When you first start up War of the Human Tanks fully in Japanese, the sight can be a bit overwhelming from a translation point of view. I’m referring to this:

It doesn’t exactly help the task that the gameplay script is split into perhaps a few hundred separate scripts, and the strings that need translating (perhaps as long as 1 character in size!) are hidden among the other game logic.

Well, our resident helper and tech genius Tony Blomqvist wrote some marvelous filters to help us deal with this issue. I’ve been chipping away at them from various angles for a while now with Yoshifumi‘s support, and the gameplay is… getting there. There are still a few bigger scripts to tackle (including unit infos, which are reflected pretty much everywhere), but it’s getting easier and easier to figure out what goes on in the game in English.

Of course, the initial translation is just half the story. After inserting the changes you go fiddle with the menus to figure out exactly where that one word was supposed to appear in and just how badly you screwed it up. Then tune and tinker.

But as you can see here, progress is definitely being made, and it’s quite fun to see the screens one by one turn into something understandable:

(Note that the images shown in the screenshots are also a work-in-progress.)