Dragon Quest Monsters (GBC) Delocalized

[Bagel_Bear]

I can't wait to get my hands on this! However long it takes. Dragon Quest Monsters was my introduction to the Dragon Quest series and it will be awesome to play a more faithful version to the original.

[Chicken Knife]

We are chipping away at it. Nejimakipiyo is doing a scrub, and after that I plan on doing a final scrub. Whether or not the issue blipform and nejimakipiyo were going over gets resolved is rather minor. I may take a stab messing around with it, but I haven't touched Asar or any other assembler software yet.

And btw, I can't tell you how pleased I am with your profile pic.

[nejimakipiyo]

I can't wait to get my hands on this! However long it takes. Dragon Quest Monsters was my introduction to the Dragon Quest series and it will be awesome to play a more faithful version to the original.

It shouldn't take too much longer. In my current play test I'm about halfway through the pre-credits game. The main delay is that I'm also trying to breed the perfect team so that I can easily breeze through post-game when I get to it. The problems that I'm uncovering are now limited to simple text-based errors caused by miscounting character limits in the insertion file. If you go over the allotted 18 characters per line, weird text glitches happen like messing up Yes/No prompts and the menu options. Fortunately, they're easy to fix when I find them - it just means I have to be extremely thorough and check for every possible piece of text the game can generate.

[Chicken Knife]

I wanted to give everyone an update. We've been working very hard on this project and making some major strides. As typical for our projects, the scope of our work generally widens greatly as time goes on. The initial plan was just to fix some of the most obvious problems and censored elements with the script, but by this point, the text has gotten an extremely thorough makeover. I'd say that the finished product will be very much in line with the amount of work that went into our Delocalized projects for DQ1, DQ2 and DQ3.

In fact, I think that the finished script for Dragon Quest Monsters will be the largest improvement over the original out of all 4 of these games. DQ1 & DQ2's scripts were a major departure as far as removing the medieval speech, and there was plenty of censorship to remove. But aside from fixing a few genuine translation errors, the original translators did a decent job. By DQ3, I would say that they did a very good job overall, not to say that our Delocalized project brings nothing to the table--it certainly does, but the original Dragon Warrior 3 had a competent translation for its time.

Our work on Dragon Quest Monsters, however, has revealed just how inept the original localization was. The translators seemed to have a very weak grasp of the Japanese, and I'm not even sure they had a great grasp of English, either. Nearly every scenario in the Japanese game has wonderful humor and references to elements of the mainline series that were botched in the localization. The amount of improvements to the script we are implementing is vast, and we are very excited to share them with everyone.

It's hard to say exactly how much longer this is going to be take, so I won't say it. But the process has been picking up speed as our excitement grows and we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

[AdamDravian]

That's awesome, Chicken Knife. Again, I super appreciate the hard work and commitment you and your team put into these projects.

[zarkon]

Sounds great, looking forward to playing through and getting to the Starry Night Tournament again.  Assuming it's still called that

I've never actually replayed DWM since the nineties, I loved it but it was such a timesink.  I played it to the point the clock reached its maximum value on the save screen (not as bad as it sounds, I think it was either 60 or 99 hours iirc).

I think I could speed up a lot on my initial playthrough now that I know the most important thing in the game is stealing monsters from other trainers though, something I only realised pretty late into the game originally.

[Bagel_Bear]

As a kid, I fondly remember using the website Dragon Warrior Monsters Central to make breeding chains in a notebook.

Playing now, I'd progress leagues quicker lol

The amount of work you folks are putting into this makes me want to play it more and more each update.

[Masaru]

Tilemap locations:
german rom 17e4f3  [$77 bytes]
usa rom 17e4f1  [$92 bytes]

Which gives us this patch
https://github.com/blipform/Dragon_Warrior_Monsters_1/raw/title_logo/german_title_logo.ips


I'll add some user prompt support to the exe and note an update here when it happens.

__________________________________________________


Summary of previous posts:

1. LZ just means dictionary compression, based on previous data. So
abcdeabcdabc ==>
abcde[abcd][abc] ==>
abcde[lz1][lz2]

We can copy from the previous "abcde" string to recreate the next strings. Save space.


2. The teleporter names have a ptr table @ $15801f, 2 bytes each entry or 16-bits. If the new packed data doesn't fit, you'll know to look here when shuffling everything around.


3. German logo uses same packing math as the gate names. I chose to make it smaller since it doesn't fit in the USA rom so easily.

Tilemaps are basically stored "raw" and copied over. So using the bgb vram viewer -- bg map window, I was able to find the rom locations. Turns out German uses smaller maps than USA so I didn't need to move anything around.

A tilemap is a bunch of painting codes that draws the screen: [tile 00][tile 01]..[tile 50].


Hope that simplifies everything.


EDIT1
Exe tools are updated and now ask for input if run directly
https://github.com/blipform/Dragon_Warrior_Monsters_1/tree/crunch
https://github.com/blipform/Dragon_Warrior_Monsters_1/tree/decrunch

Someone has a backup of his title screen patch or the tools?, the github was taken down

[nejimakipiyo]

Sounds great, looking forward to playing through and getting to the Starry Night Tournament again.  Assuming it's still called that

I've never actually replayed DWM since the nineties, I loved it but it was such a timesink.  I played it to the point the clock reached its maximum value on the save screen (not as bad as it sounds, I think it was either 60 or 99 hours iirc).

I think I could speed up a lot on my initial playthrough now that I know the most important thing in the game is stealing monsters from other trainers though, something I only realised pretty late into the game originally.

We're going with "Shooting Star Tournament" for better accuracy and to maintain the theme of wishes in the plot.

Someone has a backup of his title screen patch or the tools?, the github was taken down

Unfortunately I don't have a backup of the title screen patch alone. I've already implemented it into the ROM to be credited to blipform. (Learning moment: Never delete stuff, nejimakipiyo. Never delete stuff.  )

I do, however, have the crunching/uncrunching tools for the list of travel gates given to you by a warrior NPC. As far as I can tell that's the only purpose of them. Are those what you're asking for?

[CoolCatBomberMan]

The original translation was THAT bad, huh? Pardon my rudeness, but care to share an exceptionally egregious example? Something to hype up the actual release?

[FlashPV]

Someone has a backup of his title screen patch or the tools?, the github was taken down

Yes, here it is:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ecBGrPKym5KtPGVlEWTNr6YAUF_NShgF/view?usp=sharing

[nejimakipiyo]

Yes, here it is:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ecBGrPKym5KtPGVlEWTNr6YAUF_NShgF/view?usp=sharing

Thank you, FlashPV!

The original translation was THAT bad, huh? Pardon my rudeness, but care to share an exceptionally egregious example? Something to hype up the actual release?

Yes, it was really atrocious. Not only was there rampant censorship of religion and alcohol references (which you can see a bit of in the first post on this thread) but there were some cases where they missed the mark in such a way that the humour of the original Japanese text was lost.

Let's take the Casino at the end of the Gate of Peace as an example. The original translation from this slot machine is as follows:

TERRY pulled the slot machine!
The reels spin quietly.
Spinning....Spinning....
TERRY's eyes are slowly getting used to the speed of the machine.
Spac spoc spac!!
TERRY hit the jackpot!
Jingle Jingle Jingle Jingle!!
Wow! TERRY got 500 in Monster Gold!!

When our team took a look at the Japanese text in this section, we discovered that it actually contains a reference to the special ability of the Poison Needle weapon from Dragon Quest III. Here is our translation:

Terry pulled the arm of the slot machine!
The reels spin quietly.
Spinning... Spinning...
Terry's eyes are adjusting to the speed of the slots.
Terry jabbed the button!
And penetrated the slot machine's vital organs!
Jingle jingle jingle jingle!
Wow! Terry got 500 in monster gold!

As I mentioned in the first post on this thread, we changed all of the text from the mirror in the arena to be the monster wordplay jokes that were intended, and I posted a screenshot of one such example there. There were also a number of vast improvements to the king's text. The king of GreatTree often uses extreme hyperbole in acknowledging Terry's accomplishments, much of which was lost in translation and degraded to basic statements. We fixed all that as well.

Furthermore, thanks to a lot of dedicated work by Chicken Knife, we've also improved the overall flow of the longer speeches in the game. A lot of it was written with choppy, non sequitur statements, and Chicken Knife excels at improving these parts in a way that makes it more pleasurable to read.

Since I'm here I also want to say that we've backtracked on my original plan to release two versions of this hack; it's just going to be Dragon Quest Monsters: Delocalized now. I didn't realize in the beginning how much work it would be to go through the whole thing after completion and just change all of the names back to what they originally were. As someone who played this game multiple times a year over the past 2 decades, I admit I was battling with my nostalgia as well. But after seeing all of these improvements come to life and playing extensively with the new monster and spell names, I truly feel confident that old and new players can enjoy the Delocalized version of this game.

