Introduction
...A peaceful life...
...Boring day after boring day...
...Youth slowly passes by...
What if...
that reality were destroyed?
What if...
the school were thrown into a different reality?
This is the story the boys and girls who were suddenly lost in the Demon World.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Shin Megami Tensei name, now that titles like Nocturne and Devil Summoner have made it into English. Likewise, I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with the two original Shin Megami Tensei games that appeared on the SNES, which have been faithfully translated by Aeon Genesis. The game I'm about to translate, Shin Megami Tensei if..., is kind of a side story to those two titles. Rather than an epic story of the war between Law and Chaos, this is the story of Karukozaka High School, and ordinary high school that is suddenly warped into the Demon World by Hazama, a student who claims to have become the Demon Emperor. The hero, your partner and the demons you get to join you must battle your way through several worlds of the Makai to defeat Hazama and return the school to the real world.
if... retains the same gameplay as I and II (and pretty much all the graphics and music
), while throwing in a new feature: the Guardian System. When you die, rather than being kicked back to the title screen, you get assigned a Guardian demon and sent back to the start of the world you were at. These Guardians are the prototypes for Persona in the Persona series of games: they alter your stats, and in the case of your partner, teach you magic. As you fight enemies, you gradually accrue Guardian Points. The more you have, the better a Guardian you'll be assigned if you die. The reverse is true as well, however...If you'd like to see a demonstration of Guardian assignment, I've uploaded a preview video of if... / Backup to YouTube featuring the intro and then me instantly slaughtering my party.
For the purposes of this thread, I'll be translating the game as we go through it. If you saw my Eternal Filena thread, we'll be doing things a little different this time through; instead of working on a hack, I'll just be doing straight translations from the screenshots. This thread should be a bit easier on your browsers, since I'll only need take a few screenshots of dialogue since all the text is going to be in Japanese. I hope you find it interesting; if not, I'll close the thread and hang my head in Internet shame. There are... kind of a lot of LP threads around these days, and I don't want to clutter up the forum with yet another one if no one is interested. (By the way, sorry to the people who were expecting G.O.D or Day of the Idea; it looked like more work than I can put in at the moment, and I wanted to make sure I could finish the thread.)
Anyway, let's get started!! From this point on, all translations will be written as captions, and all comments will be written in italics.