Legends of Localization DEV BLOG

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~

One of the bookplates we signed for the EB LoL book accidentally got ripped, so now it lives on Fangamer’s receipt printer.

We had to buy a lot of Zelda merchandise when we were working on the first book (we didn’t want to steal any photos from the internet, so we took our own). Now that the book is published, all that merchandise is displayed around the Fangamer office. Here’s a portion:

90s Sega ads are never not weird.

We finished our LoL stream of Super Mario RPG earlier this week. If you missed it, check out the archive here!

Fangamer just happens to have a unique Super Mario RPG poster hanging up in the office:

Legends of Localization has its own little spot in the Fangamer office to store the various bits and bobs relating to each project. Today we found a forgotten box of bonuses that were include with the first 500 copies of the deluxe edition of the Zelda book. We kept some in case we needed them for customer service, but maybe we’ll give them out with random orders now.

(Note: Zelda II was not a bonus, lol)

The LoL team had a meeting yesterday, and Tony the Designer laid out a big ol’ schedule for the rest of the year. It’s good to see it all laid out visually, but it also means we have to get all that work done!

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.

While working on my academic paper about Funky Fantasy IV I noticed something familiar.

First, the game was obsessed with fluoride for some reason:

Then, while looking through another really badly translated game, I found this:

I can only assume that Google’s old machine translation system considered dentistry as fantasy.

Here’s a blurry look at the bonus we’ll be including with every copy of “I’m Stuck in a Video Game”! Spritework by Nina Matsumoto~