Project RE-Quest: Script Ports For Dragon Warrior 5/25/20 DW2 is Ready; Screens

[Choppasmith]

So I thought it was about time I brought this into the Personal Projects section.

Update: 4-20
A DW2 Beta Appears!
https://www.mediafire.com/file/tfh668w56h02d9p/DW21b.xdelta/file

Dragon Warrior Quest
1.3c (1-19-2019)
-Did a THOROUGH search and fixed a few more dialog breaks. That SHOULD be the end to that.
-Overlooked a couple of lines retaining their DW original dialog. Using the Rainbow Drop and selling items.

1.3b (1-15-2019)
-Thanks to abw who devised some new ASM to properly enable/disable non-indented third person dialog on the fly. This fixes the ending, some of Dragonlord's dialog, and the sage with the Rainbow Drop.
-Fixed a typo for a Kol NPC (thanks laserlambert)
-Tweaked more dialog breaks (Princess' Pledge and various shops should no longer require an extra button press)
-Fixed scrambled, out of order dialog when bringing Gwaelin to the King

1.3 (1-9-2019)
-More battle message tweaks. Fizzle-related messages should be fixed and stat increases on level up are a little smoother
-Stone Golem typo fixed
-Various script tweaks, mostly adding new pause and line breaks. Added some missing dialog for Princess' Pledge item. The merchant in Rimuldar (by the key shop) and the twin guards in Galenholm now have updated dialog. This now leaves the Nester cameo in Cantlin as the only unchanged NPC.
-More logo tweaks by Chicken Knife
-Updated End Credits with a small change to reflect new translation (also changed "Character Designed" to "Character Design").
-Lack of silent third person narration added to "issues" (in readme).
-Checked and tweaked Inn dialog when carrying Gwaelin (thanks High Score Girl anime!)


1.2 (12-19-2018)
-Fixed an inaccurate pointer which scrambled some NPC dialog among Galenholm, Kol, and Rimuldar (thanks AustNerevar).
-Fixed the dialog for discovering items like the faerie flute that was referring to the hidden staircase in Dragonlord's Castle. Also changed the name of said staircase to "hidden stairway" because the game doesn't like displaying item words longer than 8 letters (thanks laserlambert!).
-Fixed "new spell learned" dialog and changed an old line referring to a "treasure box" to "treasure chest".

1-1 (12-11-2018)
-Slight iprovement tweaks to logo (thanks to Chicken Knife who's a far better pixel artist than me)
-Patch is now XDelta which should avoid any sort of copyright issues AND should be better compatible with other patches (thanks Count Buggula)
-Added some pauses to the King's dialog for better readability.

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4237/

So, what is this?

I'm a Dragon Quest fan. Yeah I played the original Dragon Warrior for NES, but it wasn't until Square-Enix's recent releases and completely overhauled localization that really made me a hardcore Dragon Quest fan. Square-Enix released some decent remakes of the Erdrick trilogy (I-III) on Mobile devices based on the Super Famicom remakes (DQ I+II getting a bit more visual polish). The upside is that these featured a lush, extravagant translation that mixed the old school Olde English dialog of the NES games with a bit more flair and charm of Modern Dragon Quest releases. These releases are also consistent with other games that reference them directly like Dragon Quest Builders. The downside to these mobile exclusives are... well, they're exclusive to mobile devices, and from a technical standpoint... they're not the best. No controller support, stuck in portrait mode! Yuck! What if I just want to play the games the good ol' fashioned way?

And this is where PROJECT RE-QUEST comes in. Inspired by the likes of 121J and Chaos Rush and recently being able to extract the scripts from the three mobile games, I now have the means to port the scripts to the three Dragon Quest games.

So are you doing Dragon WARRIOR NES or the Dragon Warrior remakes on SFC?

I plan to do BOTH. I'm interested in updating the GBC remakes as well. While the NES versions are certainly dated, and the scripts are based on the remakes, I want to give people options. Sometimes you just want that good old broken NES difficulty and 8 bit graphics. I'm a bit of an amateur ROM Hacker though, so don't go expecting anything miraculous. I'll probably be using this thread to ask for advice and help for those willing to follow this thread.

What about Chicken Knife's Project? Isn't he doing the same thing?

We have similar goals and enjoy helping each other out where we can, but Chicken Knife plans to decensor and delocalize Dragon Warrior, making it closer to the Japanese version. I'm simply updating the script to make it better resemble modern Dragon Quest releases and make it so you can play Builders and go straight to Dragon Warrior and not feel a jarring difference in localization.

Puff Puff?

Oh yeah! You betcha

So where am I at now?

It's almost Dragon Quest Day and my release of Dragon Warrior 2 is ready. Here's some comparison screens.









If you want to see screens from my Dragon Warrior 1 Hack click the button below!

Spoiler

^Just want to say, yeah I see the different values there. Had no idea until I made this comparison. Not sure how it happened, but it's fixed.


^This might seem like cheating, but yes, the original script really was that sparse, and I wanted to show just how expanded it is. The script is now DOUBLE in size. Huge thanks to abw and his help on this.

[close]

[Chicken Knife]

Great post, my man. It's lovely to see these projects coming together.

Your description of my version has a hell of a ring to it. I might have to steal it for the actual name... Dragon Quest Delocalized 

A new era for Dragon Quest draws near. Command?

[G061]

Encouraging yours and Chicken Knife's projects both 100%.
I gotta say I'm kind of conflicted about S-E's official DQ localisations though. On the one hand I think their alteration and puns and the heavy accents are delightful, their intention to punch up some otherwise very "standard" RPGs to get new western fans attention I think has been successful because it worked on me.

However... after finishing DQ1+2 on mobile I realized something sort of worrisome. Their decision to cling to the terms and names of the original NES Dragon Warrior localisations sort of hurt some of the lore of the game for me already. I'll give the biggest example of memory;
After beating DQ1 the whole epilogue as I recall tells about how the Descendant of Erdrick or DQ1 Hero goes on to marry the King Lorik's Daughter Gwaelin and start a new kingdom in a new country, feel-good ending!
Onto Dragon Quest 2 and it's many, many years after the ending of DQ1. You play as the descendant of the DQ1 Hero, the Prince of Midenhall. It turns out Midenhall is the castle that the DQ1 Hero built with Gwaelin in the ending that DQ1 spoke of, cool!. So as I'm adventuring I encountered something a little odd; an unremarkable location that serves as a cave that connects the northern landmass to the central landmass called "Gwaelin's Gate".
Huh. So DQ1 Hero's wife got something named after her, that's cool. But it also seems random? Like, why just a cave.. because you rescued her from a cave originally? But it's Gwaelin's Gate, not Gwaelin's Cave. This is what bothered me enough to look up the original japanese names for the locations and this is where I start getting pretty conflicted.

As it turns out Midenhall in the jp Dragon Quest is called Laurasia and in the jp version Gwaelin is known as Laura. So originally, the DQ1 Hero named his entire kingdom Laurasia after his wife Lady Laura and the localization just chose ignore this in favor of keeping the old NES names and just toss in some consolation alteration to some cave for the few characters of importance in DQ1. This was a big enough change for me to almost be put off by the choices of the localization, as nitpicky as it sounds, it made a difference to me to know the hero I played as loved his wife enough to name his whole kingdom after her and that's just not there in the modern DQ2 localization. If they were okay with doing this I do wonder what else I could be missing out on?
Am I making too big a deal out of this? I dunno but I felt compelled to share.

Ideally, I'd love for your hack to apply the modern localisations while having an option of keeping the japanese DQ names in tact for this reason but I have no idea the repercussions it could have on the entire script.

[Chicken Knife]

@G061, it sounds like you lean more to my school of thought on this. The version of DW1 on my decensored thread (http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=26951.0) uses all the Japanese naming conventions and is pretty much done except for the title screen and a couple graphical quibbles I'm still working on. If you want the modern English localization of spell names instead of the Japanese style ones I can easily switch that for you.

I definitely think Choppasmith brings up a valid point about how people should be able to play the recent official releases and then go back and experience versions of the original games that sync up to those releases. As I'm playing through XI right now, I can clearly see that the flowery language, heavy accents and the naming choices that started in PS2's VIII are not going away.

For Dragon Quest 2, I'm dying to get started on the script revisions that I intend with all those beautiful original names like Laurasia. However, both Choppasmith and I are going to be facing a major issue with a unique method of text compression that Psyklax and Alchemic just confirmed in DW2. See thread on that @ http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=27053.0. Discovering this was a little infuriating because there is a ton of free space within the rom that should have rendered text compression unnecessary. Here's to hoping that we can find a practical solution to working with the text.

[Choppasmith]

So to bump this thread, I'm happy to announce the first release for the first game is out
http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4237/

Encouraging yours and Chicken Knife's projects both 100%.
I gotta say I'm kind of conflicted about S-E's official DQ localisations though. On the one hand I think their alteration and puns and the heavy accents are delightful, their intention to punch up some otherwise very "standard" RPGs to get new western fans attention I think has been successful because it worked on me.

