Senmomo EN patch - v1.0.0

Installation instructions

• Unzip the contents of the patch in the game's directory, next to the main executable (BGI.exe)
• That's it! Run the game normally. No need to apply a Japanese locale before launching.

Optional setup

• If playing on a reasonably high-definition screen, make sure to enable bicubic interpolation in the game's screen settings. This will make the text appear much crisper.
• In general, I highly recommend spending some time messing around with the game's settings. Compared to your average VN, you will find a fairly impressive set of customization features available, including keyboard/gamepad rebinding, mouse gestures, custom themes, touch controls, and more.

Troubleshooting

If you keep getting stuck on black screens, it may be because your device is too much of a potato to run our bundled video player. As some of our translated video files come in a specific format not supported natively by the engine's video player, we've bundled a copy of the MPV player in our patch, which is used to replace the original video player at certain points in the game, namely: the OP video that plays at the end of the first chapter, the end credits videos, and the PV that plays if you stay idle on the main menu for a couple of minutes.

If you experience any black screens or crashes at these points, the "fix" is to remove our translated videos from the patch: in the Patch\Videos folder, delete or rename all videos in the MKV format. This will cause the engine to fall back to the original untranslated videos in the normal video player and will likely cause fewer issues.

What's in the patch?

• "Patch" folder: all the translated game assets, including narration, UIs, CGs and videos
• d3d9.dll: a custom proxy DLL injected in the engine to extend some of its functionalities, including: special character supports, text formatting support, font modifications, japanese locale emulation and MPV player integration (more on that below). Heavily inspired from arcusmaximus' VNTextProxy. For the curious, we've published the source code for d3d9.dll here.
• ipl.\_bp: the game's initialization script, modified to have the engine load content from the Patch folder. Original file can be found in the original game's system.arc archive
• LoaderDll.dll and LocaleEmulator.dll: a standalone copy of Locale Emulator, an open-source tool that applies various localization parameters to make Japanese games run smoothly even on non-Japanese systems. You don't need to manually launch the game with Locale Emulator, the patch will do it for you! See https://xupefei.github.io/Locale-Emulator/
• mpv-2.dll: a standalone copy of MPV player, an open-source video player which we use as a replacement for the game's original video player, to run videos (OP, ED, credits, etc) in better quality and formats it does not normally support. See https://mpv.io/

And now for the non-essential stuff.

Despite how popular the works of Japanese VN developer August are, the company is often said to be cursed. Since they seem entirely uninterested in publishing their games internationally, plenty of fans have taken it upon themselves to translate them into English and release patches for them themselves. However, like many fan translation endeavors for VNs, many of these projects fail to make it off the ground. Unlike many fan translation endeavors for VNs, though, the ones that do never seem to make it to a full release endorsed by the team; to date, all the existing English patches for August games - Yoakena, Daitoshokan, and Eustia - were leaked prematurely, without their respective teams' blessings, though the Eustia team does seem to be gearing for a full release eventually.

With the release of this patch, the August Curse is broken.

Senmomo: A Billowing Bladestorm, A Persica Princess is an epic tale of love and fealty, and we of Operation Bellflower have taken painstaking care to ensure that it is presented to you in all the quality it deserves. The translator and editor spent countless hundreds of hours discussing the script down to the finest of details (sometimes to the exasperation of other members of the team), and the songs were subbed by the most talented individuals the fansubbing community has to offer.

Credits

The people who made this release possible are as follows:

PROJECT LEAD/MAIN TRANSLATOR

• DubstepKazoo

SONG TRANSLATORS

• shizuku
• alonesome

EDITORS

• alonesome
• DubstepKazoo

TLC

• Garudyne

IMAGE EDITORS

• darbury
• Mysterious Osananajimi A

SUUPAA HAKAAZU

• Perturbed_pangolin
• Kalazb
• pdvt

SONG SUBBERS

• LightArrowsEXE
• petzku

QC

• Melancholy
• DubstepKazoo
• Garudyne

SPECIAL THANKS

• gambs
• The moderators of VNDB
• Hatsune Miku
• ...and last but not least, everyone who voiced their support for us over the years. Thank you.

Q&A

Now, allow me (Kazoo) to preemptively answer some questions I anticipate being asked.

Q: What about the fan disc?
A: Haven't touched it since I finished my initial translation in 2021. Until such time as Lonesome can be bothered to edit the script, Shizuku can work up the courage to tackle the absolute nightmare of its song lyrics, and we can find a new image editor (since the two who worked on this game can't commit to another project), there won't be any progress on it. Sorry.

Q: What about that other game you said you translated?
A: Yui no Kotonoha? Yeah, the script is still about 95% set in stone, I'd say. Pangolin doesn't seem too enthused about hacking the game, so I'll probably need to find someone who can step up and do that, and I need an image editor for the few images with text the game has. Though they're all much easier than the ones in Senmomo.

Q: I found a typo.
A: Shit.

