Author Topic: Mega Man X2 Relocalization (Read 22664 times)

Thirteen 1355 · « **on:** October 23, 2019, 01:43:26 pm »

Good morning/afternoon/evening/night guys and gals!

New text is on the left.

I am in the process of relocalising Mega Man X2, to match the context of the story with the Japanese version. Mega Man X is changed to simply 'X', for example, like in the first and third game. The X-Hunters' dialogue will be somewhat overhauled and Sigma's mention of Zero's origin will be fully fleshed out.

Firstly, I am not sure if 'relocalizations' should go under hacks or translations, but I'd go with hacks, since it's not really a full retranslation.

Secondly, I wonder if I should change Serges to Sagesse. Give me your thoughts!

EDIT:
Obviously I can't get the picture embed stuff to work here, still

Metalwario64 · « **Reply #1 on:** October 23, 2019, 01:55:13 pm »

I always hated how X was just called "Mega Man" in the English version!

COA really must have thought he was the original Mega Man, and that confused English speaking fans for years, and lead to X sounding like a little kid in X4 "because he's Mega Man!".

acediez · « **Reply #2 on:** October 23, 2019, 01:57:02 pm »

Nice! Looking forward to add this to my X hack collection

In case you didn’t know, there’s a retranslation of the script by the same person who retranslated 8 and X4.
If you decide to extend this to a complete script overhaul, here it is:

https://hondoori.wordpress.com/scripts-and-localizations/rockman-series/rockman-x2/

Thirteen 1355 · « **Reply #3 on:** October 23, 2019, 02:00:12 pm »

Haha, that's actually the script I'm taking the Japanese info from. His script is a complete rework though, and honestly I'm not sure if I'd be able to insert that script as a whole into this ROM (with everything needing to be about the same amount of symbols and all that). I also believe that some of the English writing is pretty nicely done ("but ~~Mega Man~~ X and the new generation of Maverick Hunters have yet to destroy all of Sigma’s followers.")

This:

instead of this.

acediez · « **Reply #4 on:** October 23, 2019, 03:03:24 pm »

Be sure to include any interesting bit you find in the script missing from the american version, like Serges refering to X as "Rock... X..." (maybe "Mega... X..." in this case).

It's only halfway there, but it's the only canon "Mega Man" mention in the X's series that I know of. A very slight and uncompromised hint of him being Wily, just like they did with Isoc in X6.

Thirteen 1355 · « **Reply #5 on:** October 23, 2019, 03:10:27 pm »

Exactly why I decided to make this hack. I wouldn't mind the 'Mega Man X' mentions much (since ZX series kinda call both X and Zero 'Rock Men' or 'Mega Men'), if not for Serges' specific mention. I want to restore his lines and that's the initial reason I chose to edit this game's text, and by extension, to remove the 'Mega Man' bits while restoring Serges'.

Still wondering if I should keep it Serges or make it Sagesse.

acediez · « **Reply #6 on:** October 23, 2019, 04:44:56 pm »

I'd keep the localized names (Serges), as I usually don't have a problem with those, I just want to get cut meaning and content.

But really, it's up to you. If your aim is to have a 100% faithful relocalization that includes all the japanese names, that's fine too.

star_scream1646 · « **Reply #7 on:** October 23, 2019, 04:56:58 pm »

Quote from: Metalwario64 on October 23, 2019, 01:55:13 pm

I always hated how X was just called "Mega Man" in the English version!

COA really must have thought he was the original Mega Man, and that confused English speaking fans for years, and lead to X sounding like a little kid in X4 "because he's Mega Man!".

Same here, I never understood how come they kept calling him "Mega Man X" when they simply called him "X" in the first game.

