Dragon Quest Delocalized Projects

[Reiska]

Just a quick chime in to note: DW4 ROMs that are 1024KB are an overdump that commonly circulated back in the early days, the correct ROM size is 512KB.

[MaruMaru]

Don't mind me, just here to cheer you guys on! 

[Kallisto]

I have formed a somewhat strange opinion when it comes to the graphical changes for DQ1-3 (not so much IV), but it seems to me that the American Sprites were actually better than the Japanese Sprites in some cases (some, but not all).

Personally I'm not a fan of the original religious icons due to their sloppy design, but the American designs to me look much cooler in comparison.

The DQ1 NPCs were also lacking somewhat compared to their USA versions.

Another being Ortega, seems like Ortega look liked a giant moron compared to the makeover he got later.

Personally if it were up to me I would split the graphics up into mini-patches, and the people can mix and match which ones they would like to restore for their version of Dragon Quest. I think this has been done before for some games on here, and I think Dragon Quest could qualify for mini patches if you so desired to do so though.

Looking through TCRF it seems that DQIV heavily suffered for other reasons besides the minor censorship such as lost sea monsters.


and speaking of the SNES versions earlier in this thread, I still hope one day someone does something about that terrible music for DQI&II whether it be remixed SNES type music or MSU-1.

[Chicken Knife]

Just a quick chime in to note: DW4 ROMs that are 1024KB are an overdump that commonly circulated back in the early days, the correct ROM size is 512KB.

Thank you, Reiska. Something to watch out for. Perhaps that list I referenced was using the wrong ROM.

Don't mind me, just here to cheer you guys on! 

We appreciate your enthusiasm and support!

I have formed a somewhat strange opinion when it comes to the graphical changes for DQ1-3 (not so much IV), but it seems to me that the American Sprites were actually better than the Japanese Sprites in some cases (some, but not all).

Personally I'm not a fan of the original religious icons due to their sloppy design, but the American designs to me look much cooler in comparison.

The DQ1 NPCs were also lacking somewhat compared to their USA versions.

Another being Ortega, seems like Ortega look liked a giant moron compared to the makeover he got later.

Personally if it were up to me I would split the graphics up into mini-patches, and the people can mix and match which ones they would like to restore for their version of Dragon Quest. I think this has been done before for some games on here, and I think Dragon Quest could qualify for mini patches if you so desired to do so though.

Looking through TCRF it seems that DQIV heavily suffered for other reasons besides the minor censorship such as lost sea monsters.


and speaking of the SNES versions earlier in this thread, I still hope one day someone does something about that terrible music for DQI&II whether it be remixed SNES type music or MSU-1.

Kind of a unique set of opinions, as you stated, but I get where you're coming from. I published an addendum patch for FF1 Restored that reverted several sprites back to their North American counterparts because I felt they looked better, so I get it. But in those cases, the changes were generally more about polish and less about censorship. Removal of censorship and faithfulness to Horii's vision is the core idea of these particular projects; not necessarily making an "ultimate version" that's going to make everyone happy.

That being said, you aren't going to get the whole story of the Delocalized versions based on TCRF alone.

I included an option to revert to the localized hero / NPC sprite graphics for DQ1, knowing that many would get hung up on the relative downgrade of the Famicom graphics. I ultimately am an advocate for the Famicom graphics because they are historic, and they make for a much better transition to the graphics in 2, which essentially takes the design of the Famicom DQ1 sprites and adds 4 direction walking.

I did not revert the localized Ortega to the original Famicom Ortega however. I believe I had come across evidence that the Kandata / Kandar palette swap sprite in the Japanese version was only used for the reason of severe space restriction in the ROM, kind of like the title screen and fanfare being cut.

If the cross instead of the star tile is a big issue for you, I could very easily send a version of the patch with that tile swapped. Let me know.

[Rabite890]

Thank you, Reiska. Something to watch out for. Perhaps that list I referenced was using the wrong ROM.

To my recollection that 1024KB ROM was due to a work around that NESticle used to get the game to work.

[sheltermix]

oh, i have a request - feel free to reject this if it would be a hassle and i'm definitely not expecting anything, but would it be possible/simple to make an optional patch for your dq1 that restores the original japanese sprite without the added directional animations? i know it probably sounds silly but i find the crude weirdness of the original unidirectional sprite really charming and tonally appropriate and it would be cool to play with it. if not then again it's no big deal - as i said before i'm really enjoying your work and appreciate it.

[Chicken Knife]

oh, i have a request - feel free to reject this if it would be a hassle and i'm definitely not expecting anything, but would it be possible/simple to make an optional patch for your dq1 that restores the original japanese sprite without the added directional animations? i know it probably sounds silly but i find the crude weirdness of the original unidirectional sprite really charming and tonally appropriate and it would be cool to play with it. if not then again it's no big deal - as i said before i'm really enjoying your work and appreciate it.

