Interview with TKO Soft, the doujin group behind Yugekitai ~ Saikyoshin Fukkatsu no Maki ~ 遊撃隊 ～最強神復活之巻～

Gargatar over at Tokugawa forums took to translating Yugekitai on PC98 around June 2009, and recently he’s not only completed his fan-translation, which is available via RHDN, but he also interviewed the guys behind it. Read on!
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As Gargatar explains it, Yugekitai ~ Saikyou Kami Fukkatsu Yuki Kan ~ 遊撃隊 ～最強神復活之巻～ is:
“An adventure game where you control a group of 5 high school students in a rock band and their battle against a plot that could destroy humanity. It's pretty hilarious even without an English translation.”
Losing his translator early on Gargatar took to learning Japanese and translated it himself, and by March 2010 he’d made a fair amount of progress. As he put it:
“So I've finally gotten my Japanese to a level that I can translate this game myself. I've just finished translating the biggest file of game text, so I estimate that about 1/3rd of the game is in English right now.”

By June he had completed the work and the translation was at 100%.

Even more amazingly is that in July he went to Japan and was able to meet with TKO Soft. He posted his findings on Tokugawa’s forum, and I find the whole situation so fascinating that I asked his permission to repost his write up, to bring it to more people’s attention. Thanks to Gargatar for all the hard work of translating the game and contacting those behind it.


Well, had a meeting with them (TKO Soft was a team of two brothers who made doujin, one doing the programming and one who made the art), here's the information that I was able to figure out.

Early Games - The bulk of their PC88 games were simple RPG or Adventure games using whatever engine they made for Jark (Ryu system). They have physical copies of them somewhere, but they haven't dumped the images.

Graphics formats - The formats for the PC88 are a custom format that the programmer made himself. He programmed his own graphics tool in BASIC and used that to make the images. I assume that this was the standard practice for creating graphics on old Japanese computers. I believe that the PC98 graphics were hand-drawn and then scanned, but I wasn't quite sure if that's what they said. I don't know if the PC98 games had a custom format or not.

General History - I wasn't really able to get a "why" or any big names, their involvement in the scene started around 1988. They would usually sell their games at Comiket. The PC88 and PC98 doujin were able to become the most well-known because those systems were the dominant ones in businesses. They didn't make anything for any other computer systems, but they held the X68000 in very high regard. Due to its strong power, but high cost; it was a bit of a distant dream for computer-users.

Other Things
- The story for the first Yugekitai game was based off of a short film that the younger brother made with his high school classmates. As such, the games characters are based off of his real classmates, but with the names slightly changed.
- The original disk version of Yugekitai II originally took up 10 disks, fortunately it's possible to run the game from an HDI.



Gargatar has tentatively hinted that he’s thinking of translating other Yugekitai games, such as the side-story on PC88 and the sequel on PC98.

Since the game is freeware, you’re to download the translated version HERE.