I think COA was trying to make it so that "X" was really Mega Man, I say this because of the ending in Mega Man 7. When Mega Man tells Wily "I am more than a Robot!!!" I think they were trying to suggest that Mega Man was somehow internally evolving allowing him to being able to think, feel and make his own choices. Which is what Dr. Light said X was capable of doing in his message in the first X game, of course they scrapped that idea and "Mega Man X" went back to being "X" in X3 . Leaving my favorite X game sounding weird, when ever I read the dialogue.

Thirteen 1355 · « **Reply #8 on:** October 23, 2019, 04:58:16 pm »

Yeah it's out of place, when the other games did it all correctly. X2 is my favourite too, out of the SNES games, and I was surprised nobody had done this before.

Metalwario64 · « **Reply #9 on:** October 23, 2019, 05:42:00 pm »

Quote from: star_scream1646 on October 23, 2019, 04:56:58 pm

Same here, I never understood how come they kept calling him "Mega Man X" when they simply called him "X" in the first game.

I think COA was trying to make it so that "X" was really Mega Man, I say this because of the ending in Mega Man 7. When Mega Man tells Wily "I am more than a Robot!!!" I think they were trying to suggest that Mega Man was somehow internally evolving allowing him to being able to think, feel and make his own choices. Which is what Dr. Light said X was capable of doing in his message in the first X game, of course they scrapped that idea and "Mega Man X" went back to being "X" in X3 . Leaving my favorite X game sounding weird, when ever I read the dialogue.

Yeah, and his dialogue boxes just say Mega Man, don't they? That always bothered me.

It's sad that the Ruby Spears cartoon got that aspect down better than COA did for a time.

Thirteen 1355 · « **Reply #10 on:** October 23, 2019, 06:38:08 pm »

Weirdly enough, in some lines, Dr. Cain does simply call X 'X', while at other points he calls him 'Mega Man X'.

Anyway, progress is going smoothly! Most of the bigger cutscenes have already been tackled, as are the Light Capsules (though I'll probably need somebody to test the Shoryuken one). Tomorrow I'll do the Counter Hunter pre-battle texts and more.

CoolCatBomberMan · « **Reply #11 on:** October 23, 2019, 07:28:56 pm »

I cannot stress enough how much I would prefer "Sagesse" over "Serges." The X-Hunters all have meaningful French names that coincide with their fighting styles, something that's lost in the original localization. "Sagesse" means wisdom, and the character is known for using machines, rather than directly fighting you. In times like these, developer intent should always take precedence.

Metalwario64 · « **Reply #12 on:** October 23, 2019, 08:02:14 pm »

Thirteen 1355, would you mind if I submitted some minor graphical corrections? While I was helping Justin with his X3 hack, I noticed a few errors in the X2 armor tiles (as well as some unused graphics for X in his X2 armor falling down like in X1 against Flame Mammoth, so I wonder if an enemy or boss would have done that in X2?). Some tiles incorrectly used the brown from the yellow parts as the shading for the red parts of the armor instead of the dark red in the palette, and the charging palette has the dark red as white for some reason.

Also, for some reason, the teleporting animation has all of its frames removed when X has his armor (I can't recall if it's just one part of all of them), but that's something I wouldn't know how to fix, so I can't do anything about that.

I know this isn't a graphic hack, but I wouldn't want to just have a standalone hack for a few tile fixes and a palette change, so would you mind me fixing those issues on my own and sending you the patch for those changes to put in your hack to add a touch more polish?

star_scream1646 · « **Reply #13 on:** October 23, 2019, 08:04:41 pm »

Quote from: Metalwario64 on October 23, 2019, 05:42:00 pm

Yeah, and his dialogue boxes just say Mega Man, don't they? That always bothered me.

It's sad that the Ruby Spears cartoon got that aspect down better than COA did for a time.

Yes, whenever X talks the game calls him (Mega Man), while the other characters call him "Mega Man X" and I had to look up what Thirteen 1355 said. Dr. Cain simply calls him "X" which I never noticed.