I can really appreciate this kind of stubborn faithfulness to the original Japanese release. Here's the thing: it wouldn't be too much work to revert the hero sprites to front facing only, but you won't have the directional prompts for the talk command like the Japanese version had. That's the part that would require some heavy lifting to fix.

So! If you want a version with front facing hero and no direction prompts, I can send it to you as a one off, but I won't be including as an optional patch in the release itself unless I can end up restoring the directional prompts at some point in the future. Not something I was planning for, but I'm kind of unpredictable as far as what I get inspired to work on at times.

One last thing to keep in mind with this, even a native Japanese DQ player like Dattebayo who grew up on DQ1 Famicom has an extremely hard time enjoying the game now precisely because of the awkwardness of sliding around like that.

@Everyone

Our twitter account made a note of nejimakipiyo working on Dragon Quest Monsters 2. That doesn't necessarily mean it's our next release. (it might be, it might not be) It just means that they are doing some technical prep work for what we eventually do, as they spearhead the DQM games. Meanwhile, I'm (slowly....) playing around with the main series, as that's what I spearhead.

Some really cool news. I reached out to the user Dracula X, as he has done a ton of NES MMC5 ROM expansion releases, including DW1-DW3, just to see if he had anything in the works with a MMC5 expansion of DQ4. No need to duplicate efforts if that's the case. Let's just say that his response was extremely positive, and that this roadblock with DQ4 Delocalized may be solved in the very near future!

[nejimakipiyo]

Our twitter account made a note of nejimakipiyo working on Dragon Quest Monsters 2. That doesn't necessarily mean it's our next release. (it might be, it might not be) It just means that they are doing some technical prep work for what we eventually do, as they spearhead the DQM games. Meanwhile, I'm (slowly....) playing around with the main series, as that's what I spearhead.

Maybe I jumped the gun posting there. I just wanted to stir up some excitement and interest. Really, all I did so far was make a table file and begin the steps to extract the text (which I'm probably going to finish today). However, I don't have as much familiarity with this game as I do with the first one. I'll absolutely have to play through in English and Japanese to be able to compare text and ensure I don't miss anything. As well, I'll have to complete a monster library in both languages. This project is far from getting off the ground just yet, but when it does I'll likely be posting about it in my original Dragon Quest Monsters Delocalized thread. https://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=30993

Some really cool news. I reached out to the user Dracula X, as he has done a ton of NES MMC5 ROM expansion releases, including DW1-DW3, just to see if he had anything in the works with a MMC5 expansion of DQ4. No need to duplicate efforts if that's the case. Let's just say that his response was extremely positive, and that this roadblock with DQ4 Delocalized may be solved in the very near future!

Of course, with this roadblock out of the way, it's likely we can begin work on Dragon Quest IV soon. I'm looking forward to tackling this project as well!

[sheltermix]

I can really appreciate this kind of stubborn faithfulness to the original Japanese release. Here's the thing: it wouldn't be too much work to revert the hero sprites to front facing only, but you won't have the directional prompts for the talk command like the Japanese version had. That's the part that would require some heavy lifting to fix.

So! If you want a version with front facing hero and no direction prompts, I can send it to you as a one off, but I won't be including as an optional patch in the release itself unless I can end up restoring the directional prompts at some point in the future. Not something I was planning for, but I'm kind of unpredictable as far as what I get inspired to work on at times.

understood! well, if you do end up inspired to reimplement directional prompts to use with the front facing hero then i would certainly be interested, but i also totally understand if it isn't a priority or would be too much trouble. thanks for the response <3

[Chicken Knife]

understood! well, if you do end up inspired to reimplement directional prompts to use with the front facing hero then i would certainly be interested, but i also totally understand if it isn't a priority or would be too much trouble. thanks for the response <3

I was just doing some analysis / messing around to get a sense of how difficult of a project that would be. For someone at my skill level as a hacker, the answer is... extraordinarily difficult. It would take me weeks if not months of work, and I'd rather commit that to something like restoring DQ4's Japanese title screen, maps, etc.

If you don't happen to be aware of this direct English translation of the Famicom version, you should probably check it out: http://www.romhacking.net/reviews/5842/#review.

The script felt a bit austere compared to ours, and you'll see a lot of character space limitations because of lack of expanded menus, but you will get to experience the strictly front facing hero along with other limitations of the Japanese version like the password system. Our version is probably going to stay something of a compromise, in the spirit of the Japanese, but with a few upgrades from the international version.

