SEQUEL awake English patch manual

You’re reading the manual for SEQUEL colony’s translation patch. Here’s a quick
summary of the contents.

• Chapter 1: general information on the game and the patch.

• Chapter 2: patch installation instructions and help for technical problems.
• Chapter 3: translator’s notes
• Chapter 4: miscellaneous stuff (license, etc.)

For updates for this and other projects, please see my blog:
https://subpartranslations.wordpress.com/

You can most easily and quickly get hold of me on my Discord server:
https://discord.gg/nSvqDGNWSN (if the link has expired, there should be an up-to-date
link on the blog above.)

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Contents

1. About 3
1.1 SEQUEL colony 3
1.2 The translation patch 3
2. Patch installation 4
2.1 First-time installation 4
2.2 Updating the patch 5
2.3 Errors and bugs 5
3. Translator’s notes 6
3.1 Non-spoiler notes 7
3.2. Minor spoiler notes 10
3.3. Major spoiler notes 20
4. License, misc 32

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1. ABOUT

1.1 SEQUEL colony

SEQUEL colony is the third game in the SEQUEL series by the Japanese doujin game
circle Leaf Geometry. Hakika is the sole member of Leaf Geometry.

Currently, the SEQUEL series has four games. SEQUEL blight is the first one. The
second one is SEQUEL awake, and the third one is SEQUEL colony.

The fourth entry in the series, SEQUEL kludge, was released in August of 2021, and as
of this writing (November 2021), I am working on its translation. Additionally, there is
one spin-off game to the series, called ASYLUM.

While the games are designed to be playable and enjoyable by themselves, it is

recommended to play them in release order. That means:
blight → awake → colony → ASYLUM → kludge

Translation patches for all the games being distributed at this point, except SEQUEL
kludge, are available on my blog. The games themselves can all be purchased at DLsite:
https://www.dlsite.com/maniax/circle/profile/=/maker_id/RG08405.html

1.2 The translation patch

This is a fan-made unofficial English translation patch for the game. I started the project
in July of 2020 and came out with patch version 1.0.0 in September of the same year.

This patch is not a commercial work. If you paid for it, someone scammed you.

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2. PATCH INSTALLATION

This patch is for the Japanese game version 2.02. Compatibility with other versions is
unlikely. Save games between versions of this patch are compatible.

2.1 First-time installation

The game archive must be unpacked so that the patch can replace the Japanese files.
A step-by-step guide with images is available on my blog:
https://subpartranslations.wordpress.com/patch-installation/

Alternatively, you may follow these text-based instructions. These steps for unpacking a
game have been copied from the F95Zone forums:
1. Download the decrypter at:
https://mega.nz/#!ChZ3lYQD!AM4LUPDWoklrnbZK0KfOQEpsSDsW5cfqyuo
BHY1MsmQ (courtesy of some guy on reddit)
2. Download and install the .net 4.0 framework if needed
3. Run the decrypter.exe file you downloaded in step 1. I usually copy it in the game
folder, since it's only 300 kB.
4. Press "file", then "open archive" and navigate to your game folder and select the
archive (.rgss file)
5. Then press "Tools" and "Extract all files". The extractor will now start extraction.
It will create a new folder in the same location as your archive with the name
"extract". It will give you a message when it is ready.
6. Cut the content of the "extract" folder when the extractor is done and paste it in
your main game folder. This will most likely include the "graphics" folder.
Overwrite where needed.
7. Rename or remove the archive if you're adding translations. If you don't, then the
archive will still have priority and nothing changes. This also saves a lot of disk
space.

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Once the game files are unpacked and moved into the game folder, you can extract the
patch files into the game folder or move the contents there if you have already extracted
it elsewhere. Overwrite when asked.

Finally, rename, move, or delete the game archive (Game.rgss3a).

2.2 Updating the patch

To update a previously patched version of the game, simply extract the .zip to the game's
folder and overwrite when asked. You should not need to unpack the game archive again.

2.3 Errors and bugs

• The game doesn’t run!

SEQUEL colony requires the Japanese version of RPG MAKER VX ACE RTP to
work. If you get an error message (eg. missing font, error loading bitmap, can’t load
sound, etc.) when starting the game, it means you need to install the RTP:
https://tkool.jp/products/rtp/vxace_rtp100.zip

• The game crashed!!

The game can sometimes crash if you reset it by pressing F12 while loading a save. If the
crash happened elsewhere and is consistent, it’s probably my fault. Please tell me. It
probably won’t get fixed if you don’t.

• There’s a bug/typo with X!!!!

You can inform me, and I’ll put it on my list of known issues. But I will probably not be
updating this patch any more. I’ve been fixing it for over a year now

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3. TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

I love SEQUEL colony very, very dearly. I have done my best in an attempt to convey its
spirit to the English reader, sometimes employing frankly underhanded translation
techniques. The artifice is heavy in this one, but performed with great care. An
excessively gentle reading, for an excessively gentle game.

