Gemini Wing ending text

Coin-operated games and arcades.
Post Reply
User avatar
Asayuki
Please Continue...
Posts: 431
Joined: August 29th, 2015, 10:16 pm
Location: Remuria, Germany

Gemini Wing ending text

Post by Asayuki »

Hi otakus,
as I am fiddling with a Gemini Wing board lately, I reminded myself how badly I wanted to understand the japanese ending text when I was an addicted kid feeding money into this game. :lol:
Here's the ending sequence from Youtube, for those who don't remember.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0qlCqhTYjo&t=28m30s

Using Mame, I have extracted said text to a picture at the game's native resolution and without artefacts.
all.png
I have absolutely no clue about japanese, so I tried some online OCR tool which recognized a great deal of characters. Then I used Open Office's "insert special character" function to quickly fill in most of the missing symbols, mostly from Hiragana, and finally Google Translate on the result; For the most strange looking symbols I used a nice tool Google has, which allows you to draw Hiragana, Katakana and chinese Kanji yourself, and is quite good at guessing what my orrible drawings were intended to mean. :P :awe:

I believe the following text to be an accurate representation of the above picture:

世界中の昆虫をあやつり櫃物を支配していたインセクトクイーンは息絶えた。
それが自らの生み出したブリンガーのもつ生体エネルギーの結晶、ガンボ一ルによってであったのは何という皮肉だろう。
世界を埋め尽した昆虫は元のおとなしい虫たちに戻り、再び草木は萌え、烏は謳い、虫が舞い、風がそよいだ。

Needless to say, Google Translate sucks. Yet the meaning is more or less understandable if you are familiar with the game. I have therefore tried to rearrange and correct arbitrarily until I ended up with a meaningful text. The problem is that I suck at japanese way more than Google does, therefore the one below might be light years away from the truth. :oops:

<< The Insect Queen, which has been dominating the world with the insects she herself had created, is now dead.
The crystals generated by the living energy of their birth, the Gunballs, have killed her; what a irony!
Her slave insects, who filled the world with her rage, are returning to their docile original state. The vegetation is sprouting again, the crows are singing and the insects are dancing and fluttering in the wind. >>

Google translate also shows an unknown term "Gumbo Ichiru". Searching around using by text or images didn't produce anything meaningful, so maybe it could be (just guessing here) the way Gunballs were intended to be called.

Is there any of you with some japanese knowledge who can fix my mess above? :awe:
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
My 15kHz cabinet Peplos will never power up, with any item, and I am quite proud of that.
User avatar
Asayuki
Please Continue...
Posts: 431
Joined: August 29th, 2015, 10:16 pm
Location: Remuria, Germany

Re: Gemini Wing ending text

Post by Asayuki »

Curiousity made me spend a little more time with online translators. I tought I'd post my findings here, in case you need to translate something yourself.

First of all, the online OCR service I used is I2OCR http://www.i2ocr.com/free-online-japanese-ocr.

Microsoft's Bing translator and Babylon are even worse than Google. Systran, Yahoo Japan and Excite Japan got kind of closer, although quite some human guessing is still required. All six of them however seem to use different algorithms when it comse to translation, and it is maybe more useful to compare their outputs with one another rather than taking just one of them seriously.
Baidu has a translation service which however seems to be unreachable from Germany (www.baidu.com resolves to an IP, while translate.baidu.com doesn't although Baidu's search engine itself declares translate.baidu.com as being live).
And there also are quite of lot of other "online translators" whose output is 100% identical to Google's... :lolno:

On the dictionary side I was very positively surprised of jisho.org and Tangorin, which are humble enough to just cut the sentence into meaningful chunks and give you possible meanings for each separate chunk. It's up to you to connect the dots, and some basic knowledge of japanese grammar is obviously needed to do that correctly; yet, they are quite a great help even if you have zero knowledge of the language. Tangorin even shows you how to properly draw each ideogram.
My 15kHz cabinet Peplos will never power up, with any item, and I am quite proud of that.
Post Reply