[Maidentree]

just a curious question that doesn't really matter; how come the coffins (for the Princess of Moonbrooke and Prince of Cannock/Samaltria respectively) in DQ2 Delocalized have the palette of Prince of Midenhall/Laurasia? just wondering in case you want to know why I asked

[Chicken Knife]

just a curious question that doesn't really matter; how come the coffins (for the Princess of Moonbrooke and Prince of Cannock/Samaltria respectively) in DQ2 Delocalized have the palette of Prince of Midenhall/Laurasia? just wondering in case you want to know why I asked

DQ2 Famicom had a different palette color for each coffin matching that of the heroes. I think that the game didn't have separate attribute data for the coffin sprites and just piggy backed on the character sprite attribute data. For the international release, they changed them to ghosts and made them all use the same separate palette.

When I reinstated the coffins in the western version, the program was already set up to assign the same palette data to all three of them. Breaking them out to have separate palette attributes would have taken some complex engineering (for me, anyway). I thought about how every other single Dragon Quest game has matching coffins for each character. DQ3 has the white/green/tan palette, DQ4 has the white/pink/purple palette, etc. It sort of made sense in my mind for DQ2 to use the white/blue/tan palette for all of them. It just feels like a very minor cleaning up of something aesthetically messy and possibly not even intentional.

If anyone wanted to create an optional patch for multi colored coffins, I would probably include, but I'm not personally interested in working on that.

[zarkon]

You've probably already seen this, but just in case you hadn't:

https://github.com/concreted/dqiv-nds-en-script-patcher

Not sure if some of the work done here would be useful to you were you to ever tackle IV DS.

[Chicken Knife]

You've probably already seen this, but just in case you hadn't:

https://github.com/concreted/dqiv-nds-en-script-patcher

Not sure if some of the work done here would be useful to you were you to ever tackle IV DS.

We were made aware of this. Thank you! I think we would probably work on the NES and the PSX versions of IV before the DS version, as I am not particularly fond of the DS versions, and we have so many other DQ games we would be doing first. But nejimakipiyo is somewhat fond of those versions, and you never know what the future holds.

@everyone

http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=32875.0 Here, among several other topics and tangents, there has been some extended discussion about our groups intentions for work on a new Delocalized style translation of Dragon Quest I & II for Super Famicom, largely thanks to Rod Merida being kind enough to port over a variety of bug fixes to the existing RPGOne English version which we will use as a technical base. Our script would be informed by our NES DQI & DQII scripts, while accounting for all the differences that exist in the SFC versions. Our motivation for working on this new translation is primarily derived from our immense passion for the Dragon Quest series, and specifically, our interest in exploring the differences in the scripts between the SFC and FC versions. Although nejimakipiyo is a bit harsher than I am, we recognize that the original RPGOne translation is not necessarily an unplayable mess. Yet in the initial stages of our work, we have been rapidly accumulating a laundry list of translation errors or curious examples of mixed of loyalty to that of the Dragon Warrior localizations and the Japanese original. For the first time with our projects, we are planning to publish a full list of what we consider to be significant translation problems that we discover. We feel that it should be a useful tool for public comparison.

Like always, the appeal of our new script would rest with two groups of people. First, those with a strong distaste for the presence of unnecessary deviations from the Japanese source material previously introduced by localizers or fan translators in this case. Second, those who hold high expectations in general for the writing quality, grammar, formatting & accuracy of English translations. We believe that we can live up to those high expectations. For the wider audience who prefers familiar & nostalgic script elements and generally isn't very picky about writing quality, our work is probably not for them. We do not expect our work to dethrone that which came before as far as popularity.

In this thread, we were previously discussing whether we were going to work on Dragon Quest IV, NES or Dragon Quest Monsters II. As is frequently the case when I'm stuck between two options, it ends up being a third.

[Pennywise]

I thought maybe the DQ 1+2 translation was done a little later, but the last official release was from 2003. Not a lot of the old fan translations hold up very well, so I'm not surprised that it might be riddled with errors and inaccuracies.

[zarkon]

We were made aware of this. Thank you! I think we would probably work on the NES and the PSX versions of IV before the DS version, as I am not particularly fond of the DS versions, and we have so many other DQ games we would be doing first. But nejimakipiyo is somewhat fond of those versions, and you never know what the future holds.

Oh?  I'm curious, what don't you like about the DS version compared to the PSX version?  I can understand with DQV DS, where people don't like the insertion of Deborah, and DQVI DS, which aesthetically butchered the look compared to the beautiful SFC version, but till now my understanding (based on what I read as I've not played the PSX version) was that DQIV DS was effectively the same as the PSX version except additional monster animations were added for the DS.  What else changed?