Here is a good one though, when you go to face Sigma and don't have all the Zero Parts Sigma calls X "Mega Man". When you beat Zero, X's dialogue box again calls him (Mega Man) but then Zero calls him "X". So I thought maybe only his friends call him "X" but when you have all the parts and the real Zero shows up, he calls X "Mega Man X" but then when he opens the floor for X he calls him "X" then when you go to finally fight Sigma he now refers to X as "Mega Man X" when just 2 minutes ago Sigma simply called him "Mega Man". Talk about confusing

Metalwario64 · « **Reply #14 on:** October 24, 2019, 12:05:51 am »

Okay, well I just went ahead and fixed up all of the coloring mistakes I could find in the tile set. Apparently there are even some bigger ones that I never noticed before, such as a frame of shooting from a wall jump where X's armored buster was colored red instead of white!

Here is a link to the IPS patch.

Here are some examples of things I fixed:

First, a zoomed in view to make it clear where the kneecap uses the brown instead of dark red:

Since X1 has that palette entry as white (I don't know why, but X's palette has two identical shades of white in X1. Maybe the armor white and the eyes were intended to be different shades at one point in X1's development?), I think perhaps originally during development they used the X1 palette for the armor, but then since they realized that white was redundant, they changed one to make the reds look better. Unfortunately the graphic artist did a sloppy job of it, since random frames have his hand or kneecaps using the brown shade still instead of the unique dark red. The first double buster shot frame also had the corner of his arm graphic with a single brown pixel on the white armor part.

This also extends to the charge palette which has the dark red become pure white, which is a leftover from X1's charging palettes, since they clearly didn't correct the red for that palette. I did, however, and it looks all the better for it.

Here are some before and after examples of what I have done:

This also shows that red colored buster tile that I fixed, as well as showcasing how messed up his color scheme was both in graphics and in palette, since the original charging palette clearly shows where they used the brown instead of the red, as the dark red is white, which looks terrible anyway.

Also, the palettes when X is getting armor from Light's capsules had the white for the dark red, since they were just ported from X1, so not only did I fix that, but I also updated those palettes to have a smoother transition to each color, so it's superior to the original versions (the purple was originally too dark, so it kind of just flashes to bright green from that. Now it's a smooth glow):

Original:

Improved and fixed version:

You can really tell in the blue areas.

I hope you're willing to use these graphical corrections in your hack, just as a little bonus.

Thirteen 1355 · « **Reply #15 on:** October 24, 2019, 06:01:51 am »

Quote from: Metalwario64 on October 23, 2019, 08:02:14 pm

Thirteen 1355, would you mind if I submitted some minor graphical corrections? While I was helping Justin with his X3 hack, I noticed a few errors in the X2 armor tiles (as well as some unused graphics for X in his X2 armor falling down like in X1 against Flame Mammoth, so I wonder if an enemy or boss would have done that in X2?). Some tiles incorrectly used the brown from the yellow parts as the shading for the red parts of the armor instead of the dark red in the palette, and the charging palette has the dark red as white for some reason.

Also, for some reason, the teleporting animation has all of its frames removed when X has his armor (I can't recall if it's just one part of all of them), but that's something I wouldn't know how to fix, so I can't do anything about that.

I know this isn't a graphic hack, but I wouldn't want to just have a standalone hack for a few tile fixes and a palette change, so would you mind me fixing those issues on my own and sending you the patch for those changes to put in your hack to add a touch more polish?

Thanks a lot! Yes this looks worthy of adding in for sure! I will do so and give proper credit.

Quote from: CoolCatBomberMan on October 23, 2019, 07:28:56 pm

I cannot stress enough how much I would prefer "Sagesse" over "Serges." The X-Hunters all have meaningful French names that coincide with their fighting styles, something that's lost in the original localization. "Sagesse" means wisdom, and the character is known for using machines, rather than directly fighting you. In times like these, developer intent should always take precedence.

