Pia Carrot e Youkoso!! (Welcome to Pia Carrot!!) (PC-FX) [started 2-2-06]
Welcome to Pia Carrot is a much beloved dating sim that has been called "the best hentai game of all time". It has spawned two sequels, including various off-shoot versions, spanning a total of eight gaming platforms, including the PS2 and GBA. It was even made into an animated OAV series in 1997. I played the hell out of this game on the PC-FX. It was basically my first and only hentai dating-sim gaming experience and I loved it.
The PC-FX edition is distinguished by the fact that it has full cast voice acting and fully erotic pictures. The Windows/PC98 version apparently has the hentai images but with the main character visible (whereas the PC-FX version shows only the women) and to my knowledge is missing the voice acting. The Saturn version has no nudity at all, and includes an additional character. This is a classic in it's genre and one of the best. NOTE: A PC-FX emulator is forthcoming (finished)! Check out Magicengine.com for more info.
From the back cover:
- During your last summer break of high school you begin working at the family restaurant "Pia Carrot", famous for it's cute uniforms. Here you meet girls of various personalities. Raise the girls' interest in you by adjusting your parameters, and look forward to falling in love with your chosen girl in this simulation adventure game!!
- In order to get a happy ending with the girl of your choice, you must first reach the target parameters for that girl. Parameters like "appearance" "kindness" "determination" "infamy" and "conversation". "Conversation" is the key to influence the girl's interest in you!!
- There are 7 selectable jobs for you to perform such as "waiter", "cashier", or "line cook". The jobs you choose have a direct impact on your chances to meet others, and the enhacement of your strength, determination, etc... Many areas have been prepared where you can meet girls including the school, the local park, karaoke box, and a cocktail bar!!
- You choose which uniform the girls wear. Color and design variations can be chosen to your liking!!
Progress:
01-16-08 I recently got to check out a WIP build of WtPC courtesy of the distinguished Mr. Michel. There are still some technical issues to deal with before more of the script is inserted. The first few days of script are fully playable though and looking quite nice. I got to make a few small edits for some punctuation and a word change or two. Here's hoping it won't be long before more is playable.
11-04-07 I've completed a full play-through/edit of the script! This edit was to look for mistakes in the translation and to edit for wording and punctuation. I played through the game with all 8 girls through thier endings, as well as a "Rumi" play-through where I hit certain texts like talking to your father every day after work and the "doujin-games" that you can play, etc. So things are coming along very well.
Also, there has been some progress that I haven't reported here. David wrote a hack to shrink the font and inserted a chunk of the original script. More recently he's centered the text in the menus and fized some ugly formatting of text in the screens you get when you check the data about the various girls in the game.
06-06-07 It's been about 3 months since my last update, and I'm proud to announce the initial script translation is 100% complete! I'm doing some editing on it right now, but it looks like hacking will still take some time so there is no big rush. I'm really glad to have finally finished. It's been a long 16 months but I was so happy to work on this project so it was a joy to do. In the end, it cannot really live up to my expectations as something that was so full of wonder and mystery at one time, but I don't think anyone who plays it will be dissapoined. I'm truly grateful to have had the opportunity to translate this game after all these years. I hope that others will be able to experience even just a portion of the joy that this game has brought me once this project is finished.
A shot of Dave's test script insert from back in July
03-08-07 I've probably skipped some interim updates here, but I took a week off recently and did a lot of translation work. It basically breaks down like this, over the past 15 days I've translated an additional 12 script blocks beyond where I had gotten up to at that point. This should bring me to somewhere around the 80% mark towards completion of the script translation! I'm currently translating the events of August 21st in the game. The game ends on August 28th if that gives you an idea of the total progress. Granted, there is a lot of wrap-up and 50% or more of the dirty stuff happens near the end, but there is no doubt that the end is in sight.
12-23-06 Just a little more progress on this recently. Should be around the 36-38% mark on the script translation.
9-17-06 Well, I've been working a little more slowly on this project recenlty but things are still progressing. I just finished another two blocks whch offically brings me to the 33.3% mark or 1/3 of the way through the script! :P So much still to go. That is ok. This is a huge, even laughably enormous project that many fan translators in their right mind would not attempt. However D makes a good point that a huge script with character names is better than a smaller script without. There is always the need to be thankful for small blessings. Current rate of progress has me thinking summer next year is a fairly accurate estemate for completion, but one can never know for sure.
7-9-06 I've finished a number of blocks of text for this game recently. The text so far seems to be progressing by day, so with 36 days of your summer vacation that you play, including the prologue, I have about 14% of the text translated now. Many thanks to David Michel for getting rid of all game code in the script dumps and utilizing a text database to automatically insert character names during script dumping so I don't have to be bothered typing them over and over. Due to his going above and beyond I am able to translate much more quickly and efficiently on this project than would have been possible otherwise. Also thanks to Eien ni Hen for helping me out with a few tricky lines and for doing a great job on translating the opening theme song. Hacking-wise, the text routine is still being re-written by David to use a smaller font. Text is also being dumped as it is translated. There is still around 86% of the script left to go. :P There is still a long way to go on this project, but it's truly getting underway now.
Below is a mock-up of how it might look when the text routine is finished and the translated script is inserted. Cool eh? I just like to tease you.
5-24-06 I finished the second of an unknown number of blocks of text for this game. The estimated progress on the script translation is around 5%. So far all the prologue text as well as the text leading up to and including your first day of work is translated. I'm trying to approach this translation in more of a "professional" way; I intend to localize the game language as much as possible so as not to leave in Japanese honorifics and peculiarities that do not translate from one language to another. I'm still trying to be as accurate as possible to the story, so rest assured no liberties are being taken there, but just in terms of the language I'm giving myself leave to take liberties with the script to make it (hopefully) as polished and natural as something would get released by a big studio. Personally, I prefer games with a little bit of Japanese left in, but this is special and I want to take a special approach. I'd like to make a script that not just anime fans would like to play, but that anyone will really enjoy.
