Archive

It’s over, it’s over! My quest to document the GBA port of Link to the Past in Japanese is over! All for this:

The friggin’ Cane of Somasoa! Which used to be called the Cane of Somaria in Japanese. Actually it still is called the Cane of Somaria in subsequent ports of the Japanese version… Nintendo got a little inconsistent.

To get that screenshot, I had to beat LttP regularly, then phase into the Palace of the Four Swords and beat 4 souped-up bosses and four versions of Dark Link. Since you can only unlock the bonus dungeon by beating Four Swords, and since FS is multiplayer only, I had to use a code to warp past the guy guarding the dungeon. Do you wanna traverse the bonus dungeon for yourself and see a different ending to LttP?

Use this code: 030038F0:20

Don’t talk to the guy guarding the dungeon! Just enable the code while standing in front of him and you’ll be warped past him. Then disable it and you can play through the FS dungeon.

And how long did LttP Somasoa% take?

Oh…

While searching for more visual novels in Apple’s app store, I came across a port of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.

This version is different from the DS version in that you don’t need to solve any puzzles and you also have access to a flow chart so you can go back and pick different paths. The game also flat-out tells you which paths to take to get the good ending if you die enough times (which I did).

I love this game – I even preordered the DS version and got a replica watch of the Nonary Bracelet as a bonus. But I died a lot. So much that I couldn’t handle running through the game again to figure out the right path for the good ending. So I’m thankful for this mobile version that tells me what to do if I die too much, but I do miss the fun puzzles.

This 999 port was published by Aksys Games, and they have one other game in the app store – Banshee’s Last Cry. You might have heard of a game called Kamaitachi no Yoru, or Night of the Sickle Weasel before. It’s the first “sound novel” that got really popular and shaped the sound/visual novel genre as we know it today. And Banshee’s Last Cry is the first official English localization of that historic game! Definitely give it a play.

Visual novels are perfect for mobile and I hope more quality games like these two published by Aksys will be released in the future. With Spike Chunsoft opening a US branch soon, perhaps we won’t have to wait long!

Back in like 2003 when Nintendo started releasing ports of NES and SNES games for the Game Boy Advance, I was really excited. Especially when my most favorite game was released: A Link to the Past. But when I played it, I was turned off by Link yelling every time he swung his sword. Not to mention the excruciating sound of phasing between the Light World and Dark World. I don’t think I bothered beating it on the GBA.

But now it’s time to Somaria% this game! Well, more than that – I’m also getting screenshots of all the text and creating many save states for future use.

O.G. San is on the prowl in Hyrule once again! But lordy lordy, I’d forgotten how strange the GBA version sounded. Some pieces of the Hyrule Castle song were simply missing, so it didn’t sound as important and intimidating as it did in the SNES version. And when I fell down that hole in the beginning, Link screamed :I

And the controls! The buttons are mapped strangely because the GBA has fewer buttons than the SNES controller. I had to complete remap them before I could comfortably play it. It’s also a bit easier – my magic bar filled up as soon as I got the Lantern, which doesn’t happen in the SNES version. And the enemies drop way more hearts.

Now that every popular Nintendo game is released over and over on whatever new digital service Nintendo happens to be running, it’s not exciting anymore. It’s exhausting. I pity the poor souls whose first experience with LttP was on the GBA.

Mato’s working on expanding the old article on the main site about the Cane of Somaria being renamed in the Japanese version of the GBA port of A Link to the Past (whoa, what a mouthful). I checked the WiiU VC and SFC Mini ports of the game over the weekend. As per the GameCats laws, I named the file “O.G. San” (but in hiragana cuz English letters wouldn’t fit):

Since I only needed to get to the Cane of Somaria and not worry about anything else, I ended up creating a pretty quick route that skips a lot of fat and goes straight for the meat:

1. Get the Magic Powder (good for turning Fire Fairies/Bubbles into regular Fairies)
2. Beat the Eastern Palace, get Pegasus Boots and run whenever possible
3. Beat the Desert Palace, buy Zora Flippers
4. Upgrade shield and boomerang behind the waterfall
5. Get to the Dark World
6. Get the hammer in the Dark Palace, use the Magic Mirror and leave without fighting the boss
7. Upgrade Magic, rescue the bird from the statue
8. Fly to Warp Point 1, get Ether Medallion
9. Fly to Warp Point 7, beat Swamp Palace
10. Fly to Warp Point 3, beat Blind’s Dungeon
11. Rescue the frog and upgrade sword
12. Fly to Warp Point 6, enter Misery Mire
13. Get the boss key using this guide
14. Use Magic Mirror to warp to the beginning of the dungeon, walk to big chest and get the Cane of Somaria

I haven’t timed myself, but I like to call this my Somaria% speedrun :]

While doing research yesterday, I found the localization development logs for Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King on The Cutting Room Floor. The logs are fascinating because you can see the back-and-forth between the people working on the project. Here’s an example of the devs trying to come up with a good description for a weapon while keeping it within the 18 character limit:

//敵を眠らせる武器
// ALTJ, jul12: I don’t like this wording, but “A weapon that puts enemies to sleep” is way over the limit.
// ALTJ, jul20: This appears to refer to the dream blade.
// WILL, jul22: How about the more ambiguous, “a sleepy weapon”? Or is that too obscure? Or even “a boring weapon”!!!??? It might make people think!
// MORGAN, jul25: I really don’t like “sleeper”. I would prefer “a sedative sword”, “a tiring weapon”.
// ALTJ, jul27: Changed.
a tiring weapon

You can find the whole log over here! It’s pretty long, so I recommend reading it during some lunch breaks or something~

Two and a half years ago when Mato, Tony, and I were working on our first book, Tony went through a long process to create a professional logo for us. Tony’s the designer of all the LoL books, and he also loooovvvves fonts and typefaces. Thanks to his hard work, we have a pretty iconic logo:

But how did Tony reach that final design? Scroll through these annotated screenshots for an inside look!

Working on a new article for this week, Mato needed to verify something between the original SNES and SNES mini versions of Kirby Super Star. Not being very knowledgeable of Kirby games, Mato hooked things up so he could play both games side-by-side at the same time…

While in the shower last Thursday I suddenly decided that hey, maybe I should make a dedicated page for the bad translation galleries we have on the main site. So I moved things around and added a Zero Wing gallery at the start of the series, then tweeted out the new page link. I thought it’d be a popular series, but it seems I underestimated the power of bad translations:

I guess it makes a lot of sense though – we made our bad translation book largely to be an introduction to LoL as a whole, and the book immediately got super popular as soon as it was announced. In a way, this is the same deal, the bad translation galleries will hopefully entertain enough to introduce the LoL site to readers who never would’ve noticed it otherwise.

I accidentally skipped over gallery #6 so I’ll probably go back and fill it in with Breath of Fire 2 highlights. After that, there’s a lot of games that we could add to the bad translation series. Hopefully it’ll be a new, strong pillar for the site in the long run.

With the surprising immediate success of our new Bad Translation Series yesterday, I wanted to quickly find more games we could throw up there. I remembered Alice in the Heart, an otome game (romance games aimed at girls) with one of the worst translations ever released. Unfortunately, that was a mobile game, and it’s no longer available to purchase anywhere, so in a sense it’s gone forever (one reason I dislike mobile games). So I went on a search to find other poorly-translated mobile otome games.

So far, my search has turned up nothing that comes remotely close to Alice in the Heart. At most, the games I found just need better editing. Here are some examples of my favorite mess-ups:

Yeah! Let’s post on hundreds of spider webs!

ehhhh… *insert doge meme parody here*

Besides the typo, I don’t like how the picture doesn’t match the description 🙁

hmmmmm……..

February 1 marked the start of “Content Month” at Legends of Localization (although now we realize it’ll have to be 2 months or however long it ends up taking). That means we’re spending all our time researching and writing articles, putting together galleries, and compiling and organizing all the screenshots that our GameCats (game catalogers) have been taking. Getting this all done now will free up time and resources when it comes time to work on our next book later this year, because we can release the finished content little by little throughout the year.

Right now we’re making good process compiling ideas for everything, and we’re getting pretty excited with a lot of the stuff we’re digging up. I hope you enjoy what we have in store for you! Lots of neat things from games I’ve never heard of, even.