The Sun's Curse: Code Explanation

[See this post for what I used the code to translate. What follows is some insight into what the code was like.]

So, about The Sun's Curse. It would seem I was wrong that there was nothing there to translate. Yes, the text is just numbers, but... they're not random. They are decodable into Japanese. So I'd like to decode and translate them.

I was looking at the first line of numbers and noticed they repeated: 732132-732132. I thought, "I wonder if that somehow relates to "mukashi mukashi"?" Going on that assumption didn't seem to be going too well at first, but soon I realized the pattern forming.

Each character is represented by a pair of digits. The first digit represents the row of kana, while the second represents the vowel. Both are in their typical "alphabetical" order. So the relationship goes like this:

First Digit
1: _ (vowel)
2: k_
3: s_
4: t_
5: n_
6: h_
7: m_
8: y_
9: r_
0: w_

Second Digit
1: _a
2: _i
3: _u
4: _e
5: _o

Some additional things: 03 is for "n," 04 represents the voiced mark, and 70 is used like a comma (though there are quite a lot more than there would be normally, maybe to help with clarity). And for small characters like ゅ and っ, the regular character is put in-between what looks like "23," oddly enough.

Here's how the first sentence looks:

73 21 32 73 21 32 mukashi mukashi
22 26 45 15 23 51 93 85 13 51 ki ga tooku naru you na
73 21 32 55 15 61 51 32 mukashi no o-hanashi

...Unfortunately, Mogeko's priority was on making it look "legit," because even looking at the source graphics from the Flash file, it is NOT easy to distinguish these numbers, and just getting that took a while. They're squashed together, and 2 looks like 3 looks like 5 looks like 6 looks like 8...

(Here was where I originally asked people to provide whatever help they could, but it's done now. You can see the decoding process, including the Japanese text, here.)

Posted March 28th, 2015

#the gray garden

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