Yep! I decided to go with Sagesse for consistency's sake (and I also don't really like Serges as a name).

Now onto the stuff:

I'm not entirely sure if it suffices to make Sagesse say "We have possession of Zero" instead of "We have possession of Zero's parts". I could replace 'possess' with a shorter word and make him say 'Zero's parts'. Violen refers to his parts right after so I think him just saying 'posession of Zero' seems fine, since they basically own his entire body. I would like some suggestions!

Secondly:

In both the Japanese and English versions, (Dr.)Light doesn't say 'please'. I added this to make up for the chunk of text that came to be unused when removing 'Mega Man'. I like the 'please', but maybe even better would be for him to say 'Come, enter the capsule'. What do you guys think?

Solid One · « **Reply #16 on:** October 24, 2019, 07:30:43 am »

Great job. MMX2 is a game that needs a proper relocalization. Good luck with your project.

BTW, what do you think at doing a hacking work similar to this MMX1 retranslation based on japanese rom? There's a new thin VWF font for dialogues, and the author maintained the original japanese names (Rockman, Repliroid, Irregular, Vava, the original japanese bosses, etc). Although most people here are used to english terms (Megaman, Reploid, Maverick, Vile, etc), it'd be interesting to have an optional patch using those terms, not necessarily based on the japanese rom.

Quote

Haha, that's actually the script I'm taking the Japanese info from. His script is a complete rework though, and honestly I'm not sure if I'd be able to insert that script as a whole into this ROM (with everything needing to be about the same amount of symbols and all that).

You could do the same that justin3009 has done in MMX3 Zero Project v4.0: He expanded the rom size from 2mb to 4mb, and moved all texts, with its respective pointers, to the end of the rom. This way, he obtained all needed space for rewriting X scripts and add Zero ones altogether.

Thirteen 1355 · « **Reply #17 on:** October 24, 2019, 07:38:05 am »

Quote from: Solid One on October 24, 2019, 07:30:43 am

Great job. MMX2 is a game that needs a proper relocalization. Good luck with your project.

BTW, what do you think at doing a hacking work similar to this MMX1 retranslation based on japanese rom? There's a new thin VWF font for dialogues, and the author maintained the original japanese names (Rockman, Repliroid, Irregular, Vava, the original japanese bosses, etc). Although most people here are used to english terms (Megaman, Reploid, Maverick, Vile, etc), it'd be interesting to have an optional patch using those terms, not necessarily based on the japanese rom.

You could do the same that justin3009 has done in MMX3 Zero Project v4.0: He expanded the rom size from 2mb to 4mb, and moved all texts, with its respective pointers, to the end of the rom. This way, he obtained all needed space for rewriting X scripts and add Zero ones altogether.

Personally I'm not a huge fan of terms like 'Rockman', 'Repliroid', and 'Irregular'. I don't see any worth in spending time on that

The expanding thing would cost some more time, and I might do that eventually, but right now I'm pretty happy with my results that come from creative writing within these limitations. I usually prefer making the changes to a ROM as small as possible in terms of general data structure.

The Japanese version at least mentioned that the stage you randomly revisit as the 'final stage' is just a place you've visited before.

justin3009 · « **Reply #18 on:** October 24, 2019, 02:38:23 pm »

It sounds like you're overwriting the actual dialogue instead of moving the dialogue out into a new area. If you went with that method, which is fairly simple, you would be able to write the dialogue however you want.

Thirteen 1355 · « **Reply #19 on:** October 24, 2019, 03:30:12 pm »

I understand, but right now it feels as if I can achieve the purpose without doing so. I want to see how much time that would take, but first I'd like to complete it this way and take a look at what's done and if it's nice.

I don't know how long repointing would take and I'm someone who's pretty hellbent on finishing the way he starts. I certainly do want to give repointing a try though. I guess my initial concern with that is the higher probability of other patches conflicting, but I'm not sure if that'd actually be the case.