Dragon Quest Delocalized Projects

[John Enigma]

Can a project like this one be "ported" to its remakes, like the Japan-exclusive Super Famicom/SNES port, or the Game Boy Color port?

[Chicken Knife]

Can a project like this one be "ported" to its remakes, like the Japan-exclusive Super Famicom/SNES port, or the Game Boy Color port?

Not outside the realm of possibility in the future. I love the originals the most so that's what lead me to start here, but there's really no saying where we stop. Keep in mind the remakes have significant additions to the text and will pose various hacking challenges based on being different games on different systems. I think the plan is to move through the NES games, then into doing some addendums to the existing fan translations of 5 and 6. At that point we may look at applying the same conventions to various remakes--as well as the Dragon Quest Monsters series. One big dream I have is doing an English version of the Japanese only PS1 remake of DQ4 but I'd have to come a long way in my abilities before I take that on.

But tbh that all sounds like a bit of a pipe dream. Getting through the massive NES 3 and 4 alone is the goal.

[Chicken Knife]

Wanted to give everyone a quick update. Nejimakipiyo finished their work on on the script's rough draft for DQ3. At this stage, we are going through everything together to make it as natural sounding as possible. Things are moving. I anticipate that within the next 3-4 weeks I will begin work on the insertion. 

[AdamDravian]

Appreciate the update. This project is the main reason I check up on these forums.

[Lord Igniz]

Good work guys, but I'm really waiting for the Dragon Quest IV release. I already played through DQ 1-3 on the SFC, too bad they didn't remake IV on that one as 5 out of the first 6 games are available on that console.

[abw]

Good work guys, but I'm really waiting for the Dragon Quest IV release.

I'd advise some continued patience here . Dragon Warrior IV has a pretty large script for a NES game: it's about double the size of Dragon Warrior III, which was approximately 2.5 times larger than Dragon Warrior II, which itself was about twice as large as the original Dragon Warrior.

Wanted to give everyone a quick update. Nejimakipiyo finished their work on on the script's rough draft for DQ3. At this stage, we are going through everything together to make it as natural sounding as possible. Things are moving. I anticipate that within the next 3-4 weeks I will begin work on the insertion. 

Nice. Did you notice how despite the abundance of control codes for gender-specific pronouns, a lot of the script has conflicting hard-coded references to the hero's gender?

As for my own update, I've been going through joe73ffdq's Dragon Warrior II notes and merging them into my disassembly and am happy to report some serious synergy. Knowing what the data is for makes figuring out unknown code much easier, and knowing what the code is for makes figuring out unknown data much easier. Many parts of the ROM are stil completely opaque to me, but it's going to be a while before I run out of things that can be easily documented, and with every documented area making all the other areas that reference it easier to understand, by the time I'm done with the easy stuff, the stuff that's currently hard should be a whole lot easier.

Along the way, I've come across a few items that you might be interested in knowing about:

• Lunch bag letdown: despite displaying a message saying that you found a treasure chest after battle, monsters will not drop their item if you have a full inventory (there is no option to throw away an old item in order to get the new item) or already have one copy of it (you can't get 2 Mysterious Hat drops), except for selected items such as Lottery Tickets and basic consumables.
• Silent loquaciousness: the guard in the NW corner of Hamlin has extra code to display 2 additional strings after his normal string, but in the English version, both of those strings are empty (does somebody want to check the Japanese version?).
• Zahan's magically teleporting Golden Key: the Golden Key is available in 2 places on the Zahan map, but which place you can find it at depends on the X-position of the town's lone dog.
• ... I can't believe I paid money for that: in the Japanese version, the woman in the SW corner of Lianport will offer you a puff-puff for 100 G if you talk to her while Moonbrooke is dead; the dialogue was changed in the English version to 'Dost thou think I am pretty enough to be a queen?', but the code for charging you 100 G if you answer YES still runs.
• It's over 9000: despite the highest achievable maximum HP for your party members being a mere 240, the game dedicates 16-bit storage to HP values and often (maybe always?) performs 16-bit calculations on them; as one example, the Healall spell is hardcoded to restore 61,680 ($F0F0) HP.
• Greatest thing since sliced bread: in addition to protecting you from damaging floor tiles such as swamps and lava, the Armour of Erdrick also magically disarms trapped treasure chests for you. No more getting poisoned or losing half your current HP! (I guess the HP regen effect from DW1/3 was too powerful?)

[Chicken Knife]

Appreciate the update. This project is the main reason I check up on these forums.

Thank you for your continued interest! Always makes me happy to hear when people find value in these projects. 