However... after finishing DQ1+2 on mobile I realized something sort of worrisome. Their decision to cling to the terms and names of the original NES Dragon Warrior localisations sort of hurt some of the lore of the game for me already. I'll give the biggest example of memory;
After beating DQ1 the whole epilogue as I recall tells about how the Descendant of Erdrick or DQ1 Hero goes on to marry the King Lorik's Daughter Gwaelin and start a new kingdom in a new country, feel-good ending!
Onto Dragon Quest 2 and it's many, many years after the ending of DQ1. You play as the descendant of the DQ1 Hero, the Prince of Midenhall. It turns out Midenhall is the castle that the DQ1 Hero built with Gwaelin in the ending that DQ1 spoke of, cool!. So as I'm adventuring I encountered something a little odd; an unremarkable location that serves as a cave that connects the northern landmass to the central landmass called "Gwaelin's Gate".
Huh. So DQ1 Hero's wife got something named after her, that's cool. But it also seems random? Like, why just a cave.. because you rescued her from a cave originally? But it's Gwaelin's Gate, not Gwaelin's Cave. This is what bothered me enough to look up the original japanese names for the locations and this is where I start getting pretty conflicted.

As it turns out Midenhall in the jp Dragon Quest is called Laurasia and in the jp version Gwaelin is known as Laura. So originally, the DQ1 Hero named his entire kingdom Laurasia after his wife Lady Laura and the localization just chose ignore this in favor of keeping the old NES names and just toss in some consolation alteration to some cave for the few characters of importance in DQ1. This was a big enough change for me to almost be put off by the choices of the localization, as nitpicky as it sounds, it made a difference to me to know the hero I played as loved his wife enough to name his whole kingdom after her and that's just not there in the modern DQ2 localization. If they were okay with doing this I do wonder what else I could be missing out on?
Am I making too big a deal out of this? I dunno but I felt compelled to share.

Ideally, I'd love for your hack to apply the modern localisations while having an option of keeping the japanese DQ names in tact for this reason but I have no idea the repercussions it could have on the entire script.

I'm really late on this, but thanks for the info. It never occurred to me that Lorasia came from Lora. I guess it never did to Enix USA at the time either. They probably just wanted something that sounded more "Tolkien-y".

[FlamePurge]

Do you plan to do Dragon Quest III as well, or nah? I'd love to have the mobile script ported to the SFC remake

[Choppasmith]

Do you plan to do Dragon Quest III as well, or nah? I'd love to have the mobile script ported to the SFC remake

Yep, that's the plan. I want to try and at least touch up all three versions of the Loto/Erdrick trilogy (NES, SNES, GBC). I'm just going in order:

I-III NES > I+II and III SNES > I+II and III GBC.

[Chronosplit]

Speaking of III, there's one thing that bugged me on the mobile releases.  In the new translations, III uses more common english even though I and II have about the same vibe.

Have you ever thought of shifting III to something matching I and II more, or is this going to be a straight script port (which is also perfectly nice, I'm just curious).

[Chicken Knife]

@ Chronosplit
I think the mobile version of 3 was meant to follow suit with the style of the NES release where 95 percent of the dialogue was contemporary English (and a curious 5% was medieval style)

From what I've heard, they did change the dialogue for the post game Alfegard section to medieval style like 1 and 2 even though that wasn't in line with the NES version. This was a cool idea because it makes the medieval English to be something distinctive to the world of Alfegard / Torland

[Choppasmith]

Speaking of III, there's one thing that bugged me on the mobile releases.  In the new translations, III uses more common english even though I and II have about the same vibe.

Have you ever thought of shifting III to something matching I and II more, or is this going to be a straight script port (which is also perfectly nice, I'm just curious).

I believe the differing English between the two worlds was meant to show how different III's world was than Alefgard. It kinda leaves the impression that former is a little more advanced. Plus the World Map reflects ours and all the towns reflect dialects based on their real world counterparts (except for Jipang which, like Hotto in XI, speak in Haiku form which I find outstandingly clever). So in other words, no, it's going to be 1:1, no changes. Well as close as possible anyway since there's some stuff cut in the mobile version like the intro (will probably leave as is) and the Pachiisi (will change to Treasures 'n' Trap Doors and base the dialog off DQV)

[mariosmentor]

Woah! I leave for a month, and come back to find this?! Alright!!! You deserve a cookie! 

[abw]

^This might seem like cheating, but yes, the original script really was that sparse, and I wanted to show just how expanded it is. The script is now DOUBLE in size. Huge thanks to abw and his help on this.

