Ripping the NANA PS2 sound files

There are a plethora of PS2 games exclusive to Japan, but I feel the most curious subgenre of those are licensed anime visual novels/simulation from the mid 2000's that are still long without an english translation.

These don't even scratch the surface of the subgenre of a subgenre, it's truly unfortunate how another adaptation/story of popular franchises are hard to access due to the language barrier, I could talk about these in general, though today I'd like to talk about one specific game.

Nana (PS2) Released in 2005

Nana is a manga created by Ai Yazawa, I watched the 2007 Anime adaptation 2 years ago and I do think it changed me quite alot, It's my favorite anime of all time, and i designed this site with a Nana theme for a while, I feel if i talked about it extensively on its own page would still be an injustice to the series, again, perhaps another time in the future.

I love this series for a myriad of reasons, but enough with my personal experience with Nana, I wanna explain more about the PS2 Game.

It's a life sim game where your player character meets Nana Osaki (left on box art) and Nana "Hachiko" Komatsu (right) and your basically inserted into the story of the series from volume 5-8. Your main goal is to essentially make ends meet day by day, and getting to know the rest of the cast (and possibly dating them.)

Unfortunately, I wouldn't know the true goal, as with most other people online curious about the game, given the relative obscurity of this title and lack of chops to get their hands dirty with a PS2 game, this title remains unfortunately untranslated (as with most others of its kind.)

However, for a long time I went "Hey, how about I try my hand at ripping the music from this game? At the very least that doesn't really have a language barrier and hasn't been uploaded elsewhere." and like a year later I finally went on to do that, I'll be going over my process, it was actually relatively simple.

Getting the game

I Definitely Went On Japanese Auction Sites and Bought and Dumped the Game myself.

Yup, I sure did.

Files

After dumping the game into a new folder, it looks like this.

and If we quickly skim through the folders we'll find what we're looking for.

It was not particularly hard to infer this was the background music for the game cause yknow, BGM.

What the hell is a .rws file

My first barrier was figuring out how to convert .rws files into a .wav file, though the results weren't too helpful; it was mostly others wondering the same thing.

However after more scowering, I did find the solution to my problems off a comment from a 2 year old reddit post

vgmstream was what i needed, and it even had a web version so easy as that right?

Problem #2: Why are some files only outputting for a few seconds?

Cute little tune, that only plays for 8 seconds, so i decided to download the program myself.

Immediately I assumed to just drag and drop all the rws files into the .exe file and while that did output wav files, still the same problem, it would just be incredibly brief music files for some of the output.

My next course of action was reading the documentation... which frankly still didn't help me much with my issue despite its detail.

After that, I decided to install foobar2000 for the first time in ages, alongside the vgmstream plugin for foobar, and lo and behold.

It spat out 2 audio files when dragged into foobar! I had a mild hunch, but it comfirmed that these files sometimes have multiple streams/segments for looping in game.

The brief part where I made it hard for myself

Yeah so, to try and make it as easy as possible to export, i was convinced within the vgmstream command line there was an option to get the full audio file; segment 1 and segment 2 put together.

Despite all the settings i tried, it wasn't doing that, and as far as I am aware, vgmstream cannot do what i wanted. I had to manually put the segments together in Audacity.

But I had to get the segments first right? So I would drag and drop an rws file one at a time into foobar, and If it gave me 2 audio files, then I would go into vgmstream and run 2 commands. vgmstream-cli -s 1 [file].rws and vgmstream-cli -s 2 [file].rws.

Admittedly, I could've done this in foobar using quick convert much faster, but I was fixated on having these be lossless, which again foobar probably would've output lossless wavs anyways.

After all the files are outputed into wav, I just had to put the segments together using audacity, easiest part of this bar none