I’m not great at subtlety, but I’ve tried to be subtle when the game is subtle. When the
game twists the knife, I twist the knife. And so on.

This time, the notes will be sorted by how large spoilers they are for SEQUEL colony.
There may be spoilers regarding SEQUEL blight and SEQUEL awake. Not that I
think you should be playing colony before them, but still.

The sorting works as follows:

• Non-spoiler notes do not greatly reference any plot events. They are there to
explain generic translation decisions, like why ‘monster’ is used.
• Minor spoiler notes contain simple game information that should be apparent at
first reading. For example, explanations of single puns or item names that carry
no larger relevance.
• Major spoiler notes contain critical game information. Core plot points and
information that is given at one point but changes at another point. For example,
notes about what went to the translation of ▊▊▊, and some notes about post-game
content that.
Each category of notes has its own table of contents to help you navigate the maze that is
my mind.

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7
3.1 Non-spoiler notes

Here are the notes with no spoilers.

All entries recommended to be read whenever.

CONTENTS
About romanization choices 8
About pronoun choices 8
About skill name translations 8
About monster name translations 9

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 • About romanization choices.
In my translation, I generally use the kana spelling whenever I’m transliterating words
instead of a reasonable romanization system like Hepburn. It creates some issues by ob-
fuscating the correct pronunciation: for example, Ojizou-sama would be better written as
Ojizō-sama to make the long o explicit. However, this looks kinda bad and is a major pain
in the ass to write.

Similarly, I’ve chosen to forgo other special diacritics in English words, because fuck
them. Most notably I’ve spelled naïve and déjà vu with a regular i, e, and a. Might as well
appropriate the words all the way if you’re going to do it at all. Can’t stop me.

In some occasions, I’ve opted to use a nonstandard but common transliteration of “basi-
cally Hepburn without the diacritics”, which somehow has advantages of neither the kana
spelling nor Hepburn. Simply because of established conventions I’ve seen elsewhere in
translated media, like transliterating 饅頭 [manjuu] as manju.

• About pronoun choices.

In my translation I generally default to using the singular “they” whenever it’s necessary
to refer to a character in the third person, their gender isn’t made explicit throughout the
game, and there’s not a good reason to gender them. The most pressing reason to do this
is to not inject information that wasn’t present in the original game, the other is laziness.

• About skill name translations

This game mostly carries on the established tradition of having most skill names be com-
posed of English words written in katakana (except passives). Two characters have prac-
tically all of their skills named this way. One has half of them named this way, while the
other half uses standard written Japanese. A fourth character has practically all of them
written in Japanese.

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This time, in an attempt to maintain the unique airs one character’s skills have in relation
to the others’, I have used the substitution translation method for some of party member
#2’s skills. Additionally, some of character #3’s skill names are simple transcriptions.
If you are interested in explanations of either, please refer to their sections under the minor
spoiler notes category. It’s spoiler-safe to read them after they have joined the party.

• About monster name translations

Thorough the SEQUEL games, most enemy names are written in katakana. It is safe to
interpret these as proper nouns, and I have tried to keep them as such. Some names are
recognizable as having English roots, some are gibberish, some are mixed with Japanese.

When they have been mixed with Japanese, I’ve tried to keep the meaning somewhat
analogous in English. For example, the monster Walkleaf which appears in SEQUEL
awake is called サンポリーフ [sanporiifu]. It is recognizable as being composed of 散

歩 [sanpo], ‘a walk’ and the English word “leaf”.

Again, as the translation is into English, this loses a certain dimension of having a mixture
of languages in the name, but I’ve deemed it an acceptable loss. I don’t think the transla-
tion would be improved if the name was Strollblatt, where ‘blatt’ is German for ‘leaf’
(according to a random dictionary I just looked through).

However, many monster names in SEQUEL colony have ‘descriptive’ names written in
kanji and hiragana. These can be safely interpreted as not being proper nouns, so I have
opted to only capitalize the first letter, and that only for technical reasons (the game prints
the enemy names first in all of the combat descriptions).

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3.2. Minor spoiler notes

Here are the notes with minor spoilers.

Individual entries recommended to be read after they have been introduced by the game.

CONTENTS
Some of Emela’s skills aren’t named similarly as the others 11
During event 001, Explorer cracks a joke that neither Auris nor the reader gets 12
Some of Lestea’s skill names demand explanation 13
There is an abysmal amount of smarrel-like jokes 15
Shin’s name needs to be mentioned 15
These regular monsters have something to point out with them 16
The mystery of ■■■■ had no translation effort put into it 17
During event 022, there are some boxes with an unusual description 17
During the first hangout with Auris at Social Level 3/5, there’s a pun that didn’t quite get
there 18
In the scene “Gush” something rather special happens 19
The lore of the item Knight’s Notes contains some conjecture 19

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 • Some of Emela’s skills aren’t named similarly as the others.

I’ve chosen to try and write some of Emela’s skills in Latin. They were not originally in
Latin. Now, before you go on an angry diatribe online, let me explain. I believe this to be
the only acceptable language substitution that can be made in the SEQUEL games so far,
and the only way to distinguish Emela’s skills from others’.

As I said before, generally skills are named after English words written using katakana
(pseudoanglicisms). Emela’s nunlike (for a lack of better word) skills are written using
standard Japanese, while the shoot-magic-gun skills are written with pseudoanglicisms.
This difference in the skill naming schemes would not be apparent if all of them translated
them into English. So, either the other characters’ skill names need to be adjusted
somehow, or Emela’s will.

I chose Emela and Latin mainly because first, as far as skill names are concerned, it’s
Emela’s that are outside the norm. Second, historically (maybe even these days too? I
have no idea what the catholic church is up to) religion is associated with Latin. It was
the language of the clergy. So it makes kind of sense to use Latin for the nunlike skills
that talk about divine salvation and exterminating heretics and whatnot.

So, Latin is different and resonates with her character. I don’t think I could use Latin for
any of the other characters, as they are differently themed.

A small problem with this is that I don’t really speak Latin. But neither does the author
really speak English, and that certainly hasn’t stopped them from using English in the
skill names. So, whatever. It’s a dead language anyways, so I’m not hurting any cultures
by butchering it.

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 • During event 001, Explorer cracks a joke that neither Auris nor the reader gets.
The likely theory is that Explorer’s identity is that of a certain character from hakika’s
first freeware game. I’m not going to explain why, as the game’s 9 years old, was never
translated, and is no longer distributed. At one point Hakika was going to remake it, but
it was put on indefinite hold.

But the joke I can explain. The character used daggers 短剣 [tanken] as weapons, while

the name ‘explorer’ is 探 検 家 [tankenka]. It’s pun on the homonym tanken, cue

distinctive laughter.

In any case, there’s no dagger pun around exploring in English. I didn’t want to change
the name, and I didn’t want to cut the dagger reference on the no-longer-so-miraculous
chance that the first game makes its way to English.

So, I fabricated the sentence “Although I'm a little short and sharp for the job” that
contains the pun’s information, between the two other sentences that were in the original.
Now there’s a future world where someone may notice Explorer’s identity. Hooray for
robust translations!

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 • Some of Lestea’s skill names demand explanation.

Likely the first question the reader will ask is “what’s an Ura-Hakutou-Ryu”. The second
will be “what’s a battoujutsu” and the third “what’s a nekodamashi”. And I’ll answer all
of them now.

Originally, both the reading of Lestea’s skills and the meaning were important. I opted to
transliterate Ura-Hakutou-Ryu for reasons that should become apparent during the game,
and inserted explication into a few dialogues. Here’s a slightly deeper explanation.

The Hakutou-Ryu refers to “white blade style”. The ura part is a term referring to the side
of the katana that faces the swords(wo)man’s body when worn. There are different
techniques for different sides, or something. Here’s a brief video explaining the katana’s
sides, which I hope is accurate because I have no actual martial arts knowledge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfq7QRzZMLs

Second, battoujutsu. It may be synonymous with iaijutsu which might be marginally more
familiar to a Western reader, but I don’t really want to spend the effort to figure out if
that’s true or not, so I didn’t change it to iaijutsu.

Battoujutsu 抜刀術 is the ‘art of drawing out the sword’. If I was being a real hack and

wanted to distill it to the action element while removing the cultural element, I could call
them ‘unsheathing techniques’. To learn more, you could read the iaijutsu or battoujutsu
Wikipedia articles, or you could just take a gander at this video. That’s some fast drawing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HAmvm4jCSk&t=0m45s

Nekodamashi 猫騙し literally ‘tricking a cat’ is a sumo technique involving clapping

your hands together in front of the opponent’s face to stun them. The skill stuns. Whoa.
Once again, you can google to read more about it or take a looksy at a video.
(content warning: scantily-clad sumo fighters)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbtt5UcJsB4

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That kind of turned into just linking videos, huh. Anyway, I’ve got other things to point
out about Lestea’s skills.

The skill name Twilight of Youkai doesn’t quite get where I want it to get: originally
逢魔時 [oumagatoki], a folkloristic term referring to a time of twilight between day and

night when you’re most likely to meet up with youkai (fucked up ghosts) or yuurei
(spoopy ghosts). Kind of like “the witching hour” in English, but not with witches. And
also not in the dead of night. So not very much like the witching hour, actually.

Anyway, it’s a mystical horrorful time for all involved, and the flavor of its position in
the skill tree along with the interplay between what the skill does, Lestea’s backstory, and
the actual meaning of the term is just delightful. Twilight of Youkai is not quite there, but
almost.

It’s a lot, I know. But I think it would be doing Lestea’s character a disfavor if all the
Shikinowan (read: Japanese) references were simplified to meaninglessness. Battoujutsu
– Oni-slaying Sword becoming Draw: Ogre Cleave or something.

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 • There is an abysmal amount of smarrel-like jokes.

