RKS Site Update? Projected C80 RKSF release? Gasp!

The long-awaited update to [erka:es]’s site is finally here! And what an update this one is. What should I comment on first? Well, I guess I’ll handle things in order.

First things first, there’s an update patch for the original RKS that will bring the current version of the game up to 1.06b. This patch makes the following changes to the game:

• Changed the Key Config in the Options menu. The game will no longer allow the same key to be used twice for the OK/CANCEL/START/PAUSE functions. Also, controls can no longer be bound to function keys or special keys.
• Fixed a bug where if you collected an item right before it disappears, the game would freeze. (Did this ever happen to anyone?)
• Fixed a bug in which non-correct passwords would work anyway.
• Fixed a problem where the game FPS would skyrocket in the case of losing focus to another window.
• Fixed a bug where moving the mouse to the top of the screen in full screen mode would crash the game.
• And a bunch of other small changes.

And now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for… Freudenstachel news! The actual projected release date for RKSF is summer of this year, so we’re looking at a Comiket 80 release, folks! They posted up two e-mails from English speakers about the development status of the game, and they’ve assured us all that they’re working on it, and the planned release date is this year. Will we see another delay? Only time will tell! I doubt it, though.

This is especially because we have some new treats: screenshots! The title screen has changed, and we now have caps of an underwater area and a forest level. As many of you may know, the Wood Zone was originally in the beta but was taken out before the final release of RKS2; the only accessible beta stage is the Hidden Palace Zone, which was reused in Tia & Freu as the resting place of the Chaos Smaragde. Anyway, the water area is probably Trauare’s stage, and the wooded area is most likely Luste’s. In the original RKS, you basically destroy Luste’s little sky palace place a la Storm Eagle, and in the April Fool’s screenshots, Hero of Justice Luste was encountered in a forest level. We’ll just have to wait and find out!

The RKSF web demo is slated to receive the bug fixes from the 1.06b patch. Instead of releasing a patch, they will be releasing a brand-new trial version. I wonder what secrets this one has in store for us?

That’s essentially it. Go check out the screenshots. I encourage traffic to their site, so please go there and stop putting literally everything that ever happens on the wiki. Thanks!

Version 1.06a Update & Fan Spotlight

Hi there, everyone. I hope you've been enjoying the holidays.

I've posted an update at the Darkside Translations website to let everyone know the status of the latest Rosenkreuzstilette patch, Version 1.06a. At the same time, I've decided to give props to a handful of players who made their own works based on our localization (whether they've acknowledged our part in it or not).

You can read the full post here.

It's a little early, but Happy New Year, ladies and gents.

RKS 1.06a - Replay Speed Increase

They really weren't kidding when they said they increased the speed on the fast-forward.

A Blades of the Rose Cross Update

Hello, everyone.

As many of you already know, [erka:es] released Version 1.06a of Rosenkreuzstilette, which corrects a variety of bugs and allows the game to run on Vista and Windows 7. The staff of Darkside Translations and Schwer and Schwer Alike intend to release an update to our localization to incorporate these bugfixes into the English executable.

We'd like to take the opportunity to address any issues with our original release that we previously overlooked or ignored. To that end, if you have any suggestions or comments about our release, we ask you to send them our way, either by posting them as a comment to this blog update or by emailing us. We've received next to no constructive feedback on the quality of our localization, so we're wondering which aspects of our work need improvement.

As of this writing, there are three issues we intend to address:

1) The Start Menu shortcut to the RKS Online Manual currently points to the project page and not the English translation of the manual. The updated release will include a shortcut pointing to the proper URL.

2) Two Germans strings in our initial release were deliberately left untranslated. Namely, we left the "Die Zeit vergeht schnell..." ("My, how time flies...") in the Replay Mode fast-forward screen and the "Waffenenergie" ("Weapon Energy") on the Status subscreen as they originally were.

Because of its layout, it would be impossible to add an English translation to the Replay Mode text -- we'd have to remove the all-important timer or replace the German text with its English equivalent. From the outset of this project, we had no intention of removing any of the German text, so this line will remain unchanged.

As for the Status screen, we weren't able to come up with a translation layout that we felt looked good with both a full and empty inventory, so we decided to scratch adding the English translation altogether. If you check our proof-of-concept screenshots in the comments sections of an earlier blog post, you might find a shot of one of our attempts. In any event, we intend to experiment with the layout some more and see if we can come up with an attractive way of integrating an English translation.

3) As Kilgamayan pointed out in his Let's Play videos, we chose to translate the English name for Zeppelin Stage III as "Xanatos". This was my own idea. I didn't want to repeat "Thanatos" twice on the same screen, so I decided to use a variant of the name to convey the same reference (like using Kerberos instead of Cerberus). Other alternatives for the name included "Death" and "The Grim Reaper", both of which undermine the "subtlety" of the Castlevania shout-out.

