I've been thinking on this project for a long time, and I think now it's time to make it public.
During my Shenmue II Spanish Translation, I've encountered, what I think, all the changes based on censorship for the Overseas Edition of S2:
- Baby Jesus's image on the Virgin Mary in the Moon Child Convent.
- The cassette tape's change.
- All of Yuan's references, both in voice and when asking the people of Kowloon.
- Hassan's nationality being changed from arabic to chinese, with a full clothing replacement.
- (XBOX dub) Lack of a strong chinese accent from a fellow with a red chinese dress in the Wise Men Qr. This is more a dub issue rather than a censoring issue.
Well, I've been decensoring and rewriting things for the Spanish translation... But it would be a shame if it was exclusive for Spanish, right?
So I'll be announcing right now a side project of this translation called Yuan's Revenge. Right now, this is what I've already done:
- Restoring the Moon Child Convent image on Dreamcast. Doing it on XBOX is a mystery, depending on the progress of the MT5/MT7 model handlers and if the HM7 format is identical between consoles.
- Restoring the censored cassette tape and re-subbed the whole thing. It can be done on XBOX as well.
- Restoring Yuan's male japanese voices. I've made a small document on the subtitle changes for the NPCs, but maybe a Japanese translator could do a bit of a better job.
- Restoring Hassan's original clothing.
- While this is not a censorship issue, the Coca-Cola branded cans/machines are also restored.
This is what needs to be done yet:
- Find voice actors (I know some places) and redub Yuan, Hassan, the chinese guy, the censored cassette tape and other minor adjustments on XBOX.
- Edit all the existing voices to remove the "s" from the "she" parts in Yuan-based lines in the XBOX dub.
- Editing Hassan's clothing on XBOX.
The final result will be PacoChan's patcher, which means you'll need the original GDIs in Dreamcast and it will export CDI images, with a choice between undownsampled audios or downsampled for 80min/99min discs. Right now the XBOX version is on the preproduction stages but, considering there's no Default.xbe edit, I think it can export just the files, ready for FTP them into the HDD.
What do I need? Right now, people who can help testing and checking all these issues. A sound engineer/editor would be nice (I can do most of the removal stuff, but I'm busy with the translation, if nobody could help before I finish the Spanish translation, I'll be doing the editing myself).
Here's a small appetizer for all of you, courtesy of Brett "Switch" Chandler, Rock_Lee-Vk and myself: