About this site
My three main hobbies are studying Japanese, playing video games, and hoarding useless data — so over the past few years I've acquired a few Japanese video game scripts and text dumps that I use to generate study materials from. This website exists to host the dumps that I've created myself and to link to the resources and tools I use, in case they're useful to any other Japanese learners or interested fans.
What is a text dump?
A text dump is a raw list of text strings extracted from the files of a video game. It will inevitably include fun things like the game's script and other character dialogue, but is generally not presented in a logical order to tell the story, might not include information about who is speaking or where the text appears, and may contain a lot of extra garbage (such as game code, variables, and dummy text) that makes it difficult to read.
How do I learn with these?
While viewing a dump in your browser, you can follow along with a game as you play by Ctrl+F-ing a section of dialogue, and use a browser extension like 10ten Japanese Reader to segment sentences and look up unknown words. You can also search the dump for individual words or grammar forms you've learned in order to find in-game usage examples.
Because these texts were designed to be read by a piece of software and not a human being, perhaps their best use is as corpora for generating study materials from. I personally use cb's Japanese Text Analysis Tool to generate frequency lists of vocabulary and kanji from raw text dumps, and renshuu.org's Text Analyzer to identify grammar points. I also like to do searches of my whole dumps folder using Notepad++, as it will show all usage examples across all my game scripts at once and (in bilingual CSVs) will display the English translations alongside the results.
Content status
This table tracks what games are available here and what will hopefully make it here in the future. "Uploaded" are games that already have sections on the site. "Dumped" are games that I have the text for and just need to arrange into CSVs and/or make pages for on the site. "Need help to dump" are games that I've tried to extract text from and failed to get something complete or clean enough to be useful. "Wishlist" are games that I own in Japanese and would love to get dumps for, but don't know where to start or am unable to do myself.
If you happen to have any insight into dumping the text from any of the games listed here or have data of your own you'd like to share with other learners, please contact me!
| Japanese Title | English Title | System | Language | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| くまうた | Bear Song | PS2 | JP only | Uploaded!... and need help to finishMissing lyric text. LYRICS.XPF contains a "dict.xpf" file according to its header, which very likely contains the DIC files that are used to generate song lyrics, but as-is xpftool spits out a 0-byte file when trying to decompress it. |
| ビホルダー | Beholder | PC | EN→JP | Uploaded! |
| ボムラッシュ・サイバーファンク | Bomb Rush Cyberfunk | PC | EN→JP | Uploaded! |
| ブリー | Bully | PC | EN→JP | Uploaded! |
| ファイナルファンタジーVII リメイク | Final Fantasy VII Remake | PC | JP→EN | Uploaded! |
| グランディア２ | Grandia II | PC | JP→EN | Uploaded! |
| はーとふる彼氏 | Hatoful Boyfriend | PC | JP→EN | Uploaded! |
| ウィッシュルーム 天使の記憶 | Hotel Dusk: Room 215 | DS | JP→EN | Uploaded! |
| ライフ イズ ストレンジ | Life Is Strange | PC | EN→JP | Uploaded! |
| モンキーアイランド１、２、６ | Monkey Island 1, 2, & 6 | PC | EN→JP | Uploaded! |
| ナイト・イン・ザ・ウッズ | Night in the Woods | PC | EN→JP | Uploaded! |
| 暴れん坊プリンセス | Rowdy Princess | PS2 | JP only | Uploaded!... and need help to finishMissing optional dialogue & system text. The main story dialogues are all encoded in Shift-JIS in the PG folder, but I couldn't find text in any other files. |
| サモンナイト１、２ | Summon Night 1 & 2 | DS | JP only | Uploaded! |
| すばらしきこのせかい | The World Ends With You | DS | JP→EN | Uploaded! |
| 新すばらしきこのせかい | NEO: The World Ends With You | Switch | JP→EN | Uploaded! |
| アリス マッドネス リターンズ | Alice: Madness Returns | PC | EN→JP | Dumped |
| チャイルド オブ ライト | Child of Light | PC | EN→JP | Dumped |
| ドレッジ | Dredge | PC | EN→JP | Dumped |
| アースロック | Earthlock | PC | EN→JP | Dumped |
| リーサルリーグ ブレイズ | Lethal League Blaze | PC | EN→JP | Dumped |
| プーペガールＤＳ１、２ | poupéegirl DS 1 & 2 | DS | JP only | Dumped |
| テネレッツァ | Tenerezza | PC | JP only | Dumped |
| グランディア エクストリーム | Grandia Xtreme | PS2 | JP→EN | Need help to dumpNeed to decompress & complete TBL. Game text is in the MDT files and Grandia 2's TBL matches most of the characters already. However, the files seem to be using some variation of LZSS compression that doesn't work with my current decompression tools, so I can't get an accurate dump. |
| moon | moon | PS1 | JP only | Need help to dumpNeed to identify text blocks. Game text is uncompressed Shift-JIS but is spread randomly throughout the data on the disc. I can dump the whole disc to get the text, but I can’t reliably separate it from the millions of lines of code interspersed with it. |
| セイクリッドブレイズ | Sacred Blaze | PS2 | JP only | Need help to dumpMissing story dialogues. 00, 01, & 02.DAT contain a lot of Shift-JIS sections that mostly look like system text, tutorials, and in-battle dialogue lines, but I can't find any text from the main dialogues. |
| サクラ大戦 | Sakura Wars | PS2 | JP only | Need help to dumpMissing non-voiced dialogue lines. All of the voiced dialogue is written out in Shift-JIS in the LIP files, but the rest of the lines are collected somewhere else (SMX files I assume) and probably are compressed and/or need a TBL to read, so I haven't been able to find them. |
| すみれの空 | Sumire | PC | JP→EN | Need help to dumpMissing "flowerDialogue (ja-JP).txt". Asset Ripper extracts a "flowerDialogue (en-US).txt" file with a significant amount of English dialogue in it, but there appears to be no Japanese version of the file. |
| 龍が如く0 | Yakuza 0 | PC | JP→EN | Need help to dumpNeed list of files with text. PAR archives can be unpacked with QuickBMS, but there are hundreds of them, and the game text is spread between multiple files and folders, possibly also within further nested archives. I have already found lots of MSG and localization files, but I have no idea how complete my dump is without a breakdown of which PARs contain what text. |
| バイオショック | Bioshock | PC | EN→JP | Wishlist |
| グランディア | Grandia | Switch | JP→EN | Wishlist |
| アイロン・デンジャー | Iron Danger | PC | EN→JP | Wishlist |
| 神業 | Kamiwaza | PS2 | JP only | Wishlist |
| 魔剣爻 | Maken Shao | PS2 | JP→EN | Wishlist |
| ぼくのなつやすみ | My Summer Vacation | PS1 | JP only | Wishlist |
| ペルソナ２ | Persona 2 | PS1 | JP→EN? | Wishlist |
| マール王国の人形姫 | Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure | PS1 | JP→EN | Wishlist |
| ストレイ | Stray | PC | EN→JP | Wishlist | 幻想水滸伝 | Suikoden | PS1 | JP→EN | Wishlist |
| サモンナイト３、４ | Summon Night 3 & 4 | PS2 | JP only | Wishlist |
| ときめきメモリアル Girl's Side | Tokimeki Memorial: Girl's Side | PS2 | JP only | Wishlist |
| ヴィーナス&ブレイブス | Venus & Braves | PS2 | JP only | Wishlist |
| 極限脱出 | Zero Escape | PC | JP→EN | Wishlist |