I really, really had to scrape the bottom of the smarrel with these ones. My pot runneth
dry. In some cases, the word that was used didn’t really have “good” translations in
English that would’ve meshed with the joke, and in these cases I prioritized having a joke.

Let it be noted that I had the strength of will to not go with “a throng of pots” -> “thots”

• Shin’s name needs to be mentioned.

Many of the characters’ names don’t have any official romanizations. Sometimes they
have them, but they vary. Some characters have had their names spelled with the Latin
alphabet for incidental artwork and such, but the names haven’t always been great.

For example, シン [shin]. There was a single sketch of her posted in an article where her

name was rendered as “Sin”, but…I think it’s too on the nose, and overlaps nastily with
the translation of 罪 [tsumi] ‘sin, crime, punishable offense’ which I generally used “sin”

for due to thematic reasons. It would just confuse everyone involved. I’m not calling her
“Sin”.

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 • These regular monsters have something to point out with them.

Manitari Kyria, orig. マニタリキリア [manitarikiria] appears to be a transliteration of

Greek μανιτάρι (manitári) ‘mushroom’ combined with and κυρία (kyría) ‘madam, lady’.
I don’t speak Greek, so excuse me if I’ve misunderstood the Wiktionary definitions. This
does not fill me with confidence, because it means some of the names I’ve been taking to
have been made-up gibberish may in fact be the author putting words into a dictionary
and transliterating random languages into Japanese. I’m not about to try and reverse-
engineer these in any case. This name I found out about by serendipitous chance.

Konpaku, orig. コンパク [konpaku] is a Japanese word meaning ‘soul’ or ‘ghost’. It is

usually written 魂魄. I opted to transliterate it because I’m a hack because it’s a single

word that doesn’t provide a very satisfactory name for a fox monster. There’s no real
connection between foxes and spirits in English. You can explain it away as a Shikinowan
name.

Kyoukotsu, orig. キョウコツ [kyoukotsu] could be a number of things. The less-likely

candidates are 胸骨 ‘sternum’, 頬骨 ‘cheekbones’, but the most likely candidate (judging

from the monster description) is 狂骨. Literally, the word is written ‘crazy bones’, but

this kyoukotsu is a youkai from Japanese folklore. A kyoukotsu is a spooky bone figure
that rises from wells at night to yell at unruly kids, or something. You can google it.
Anyway, I’m not about to localize it to Mr. Skellington.

Also, the description mentions Eeries (orig. 怪異 [kai’i]) which I am not a huge fan of,

but I can’t think of anything better. I think this same term is used in the monogatari series
where it’s translated as ‘oddity’, but I’m also not about to take a page from their book.

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Veil and Veil of Moonlit Night, orig. トバリ [tobari] and ツキヨノトバリ [tsukiyo-no-

tobari] are recognizable as とばり (sometimes written as 帳) and 月夜のとばり

respectively. Tobari is a curtain of the literary type. When you’re talking about “the
curtain of night arising” or some such, you would use tobari. I don’t think you would use
it for everyday curtains, unless you’re being weird. Curtain is a crummy name for an
enemy, so I dug a little deeper into the literary quality of the name.

• The mystery of ■■■■ had no translation effort put into it.

This is because as far as I know there is no concrete information in the game as to what
it could be.

I have guesses, but they’re really based on nothing at all other than the fact the signs seem
to be pointing towards the City of Pests. Nothing strong enough to change the number of
boxes (or the size of them) for.

• During event 022, there are some boxes with an unusual description.

Originally, the boxes near the second room said:

一人の箱を二人で支えている。

[hitori no hako wo futari de sasaeteiru]

Two people supporting one box.

This is a clumsy translation that does not reflect the fascinating choice of words used very
well, and it never can. Japanese uses so-called counter words, which attach into numbers
whenever they refer to an amount of something. For example, if you wanted to say “one
human” you would not say *一の人間 [ichi no ningen], but 一人の人間 [hitori no

ningen].
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Don’t worry about the pronunciation, but note that the counter for people 人 is attached

to the number so that it sort of…forms an adjective that specifies what kind of number it
is? One (person) of something.

The only English counter word that I can think of is “head” as in “five heads of cattle”.

Here the counter for people is used for a box: “(one person) of box being supported by
two people”. It’s a very intriguing, minimalistic way of storytelling. Hight symbolic much
meaning yes. I’m a sucker for these kinds of little things.

• During the first hangout with Auris at Social Level 3/5, there’s a pun that didn’t
quite get there.
The pun is performed by Emela. She goes:
生活力が身についたからでしょうか。

[seikatsuryoku ga mi ni tsuita kara deshouka]

Perhaps it is because of the domestic abilities you have acquired.
……「性」活力も、でしょうか。

[”sei”katsuryoku mo, deshouka]

...And perhaps the domestic partnership too.
First she uses the term 生活力 [seikatsuryoku], which here I translated as ‘domestic

abilities’. It refers to the skills necessary to lead a life. (In SEQUEL awake I had
‘household power’ in a conversation with Rabi because that felt more appropriate in-
context)

She makes the extremely Japanese pun by switching the character read as sei for another
character read as sei. This 性 sei is used for sex stuff, and while the new seikatsuryoku

性活力 isn’t any standard word that I am aware of, you can understand it as ‘sexual

energy’ or such.

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Of course, even if I used “household power” here and Emela then went ”…and perhaps
sexual power too” that would be way too blunt, lose the somewhat-elegant pun, and also
be less coherent.

I tried to workshop something from “domestic” into “dominating” but couldn’t make up
anything that wasn’t awful. As I couldn’t figure out any good (near-)homonyms, I
settled for switching the latter part of the compound word for another.

“Domestic partnership” is notably less suggestive than Emela’s newly-coined

seikatsuryoku, but I decided having some wordplay with less innuendo is preferable to
no wordplay and so much innuendo it’s not really subtext but just text.

• In the scene “Gush” something rather special happens.

Apparently, male squirting is not only a thing, there’s one research article about it:

In male squirting, urine in the bladder gushes out from the external urethral
orifice due to strong contraction of the prostate and pelvic striated muscles.

Hara, R., Nagai, A., Nakatsuka, T., Ohira, S., Fujii, T. & Miyaji, Y. (2018). Male
squirting: Analysis of one case using color Doppler ultrasonography. IJU Case Reports,
1(1), pp. 19-21. doi:10.1002/iju5.12021

This is important information you should know because...uhh. Because I had to find out,
so now you have to find out too.

• The lore of the item Knight’s Notes contains some conjecture.

Originally, the knight’s gender was left ambiguous. Using the singular they proved
confusing, so I made the reasonable assumption.

Honestly, there’s only one person the notes could realistically belong to. Exactly who
you think.

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3.3. Major spoiler notes

Here are the notes with major spoilers.

The first two entries recommended to be read after you think the game has fully explained
them to you. The rest when you’ve finished the game, basically.

I’ve redacted two words to make the content list fully spoiler free.

CONTENTS
The mystery of ▊▊▊ had considerable translation effort put into it 21
Regarding the translation of ‘pest’ 22
The translation of song titles is iffy business 24
The location name of ****’s Funeral Grounds isn’t great 25
**** brings with her some translation headaches 26
The identity of ▊▊▊▊▊ had some translation effort put to it 28
About the Brand of Ronis and other brands 29
The Secret 3

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 • The mystery of ▊▊▊ had considerable translation effort put into it.

Originally, the game used two black boxes ■■ that stood for 妖精 [yousei] ‘faerie’. It’s a

mystery because there are countless two-character combinations, some of which might
sound excellent, that would fit. For example, 人間 [ningen] ‘human’, 魔物 [mamono]

‘monster’, 昆虫 [konchuu] ‘insect’, 男性 [dansei] ‘male’, or even シン [shin]. Although

that last one would be discredited the next time you first find the mysterious boxes. The
point is that there are a LOT of good two-character words in Japanese.

It would have been possible to keep the two boxes and write around the reveal with some-
thing like ‘these two syllables that are blotted out…’, but that’s the kind of a cop-out twist
that makes me yelp at the screen when I encounter one in a game.

So, to keep the mystery palatable, the boxes had to be changed to match English charac-
ters. The problem with using six boxes that stand for faerie is that they dilute the mystery,
as the secondmost veritable option of ‘human’ does not match. In addition, I would have
had to have seven boxes in places where the plural is required. Or leave in something ugly
like “▊▊▊▊▊▊s”. That’s questionable, because you would think they would blot out the
whole word. Japanese sidesteps this issue with nouns being indeterminate in number. Fi-
nally, six letters is fairly easy to guess.

And as such, I cheated by using fae. While it doesn’t cover the monster possibility, it does
cover the words man and bug. It can also work as a plural noun, so I don’t have to deal
with the whole plural nonsense. Unfortunately, I had to play a little fast and loose with
the definitive article “the” in order to not give the game away faster than intended. But,
well, don’t let that bother you too much.

Helpfully my casual decision to use faerie instead of fairy in back SEQUEL blight facil-
itates this change. Still, to make this not a gigantic ass-pull, I sprinkled around some in-
stances of the word fae into SEQUEL awake’s translation in patch v.1.0.1.

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 • Regarding the translation of ‘pest’.
Originally, the story uses the character 蟲 ‘insect, bug’. No reading is given, but it’s likely

the standard [mushi]. Modern Japanese uses the simplified 虫 [mushi] instead. Both are

understandable, but people will look at you weird if you write 蟲 everywhere instead of

虫. It doesn’t get used.

In SEQUEL games too, it is rarely used outside of references to Schisma’s creatures.

The large exception is the name of the Mud Bugs material. This is likely kept as a legacy
from blight, which had Squirming Bugs, Mud Bugs, and Clusters of Bugs that all used the
character. Only Mud Bugs made it to the next games.