Good work guys, but I'm really waiting for the Dragon Quest IV release. I already played through DQ 1-3 on the SFC, too bad they didn't remake IV on that one as 5 out of the first 6 games are available on that console.

Yes, like abw said IV will take some serious time. Not only does the game have separate night and day text like DQ3 but it's also the first game in the series to update vast amounts of town NPC text based on events in the story that have transpired. Quite shocking that feature existed at all in an NES RPG.

Nice. Did you notice how despite the abundance of control codes for gender-specific pronouns, a lot of the script has conflicting hard-coded references to the hero's gender?

Accurate observation. We've found that in both the English localization and  the Japanese original, there is a very high frequency of misgendering of the female hero. She gets referred to with male pronouns, she gets called "son", she is named "king" at one point. At first we thought this would be a consistent thing until we discovered there are plenty of times where the game does have separate text for both male and female and handles it correctly. One of the strangest lines of text we've wrestled with has the hero actually denying that she is female when confronted by a child in Reive / Reeve who is angry over the death of his parents. Our handling of the misgendering will be one of the ever so conservative improvements that we've done on a few occasions. We want a female hero who is consistently referred to as female.

Lunch bag letdown: despite displaying a message saying that you found a treasure chest after battle, monsters will not drop their item if you have a full inventory (there is no option to throw away an old item in order to get the new item) or already have one copy of it (you can't get 2 Mysterious Hat drops), except for selected items such as Lottery Tickets and basic consumables.
Silent loquaciousness: the guard in the NW corner of Hamlin has extra code to display 2 additional strings after his normal string, but in the English version, both of those strings are empty (does somebody want to check the Japanese version?).
Zahan's magically teleporting Golden Key: the Golden Key is available in 2 places on the Zahan map, but which place you can find it at depends on the X-position of the town's lone dog.
... I can't believe I paid money for that: in the Japanese version, the woman in the SW corner of Lianport will offer you a puff-puff for 100 G if you talk to her while Moonbrooke is dead; the dialogue was changed in the English version to 'Dost thou think I am pretty enough to be a queen?', but the code for charging you 100 G if you answer YES still runs.
It's over 9000: despite the highest achievable maximum HP for your party members being a mere 240, the game dedicates 16-bit storage to HP values and often (maybe always?) performs 16-bit calculations on them; as one example, the Healall spell is hardcoded to restore 61,680 ($F0F0) HP.
Greatest thing since sliced bread: in addition to protecting you from damaging floor tiles such as swamps and lava, the Armour of Erdrick also magically disarms trapped treasure chests for you. No more getting poisoned or losing half your current HP! (I guess the HP regen effect from DW1/3 was too powerful?)

Some fascinating trivia here! I've discovered a bit of that myself. Nejimakipiyo and I will have to check out the Hamlin/Moonpeta guard's text in the Japanese version. I don't remember offhand how we handled it.

Great to hear you are making progress and joe73ffdq's work has been complementary! I'm looking forward to seeing the result--and I wish I could read it! I have a high-brow friend of mine who is fluent in Latin and I keep prodding him to give your hacks a try. The issue is he hasn't played an rpg since AD&D in the 70's and 80's. A bit of catching up to do.

[abw]

Some fascinating trivia here! I've discovered a bit of that myself. Nejimakipiyo and I will have to check out the Hamlin/Moonpeta guard's text in the Japanese version. I don't remember offhand how we handled it.

Great to hear you are making progress and joe73ffdq's work has been complementary! I'm looking forward to seeing the result--and I wish I could read it! I have a high-brow friend of mine who is fluent in Latin and I keep prodding him to give your hacks a try. The issue is he hasn't played an rpg since AD&D in the 70's and 80's. A bit of catching up to do.

Here's another bit of trivia I came across today: the game reads controller 2 data after you win a battle. If you win a battle on one very specific but otherwise unremarkable map tile in the entire game (World Map X=$EB, Y=$14, a.k.a. the centre of the tiny "+" formation at the tip of the peninsula near the shrine NE of Midenhall) and controller 2 has the "A" button pressed while controller 1 dismisses the final battle message, the game adds 1 to the battle message delay variable, making all future battles take just a wee bit longer... unless your message speed was set to SLOW ($FF), in which case it overflows to $00 and battle messages become extremely fast. That same variable gets copied and used in a few different places, and various parts of the code only check for the pre-defined FAST/NORMAL/SLOW values, so it is entirely possible that there might be other less-obvious side effects.

