscator when I really want to get something quick. I generally don't rely on this, though, as it's prone to locking out for several hours after around 5 translates. You could probably use a VPN or something of the like to get around that, but due to security concerns with just any free VPN, I personally don't rely on that.

The languages I end up going to most include Amharic, Arabic, Hawaiian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Pashto, Persian, Hebrew, and Maori. Latin also works, but is prone to totally ruining grammatical sense in the text, and I only recommend it for short phrases or words that don't need that sort of coherence.

Additionally, if you're dealing with standard text files, use Notepad++ and not regular Notepad--it has more tools and is better-suited to carefully modifying more complex texts.

And that should be just about all the basics for how I Google Translate games.

[eN-t]

Damn, knowing you do these by hand is even more amazing. That really must take months. But it sure shows in the end results - at least in MP1, as I said MF was sadly a little disappointing because of that one-line kinda "issue". But MP1 had me laughing so much, and I hope MP2 will be just as awesome :)