Bahamut Lagoon - Translation Notes by Tomato --------------------------------------------------- I. About -------- I'm including a bunch of comments and notes about my translation of the text in Bahamut Lagoon for various kinds of people, including: fellow game translators, people who are curious about how I translated BL, people who like to say good things/bad things about translations based on REAL facts (all too often I'll hear things like "Chrono Trigger translation sucks, a friend told me so" - which is utter nonsense). Be sure to check out my Bahamut Lagoon site at http://starmen.net/tomato/bahamut for any updates I may make to my translation notes (and other BL-related stuff). II. Quick Background -------------------- I've translated about 12 or so other games, including big ones like Star Ocean and Live-A-Live (although I only did a portion of the latter). I've also translated manga, Japanese TV shows, short stories, and a novel. Oh yeah, if anybody in the game/game translating industry is reading this, I'm looking for a job, so contact me sometime. Of course the likeliness of somebody from a real company actually playing this translation AND reading this text file is pretty slim, so I'll probably be selling Slurpees for the rest of my life. III. Quick Translation Overview ------------------------------- My goal with Bahamut Lagoon was basically this: To translate stuff better than a lot of the bland commercial translations out there, but not as over-the-top as a lot of the fan translations turn out. I wanted to be somewhere in the middle ground. I don't take too many liberties with the text, but I do at least try to make people talk in their own unique ways. There are going to be lots of weird sounding parts (the intro to Chapter 15 comes to mind instantly) but I think most people will really enjoy my translation decision. At least that is my hope, anyway. IV. History ----------- I won't go into the messy details and re-open old wounds, but I started translating BL's text at the end of May 2001. I finished the initial translation a few weeks later, before I jumped onto the Star Ocean translation. The project lay dormant for about 5 months after that as a bunch of stuff happened (mainly real life, Star Ocean, and other projects). Then, I took up script editing in late November and early December. I then took a 2 and a half month break to translate a book. When I was done, I went back to finish BL editing. Because of this long break, there were a bunch of inconsistencies in characters' style of speech. I think I've ironed out most of these, but if you see anything that seems out of character, you now know the reason why. I finished script editing in March or April. Altogether, I'd say I easily put 150 hours, at the very least, into the translation and editing. Around this time, Dark Force (from DeJap) was kind enough to take Neill Corlett's place as the main ASM hacker. He worked 8+ hours per day on it, for probably a little over 2 and a half months. We all put in a lot of work to get the project to where it is today. And now you are reading this. V. Character Personalities, Etc. -------------------------------- This section is a little long and probably boring. But if you're wondering why some of the text sounds bland or stiff, that was done on purpose. Both Sendak and Taicho talk kind of weird, please refer to them in this list. This isn't even a complete list of the characters in the game. Keeping track of everybody was hard. Especially after that long break halfway through editing. * Byuu - Here's Byuu, the main character. I don't think he has any dialogue of his own, save perhaps for choices you're allowed to make when responding to people. I didn't really do much with that text though, other than making it sound normal. I had to get each text choice on its own single line, so there were 1 or 2 times where I had to struggle to keep the text sounding the same as the original. Just one of those technical issues game translators have to live with. * Yoyo - Here's Yoyo, the princess of Kahna, and the so-called "Dragnar". I actually have a lot to say about the title "Dragnar", but I'll talk about that later. Anyway, one of the weak points of this game's story is definitely in Yoyo's character, at least in my opinion. She's just plain stupid, and although that's not a problem in the plot, her dialogue and stuff was so stupidly written I wanna barf. She's like this mega idiot blonde girl, she gets kidnapped and is scared of her powers. I dunno, you'll just have to see for yourself how uncreative the writers were. Anyway, I didn't have to try too hard to bring across her ditziness. She does talk like a girl though, so I tried to bring that forth - but if you ask specifically how that is done, I can't answer very well. Not all girls talk similarly in English so I tried the best I could. * Palpaleos - Palpaleos is a general of the Empire, and Emperor Sauzer's best friend. He plays a big part in the plot, but his dialogue isn't all that spectacular, and the way he talks isn't all that out of the ordinary, so I basically just tried to make his text sound natural. Of course, everybody talks different depending on who they're talking to, who else is with them, etc., so when I say I tried to make it sound natural, I mean depending on each situation. * Sendak - Sendak's an old man (yes, he's a man for those who have doubts). He's kind of like an old advisor for the king and Yoyo. Being an old man, he speaks in a definite old-man manner in the original Japanese. It's hard to bring that across in English without using voices, so I tried to first draw out his sentences as much as possible, since old people do tend to ramble on a lot. Luckily, this fits in with another quirk in his personality - that he rambles and complains a lot. He also talks/thinks to himself a lot. To help accentuate his rambliness I decided to not let him use many contractions in his speech. Whether or not this was a good idea I don't know, but I tried to be consistent at least. I did let him use contractions when he was talking to himself though. He seemed very self concious and it just seemed fine to have him talk like that. And yeah, I don't know what's up with him, he does seem a little too attached to Byuu. I'll leave any inferences to the player. Especially the... one scene. * Matelite - Matelite is the head of the knights of Kahna from what I can tell. He's a big loudmouth and rude. These kinds of personalities are always fun to try to translate, because it's at least possible in English translations. In contrast to Sendak and Taicho, I let Matelite use lots of contractions and quicker-sounding speech. I'm sure most people won't notice it anyway, though. For the most part, the content of his dialogue makes up a big part of his personality, the way he says it is only the icing on the cake. I like to think I did a reasonble job with him, though I'm sure some would want to disagree. * Bikkebakke - Bikkebakke, Rush, and Truce apparently were all just barely surviving before Byuu let them into Kahna's dragon squad. Because they're so similar in character and always hanging around each other, I tried to keep the styles of all three pretty close together. And since they're kind of young and not especially intelligent, I try to have them talk kind of quick, and with lots of contractions and things like "gonna". Bikkebakke himself looks up to Byuu, almost as kind of an older brother. He often refers to Byuu as "aniki" in the Japanese version, but that shows familiarity more than anything else, in this case (IMHO). Because of this word, some people who don't know a whole lot of Japanese think Bikkebakke is Byuu's little brother, but this is not true. Watch out for people who pretend to know Japanese. * Rush - Rush hangs around Bikkebakke and Truce a lot. He's really headstrong, and doesn't like to think too much. Hence the name, I suppose. Anyway, he reminds me of a hyperactive kid in his late teens, so I tried to make him come across as such. Hope it worked. * Truce - Truce. It took a lot of time to pin down a good transliteration of his katakana name, but I think this is most likely what it should be. I've seen people call him Tulus or Toulouse or Taurus, but I don't think any of them are quite right. Truce seems to be the less hyper of the three, to me at least. I hope this comes across. I'm worried a lot about inconsistencies in his language that might creep in. In old, old versions of the script he talked a little too stiff. If this is still anywhere in the script, it'd be in the first few chapters. Hopefully I eliminated these inconsistencies. * Taicho - Taicho is/was the captain of the army of Mahal. Unfortunately the Empire kicked the crap out of them and now Taicho is out of a job, home, and wife. Taicho's dialog style was difficult to decide on. In the end, I decided that since he's a captain, and since he ends everything with "de arimasu", that I should make him sound like a stiff-talking army guy. So his text will sound really stiff. I'm betting that people who don't realize this purposely-made decision of mine will chalk up his stiff-sounding text to a bad translation/translator and/or bad editing, but they don't know the truth. At any rate, I'm concerned the most about Taicho's dialog, because there were some major inconsistencies in his text in early chapters in early versions of the script. If he suddenly starts talking normal, let me know, because he's not supposed to sound normal. One of the main things that is lost in translation if his text is his "de arimasu". It's kind of like his signature "word", but in translation that word is lost. Normally that might not be so important, but there are a few times when people are making fun of him, or when he's talking and the game doesn't tell you he's talking, you can just tell it's him from the "de arimasu". But in translation that's gone, so it makes things harder. I've tried my best to keep things working, but this is just one of the problems any translator will have to face. I could always go the Pokemon route and have him say "Taicho Taicho!!" at the end of every sentence, but then I would have a mob and the flaming torches and the biting and the kicking... And the Mini-Devils already talk like that. * Gunso - Gunso is a heavy-armor knight under Taicho. He apparently has some weird scratching problem - I'll leave any possible reasons up to the player. I tried to keep his dialogue between normal and Taicho-level stiffness. It varies but not by a whole lot. * Barclay - Barclay is another heavy-armor knight under Taicho's command. His text is a little less stiff than Taicho, because of little side-story stuff that happens later in the game. * Anastasia - Didn't do a whole lot with her character, as she has VERY few lines in the game. I just made her sound normal. * Diana - Same as Anastasia, I didn't do a whole lot with Diana's text. * Ectarina - Ectarina seems like a shy girl, and very unstable. So I tried to bring that forth. * Frederica - She seems to be way too hooked on medicine. I tried to at least make her sound like it, although in reality I didn't have to do much. * Joy - Um, there's not a whole lot to say about her. She serves the queen of Campbell, so when she DOES talk I try to make her sound elegant and/or official, but she doesn't talk a whole lot. * Melodia - Melodia is a little girl. It's pretty easy to make people sound like little kids, because we have little-kid talk in English too.She hangs around the Mini-Devils a lot, and in a way she even looks kind of like them (not so much in battle though). I think I did okay with her text, though there might be a few places where I could have made her sound more kid-like than I did. * Nelbo - Just like Joy, Nelbo serves the queen of Campbell, and as such I tried to make her fit that character in her dialogue. Of which there is VERY little of. Anyway, Nelbo = :) IMO * Zora - Zora's an older woman, and I guess she serves Princess Yoyo. She isn't all that graceful or anything, and she's pretty rough. She yells at people a lot, not to mention occasional physical violence. I tried to bring this coarseness out. She's a mother of one of the other characters, so I tried to make her sound like a strict, middle-aged mother. * Lukia - Lukia is a light armor knight. She's kind of playful in a kissy-kissy sort of way. I think you know what I mean. Anyway she also seems like a big loudmouth to me so I tried to put that into her dialogue. * Jeanne - I don't know a whole lot about Jeanne, but people mention she's sort of tomboyish in the game, so I tried to make her sound like that. * Mist - She's constantly bragging about her good looks and talking to herself about how beautiful she is. I didn't do too much with her. She's also a secret character, for those who are paying attention. * Reeve - Reeve is a Lancer. Together with his friend Frenze, he does a lot of showing off of his lancing skills. I had a hard time figuring out what to name him and Frenze, but these seemed the best. * Frenze - Frenze's name was hard to figure out too. In the end I'm glad I chose this one, it's short and isn't too funky. Character-wise, he's just like Reeve, so there's not much to say. * Donfan - Donfan was my favorite character to work on. Translating his text was hell, but making it sound good was real fun. I'm sure most people will agree a lot of his scenes throw in a lot of much-needed humor to break up the over-dramatic monotony of the story. Maybe it'll make some people laugh out loud even. I'd be real happy if it did. Anyway, the first thing I should point out that his name in Japanese can be seen as a rendition of "Don Juan". He certainly fits the character, sort of. The reason I chose Donfan was two-fold: that was what I called him from the start, and changing his name later on would suck, and the name "Don Juan" doesn't fit too well in this game, in English, IMO. Of course, calling him Donfan isn't exactly wrong either, it's a perfectly allowable rendition of his katakana name. In the end it's just a choice the translator will have to make, and I chose Donfan. I think most people will like this one better. And if not, they should stick bananas in their ears. I tried to make his speech really wild and corny. I hope people appreciate his text style. My only concerns are that maybe early in the game his style will be slightly inconsistent with his style later in the game. I'll hopefully have had that fixed up by the final patch. Also there's his trademark line, it's a bugger to translate. Ah well. I'm pretty sure my translation of "such is the way of the world" is WRONG. I'm fairly certain "that's what I'm here for" or "that's my job" is closer. But I think I'll keep it as is until I can take a break and look at it again with clearer eyes. If that makes sense at all. * Zora's Son - Zora's Son doesn't give his name (right away), probably because having Zora for his mother really screwed him up in the head. Character-wise, he seems like a kind of innocent guy who had the unfortunate luck of having a real monster of a woman for a mother. So he's kind of timid, and I tried to put that into his text. * Manyo - Manyo is one of the Mini-Devils. There's not a whole lot to say except these guys are weird. I think they're really into death and praying to gods of death and stuff. Actually you don't know about that until maybe midway of the game. When I got to that text I was like, "WTF." Anyway, my only decision was how to make the text in parentheses sound - should I make it sound weird, like caveman talk, or just normal, like normal subtitles? In the end I chose to do a little of both. * Monyo - See above. Nothing special here. * Munyo - See above again. Bleh. * Wagahai - Wagahai's a Mini-Devil who thinks he/she is better than the others. I'm not quite sure about a couple lines this Mini-Devil says inside the ship (you'll see what I mean, I need to analyze those lines more), but this Mini-Devil is definitely proud. So the other Mini-Devils eventually get fed up with it, and then.... you'll just have to play ;) * Sajin - Sajin is a ninja-for-hire. He doesn't say a whole lot, so I didn't put a whole lot of effort into making him his own style. * Zeroshin - Zeroshin is another ninja-for-hire. He's extremely shy, and always writing letters back to his mother. I didn't need to do much with his text, the content of his text speaks for itself most of the time. VI. Naming ---------- People like to think that translating non-dialogue stuff is real easy. Like translating item names, monster names, etc. They're actually MUCH harder than dialogue. It just seems easier to beginners because they're single words. But a lot of items, spells, monsters, and the like are made-up names, or names based slighly off a real word, but aren't real words themselves. Or, names which are originally neither Japanese nor English. BL had a lot of these words. There was a bit of German influence on this game. A lot of items and enemies were based off of World War I and II terminology. Others were of historical and religious significance, which I also had to research. A lot of work went into figuring out these item names. But there were a few lost causes. In these cases, I tried to come up with a good equivalent that would make sense to English speakers. So if anybody wants to complain about how I named things, you can't say I didn't put a lot of work into it. But I make mistakes too, so if I did make any, please let me know. Somebody once came up to me and said that all the character names in BL were supposed to represent who they are. For example, Rush. His name sort of signifies who he is. Also, there's Taicho, which literally is a sort of military commander, and Gunso, which is literally a sergeant. So this person also pointed out that the main character should be called "View" not "Byuu", since he gets to "view" all that happens in the game. I don't buy this. What about Sendak? Matelite? Palpaleos? Just doesn't work. But I thought I'd throw this in for people to ponder over. Some of the chapter titles are kind of corny/weird, but I'm not going to change them just because they sound weird. The one I have the most problem with is "Full of Regret". I should probably have translated it some other way, because "regret" doesn't seem to be the right word in this context. The title comes from a line Matelite says in the chapter, but again, regret doesn't seem to be quite the right word. But it still makes sense overall. Many of the default dragon names are slightly different. Byuu's dragon is Salamander in the original, but that doesn't fit in 8 characters, so we dropped it down to Salmando. Icedrake was originally Icedragon. Thundera or whatever we called it was originally Thunder Hawk. What we have as Molten would probably sound best as Morten, IMO, but that was one of the things I conceded to DF. His reason for calling it Molten was because it would be the fourth element earth since the other 3 fire/thunder/water were used on the other dragons. The flagship's name was originally Fahrenheit, but we had to make it fit within 8 characters, so now it's Farnheit. You can always change these names to whatever you like; you get to name your dragons and your ship near the beginning of the game. In regard to "Dragnar", let me say this. From the katakana, Dragnar is the most likely English spelling. I used it in all my early scripts. I didn't like it very much, so I changed it to "Dragoner" in an edited script, mainly because other groups were calling it different things, and because people on message boards were calling it by that too. But after a while, I changed my mind again, and put it back to Dragnar. I'd rather choose a name because of what the game says and what I think than because of outside influences. So now it's "Dragnar" again. Plus, it has that sort of exotic feel that the original Japanese word has. Dragoner just doesn't sound all that exotic. Some item names were practically impossible to translate. The biggest culprit is "Drawer Thing", which is the closest rendition I think anybody can really make. It's a "thing" in a "you-know-what" type of sense, at least that's the original's meaning. "an item from a drawer - you know what it is." Another is Uniuji - I don't think this is "Sea Urchin Grub" but just another made up name. "Uni" shows up a lot in this game, so I think Uniuji is just another extension of that. VII. Editing ------------ I did all of the dialogue editing myself. So if it sucks, blame me. Dark Force helped to do some of the in-battle text, map dialogue, and other little things. I didn't always agree 100% with his decisions, but I'm still very happy with how things turned out. Editing took me probably 2 months total. I wrote a custom text previewer application (which was pretty sucky), and went through every single line of text to make sure the text was formatted correctly. If it wasn't formatted correctly, the game would crash and it wouldn't work. There's a slight chance there may be a line or two in the game that will overflow the box and freeze up the game, but if there are any of those lines, I must have missed them in my testing. Since the game is so linear, I went through each chapter and edited the text as I played. I would edit a chapter's text, insert it into the game, try it out, then re-edit and reformat to sound better. I would then test this newer text and re-edit it again. I did this time after time after time, for each and every chapter. I played the game so much it was disgusting. VIII. Miscellaneous ------------------- To answer one of the most-likely questions: Yes, the game is that perverted in the original version. I made sure not to go overboard, but I made sure not to be too cautious. Speaking of cautious, one of the big changes I was *going* to make was with the word "drug" that appears all throughout the game. In English, the first thing that word brings out is "illegal narcotic", which is not exactly how it is in Japanese. Because of this cultural difference, I was going to change all the instances of "drug" to different things like "Tonic", "Heal", etc. so that they would make sense in context. I can just see the little, immature teenagers making bad jokes and giggling about items like "High Drug" or "White Drug" or "Drug Hit" or "Heal Grass" or whatever else there is. In the end, though, I just decided, screw that, I'm not gonna change it, people would just call the translation sucky if I changed it, and it'd just take more time which I can spend sleeping. Originally the font was the same one as in Neill's SD3 translation, but since this game looks so much like FF6, I wanted to go with FF3us's font. I had to slightly modify a few of the larger characters, like w and m, but in the end it looks real slick. Very professional looking. For those people who like to play games a zillion times and find all the smallest secrets, check out the checklist at my BL page. It lists some hard-to-find stuff, some of which is stuff we added and/or slightly changed (changed is such a harsh word). As for "Holy Dragons", this was a difficult decision. Certainly, these dragons are not of a holy nature. Dragon Gods was another possibility, but it just didn't seem quite right to me. Divine Dragons was another choice, but that sounds pretty funky, to me at least. It was a hard decision but I chose Holy Dragons in the end, because I had to choose *something*. IX. End ------- That's all for my little BL translation notes file. I'm sure I'll think of stuff to add to it later, so if you're one of the weird geeks who has read this far, and you happen to be interested in this kind of stuff, check out my BL page at http://starmen.net/tomato/bahamut. If I ever want to update the translation notes, I'll do it there. I also have a complete walkthrough with screenshots, helpful tips, and explanations on how to get secret stuff at that site, not to mention lots of pics, downloads, and other stuff. So check it out sometime. X. Personal Thanks ------------------ Too many people to thank. Neill Corlett (http://lfx.org/~corlett), Dark Force, all my Japanese sensei and friends in Japan who helped me out with learning the language. reidman, and all the cool people at Starmen.Net. All the cool people over at MO's translation board, koitsu for pulling off that awesome April Fool's joke (you had me tricked for about 0.5 seconds, it was the lawyer name that gave it away big time), the people at the BL GameFaqs board who helped me with some info when I needed it, the authors of some Japanese BL pages which don't exist any longer, Summon Illusion, Zalagren, iMoose, and Square (for the cool game, and for hopefully hiring me. Right??? Come on. ;) NO thanks to all the "gimme BL now", "WHAT UP WITH BAHUMAT" kiddies who have pestered me for an entire year. "If you're translating BL why aren't you letting people download it? you're a stupid liar" My answer to that is: I wasn't letting people download it because it wasn't done yet. Idiots. Now go play the game and stop reading my boring crap. -Tomato (http://starmen.net/tomato) May 31, 2002 ============================================================================= ============================================================================= Bahamut Lagoon - Technical Notes by Dark Force ---------------------------------------------- Reprogramming ------------- Originally, I only wanted to help out Neill finish his work on BL, I did not plan on taking over the entire project. It quickly became clear that Neill had no interest in finishing BL on his own or even with help, and so my interest in BL diminished as well. It was only when Tomato consistently began to persuade me to work on it and when the other groups began announcing their BL projects, that I decided to actually help. Initially, I was impressed by the work Neill had done with the 