Heh, I'm just glad I could help . Congrats on the release! That updated script is pretty awesome!

[CountBuggula]

So to bump this thread, I'm happy to announce the first release for the first game is out
http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4237/

I sent you a PM but wanted to make sure you saw that your patch shifts data, and due to releasing it in IPS format, it contains a significant amount of code from the original ROM.  In addition to obvious copyright problems with that approach, it makes combining several patches problematic.  Please re-release in xdelta or similar to avoid problems.

[Choppasmith]

I sent you a PM but wanted to make sure you saw that your patch shifts data, and due to releasing it in IPS format, it contains a significant amount of code from the original ROM.  In addition to obvious copyright problems with that approach, it makes combining several patches problematic.  Please re-release in xdelta or similar to avoid problems.

Sorry, I did get your PM, I've just been short on time, wanted to put in a couple of other tiny updates, and wait for other potential bug reports (I figure knowing my luck, the second I upload a revision, I'll get a report of something I missed). Hope to have it up by the weekend.

[laserlambert]

I am very impressed with the patch, and the scope of the project in general.

Nothing game breaking wrong but I noticed a couple things with the first game (using the xdelta patch 1.1)

The game shows a number in front of the word spell whenever you learn a new one, I don't know if it is supposed to say the spell name or not, but my version doesn't.

Also in Galenholm an NPC speaks with a glitched version of a neighboring NPC's dialogue.

Lastly when you find the Faerie Flute the game claims you have found a hidden staircase.

[Neon Streetlight]

Really excited about these projects. Just played the first three games for the first time in a while after finishing XI and it really made me wish the terminology synced up.

Ideally, I'd love to see the mobile scripts brought over to the first three (or maybe six?) games, between the NES AND SNES versions but also with the censorship removed where possible.

I also hope that one day, we can have the original title screens brought over since they are so iconic. The work that's been done on the Mega Man/Rockman series has been very impressive on that front.

Thanks for taking these games on! Can't wait to see how they develop. Finally seeing some love come to this series!

[Choppasmith]

I am very impressed with the patch, and the scope of the project in general.

Nothing game breaking wrong but I noticed a couple things with the first game (using the xdelta patch 1.1)

The game shows a number in front of the word spell whenever you learn a new one, I don't know if it is supposed to say the spell name or not, but my version doesn't.

Also in Galenholm an NPC speaks with a glitched version of a neighboring NPC's dialogue.

Lastly when you find the Faerie Flute the game claims you have found a hidden staircase.

Ah thanks for this. I was just told about the Galemholm NPC and the new spell message (when casting there's a special byte to display the spell name "[name} cast [spell]!" I thought I could use the same byte for new spells learned at level up, but apparently not.

Totally know the problem the faerie flute. Thanks again!

Really excited about these projects. Just played the first three games for the first time in a while after finishing XI and it really made me wish the terminology synced up.

Ideally, I'd love to see the mobile scripts brought over to the first three (or maybe six?) games, between the NES AND SNES versions but also with the censorship removed where possible.

I also hope that one day, we can have the original title screens brought over since they are so iconic. The work that's been done on the Mega Man/Rockman series has been very impressive on that front.

Thanks for taking these games on! Can't wait to see how they develop. Finally seeing some love come to this series!

I want to actually do the NES, SNES AND GBC versions. After that I plan to look at other games like IV-VII.

[Neon Streetlight]

I want to actually do the NES, SNES AND GBC versions. After that I plan to look at other games like IV-VII.

Sounds like a lot of hard work! Glad to see someone took inspiration from Chaos Rush. His work on the Final Fantasy series finally gave me some definitive versions to play on the NES. Also, happy to do some testing or help however else I can.

[Choppasmith]

Okay, I've submitted a 1.2 patch and will update the title when it's approved. Thanks again. The text error in Galenholm was a dumb pointer mistake. I seem to have a bad habit of remembering hex values wrong. Said pointer was set as A5 47 instead of A5 F7 (all throughout working on this I would remember hex values as something that sounded similar 4 instead of F, 8 instead of A, etc). Hopefully that's the last of it!

[abw]

One thing you can do to check your inserts before releasing a patch is to try using your extract process (modified as necessary to account for any structural changes you've made, such as half the text now being in a new ROM bank) on the patched ROM and compare that text to the text you wanted to insert. I tried that on the 1.1 patch just now and noticed that the pointer at 0x8014 is off by a bit too, which results in the girl who sells you Fairy Water in Cantlin not having any text to display when you agree to buy from her.

... and that's the trouble with manual pointer editing .