Incoming heavy duty necromancy.
RISE THREAD FORGOTTEN AND DO MY BIDDING.
Anyway as someone who came late to the party (I found Nanoha less than a year ago) I have gotten to the point where I have started playing the PSP games in the emulator. Even though I don't know Japanese
The first one is okay. It's not particulary deep and I feel like range focused characters have a definite advantage, to the point where while playing on the Nanoha's part the only characters that gave me trouble are Zafira (because his auto guard blocks a lot of my shots and he has the skills to force me to fight close to him) and Reinforce can be annoying since she has quick cast beams that can track you even through dodges. This might be a artifact of the AI not being the smartest tool in the toolbox, which is probably exemplified by Signum who is ruined by it. Signum has a lot of short to medum ranged attacks, BUT the AI seems not to be able to understand that her attacks have an actual range, so she will happily continue spamming attacks that have no way in hell of reaching me.
By now I have completed 4 paths and I have lost not once. Then again I was playing as the Aces and Rein where I could exploit ranged shenanigans. Considering that I'm terrible in melee (I have the reflexes of a dead horse) it's likely going to be more difficult going with some of the other chars.
By contrast I tried to play the second game and had my shit ruined in the first fight.
Then again I don't mind the game being easy, I like curb stomping my foes.
Anyway seeing as we do have translations of the three Aces's routes and no translation patch I was looking into the possibility of modding in the translation. No luck I'm afraid so far. The links to the tools that Chinese community used and that
were being offered are now dead. I have tried figuring out the file system on my own, and using resources form the net I have figured out how to extract the files containing the dialogue, or at least where I think it is (I can see the talk in English (Rising Heart) but the Japanese is not using Unicode or Ascii). The trouble is that while there are unpackers for pac and lzs compressed files there is no packer that would put the file bakc together from modified file. So bummer there.
Spoiler for How to uncompress Battle of the Aces *.pac files:
DISCLAMER: Even though I have a CS degree I'm faaaaar from somebody that is comfortable with this kind of low level work/hacks. As such most of this is based not much on my expirience as on cobbled together info I was able to glean from the Internet. So the thanks should go there.
As for how did I do it, the dialogue seems to be contained in the story pac files. They are labeled according to which stage and whoose story they do. So Nanoha's prologue is in PSP_GAME\USRDIR\story_na_prologue.pac, but just opening the file in notepad won't do since that file is actually an archive containing multiple files. The archive can be extracted using
quickbms's
Add Pac script. Now that you have extracted the files from the pac archive one of them should be story_na_prologue.asm, but that one has been compressed using LZS compression (not much deduction needed when the first word in the file is LZS) and to uncompress it use
LZS script for quickbms. This should give you the uncompressed story_na_prologue.asm file that contains the text that the characters speak in the Prologue of Nanoha's run and addresses of the sound files. You should be able to spot towards the end the Rising Heart's lines since they will be the ones that can be understood meaning even though we don't know how did they encode the japanese characters, ASCII should work for English.
Seeing as that route is closed I decided to at least provide subtitles for the cutscenes in video form and this is the first result.
The prologie and stage 1 on Nanoha's path