I should probably approach this more methodically, but at the moment I'm basically just jumping around to whatever looks interesting and/or easy at the moment. Thanks to joe73ffdq's notes to start with and all the expansion I've done from there, I've got pretty good coverage of banks 4 (battles) and 6 (main COMMAND menu selection handling, which includes the dialogue and searching logic), and I already had the menu data in bank 1 and the script data + text engine in banks 2 and 5; bank 0 is mostly graphics, the rest of bank 2 looks like map data (including warp point data, shared with bank 3), bank 3 is where the audio data lives, and bank 7 has, among other things, the opening Moonbrooke sequence and some text engine support functions. I haven't done much with banks 8 through B yet, banks C-E are empty, and the fixed bank F is a smorgasbord of everything.

[Chicken Knife]

Take a look at what abw pulled off! This was the last censored element waiting to be restored in Dragon Quest II! I'm overjoyed that we were able to include this revision in the 1.10 patch I just submitted. There are also a few text corrections included that came up in the last couple months. I try not to issue updates unless I feel like they are worth people's time and effort.

Ah, I should also say something about DQIII. I think I've considerably exceeded my previous time-frame estimate. I didn't realize how much work I'd be putting into script polishing. I spend 1-2 hours a day on it and I'm only a little over 1/3 through the literal translation by nejimakipiyo. They are supervising all my revisions to make sure I don't stray from the nuance of the Japanese text in my attempts to make everything sound great. I'm confident this will be our best script yet when we are ready to publish.

[Choppasmith]

Take a look at what abw pulled off! This was the last censored element waiting to be restored in Dragon Quest II! I'm overjoyed that we were able to include this revision in the 1.10 patch I just submitted. There are also a few text corrections included that came up in the last couple months. I try not to issue updates unless I feel like they are worth people's time and effort.

Ah, I should also say something about DQIII. I think I've considerably exceeded my previous time-frame estimate. I didn't realize how much work I'd be putting into script polishing. I spend 1-2 hours a day on it and I'm only a little over 1/3 through the literal translation by nejimakipiyo. They are supervising all my revisions to make sure I don't stray from the nuance of the Japanese text in my attempts to make everything sound great. I'm confident this will be our best script yet when we are ready to publish.

Man, that's WONDERFUL news. Well done abw! Thankfully that's the only real big map change.

Just wanted to share something really quick. Thanks to your translation, the dialog for using a "Dragon Potion" pretty clearly hints you're talking to either DQ1's Hero or Gwaelin (the ORIGINAL dialog only just has the vague "I watch over my descendants"). Until now I had really overlooked the mobile script, it's a messy rip and easy to miss, it's stored just before the Opening Prologue. There's two lines for a lot of the save prompts which kinda makes me think it's randomly one or the other. But one message if you refuse to save makes it pretty clear it's Gwaelin "Th-!? B-!? Hmph! Dost thou truly mean to take thy leave without first recording thy progress...?" that's the same confounded stutter she does in DQ1. Was there more to it in your translation and ended up having to cut it? I'm short on room myself so I probably won't be able to use that line. It's a great callback though.

[abw]

But one message if you refuse to save makes it pretty clear it's Gwaelin "Th-!? B-!? Hmph! Dost thou truly mean to take thy leave without first recording thy progress...?" that's the same confounded stutter she does in DQ1.

Can I get a 'But thou must.'?

[Choppasmith]

Can I get a 'But thou must.'?

You know, that'll work. The current/original line is "That is not wise..." and since this is something incredibly easily missed by most players, it'll make for a nice Easter Egg.

[Koop]

Had to make an account just to say THANK YOU THIS IS AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!

[Chicken Knife]

@Koop

We are delighted to hear you've been enjoying these projects. Thanks for creating an account just to say that. 

@Choppasmith

To your point with the Orb of Restoration / Dragon's Potion text, yes, I also noticed immediately the connection to Laura / Gwaelin, which was totally lost in the original localization. Her Japanese response in the first game for telling her no was "how cruel" and when I saw that as part of the Japanese script in DQ2 I knew immediately who was speaking. Months ago I put up a post about this in the Dragon Questers FB group and everyone was pretty surprised.

[Koop]

@Koop

We are delighted to hear you've been enjoying these projects. Thanks for creating an account just to say that. 

Absolutely! I'd love to apply these patched roms to real carts in the future one day.

[Chicken Knife]

I thought I'd post a little tease from the DQ3 script. Just passed the 70% mark with my part of it. nejimakipiyo's straight translation came first so altogether we are at the 85% mark. Here's a before and after from one of my favorite scenes.

NES localization:

This is the promontory of Olivia. This is where Olivia, despairing of her beloved lost in a storm at sea, hurled herself to her death.
But they say that even now she cries out to the ships that pass to call them back.
If someone were to offer her an item belonging to her beloved, Errol, her soul might be released.
Rumor has it that the ship in which Errol sailed also wanders as a phantom.