13x13 and 8x8 variable width fonts and the dialogue script, thinking those would make my job really easy. Neill had done 3 of the 12x12 variable width fonts and one of the 8x8 variable width fonts, as well as the dialogue replacement and recompression. I never would have imagined how much was left to be done. Neill didn't know it at the time and neither did I, but he had only scratched the surface. And to make things worse, Tomato wanted EVERYTHING in a variable width font! So, reluctantly, I complied. It was a challenge to find enough VRAM space to hold all of the vwf text, like hacking the inventory screen, for example. Seeing the finished product, however, I think it was worth it. The game feels more like a psx game than an snes game, as I don't remember any other snes game or translation having a dynamic variable width 8x8 font (except for Front Mission which used one, I don't know if it used it everywhere or not). It was so nice not having to abbreviate item names and not truncating text, forcing it to sound bad. It makes the whole translation that much more friendly and enjoyable. Eventually I think this will affect future translations to do full 8x8 vwf hacks (which are much harder than 16x16 vwf hacks). I know Bongo is already implementing one for his current project and I'm thinking of doing one for Star Ocean. Kammedo's BL patch also uses a variable width 8x8 font, but that was only after Neill tried adding one first. This game is by far one of the ugliest I've worked on, especially when adding an 8x8 vwf. There are so many inconsistencies, hundreds of hardcoded pointers, dialogue scripts embedded in 2 separate scripting languages, individual text strings spread out all over the damn rom, every different kind of pointer system possible, at least 5 different fonts and routines to display them, which all look the same on screen! Some of the fonts were identical when decompressed, yet were compressed with different routines. I often became quite sick of all the inconsistencies and stupidities in this game and can only imagine it was written by 5 separate teams who never spoke to each other and kept adding more features as hacks rather than including them into the game engine. After it's all said and done, I can take pride in the work we did on this game. As far as the hacking goes I think it's the best looking job I've done to date, and Neill gets half the credit for that. Also, Tomato's 12x12 font makes the dialogue very easy to read. It's similar to my ToP font but his looks much better. Visualization ------------- As with with other translations, I spent a lot of effort on redesigning the various screens and repositioning text and cursors to make the most effective use of space while still keeping the screens pretty and easy to read. The tech names were a bit too long in some places which cause some cramming, and one screen where there is a problem with space is the formation sub-screen, but overall they look great. I could have made more room by expanding the window borders right to the edges of the screen, but then the screen would appear cut off if the game was played on a TV screen instead of an emulator, and I intend to play it on my TV. I took some liberties along the way, improving some screens where I thought the original game needed improvement. Below is a list of modifications that changed the game from it's original design: - Added variable width fonts everywhere * This will cause noticible slow down on some screens (such as item lists) compared to the Japanese version and you can even see it redrawing in some situations. For this reason, there is a separate patch for emulators which will reduce all the slowness. The emulator patch, however, will not work properly on a copier. - Inventory Menu Screen * I moved the 2 item columns as close together as I could to fit the longest item name. The right column is actually a bit wider than the left column, but it's almost impossible to notice unless you have the same item name on both columns, which is also impossible. * The original text at the bottom read "Dragon Keeper's Item Explanation", which sounded bad and was too long to fit with the vwf so I changed it to "Inventory / Item Details" because that sounds closer to what you can view and there are two separate screens accessible from that one menu option. * I made the regular item icons variable width, meaning you may notice that first letter of light armor items and heavy armor items do not line up. * For the item details I used up and down arrows to show status changes. - Dragons Menu Screen * I changed the dragon status attributes (at the botton of the screen) from font text to colorized icons drawn by CPF, which I think work much better especially given the limited room on that screen. - Formation Sub-Menu Screen * I moved around some text to make more room for tech lists, so a couple long item names (weapons/armor) overflow on to the next line. I don't care enough to fix it and it's only on a small number of items so chances are you won't notice it, plus there's no more room to move it around anyways. - All Menu Status Screens * I chose not to use the variable width font for