This week I’ve been doing some organization-related work for my upcoming book about Funky Fantasy IV. I’ve got an early chapter already mostly done but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything good/funny so I’ve been scouring through text files and jumping around in the game to get things I missed before.
It’s a bit of a hassle since FFIV/FFII don’t really have debug menus, so I’ve been relying on an old save file archive I put together for my FF4 comparison site. The problem is that I never really documented where each save file is so it’s always taken me 10+ minutes just to find a save file where I need it to be. So now I’m finally going through and documenting that stuff for future time savings.
Unfortunately it looks like one of my saves is missing entirely so I’ll have to play a good chunk of the game to re-create it. It’s also a bit of a hassle when using different save files on different versions of the game, as it means the characters’ names get messed up each time. But it’s a small hassle when I stop to realize I’m playing Final Fantasy IV for a career – kid me would be so shocked hear about this š
I’ve been playing through the Japanese version of “Vroom in the night sky” to screenshot all of the lines of text in the game. That means I have to spend a lot of time in levels racking up the points. In doing so, I’ve discovered a few funny bugs:
I clipped through the floor in the sunset beach level
Myself and the purple witch sometimes get stuck in the palm trees
The purple witch started bouncing up and down, and then got stuck when she landed on top of my head (pictured above)
Despite all the horrible reviews it’s gotten, this is one of my favorite games on the Switch~
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:
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.
The past few days/weeks have been filled with some interesting and unexpected things for me and Legends of Localization, so I thought Iād share of them! Iāve forgotten about half of them now, so here are just the ones I can remember:
Academic Journal
Thatās right ā apparently I was mentioned and quoted in an academic journal called The Journal of Internationalisation and Localisation 😯 This was actually from many years ago too, so itās surprising that Iāve only now heard about it. You can check it outĀ hereĀ and you can find the stuff about me by searching for my name.
You know, sometimes when I think back on some of my projects, I just remember, āOh, thatās the game where I had to translate poop jokes,ā so itās a pretty crazy feeling to be a quotable source for academic writing, heh.
Retro Gamer
Iām also in the latest issue of Retro Gamer magazine! I swear, every time I see pictures of this magazine it makes me want to buy every issue ever. So itās an honor to be within its pages! You can actually see a quick video preview of the issue here:
Haha, I just realized that the Japanese text next to āKey Figuresā means that Iām an āimportant numberā 😛
New Project in the Works
For the past many weeks Iāve been putting together a new project ā a comparison of the latest Zelda game for the 3DS. Late last year I finally sat down to play through A Link Between Worlds and started thinking ā since Iāve already taken a detailed look atĀ the first Zelda gameās localization, it would be cool to look at the very latest gameās localization too to see how things have changed in all these years. So Iāve been doing just that, and itās actually turning out to be a lot more fascinating than I expected!
Anyway, I donāt have a timeline for this project yet, but itās coming along nicely. I originally wasnāt even going to mention it until it was ready, but the main reason is this:Ā if you have any questions or suggestions for stuff I should look into, lemme know!Ā I donāt want to miss anything if I can help it, since it wonāt always be easy to go back and check things.
In fact, while playing through both versions of the game and gathering screenshots, I also decided to record video for future reference and to supplement any screenshots I miss. I also decided to start uploading them to YouTube, so if youāre interested in checking out videos of the Japanese and English version of A Link Between Worlds, Iāve started slowly posting them on my YouTube channelĀ here!
When the time comes Iāll be adding these to the appropriate comparison pages too. Be sure to let me know if Iāve missed anything or if I should try not to miss certain things ā as of writing this Iām about to get the Master Sword.
Final Fantasy IV
MyĀ Final Fantasy IV comparison sectionĀ has turned into a huge monster over time! But my recent decision to try to do one update a month has made it a lot easier for me to handle, so Iāll probably keep doing it that way for a while. The next update is going to be the Tower of Zotā¦ which means some serious stuffās about to go down!
AVGN Section Stuff
The other week I posted a new section aboutĀ Angry Video Game Nerd-related stuff, and itās actually been one of the most-viewed section of the site since 😯 My aim is to do a new article every couple of weeks; the ones that donāt involve creating comparison videos are surprisingly quick for me to write up, so itās pretty easy and fun. Next up will be Who Framed Roger Rabbitā¦ ugh.
Xenoblade for Fun, Research, and Health!
Last year I played through Xenoblade, and after some initial frustration it went on to become one of my all-time favorite games. I spent about 150+ hours on it, and about half of those were actually while I was on my exercise bike. I actually mentioned this to some friends and they were like, āHoly crap thatās a great idea, Iām gonna do it too!ā
Anyway, I wanted to get back in the swing of things, so I decided the other day to start a new game of Xenoblade. Then I realized, you know, maybe I should record my gameplay for future reference if I ever want to do a comparison project, or if I just want to do tiny mini-articlesĀ like this one. So Iāve started recording Xenoblade videos and uploading them too, in what I call a āLetās Workoutā 😛
Itās not especially exciting stuff to watch, but if youāre interested, itās on myĀ YouTube channelĀ too. Eventually I hope to move on to the Japanese version and record it too, but that wonāt be for a while Iām sure. But, again, if you have any suggestions on what I should look out for or what I should try not to miss, let me know!
(Just to be clear, Iām not announcing a Xenoblade comparison, but Iād love to do one someday, which is why Iām recording these videos.)
Man, I know thereās a lot more that I ought to mention, but I canāt remember it right now. But anyway, if you have any info or suggestions or whatever, please share them with me~
Also, after writing all this up, Iām amazed at how I rarely play games how theyāre meant to be played anymore ā I play them for research purposes and workouts now? Man, what a weirdo.
As Iāve been slowly putting the Legends of Localization site together over the past few weeks, itās actually started to get noticed by some people in the gaming press, which is pretty exciting. For example, Gametrailersā Pop Fiction series featured theĀ 256 worlds of Super Mario Bros. 1 trickĀ that I posted about a while ago:
The guy behind Pop Fiction actually got in contact with me a few weeks beforehand and I provided more info, pics, and such. So it was really cool not only getting mentioned in something, but also playing a tiny part in it 😀
Legends of Localizationās also gotten a few big mentions on Kotaku in the last few weeks, particularly thanks to Jason Schreirās āRandom Encountersā series.Ā One post involved JRPG censorship:
Itās a lot of work putting together these localization thingies, so itās cool to see the word slowly getting out little by little. Hopefully I can keep digging up more neat stuff like this as time goes on too 😀