Delocalized script:

You have arrived at the Cape of Olivia. This is where Olivia, mourning her lover who was lost to a storm at sea, cast herself into the ocean.
But her spirit lives on. To this day, she can be heard calling out to the ships passing by.
If you were to offer her a memory of her beloved Eric, perhaps her soul may yet rise up to heaven.
They say that the ship Eric sailed on still wanders the seas like some kind of phantom.

While the original script of Dragon Warrior 3 is generally accurate and matching in style to the Japanese (unlike the scripts for 1 and 2), I hope it can be demonstrated by this comparison that there are instances of awkward phrasing, missing details, poor flow, and censorship.

I find the original loc tends to struggle the most with the lengthier sections. Plenty of short npc phrases are translated very well by our measure. In spite of that, I try to create some variation whenever possible as long as the resulting quality and accuracy are the same or better. If someone wants to utilize a new script, I assume they would want the experience to be as fresh as possible.

Overall, the text size has increased around 10%. I started allowing for this expansion after seeing that there was a tremendous amount of free space available in the rom immediately after the script. It was kind of shocking to see because DW1 and DW2 had no such space immediately available. I think this modest expansion is important as far as adding a little more flavor. DQ1 and DQ2 worked out well because the shift from medieval English to contemporary English saved a ton of space on its own.

Anyway, I'm looking forward (or am I?) to soon taking off the writing hat for awhile and putting the hacking hat back on.

**EDIT

Also I'm thinking more about the DW3 title screen. I really like the idea of using the subtitle like we did in DQ2.

What would you guys think of moving the III up to the end of the top line (like I did for DQ2). It's a nice solution to DRAGON QUEST being shorter than DRAGON WARRIOR. We could also have the center section with roman numerals changed to say something like:

And Into Legend...

or

And Thus Into Legend...

[Choppasmith]

I've always liked the translation of the Ending track, "Into the Legend" (specially being a prequel, it's like the title's way of saying "We're taking you back to where it all started.") but I see you're going for more of the adjective rather than the noun

"And into legend" sounds kinda wonky. Adding the Thus is the better of the two. Really adds a prestigious ring to it.

[Chicken Knife]

I've always liked the translation of the Ending track, "Into the Legend" (specially being a prequel, it's like the title's way of saying "We're taking you back to where it all started.") but I see you're going for more of the adjective rather than the noun

"And into legend" sounds kinda wonky. Adding the Thus is the better of the two. Really adds a prestigious ring to it.

I'm with you. The word "thus" is the secret sauce with that rendering of the title. Into the Legend isn't bad either but I think And Thus Into Legend... wins it for me. nejimakipiyo agrees now. We weren't seeing eye to eye on this when we discussed it months ago. 

Do you like the idea of moving up the roman numeral to the upper right and putting the subtitle in that central area? I'm thinking about what kind of font should be used since we essentially have a free hand there. Something hand-drawn style is what sticks in my head.

[Chicken Knife]

Finished the DQ3 script. Here's a link for anyone who wishes to peruse it. Blue text is our retranslation.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Eg5DONvRRY430C4Nqk387RIcIcrQHodaxaqZINRhOmI/edit?usp=sharing

So now the real fun begins, extraction and insertion. 

[AdamDravian]

Finished the DQ3 script. Here's a link for anyone who wishes to peruse it. Blue text is our retranslation.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Eg5DONvRRY430C4Nqk387RIcIcrQHodaxaqZINRhOmI/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for providing that. I get an odd enjoyment from reading direct translation comparisons.

Great job. There were just a couple lines that gave me pause:

"In that country, everyone is troubled greater by a monster of many heads known as Orochi." [When I first read this, I thought that perhaps you were going to give all the people of Jipang a similarly strange way of speaking, but that didn't turn out to be the case.]

"Brave X! You are one of incredible strength!" [While that's not incorrect, it'd read more naturally as "Brave X!" Your strength is incredible!"]

"I've heard about you. You're those country bumpkins, aren't you? Teehee" [Missing punctuation at the end of the "Teehee".]

"You should head south search in the center of four mountains. Meow!" [I assume there's a missing "and" in there.]

"It is also said that due to the king's orders, the hero Simon was banished through the travel door on the right." [In all other instances, you capitalized "travel door".]

One thing that really stood out to me was how surprisingly accurate the original English translation was, especially for an NES game of that era. They even managed to sneak a couple direct references to death past Nintendo of America's censors. I wonder if the translation accuracy had anything to do with how long it took for DQ3 to come out in the US, giving them plenty of time to get it right.

That said, your translation is still a definite improvement. I look forward to your work on DQ4, as I've been holding off on playing that one until a better translation comes out.