In retrospect, the order in which the names appeared should have been reversed. "Thanatos" is the official nickname of the stage's boss, whereas "Xanatos" is just a variant. We intend to reverse the names in the updated release.

That said, please let us know what you think of our work. If you didn't like how we worded a line, didn't like the fonts we used, or thought that a graphic should have been nudged just one tiny pixel over, point it out and we'll give the matter some thought. We can't fix anything if we don't know it's broken, so fill us in!

Oh, and those of you who recognized Xanatos as the last name of Jonathan Frakes' character in Gargoyles: good job!

New RKS Patch Fixes Game Breaker

I apologize for the negligence I've been showing to this blog and RKS as a whole. I've been busy with a bunch of other unrelated things, but with this patch release, I can hopefully get back on track.

This is actually part of the reason I haven't done anything RKS-related lately. A huge bug was discovered that caused the game to completely fail to load and cause strange graphical errors within Windows, thanks to certain graphic driver updates. Whenever I would execute the game, my monitor would start blinking, and after a moment, my Nvidia drivers would inform me that it just recovered from a crash. This appears to have happened to someone else as well, as they sent [erka:es] a report on it that was shown in their last blog update. Well, it would appear that the new patch fixes this problem, making it possible for people like me to once again play this stellar game.

Unfortunately, there's a new issue. I haven't been able to test this completely yet, but the original RKS's 1.05c->1.06a patch does not work on the rks_e.exe file within the English "Rosenkreuzstilette ~Blades of the Rose Cross~" folder, and I don't know if the English patch will work on a 1.06a version of the game. Due to these developments, we will get to working on an update patch or something for the English version, which may very well require an entirely new installer. Luckily, there are no hitches with the current version of the Freudenstachel web trial, so that works out okay.

I'll be providing further updates by Saturday on what's going on, so stay tuned!

Edit:
Also, I got this in the mail today. (I ordered a free sample thing back in August, and it JUST showed up.) I have to cut off the ad part, but I think it's pretty sweet for a (bumper) sticker.

Rosenkreuzstilette Chinese Language Patch is done!

I received word from leozx telling me that the Chinese language patch is complete. They weren't able to get a website up, but more information is available here. I guess you could head over that way and show your support!

RKS Freudenstachel Demo Patch

Apparently, there's a patch update thing for the demo. It probably fixes the bugs and what-not, so go check it out.

Freudenstachel C76 Demo Patch

For those of you who happen to have the C76 demo for whatever reason, a patch has been made available on the RKS Freudenstachel Download Page. It fixes the various bugs that were found by a few of the testers. Only a matter of time before the downloadable trial is released!

Note: Please keep in mind that this only affects the C76 demo, not the C75 demo.

Casting Call for Spiritia

I have started a thread for an open audition casting call for Spiritia. Just throwing it out there. I've actually gotten a submission for this part, and I have to say that the girl in question did a pretty good job. I hope I get more talent like her. ASK YOUR FRIENDS OR SOMETHING.

RKS Dub Project

I wanted to post about this when I got a little further with it, but this is probably the best way to get there. That's right. I want to dub Rosenkreuzstilette.

I have posted an interest check thread over at the Voice Acting Alliance Forums to see if I find suitable voice artists for the game. I am also turning to you, Schwer readers. If you or anyone you know would like to be involved in this project and are actually willing to put forth semi-professional effort into it, I ask you to sign up for the VAA forums and post in my interest check thread. I have faith that this could turn out wonderfully, and it's the one last step to make before RKS gets a total English version.

Actually, there is one other thing. Now that things have died down a bit, Darkside and Zeppy will be going back over the RKS and RKSG scripts, because I think we can do better. I would like to release a final v2 translation patch that we can all be happy with. In fact, if you would like, play through our English patch and tell us what we did wrong. We will potentially take your feedback to heart and use it to better the final script.

Oh, and here's a little work-in-progress:

Put The Best To The Test

Finally, we're ready to go, so now I can do an official advertisement of this. The "no-CD version" of the English patch, officially called "The Best Version," as it is designed to work specifically with RKS THE BEST, is finally complete. Now that we have that settled, I urge all of you, if you haven't already, to head over to the English DLSite page for RKS and buy yourself a copy of Rosenkreuzstilette [erka:es] THE BEST. I've added a button over on the side in the External Links section for your convenience. Once you've got yourself a copy and sent all of your money to [erka:es] (ALL OF YOUR MONEY), head to the right sidebar again and pick up the English THE BEST patch and start your wonderful RKS crusade. Included in THE BEST is a neat little addition in the form of a high-res image of the DVD case cover, so in essence, you can actually print out an authentic cover for the game and have your very own physical copy! How neat is that? What are you waiting for!? Get to it!