HP/MP/SP/LV/NEXT/EXP because I felt they were more important and I wanted them to stick out. * I also chose not to use the vwf for PARTY and PAGE for the same reason. * I chose to leave TIME as fixed width because it's always directly followed by numbers which are also fixed width. It would look strange to mix the two font types together here. - Item Descriptions on Menu Screens * There is no shadow on the 12x12 variable width font used for descriptions. Neill did this one and he didn't included a shadow, reason being it's really nasty since the font is displayed using sprites. I don't blame him and it doesn't bother me enough to try and add a shadow to it. - All Money Screens * I chose to use PR instead of Piro (the game's currency) because it's more in line with using GP like Square does in its English translations. - Naming Screen * I completely redesigned this, instead of trying to reuse the Japanese layout. The result is it looks like a naming screen should be, instead of a hacked up Japanese one. The name cursor is also repositioned on a pixel basis, to accomodate the variable width font for the name. - Load/Save Game Screen * I expanded the 12x12 chapter names to print on two lines instead of one, because I didn't want to truncate any of Tomato's translations. There's one small bug as a result but I don't care since this screen looks amazing the way it is now. - Title Screen * I fixed the "Temporally Play" graphic to read "Temporary Play", silly Square... * I Added our custom logos beside the Square logo. - Sound Menu Screen * Neill added a hidden jukebox (sound test) to the game. The names used in the track titles of the songs don't correspond to the spelling Tomato used in the dialogue, this is because the track titles were taken from an OST cd (I think) but weren't necessarily correct, but we will still honor them. For example, they had Zauzer instead of Sauzer. - Dragon Feeding Screen * I changed how the dragon class was displayed slightly, by adding a cell separator instead of appending it with a slash. * I made the Loyalty/Fidelity statuses always visible, which the game originally hid unless you had an Uni Uni dragon; I think they're useful to see at all times. * I also changed the graphics/text for Loyalty/Fidelity from '?' and '??' to letters of the status they actually represent. - Dragon Transformation * When the dragon transforms, I went as far as making it display 'a' or 'an' when it says "Transformed into a[n] xxx dragon.", instead of taking the cheap way out and saying "Became xxx dragon". - In-Battle Screens * I added pixel-centering for the magic/attack names and descriptions. * For the battle dialogue I forced it to be not centered (unlike the original game) because I felt centered dialogue didn't look right. * I also allowed the battle dialogue to have multiple lines of text, instead of just one line in the original. * I made the colorized item icons display instead of the standard vwf icons. This isn't really a change from the original, but I'm listing it so that people don't think it's a bug on our part: there is an icon that looks like a bomb in battle which is appears as a pot on the status screens. That's what the original game did so I'm keeping it the same way. * The character select window I shortened because it was longer than it needed to be now that we were using a variable width font for the names. * I removed the ":" after the element/status icons for enemies because it seemed completely useless to me. * For when a spell or item fails, I replaced the "Fail" word in Japanese with a "Fail!" graphic in English, but I don't know if that's the best word to use.. maybe "Miss!" or "Missed!" ? - After-Battle Screens * I changed the colors of "Exp" and "Lv Up!". The game originally meant to display Exp in a different color, but because of a palette bug on their part, it showed up as white. When I fixed that and "Exp" showed up in yellow, "Lv Up!" looked strange also in yellow, so I changed it to the next available color which was orange. * I removed the "+" sign from the amount of exp gained after battle. - Main Dialogue * There are a few strings that contain hidden references to ourselves, one of them tells you how to access the jukebox. - Map/Field Dialogue * The scenario objective is now pixel-centered. * When drowning, it displays the message "Will drown in x turn[s].", I made the "s" in "turns" only display if there is more than 1 turn left, instead of taking the cheap way out and saying "turn(s)". * The only string we didn't find was "Dragon evolved into xxx", when a dragon evolves on the field. If anyone gets this to happen, please send us a savestate, you will probably see garbage text on the screen. - Map/Field Menus * For spell details, I drew range and radius icons instead of using text. * For the terrain window, I replaced the 12x12 font with an 8x8 variable width font and pixel-centered the terrain type (Tomato's idea). * For the main menus, I used different idents/cursor positions depending if the field menu or attack menu or dragon menu is being displayed, in an effort to make the text in the menu look centered. It works most of the time but not always. - Intro/End