The problem is that I don’t want to expend either of the words “insect” or “bug” to be
forever associated with Schisma’s creatures. They are much too useful and common, un-
like 蟲 which you could go a lifetime without using. And even if I was willing to do that,

I would prefer to use the latter “bug” for additional spice on the mystery of ▊▊▊. However,
as I have already established ‘bug monster’ as a type of monster, it would be very con-
fusing.

When you think about the problem for a little while, there’s a solution that seems obvious:
capital letters, the English language’s other alphabet. Using capitalization, a distinction
could be made between normal bugs and Schisma’s creatures while continuing to keep
the literal meaning of ‘bug’ as the Japanese does with the character 蟲.

There are three possible capitalizations.

1. Proper noun style: Bug or Insect
2. Final Fantasy style: BUG or INSECT (full capitalization)
3. Spongebob style. BuG or bUG or bUg or InsEcT or InSECt

All of these have issues, which I will now discuss.

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First, we’ll discard the Spongebob style for being disgusting, too memey, and too avant-
garde.

The Final Fantasy style isn’t acceptable, because typically fully capitalized names are
acronyms. In the case of FF7, they’re organizational names. Also, it looks silly, and the
FF7 translators got away with murder on that one.

The reasonable style is of course the proper noun style. As I luckily did not get into the
habit of capitalizing monster types, I could have got away with calling Schisma’s crea-
tures Bugs or Insects. Now, I don’t personally like capitalizing Letters of common Words,
as it evokes a certain YA fiction feeling in me. In this case, I would have grudgingly used
it, if it weren’t for one very important fact.

Capitalizing the moniker does not fit thematically. 蟲 is a word invented to dehumanize

(defaerieize?) and denigrate the faeries. It is in practice a fictional ethnic slur. Capital
letters run contrary to this, drawing the reader’s attention, and elevating the word above
Others. It would be somewhat less of a believable tool of colonial oppression if the mon-
iker was a capitalized Bug.

So, no special capitalization treatment, no using the words “insect” or “bug”. I settled on
“pest” for being closely associated with insects and somewhat in casual use, but not
enough in casual use to miss it. I don’t think I used the word “pest” a single time in my
translation of SEQUEL blight and awake. It might hit doubly hard as “insect” when the
reveal on the name comes, but so be it. I’ll err on the side of dramatic rather than tame.

Incidentally, I discarded the word ‘vermin’ for being less bug-like in feel than ‘pest’,
‘invertebrate’ and ‘arthropod’ for being too scientific, remrun’s suggestion of ‘entomon’
for being too cool and fancy, and IntrepidMoon’s suggestions of ‘budde’, ‘bugge’, ‘bogey’
and ‘bogle’ for being too archaic. Also, ‘worm’ for not being diverse enough to work as
a satisfyingly plausible name for all the kinds of faeries there are. I cannot be pleased.

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 • The translation of song titles is iffy business.
Two of the song names were in English to begin with. Now they’re indistinguishable from
the ones that were in Japanese. Also, you won’t find the songs on youtube by searching
the English names. So, here’s the song names as I have them in-game and what they
originally were. Names marked with an asterisk* have something else to mention about
them.
ENGLISH #1 JAPANESE #1 ENGLISH #2 JAPANESE #2
Hymn of Pests* 蟲の唄 World Without Color 色のない世界

Amalda アマルダ Land of Cinders 燃え殻の地

Frozen Resolve* 凍てついた意志 Dark Secrets 暗い秘密

Shade 日陰 My Theme 私のテーマ

Counteroffensive 反攻 Fracture 破綻

Artificial Heart 作り物の心 Hymn of Fae* 妖精の唄

Devilish Eyes 魔性の瞳 The Sin The Sin

Homestead Homestead Clinic at Night 夜の診療所

Pals* ともだち Stern Investigation 冷厳の調べ

Scars 傷痕 Tasteless Puppetry* 心無い人形劇

Hymn of Pests/Fae: these use the 唄 [uta] character instead of the more typical 歌 [uta].

The former is more typically found in reference classical Japanese songs and poetry. As
it produces a more ‘high-culture’ feel, I went with ‘hymn instead of simple ‘song’.
Frozen Resolve: this (and the other party member themes except Rabi’s) had to be worked
to fit in their namedrop moments.
Pals: this is atypically written in hiragana for that authentic childish feel. I was not brave
enough to have comic sans in the name of a song, so it’s now pals rather than friends.
Tasteless Puppetry: a strong contender for the name was “heartless puppet show”.

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 • The location name of “Shin’s Funerary Grounds” isn’t great.

Originally, the name was somewhat clever, and now it isn’t very clever:
シンの斎場 [shin no saijou] – here the saijou ostensibly carries a double duty. In modern

parlance a saijou is a funeral hall, a place where people come to say their last goodbyes
to the deceased, have a funeral ceremony, that sorts of stuff. I say ostensibly, because the
other meaning is as a generic ceremony/festival place in Shintoism, but…even in that
case I haven’t actually seen this refer to anything other than a Shintoist funeral. Still,
technically, it could refer to just a ceremonial site. Giving the player some optimism.