Special thanks to [erka:es] for this great game, TDOMMX for the installers, and for all of you Schwer readers, because especially without you, there'd be no RKS fanbase, and we probably wouldn't be here today.

Chaos, The Mass Confusion

My absence can only be explained by some engagements outside of the internet. I haven't even been at my computer much, so I haven't been around to make an update. Regardless, I'm here now, so it's time for an update.

The initial English release for Rosenkreuzstilette is done and can be found here on the Darkside Translations site. Despite my own earlier judgment, I'm going to go ahead and say something about it. Before, it was stated that the script work was going to be split between TDOMMX and myself, with him handling the Spiritia script and me, the intense Grolla fanboy I am, handling the Grolla script. Well, that didn't happen. I wrote a script, but much of it was pretty much rejected by TDOMMX. Not so much flat-out thrown away, but in the end, so many changes were made that it didn't feel like my script anymore. There were a lot of creative differences and various disagreements, and finally, I could not take it anymore and just threw my hands up. My text had to fit his predetermined characterization and meet his editorial criteria, and it became so much of a big deal that doing this project for a game that I enjoy as much as I do went from something fun and exciting to something frustrating and headache-inducing. I couldn't enjoy it anymore. It's unfortunate, but what's done is done, I guess. While the script that I did write was referenced and used in bits and pieces, what you see is not really my work anymore and, as such, not really what I wanted. Hopefully you all will like this far more than I do. I apologize for my ranting.

[erka:es] released the digital-distribution version of RKS far sooner than I thought they would, and it is available through both Melonbooks and DLSite. However, I knew about this a few days ago and was hesitating to post anything about it for a reason. There have been a few changes that were made to the game during the course of the English translation, and I want to bring all of that to Isemiya's attention to see if he will decide to implement some of those changes or not. Regardless of the answer, as soon as I get word, I will provide a full tutorial on how to get the game through the download sites. If you don't really care and simply want to purchase the game as soon as possible, check out the [erka:es] diary page and use the links they provided.

Anyway, we look forward to working on Freudenstachel in the future, so if you like RKS enough now that (some of) you can play it in English, stick around. That's all for now.

English Patch Release Plans

With the recent developments as they are, TDOMMX and I have talked, and we have come to a final conclusion that you all will like.

The release schedule will continue as planned with the English patch installer (CD required) being released on the 15th, give or take depending on play-testing issues. Two weeks later (I assume around August 1st or so), we will be releasing a no-CD version of the installer. If you have the disc, grats. You get to play the patch "early" or something. If you do not, you just have to wait a short while, and you can join in the fun as well. We will finally be releasing a third English patch that will work with the inevitable final release of the game that [erka:es] makes.

Hopefully this makes everyone happy. It makes me happy.

English Patch Answer

The powers that be have spoken, and no change has been made.

The English patch of Rosenkreuzstilette will require the game disc, physical or ISO.

This decision will most like not be changed at all, as it is the best possible method is terms of quote "practicality and ethics." This, in turn, means that you will be left to find the game image or disc on your own. For those of you who already have the game installed, you will inevitably have to uninstall the game and reinstall it from the disc using the English patch. Replays are transferable, so you'll probably want to grab those before you delete it.

For anyone who does not have access to the game disc for any reason, I'm sorry to say that you're pretty much left out. There's nothing I can do about this decision, so there's nothing more that I can say.

English Patch Question

I have a question for the Schwer readers. I need as much input and feedback as possible, so please, everyone comment.

I am having something of a disagreement with TDOMMX about the English patch, so I would like to have the opinions of the community who will actually be playing the game. The English Trial version required the game disc, either in ISO or physical form, to install the "Extended Preview", which allowed people to see the English scripts for the prologue and the 8 bosses. I found this to be a nice little goody, so it was all well and good. However, he also wants to make the disc a requirement for the final patch, and I don't really think that's a good idea.

TDOMMX's reason, as noted in the previous comments, are as follows:
You will however need an original RKS game disc to install the English version; our installer dummy-proofs the process, installs the necessary system files, the game itself, the Freudia Voice Enhancement, and our English localization. In effect, you get Version 1.05 since that's what our graphics edits are based on. Unfortunately, NSIS isn't nearly as intelligent as [erka:es]'s custom patcher, so the installer filesize will be a little larger than I would like (though it won't be quite as large as the English Trial - that contained two versions of the game instead of just one).

In spite of the fact that there's a tutorial on this very blog linked to on the right menu on how to install all of the necessary patches from a clean install, he still feels this necessary.

What is your opinion? Do you think having the physical disc/disc image should be a requirement for the English patch of the game?

Introducing KreuzChannel, RKS HQ's Official YT Channel

I'm sure some people were wondering why the video I had uploaded to YouTube were deleted, and the reason is this! I've been working on transferring the videos over to an "official" Schwer and Schwer Alike channel called KreuzChannel.