[Chicken Knife]

I thought maybe the DQ 1+2 translation was done a little later, but the last official release was from 2003. Not a lot of the old fan translations hold up very well, so I'm not surprised that it might be riddled with errors and inaccuracies.

It's interesting that you feel that older translations are generally less accurate while newer translations are generally more. I wonder why that would be? I would assume that translation quality would be based on the skill, knowledge and rigor of the individuals involved on a case by case basis. Would it be because most people don't bother making a translation without thinking there's room for improvement? That's probably the case, until you have a popular game where someone releases a script editor.

Oh?  I'm curious, what don't you like about the DS version compared to the PSX version?  I can understand with DQV DS, where people don't like the insertion of Deborah, and DQVI DS, which aesthetically butchered the look compared to the beautiful SFC version, but till now my understanding (based on what I read as I've not played the PSX version) was that DQIV DS was effectively the same as the PSX version except additional monster animations were added for the DS.  What else changed?

The content differences between those two versions seem to be almost nonexistent. It just comes down to aesthetics for me. I prefer the traditional 4:3 display of the PSX version to the vertically aligned split screen. The graphics look a little nicer on PSX, and the sound effects and music sound a fair amount better to me. I especially love the combat sounds. DS version added the wiggling monsters, but I'm not a big fan of that animation. It kind of creeps me out. If we are talking about 2D monsters, I prefer them static until they make a move.

My real love is the Famicom version. There's something so special about it to me, and I prefer old school 2D graphics in general to 3D. I have a lot of unconventional opinions when it comes to version preferences for Dragon Quest, so take me with a grain of salt. But it does effect my motivation level as far as which projects to prioritize.

[goldenband]

It's interesting that you feel that older translations are generally less accurate while newer translations are generally more. I wonder why that would be?

One obvious reason is that when hackers were less skillful/capable, translations were frequently truncated to fit available space. In ye olden days (ahem), making any headway at all with something resembling a translation was kind of miraculous.

[zarkon]

It's interesting that you feel that older translations are generally less accurate while newer translations are generally more. I wonder why that would be? I would assume that translation quality would be based on the skill, knowledge and rigor of the individuals involved on a case by case basis. Would it be because most people don't bother making a translation without thinking there's room for improvement? That's probably the case, until you have a popular game where someone releases a script editor.
The content differences between those two versions seem to be almost nonexistent. It just comes down to aesthetics for me. I prefer the traditional 4:3 display of the PSX version to the vertically aligned split screen. The graphics look a little nicer on PSX, and the sound effects and music sound a fair amount better to me. I especially love the combat sounds. DS version added the wiggling monsters, but I'm not a big fan of that animation. It kind of creeps me out. If we are talking about 2D monsters, I prefer them static until they make a move.

My real love is the Famicom version. There's something so special about it to me, and I prefer old school 2D graphics in general to 3D. I have a lot of unconventional opinions when it comes to version preferences for Dragon Quest, so take me with a grain of salt. But it does effect my motivation level as far as which projects to prioritize.

I see.  I generally prefer 2D pixelart myself, my fave versions of the pure 2D era games are:

DQ1 - SFC
DQ2 - SFC
DQ3 - SFC
DQ4 - DS
DQ5 - PS2
DQ6 - SFC

DQ4/5 I stray as for 4 I enjoy the additional content & QOL changes enough to make it worthwhile and for 5 the changes Horii made to the core story involving Gema were much needed and serve to make the game far better - when I first played the SFC version 20 years ago I was very disappointed with how the Gema arc initially concluded.

One obvious reason is that when hackers were less skillful/capable, translations were frequently truncated to fit available space. In ye olden days (ahem), making any headway at all with something resembling a translation was kind of miraculous.

I think the available tools added a significant barrier, for SNES I remember a lot of people being very pleased when Near made that version of BSNES with a debugger (levatein or somesuch).  It's so long ago that I don't remember the complaints against Geiger SNES9x which is what people were using before (I've no idea what people use now, but there's far more options - Mesen-S, BSNES plus, No$SNS, the newer version of Geiger...).

Presumably it's a bit easier for self-taught translators now with all the online language resources available compared to back then to be able to double check things when unsure.

[nejimakipiyo]

Although nejimakipiyo is a bit harsher than I am, we recognize that the original RPGOne translation is not necessarily an unplayable mess.

I would argue this point, except for the fact that I'm currently the one playing it. 
I'd never play it for enjoyment. I'm cringing at almost every line.

So far I've uncovered 30 translation mistakes, and I've only gotten to Rimuldar.

For the purposes of this list, I'm focusing solely on translation errors rather than English errors. I'm finding many of those as well, but Chicken Knife is a better writer than I am so I'll let him focus on the grammar and flow of the text in cases where it's been properly translated with stilted English.