The more important part is the shin no part, which you could read in two drastically dif-
ferent ways. First, when you learn the name, you might optimistically interpret it as
“Shin’s place for rituals”. Or even funerals, but probably for other faeries. Or Amalda?
But then you’ll later interpret it as “the place of Shin’s funeral”. And then you’ll never be
optimistic again.

I didn’t think “Shin’s ceremonial site” carried the funeral aspect strongly enough, and
“Shin’s funeral hall” doesn’t work because it’s not really a hall. “Shin’s funeral grounds”
sounds like a graveyard to me, as does “burial grounds”, so I went with the marginally
less explicitly graveyardy “funerary grounds”. It’s somewhat of a mess and kind of loses
the ritual aspect, but it’s the best I could think of.

I alternatively tried “Site of Shin’s Rites” for the double meaning of “shin does rites here”
and “shin’s (last) rites were held here”, but the name was very clumsy. Especially when
characters were repeatedly mentioning “the site of rites”. So, funerary grounds it is.

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 • Saxa brings with her some translation headaches.

She speaks even wackier than in SEQUEL awake. Don’t worry about it, it’s just the cha-
otic neutral energy. Saxa kind of offhandedly drops some dank Japanese memes from
2006 and stuff too, but I chose not to drag “more cowbell” or whatever from its grave and
slam it in. No, “eather” is not a typo.

There are some jokes with her name that don’t go well. In Japanese, Saxa’s name is
spelled サクサ [sakusa] and I settled on the form “Saxa” for pronunciation and stylistic

reasons.

There are numerous references to the number 393 in Saxa’s dungeon. This is because the
kanji for the numbers 3 and 9 can be read as sa and ku respectively. I’m sure you’ve seen
this gag elsewhere, and it never translates well, not without heavy changes. I opted not to
bother.

As Japanese is syllabic, the palindrome of sa-ku-sa is sa-ku-sa. This was trivially solved
in the Hanging Gardens by going for “saxas” instead of “saxa” when she makes the joke.
Notably, having the name as “sakusa” would make the palindrome unworkable in English.

Less trivially, in the In a Raincloud, Saxa goes:

サクサ。サクサクの……サクサ！

[sakusa. sakusaku no…sakusa!]

Saxa. Sexy...Saxa!
Here, the onomatopoeia sakusaku is formed. Sakusaku is a sort of a crunchy or rustly
sound. Like when you step on snow or bite on a cookie. Here it functions as an adjective,
so literally she is saying something like “crunchy Saxa”, but in English that becomes
gapingly incoherent when it should not be. So now it’s “sexy Saxa” because of the sort
of similar structure in the words.

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In the Saxa Beach, Saxa goes “Saxaxaxaxa.” In the Japanese, it is simply sakusakusakusa.
This joke would be more workable had the name been left as “sakusa”. There’s an addi-
tional dimension to this with the aforementioned “crunchy” onomatopoeia. In a way, it’s
both crunchy and Saxa at the same time.

The Saunaxa’s name was originally sakusauna where the last syllable of sakusa did dou-
ble duty while being the starting syllable of sauna. I figured Saunaxa rolls better off the
tongue than Saxauna and is immediately more recognizable. This joke would have been
better off with the name staying as sakusa.

Furthermore, there are some really…avant-garde enemy names in Saxa’s dungeon. No-
tably, the enemies “tree”, “gnat”, and “hair” were named き ki か ka and け ke. The joke

is that “tree”, “mosquito”, and “hair” are single-syllable words and these are the syllables.
The humor doesn’t come across well, but maybe now the player can look at them and go
“those are some low effort names, huh. and they’re all four letters. that’s kind of neat”
which is…sort of in the same ballpark?

Or not really, but, you know. Whatcha gonna do.

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 • The identity of ▊▊▊▊▊ had some translation effort put to it.
The game doesn’t spell out the name at any point, but there is a somewhat plausible theory.
that I’ve worked around. Originally the name had five characters, and as the theory’s
suspect’s name ended up having five characters in my translation too, that’s what I went
with.

There are some problems, however. First, it was unfeasible to keep all the names of other
suspects that originally had five-character names in five characters. I did not want to ei-
ther unduly lengthen the prime suspect’s name, and I did not want to heavily rework the
lesser suspects’ names. For example, the name of House Lastang had five kana in it [ra-
su-ta-n-gu], and there’s simply no way to cram it into five roman characters. But there’s
practically no reason why it would be them other than to have a twist for the sake of a
twist, so I did not prioritize having five characters.

Second, some names that were originally not five characters ended up being five charac-
ters. For example, Beryl’s name in English has five characters, while in Japanese it had
three. She shouldn’t be a suspect on any level, but I’m sure now someone’s going to have
a crackpot Beryl Culprit Theory.

So, well, it’s not great.

If ▊▊▊▊▊ is anyone mentioned in the story, it’s probably Olvan.

