so. kamigami no asobi

I have mentioned this game extensively elsewhere on this site. it is an otome game which isn't good by any definition. however i am still downright obsessed with it. there are fan translations of SOME romance routes (most of them), but they're just google docs, not real patches. someone tried, and nintendo stopped them. so I thought I'd take things into my own hands and do it myself because how hard could it be. boy was I wrong. this is going to be a chronicle of my journey of hacking this amazingly godawful game. once i get it right I'll write a more cohesive tutorial for the how to's section, but for now I'll just lose my mind.

This first step was encouraged on the first pdf. it also felt logical, yknow? gotta break open the iso.

I did this using UMDgen. this was quite intuitive unlike literally everything else in this process. chuck it in and press go.

This is where the guide stopped working because kamiaso is a bitch and encrypts its data in a much more complicated way. like why the fuck do you have TWO EBOOT FILES AND AN UPDATE TAB?? anyways. the next step was to figure out where the text was stored. easier said than done.

the tutorial used astrogrep to look up a phrase used in the game and thus find where the text was stored, warning that there would be more in the eboot file. astrogrep is a good tool, since you can search across multiple files at once. I, however, got no results. I tried again using a phrase from the title screen like the tutorial did, but no results either. this might be because the game used images rather than text for the menu, but I don't know that for sure yet.

next step was to try even more hex editors to see if i could find anything different. this didn't work particularly well. I then tried madedit, which just shows you the content of the files, and made a discovery: in /PSP_GAME/SYSDIR/EBOOT.BIN, there is our only word so far: deorum. this is also the only coherent word in any of the files at all. it is also part of the title of the game. this could be a coincidence but the odds for that are so insanely low I don't believe it. this is our key in methinks. however, the rest of the text is still gibberish.

I tried one more editor which has so far been the best looking: imhex. while it still showed nothing but gibberish, at least it looked prettier.

through all this, i (or maybe the internet i cant remember) realized: maybe the text is in japanese, and that's why it's unreadable, because windows is deciphering it wrong. so now we need to figure that out

(pirate of the carribean voice) I sure hope you like hex editors, mrs swan. you're in one

next step was finding a hex editor which processed japanese right. madedit could hypothetically do it, but it still only returned gibberish, so I wanted a second opinion.

for this second opinion, i downloaded yet ANOTHER hex editor. this one being windhex32. I tried both english and japanese. gibberish. this leaves another reason why it might not be making sense left: the eboot is encrypted. which means i would need a decrypter. hold my hand as we descend into the next layer of hell.

this step was so torturous I stopped working to come and make this page instead. the issue I faced here was that none of the programs that I downloaded would even RUN. and i tried THREE OF THEM.

the guilty parties are quickbms, which malwarebytes flags the website of, but not the actual download, pspdecrypt, and deceboot. none of these application files would launch. i think it's a compatibility issue (do not worry, I scanned my computer with two different antiviruses, and both came up negative)