I’ve been a fan of Kantai Collection, which is a game based around the concept of female characters that have memories from their World War 1 and 2 counter parts. As you would guess, it’s a JRPG with lots of RNG abuse, and it eventually took form as a DMM-hosted Flash Browser-based flash game. As popularity grew, it spawned both a PS Vita port (KanColle Kai) and an Arcade port (KanColle Arcade). I gave up the Browser version because the compass trolling in the game was taking a toll on my sanity.
If you want more information about it, please go see the KanColle Wikia as they do a much better job explaining the game than I do.
Someday, I do hope to get my hands on a ROM/HDD Dump of the arcade version of KanColle, mainly because I’d love to see what game engine they use, as the battle sequences are full 3D and I want to rip the 3D models to use in personal projects. If I win the lotto or something, I might even buy the arcade and import it here. (If anyone does however have a dump of the arcade game, please do get in touch…)
As for KanColle Kai, the game runs on Unity3D. This can be confirmed by the presence of the “UnityEngine.dll” file in the
gro0:/app/PSCG00684/Media/Managed
folder, along with numerous other Assemblies that are the compiled C# code and UnityScript.
On the Vita, gro0: is the game card, while app0: is the filesystem that belongs to the application version (the one you would download from the Japanese PS Store). My copy is the retail game cartridge version. I believe gro0: stands for gamecard read only slot 0. Which makes sense, because the PS Vita only has one game card slot. You can’t write to the game card through gro0: unfortunately.
I have been researching and looking at a forum who did a guide on how to dump PS Vita games with the 3.60 Henkaku exploit and while I can access my savedata unencrypted, the rest of the game is encrypted. At least the cartridge is. The guide I’m following is supposed to allow me to decrypt the data on the fly, but it seems that isn’t working – for now at least until I get some more pointers. With that being said, that doesn’t stop me from looking around in the file system and documenting what KC Kai has hidden. From what I can see, the game uses quite a lot of XML files.
I’d like to stress that I am not doing this to endorse piracy. I am a tinkerer, and I like to see what underlying things are inside the game and if I can even replace sounds and/or music for example. As I usually say, I’m doing this for educational purposes only.
Next update to this project will contain a list of the files in the filesystem. It’s pretty big and I might turn the list into a PDF or something for easy viewing. Or I might just dump it all into a blog post. Heh, I don’t know.
Coburn out.