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 • About the Brand of Ronis and other brands.
In a vacuum, I would have preferred to use the word “sigil” instead of “brand”, simply
because the former is more tangible and equippable. However, as I alluded to in SEQUEL
awake’s readme, The Brand of Ronis was the title of hakika’s canceled game project
which was in development for some time after Liberty Step. I don’t think much more
details than this title screen image exists on the internet:

Considering the information presented in SEQUEL colony and my fragmentary

knowledge of hakika’s previous games (and Ronis itself), I’ve kept it as ‘brand’. The item
type is an unfortunate conclusion. But I couldn’t just call the spell a brand and the items
sigils when they use the same word and are clearly linked.

All of the brand item names are formatted in the same way as the Brand of Ronis’s name
is. I would have liked to follow this same style for all the brand items to keep this con-
nection clear, (ie. Brand of Stamina instead of Stamina Brand), but the tyranny of char-
acter limits prevented that. I ended up prioritizing a consistent naming scheme instead.

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In addition, I would have preferred to use the word “crimson” instead of “red”. Finally,
don’t think too hard about the compound name brands. If I had my way, Guardian’s Red
Bloodbrand V would have been Crimsonbrand of Guardians’s Blood V but the character
limits are a cruel mistress. At least I managed to cram in all the description info.

Elements from The Brand of Ronis’s story were probably recycled to be used in SEQUEL
colony.

• The Secret

There is one line that Flutterer says that is ambiguous to such a degree that how you
interpret it kind of affects how you read her whole character. Here’s the line and my
translation of it.
だから裏切った。裏切ったんだよ。そして彼は妖精の敵になってしまった。

[dakara uragitta. uragittandayo. soshite kare wa yousei no teki ni natteshimatta]

So I was the betrayer. It was me. And he became the enemy of fae.

The first two sentences “dakara uragitta. uragittandayo” are the key. Here, dakara works
as a conclusion ‘therefore Y.’ The verb uragitta is past tense of ‘betray’. The latter sen-
tence asserts it more strongly, simply put. However, “Therefore betrayed. Betrayed.” does
not good English make, even if we workshop the latter line to more insistency. As always,
we must infer from context.

For reasons I won’t go into it’s clear that she’s the one doing the betraying, but that
doesn’t help much: “Therefore I betrayed. I betrayed.” The sentence does not feel right
to the English ear. This is because of something called valence, the number of arguments
(other words) a given word needs around it. For the English word “betray”, this is two: it
needs a subject and an object “I betrayed you.”

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English words are very strict about its valence, while Japanese is a high-context language
that can comfortably drop the subject or the object. The problem is the interpretation of
the object, the target of the Flutterer’s betrayal, that affects her character reading. Does
she sympathize with the egoistic man, agreeing that her behavior was betrayal for him?
Or does she sympathize with faeries, thinking that her actions were akin to betraying
them? Or both?

The game does not make either explicit, and that’s delicious. I thought of three ways to
solve this issue, and what is above made it in.

The first scrapped idea was a passive construction: “so the betrayal was done by me. I did
it.” which is awful in all sorts of ways: it lacks gravitas and highlights the betrayal and
sidesteps her own agency in it.

The second scrapped idea was explication: “So I betrayed him. I betrayed them.” which
is better with gravitas than the passive construction, but does prioritize one viewpoint by
placing it first, and has a more boring level of ambiguity because it doesn’t let you think
out by yourself what she means.

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4. LICENSE, MISC

This translation of SEQUEL colony is released under the Attribution-NonCommercial

4.0 International license 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc/4.0/
The original story, code, images etc. necessarily redistributed in this patch are copyright
of their original creators, as detailed in the game’s readme.txt

Leaf Geometry’s blog (in Japanese) can be found at http://leafgeo.blog.jp/

Extremely helpful site (in Japanese) https://sanpingame.x.fc2.com/doujin/sequel_colony/

Additional font resources used. I’m not a lawyer, so bear with me:
Qarmic sans is distributed in Fonts/Qarmic_sans_Abridged.ttf. Downloaded from
https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Qikki-Reg, original license available in file “Joanne
Taylor Font License.txt”. ©Joanne Taylor I guess? It’s not very clear.
Microsoft JhengHei UI is used in ending2.png, MActor1.png, MActor2.png,
MActor3.png, and MActor4.png and is ©2016 Microsoft Corporation.
Volkhov is used in seq01.png. Downloaded from https://www.1001fonts.com/volkhov-
font.html, and apparently SIL Open Font License doesn’t require mentioning anything so
idk
Quikhand is used in op1.png, op2.png, op3.png, op4.png, and setting01.png.
Downloaded from https://www.1001fonts.com/quikhand-font.html
Felix Tilting is used in ev08.png, ev08b.png, ev08c.png, ev08d.png, and wmap.png and
is ©1991-1995 The Monotype Corporation??? look these font documentation pages
Microsoft have aren’t very clear.

Auris best girl (Fake-Rabi best boy)

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