FF6T Script Difference Checking

A distant goal is to create a script for my custom emulator project that will allow fans to play the Japanese Final Fantasy VI T-Edition hack in English. The hack is incredibly complex and thorny, enough that a full translation patch is considered to be impossible. Personally, I say it’s possible but just excessively work-intensive to do a patch. In any case, I started laying the groundwork for a non-patch translation project (which uses my custom emulator sidebar stuff as a base) a few weeks back but I needed to determine some info ahead of time in order to save myself a ton of work later.

First, the original FF6 script contained about 3000 lines of text. The FF6T script clearly has many more, and after doing the necessary reverse engineering, I learned that it’s around 4600 lines of text. Most of the original script was left intact, though, so I decided to run a comparison to see which of the original FF6 lines matched the FF6T lines. In these cases, since nothing was changed, I simply display the equivalent line from the SNES English translation. This alone will save me a lot of time – otherwise I’d be retranslating the entire original game from scratch (which has already been done to death) AND the entire new hack!

But I soon discovered that many of the changed lines simply had kana words changed into kanji – in other words, no meaning was changed. So I wanted to find a way to identify these lines too and avoid having to manually translate them. So I made a big HTML file of text lines that were different in FF6 and FF6T, which you can see here if you’re interested:

diffs

Using this file, I then manually made a list of the line #s that were essentially the same despite kanji differences. In all, about 440 original lines were changed, and adding in the number of completely brand new lines, I have about 1600 lines of text to translate. Oh man. That’s on top of all the other programming, enemy/item/spells/technique names, and whatever else I’m forgetting. But I think it’ll be worth it in the end… whenever that comes.

I’m currently using FF6T version 2.5 as a base, but it gets updated often enough that by the time I finish it’ll be beyond 3.0. Hopefully not TOO much will change between those versions, or we’ll just be stuck using 2.5.

8 thoughts on “FF6T Script Difference Checking”

  1. Hey there lord of the beasts,

    I recently was watching parts of your FF6 T-Edition walkthrough on Youtube. Nice stuff.

    Question related to *this* post: How accurate are you looking to make the translation? I looked over your diff file and a *lot* of the new text you had in your diff would be fairly easy for someone to extrapolate the meaning from G-translate into some decent playable English. e.g. just to pick out a couple at random…

    Line 3159’s Google Translate

    Setzer “Earth Crystal, or ……
    Setzer “The tomb of Darryl is a thing that added the
    subsurface cemetery originally in that place

    Setzer “Perhaps, there may be some gimmicks that I do not know ….

    could become

    Setzer “The Earth Crystal…there?
    Setzer “I added Darryl’s tomb to an underground cemetery that was already there beforehand.”

    Setzer “Perhaps there are some things about that place that I wasn’t aware of…”

    Line 3160’s G-Translate reads:

    Rock “Fire Crystal ……
    That reminds me, where Phoenix Manastone was
    sleeping, the deepest part of the cave
    Rock “There was a feeling of strangeness at the feet … That was the feeling that there was a
    cavity underneath.
    Rock “You
    may as well go and try it again.”

    which could go to:

    Locke: “The Fire Crystal…that reminds me…
    In the deepest part of the cave, where we found the Phoenix Magicite…”
    Locke: “The ground felt strange…like it was hollow underneath. Maybe we should go back to the cave and check it out?”

    If it’s a matter of just stuff being playable (vs. being perfect) and you’re thinking the load would be too heavy to do by your lonesome I’d be really happy to help with the raw translating. I’d love to play this in English too. Ping me if this is something you think I could help with (I’m happy to be told, “No, booo, you suck” as well if you ain’t feelin’ it.)

    1. Oh, I actually *want* to translate the script myself – it’s a fun little thing I’ve been looking forward to for a while, plus I already live-translated most of it so it shouldn’t be too tough. As you might imagine, I’m wary of using Google Translate for anything beyond simple experiments 😛

  2. Just want to say FF6 is my favorite game of all time, and I have been hoping for years for someone to translate this hack into english. Please please find a way to make this work, I would be forever grateful!!

  3. You should consider maybe setting up a patreon or gofundme or something similar to do this project. I’m sure plenty of people will be willing to donate to you for your time in translating. I know people in the USA have been wanting an English patch for a really long time!

  4. Hi Clyde, I was wondering if you are still working on this? I would love to play T-Edition but the language barrier is a bit of a problem. I typically play FF6 on my phone so having to have a bunch of translated web pages would make the experience impossible if not mostly cumbersome

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