Medarot/Medabots GB/C translations

[Variant]

Creating this topic in hopes that it makes it easier to receive feedback for various projects, and maybe solicit some help!

Most people outside of Japan might've only heard of Medabots through the late 90s/early 00s anime or the GBA and GC games released around the same time before it effectively disappeared from most non-Japanese media. The series presence in Japan, while not gigantic, is still fairly active and has much more media than was ever released outside of the country.

As far as this topic is concerned: there have been 5 mainline games for the Game Boy/Game Boy Color, and a slew of "Parts Collection" side-games to match the mainline ones, and we hope to eventually get to translating all of them.

Myself, andwhyisit, Kimbles, and others (who are credited on the git repositories but aren't on RHDN) have been working on hacking and translating the Medarot GBC games for a few years; recently, the pandemic ended up giving us more time to push these projects out the gate faster.


Some things that apply to all the translations:
* We do implement a variable-width font everywhere we can (either via dynamic drawing or pre-rendered tilesets for fixed text)
* We do keep the projects we work on open-source via GitHub, so feel free to fork and do whatever you want to them

As for the projects themselves:

Medarot 1

We released Medarot 1 in a few variations, and had a Spanish translation based on our work as well:
* English (Japanese terms): http://www.romhacking.net/translations/5792/
* English (Americanized terms): http://www.romhacking.net/translations/6479/
* Spanish: http://www.romhacking.net/translations/6249/

The original git repository is here: https://github.com/Medabots/medarot1
* 'master' rebuilds the original ROM and is used as the base for the primary translation branch
* 'tr_EN' is the primary translation branch (English with Japanese terms)
* 'tr_EN-US' is the Americanized translation branch that uses tr_EN as a base
* 'tr_ES' is the translation branch for the Spanish patch

There is also a WIP disassembly of the first Parts Collection game for Medarot 1 (there are two) here. However this is currently stalled as the mainline games are more important.

Medarot 2

(We skipped 2 for the GBC as it was remade for the GBA and had a worldwide release as just 'Medabots' on the GBA)

Medarot 3

This is our current active WIP.

The original git repository is here: https://github.com/Medabots/medarot3
* 'master' rebuilds the original ROM and is used as the base for the primary translation branch
* 'tr_EN' is the primary translation branch (English with Japanese terms)

The disassembly and patching work itself is fairly straightforward and moving along at a steady pace, with most screens and menus translated already.

However, the biggest issue is currently dialog. Our translators are fairly busy and there are about 7500 blobs of text (dialog, descriptions, etc...) to go through, translate, and edit.

Some progress images:










Medarot 4

After 3!

Medarot 5

After 4!

----


Some plugs:
* The Medabots community (via the subreddit and Discord) have been a huge help with just about everything from terminology to game mechanics to providing save files to test with, as well as testing themselves, if you're interested, please check out the Discord server!
* I do post regular updates on my Twitter a lot, as it facilitates quickly posting images with notes and has the highest range of visibility for the Medabots community, you can find that here

If you'd like to help, give feedback on the existing patches, test our WIP patches, or just want to chit-chat about Medabots feel free to post here, hop on the Medabots discord server, ping me on RHDN, or ping me on Twitter!

[tvtoon]

Do you have plans for "Shingata Medarot" (GBA)? It is the remake of the first, with a similar setting but with modernized engine plus more story.

What about the *NOW LOADING* "Medarot R" (PS1)? Any chance to touch another remake from the 2 with a stick?

[Variant]

Do you have plans for "Shingata Medarot" (GBA)? It is the remake of the first, with a similar setting but with modernized engine plus more story.

We actually have a running joke about how we'll one day just show up with a Shingata translation. It isn't very widely-loved by the community in general, but it's got a charm to it.

Speaking of GBA games, Navi is also a point of interest and some others started work on it, but it sorta stalled indefinitely.

Our focus is the GBC games right now, and *I* hope to eventually hit the GBA games, but that's a far in the future thing right now for sure...

What about the *NOW LOADING* "Medarot R" (PS1)?

Medarot R already had a translation I thought, by Star Trinket? I haven't actually tried it myself but it seems like it already exists or is being worked on.

[Masaru]

Medarot 2

(We skipped 2 for the GBC as it was remade for the GBA and had a worldwide release as just 'Medabots' on the GBA)

If that's the case, then why not doing a direct re-translation or decensor of the GBA Remake?

To my knowledge, they changed a lot of stuff in the international relases of the game to the point of affecting it directly

[Variant]

If that's the case, then why not doing a direct re-translation or decensor of the GBA Remake?

To my knowledge, they changed a lot of stuff in the international relases of the game to the point of affecting it directly

Yeah, the US version actually even tries to (inconsistently) change the setting to America for some reason. It's a bit... uh, weird.

I think the team would love to this eventually but it's mostly just a matter of lacking resources right now... Medarot 3 itself is taking some time to go through, and there's still 2 games after this. The hacking part is moving steadily, but a hobby project is a hobby project, gotta do it when we find time.

Also, I guess it was more correct to say that we went to 3 because 2 had something already translated. So 3 would be a nice new thing for anyone looking to get back into it, and would be a direct sequel to the game they already knew.

We're a bit short-handed on translators as-is . Hopefully we'll find more as we get closer to being done with all the hacking parts (not much left at this stage, at least).

[FAST6191]

Always used to get up early to watch the anime as far as pokemon clones go the English GBA one is one of the better offerings (though for fighting robots I might go with robopon).
Glad to see these being looked at.

As far as improvements go. As above I really liked the GBA effort, save perhaps the races but this is why emulator has turbo press, but the main criticism is fighting the same 5 medabots for each section on the random battles. Always wanted to mix that up a bit.

[Variant]

A bit of a bump almost a year later, but still relevant. Medarot 3's hacking work is pretty much done, the major graphics and credits have been translated. Unfortunately we're only at about 40% of the way through the dialog translations...


While waiting for that to move, we started work on Medarot 4 finally. Luckily a lot of the Medarot 3 stuff seems to carry over, so dialog text is dumped and insertable:




When I looked at Dragon Quest/Warrior 3, that game had like ~5700 text pointers. Medarot 3 has like ~7100, which I thought was a ton for the GBC... but Medarot 4 has over 11000 unique text pointers...

Maybe this is the reason why Natsume/Imagineer didn't want to translate the GBC games...



We're still looking for translation help!