Credits * Fixed Square's spelling mistakes ("designner") and added us to the credits. Editing ------- Like Tomato said, I helped with the editing for map and battle dialogue, so don't complain to him if the text isn't exactly what was said in Japanese. I wanted to make the text sound more elaborate rather than using the lame incomplete phrases that existed in Japanese. For example, original text: "Lestat: I haven't started yet!", my edit: "Lestat: I still have a full deck up my sleeve!" (talking about showing his potential in battle); or, original text: "Sauzer: The Holy Dragons' power... It is a terrifying power!", my edit: "Sauzer: The power of the Holy Dragons commands such malevolence..." That's not exactly what you'd call literal translations. I know Tomato wanted to keep to the original scripts while still trying to make them sound good, but in this case I didn't think that would work, and I wanted to have some fun with those scripts as well. The only reason I chose to edit them was because I was sick of hacking at this point. Retranslations -------------- Anyone who wants to translate BL to their own language, DO NOT CONTACT US AND DO NOT RIP OFF OUR PATCH! We will plan on working on multilingual BL translations when we're ready. In the mean time, Kammedo is probably more able to help with translating BL to other languages, I think he's already planning one for German. There is also a group that already has a BL patch in French that could also help you with another language translation. There's also a Thai translation group that has made a decent BL patch. -Dark Force (http://www.dejap.com) May 31, 2002 What's New ---------- VERSION 1.3: * Fixed all the crashing that happened. This was because of a simple missing % sign in the main script. The game now runs fine. We've re-tested the entire game and no crashes were to be found. If the game crashes, then you likely have a bad ROM. * Fixed a few aesthetical things in the script. * Fixed that fireworks graphical glitch for good. VERSION 1.2: * The checksum has been fixed. So if you apply this patch and your emulator says the checksum is bad, it means your original ROM was corrupt. Look elsewhere for the ROM. WE WILL NOT SEND ONE TO YOU OR TELL YOU WHERE TO GET ONE. If, after you apply the patch, the checksum is OK, then you have a good version of the ROM. * Fixed instances in the script that might have frozen the game if you renamed a main character to a long name. This will fix the problems that a few people had in Chapters 6, 12, and 15. * Also fixed some spelling and text consistency issues. Fixed a few item and dragon class names, as well. * Re-edited a bit of the map dialogue text and other map messages. * Fixed the dragon evolution line on the map scene. Thanks to all who provided us with save states. Known Issues ------------ * Zsnes 1.337 WIN has a bug during battle where the message window appears in the middle of the screen after an attack fails. THIS IS NOT OUR PROBLEM! This will be remedied in future versions of ZSNES. * Load/save game screen: garbage text appears at bottom of screen momentarily when saving a game. * Long item names on formation sub-screen overflow onto the next line. * There is a version of the ROM out there that gets your party members to Level 99 instantly. This is a bad ROM. THIS IS NOT OUR PROBLEM! There are also versions of the ROM that are corrupt and will cause the game to reset randomly or just mess up in weird ways. * If you use cheat codes, the game may suddenly reset on you at anytime. Use cheat codes at your own risk. ! If anyone notices any other bugs, please report them to us. Bug when using the patch on a COPIER ONLY ----------------------------------------- When viewing the list of items in battle or during dragon feeding, the item names may show garbage text. To get around this problem, select any item in the list as if you were about to use it, then press the B button to cancel and return to the item list. When you return to the list, the item names will be properly displayed. Patching Help ------------- For the first time, we are not providing any support for using this patch. We didn't spend all these months translating this game only to be barraged by questions on how to apply the patch. If you haven't figured it out by now, the DeJap forum is the place to ask these questions. Click on the Forum icon at the top of the DeJap homepage (the link has been fixed), but for lazy people, the URL is http://board.zsnes.com/index.php?board=6 . Make sure to read the topics at the very top of the board; the answers you need will most likely be there already. Credits ------- All Translations...........: Tomato All Programming/Hacking....: Neill, Dark Force 12x12 VWF Font.............: Tomato 8x8 VWF Font...............: Neill 16x16 Status Icons.........: CPF 8x8 Naming Font............: CPF All Main Dialogue Editing..: Tomato Non Main Dialogue Editing..: Tomato, Dark Force Testing....................: Tomato, Dark Force, Neill Special Thanks to (for technical assistance): Neill, Bongo, Kammedo, F.H Special Thanks to (for other): iMoose, zalagren, Summon Illusion, MO, Shih Tzu, Major Damage, animesou, didalos, katharsis