This channel will be the one-stop YT channel for pretty much any videos that get showcased on this channel from here on. One thing to note is that I have now included a glitch showcase video (see below), and I changed the Grollschwert C72 Trial to contain all-new footage and a new translation of the opening. Some videos, such as the hidden Freudenstachel stages, mod vids, etc. will remain on my personal YouTube channel, mostly because they're annotated, and I really don't feel like doing that again.

The channel serves another purpose, though. This channel is for you guys, the Schwer readers as well. We will be accepting contributions. If you have a replay or something like that you would like to showcase, I'll record it to video and toss it up on the channel with the proper credits. Future challenge submissions or time attacks also have a place there. My intention is to create what amounts to a bulletin board of various things from the RKS community, much like how this blog is something of our public forum, since setting up an actual forum to my liking, is cumbersome for me.

Well, I hope this turns out to be something great.



2ch has started their 7th RKS thread, but it looks like discussion is pretty much dead until either Summer Comiket rolls around or some major update happens, like the web trial, so we won't be hearing much from that end for a while. In the meantime, I'll do my best to give you guys something so you don't end up bored. If anyone wants to contribute anything like fanfiction or art or whatever (AND IT'S REASONABLY WELL DONE, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE), it may give me something to put up in our downtime. We shall see.

RKS English Game Over

And here's the game over text to finish this off.

(video temporarily removed)

I'm moving the RKS English Patch release date to July 15th at the latest. As TDOMMX said, things are moving as quickly as possible, and we're ironing out everything we can, so it may take a little longer than planned. However, if we finish at any point before the deadline, we'll release it immediately. Alright then! Stay tuned!

RKS English Showcase Series

We present to you this portion of the near-finalized Spiritia script. This showcase features the prologue stage and the 8 bosses, as seen from the RKS Trial Extended Preview patch. Please enjoy.

Is your copy of RKS up-to-date?

Is your copy of RosenkreuzStilette currently up-to-date? The [erka:es] duo have made a lot of changes since the creation of the game, and you owe it to yourself to make sure that you have the most recent version of RKS to gain the full experience.

How to check:

[Step 01]
Load up your copy of RosenkreuzStilette. The version number will be listed in the Window title.


The picture says it all.

[Step 02]
Not up-to-date? Not to worry. Head on over to the RosenkreuzStilette Product Page and click on the Download button on the sidebar.

[Step 03]
Many of you probably can't read Japanese. That, of course, is why I'm writing this tutorial! Now, the first section in the Download area is where the download links for the patches are. Time to figure out which one is best for you! Refer to the figure below. If your version is 1.00a (the initial release version), then you'll want to use the first download link. If you've been updating but are still running on 1.05b, then you'll want to use the second download link. If your version is neither, then the third download link, which will update the game from any version to the latest, is for you.


So many difficult Japanese words I don't understand!

[Step 04]
Once the .zip is downloaded, extract it. If you're not familiar with extracting .zip files, Windows XP users can just double-click the .zip archive folder and drag the file inside wherever they'd like. The best place for it will be inside your RosenkreuzStilette folder.


This is the patch. For the sake of this tutorial, I've downloaded the 1.05b->1.05c patch.


Toss it in your RosenkreuzStilette folder. (This step isn't necessary, but it will help you keep track of it.)

[Step 05]
Open the patch, and follow these simple instructions:


Click "Yes". Simple enough.


Here, it will ask you to locate the folder that rks.exe, the game executable, is in. Click on the Browse button as indicated.


Select the folder, and click OK. Confirm the selection at the next screen.


The patch will then install itself! Congratulations! Your copy of RKS is now up-to-date.

[Step 06]
Here, you can do one of two things: Play your newly patched RosenkreuzStilette, or step further in and download a voice update patch for Freudia. If you're like me and don't want to leave any rock unturned, continue on. If not, you really should.

[Step 07]
Scroll down the Download page until you find the "Omake Data Download" section, as pictured. Go ahead and download the only file listed there.


The link says "Freudia 'Sound Quality Improvement Edition' Voice Data".

[Step 08]
Extract the folder "ex_voice002" from the .zip, and open it. Inside you'll find two folders and a readme.txt, as pictured. Drag the "extra" folder into the "data" folder in your RosenkreuzStilette folder, and that'll do it! This voice update requires at least v1.05b, but since we patched the game already, that's not even an issue. The other folder "Omake Voice" features two .wav files of Freudia saying "RosenkreuzStilette" and "Freudenstachel". Take a listen!


The readme.txt contains the URL that redirects to Freudia's seiyuu's website.

[Step 09]
And that's it! Everything about your copy of RosenkreuzStilette is up-to-date. Now, have fun, practice, and save your replays! Eventually, I'll have a replay archive set up for everyone to use!