[Choppasmith]

Wanted to show my support as a DQ fan. 

But I also wanted to ask you nejimakipiyo, if you get a chance after you were done with this might you take a look at the Terry dialog for Fortune Street Special? I have it separated as an open spreadsheet here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jkCGph6cC2_ZQ5m1zAQF0KpWhkayodTwxBVnrkWGMQw/edit?usp=sharing

I only ask because it's centered on DQM and thought it might be good to have someone already really familiar (I'm not, sadly) with the game to translate this.

[Masaru]

I made some mockups for the title screen to be more closer to the japanese title screen





A version without a screwed up logo

[nejimakipiyo]

Wanted to show my support as a DQ fan. 

But I also wanted to ask you nejimakipiyo, if you get a chance after you were done with this might you take a look at the Terry dialog for Fortune Street Special? I have it separated as an open spreadsheet here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jkCGph6cC2_ZQ5m1zAQF0KpWhkayodTwxBVnrkWGMQw/edit?usp=sharing

I only ask because it's centered on DQM and thought it might be good to have someone already really familiar (I'm not, sadly) with the game to translate this.

Sure! Our progress for the Dragon Quest Monsters hack depends a lot on Chicken Knife's schedule right now, so I don't mind poking at this in my spare time. I saved all of the Terry stuff to a separate doc on my google drive and I'll tackle it on my days off next week.

I made some mockups for the title screen to be more closer to the japanese title screen

They look great, Masaru! I've already implemented the title screen patch that blipform made, which we can see is clearly more similar to the English localization screen.



The Japanese title screen has some funky stuff on the go with the katakana title overlaying the Dragon Quest logo. Yours look much cleaner, and I love that you wrote in the Terry's Wonderland subtitle as well. Of the mockups you made, I like the third the best. When compared side by side to the Japanese title screen it honestly looks like an improvement.



Would it be difficult to implement something like that in the ROM, especially considering that I've already integrated blipform's title screen patch into my hack? Sadly, it isn't as easy as just adjusting the script anymore, since there are also some graphics edits and renamed travel gates.

[Thirteen 1355]

Impressive! Never touched a DQ Monsters game, since I'm still looking for a nice translation for the original trilogy (was hoping someone had made one for GBC versions ).

[nejimakipiyo]

Impressive! Never touched a DQ Monsters game, since I'm still looking for a nice translation for the original trilogy (was hoping someone had made one for GBC versions ).

If I get better at the actual hacking process, I might eventually tackle the GBC versions. It's currently not on my plate but something I've been thinking about. Of all of the releases, I think the GBC localization of the Roto games was closest in tone to the original Japanese. There were some errors of course (like Roto being called Loto, for instance), and of course compromises due to restricted space especially in menus.

Our team did re-translate the original trilogy on the NES, though.
http://www.romhacking.net/community/6179/

[CoolCatBomberMan]

I remember the GBC trilogy. They were localized by the same guy who localized Pokemon for a while. Saw him in an interview on YouTube some years back. Apparently, working on Dragon Quest was something he had always wanted to do.

[Thirteen 1355]

If I get better at the actual hacking process, I might eventually tackle the GBC versions. It's currently not on my plate but something I've been thinking about. Of all of the releases, I think the GBC localization of the Roto games was closest in tone to the original Japanese. There were some errors of course (like Roto being called Loto, for instance), and of course compromises due to restricted space especially in menus.

Our team did re-translate the original trilogy on the NES, though.
http://www.romhacking.net/community/6179/

Actually, it's only the names/terms I'm kinda bothered with. Mainly when playing DQ11, some names just don't match up. The rest of the localization is much better than I expected, and certainly better than the fan translations done for SNES.

Sadly, the NES versions of these games are juust a tad too old for me.

[Choppasmith]

Actually, it's only the names/terms I'm kinda bothered with. Mainly when playing DQ11, some names just don't match up. The rest of the localization is much better than I expected, and certainly better than the fan translations done for SNES.

Sadly, the NES versions of these games are juust a tad too old for me.

This is exactly why I'm doing my Re-Quest project. Going from something modern like DQ11 and then going back to the older games can be very jarring and confusing. I'm a long way off, but I plan on going NES>SNES>GBC with the Erdrick trilogy and I'm on NES III right now. With respect to the Delocalized team of course. Options are great!