Q: Also, even in old times, "my" only became "mine" when the next word started with a vowel sound, so-
A: You are doing this: :O
I want you to be doing this: :|

Q: Isn't this machine-translated or something?
A: Nope. The moderators of VNDB list this release as MTL because they find it hard to believe that I could've translated the whole thing in as short a time as I claimed, hence my somewhat facetious nod to them in the Special Thanks up there. I don't blame them; I was working at least sixteen hours a day, every day, for weeks on end. That's not an experience I'd ever want to repeat even if I somehow had the opportunity to (since I only had that kind of time on my hands back then because of the pandemic). I was quite disoriented when it was finally over. At any rate, you can rest assured that the script of this patch is 100% the product of good old-fashioned human ingenuity.

Q: Wait, so are the other Special Thanks jokes, too?
A: No, those are genuine. Gambs introduced me to an excellent textbook on translation theory by one of his college professors, which sent me and Lonesome down a rabbit hole of study that gave us the vocabulary we needed to make our discussions go smoother. And you guys are obviously the best, so that one goes without saying.
And as for Hatsune Miku... Well, where would we be without her? She did invent anime, after all.

Q: Are you going to do other games?
A: Maybe Yui and the Senmomo fan disc, since those translations are already done, but now that I have something vaguely resembling a life if you squint a bit, I don't have the time to promise I'll do another VN. If I do, it likely won't be a big corporate game, but something small I found at Comiket. That said, Light, Petzku, Lonesome, and I still work on anime together in the fansubbing group Kaleido. In 2024, we subbed the ATRI anime, and in 2025, we're working on the Summer Pockets and 9-nine- anime. There's also a few other series I'm considering bullying them into helping me with, so I'll still be translating things. I also translate a certain gacha game for a living now, but like hell I'm telling you which.

Staff messages

Last but not least, some final thoughts from all the team members who care to write 'em.

DubstepKazoo

I wrote this translation for exactly one person: myself. To borrow the words of one of my favorite light novel authors, I present to you Senmomo: A Billowing Bladestorm, A Persica Princess, translated 1000% for fun. Despite this, I have been inordinately blessed with unbelievably talented individuals to help me bring my selfishness to fruition, including the best editor I've ever had the pleasure of working with. If I may be even more selfish, allow me to express the hope that at least one person other than myself derives some enjoyment from what will without a doubt prove to be my magnum opus.

alonesome

There are many valid approaches for creating a translation. For this project, my translator Dubsy produced a complete initial translation, which I read in full before proceeding to edit and revise. We then extensively reviewed each edited script file in our regular "review sessions", in which we meticulously checked our combined output against the original Japanese and (exhaustively, exasperatingly!) debated every relevant concern of English word choice, grammatical construction, and translation philosophy until we were unanimous in our acceptance of the final target text. We both take full responsibility for any errors that we may have overlooked.

Speaking only for myself, I believe that there is an eminently high ethical standard that so-called "fan-translators" ought to live up to. Given that we are selfishly choosing to translate a work without the consent of the original creators, it is especially incumbent on us to produce a translation of such indisputable quality that no creator could possibly have any reason to not proudly declare that their work was faithfully and lovingly represented in the target language. It is my personal belief that our work here manages to live up to such a lofty standard. Please enjoy your time with Senmomo, and please continue to support the original creators however you can. I hope you appreciate the unexpectedly excellent imouto moe that this game has to offer~

LightArrowsEXE

I don't have anywhere near as much to write as the two beautiful gentlemen before me, but getting to work on this project and subsequently stall the everliving crap out of it (my bad) was fun, and getting to witness Dubsy and lonesome's passionate (love-making) arguments first-hand was an experience. The song styling is not my proudest work, but I hope you enjoy it all the same. Make sure you check out all the projects we (including Dubsy and lonesome) are working on over at Kaleido on the cat website!

Kaleidoman, out.

petzku

light conned me into styling the songs so i blame him for all the stalling, none of it was my fault. also the songs are great go listen to them a lot

shizuku

These songs were pretty darn difficult to wrangle, but I had a lot of fun working on the lyrics for my little part of the project.

By the way, if for whatever reason you have to hide your window during an H-scene and also want to use the built-in emergency feature, press escape to activate it. Don't try to use the actual "Emergency" button in the game; it'll just take a screenshot and you'll still have hentai on your screen. This is actually a problem with the game itself rather than the patch, and we never looked into fixing it because it's hilarious.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the game as much as we did.

Perturbed_pangolin

Well, it's been fun. I hopped into this project in the role of resident hackerguy with little expectation and never thought I would meet such a dream cast of talented individuals who are honestly overqualified for the fan translation scene. Sure, there's been some stalling, but if you read this it means that we finally made it past the finish line. Senmomo is an incredible visual novel in all aspects, and I hope you will find that our efforts did the game justice.

Hacking together a patch for this obscure Japanese anime PowerPoint software has been an extremely valuable learning experience, and one I would highly recommend to anyone, technologically inclined or not. If you're curious to hear more about the hacking work that went into this patch, check out my Adventures in the Ethornell Engine series of blog posts.

Have fun!