Breath of Fire 2 GBA Relocalized (WIP)

[Azure_Brian]

Hey everyone! I've been wanting to play Breath of Fire 2 on my channel for the longest time. Only issue is I "usually" tend to play the handheld versions of games whenever possible. That got me into looking at just how bad the localization of this game was. They barely changed a thing about the SNES script that was essentially a draft of a Japanese to English translation of the game. There's also the Ryusei version on the SNES that I COULD play, yes. But, even then I noticed some issues with it such as some Dragon Tear effects not working the way they should (mainly in the first town since that's all I've looked at so far).

Either way, this is my first post and I know zero coding. I eventually managed to put together a sort of text table for the game in a hex editor and have been modifying the game, albeit, rather slowly as I am learning as I go. I have no idea how to go about making ips patches for games but I figure that would come when it comes. Big issue with that is I started my work on an already patched version of the game that adjusted the palette and audio so I eventually might want to figure out how to "depatch" those to work on the base game itself.

Note that I am using the Ryusei version for ideas for some lines and how to make them sound better since I am localizing, not retranslating. I won't copy it 1:1, of course. Some lines actually wound up being copies accidently when I wrote mine and checked what they wrote after the fact. I am taking the lines themselves and rewriting them to sound a bit more natural but I am also limited by the amount of space the programmers left me so I can't exactly "expand" the script. I can only make it seem more like a... if the game was released with an okay localization from the start.

Let me post a video of my progress so far. This goes up to the title reveal only. That's as far as I got.

I don't know if anything will come of this, but I hope I could finish a project like this one day as I've never done this before. I would love to hear ideas for anything and even stuff I might be able to completely change based on the original Japanese script that wasn't in the localized version. I can't make the names be more than four letters as I don't know how to code that in so names will stay as they are. I might change items names though. Not sure what to, but I did change TreePole to WoodRod in the video as a proof of concept.

[Fray]

I wish you good luck with your project ! I'm no coding expert, so I can't help out, but conceptually creating a "clean" ips patch shouldn't be a problem. You should just create a patch from your patched+relocalized rom together with a patched only rom (with the colors and sounds modified) and as a result you should have a patch with just the script... and hope that the resulting patch works with the rom not modified.

[Azure_Brian]

I wish you good luck with your project ! I'm no coding expert, so I can't help out, but conceptually creating a "clean" ips patch shouldn't be a problem. You should just create a patch from your patched+relocalized rom together with a patched only rom (with the colors and sounds modified) and as a result you should have a patch with just the script... and hope that the resulting patch works with the rom not modified.

Thank you! That worked! Now I can work on the game that isn't palette patched. I mostly touched text only so far so nothing seemed off compared to how it looked with the colors altered. I hope I can keep the drive to continue this. It took me a good long while to get what I did done! If I had access to the debug menu that the SNES version had, if it still exists in the GBA version, I could just test every line of dialog from there.

[joje]

Good luck 

[Red Soul]

As someone who made a patch based on a pre-patched work at first (my Hues of Mana patch for Trials of Mana), I strongly recommend you you don't move forward at all in this manner. Save your notes and re-start on a completely vanilla ROM, otherwise you could burn out when it comes time do release your project and you can't undo this snag.

In my case, I burned out and restarted from scratch, but was only able to muster the patience to do so one year later. I wish you luck!

[Azure_Brian]

As someone who made a patch based on a pre-patched work at first (my Hues of Mana patch for Trials of Mana), I strongly recommend you you don't move forward at all in this manner. Save your notes and re-start on a completely vanilla ROM, otherwise you could burn out when it comes time do release your project and you can't undo this snag.

In my case, I burned out and restarted from scratch, but was only able to muster the patience to do so one year later. I wish you luck!

It's something I'm doing in my spare time but I managed to revert the colors back and kept my work so far so I think it's going well. I haven't made much progress though since my last post. I'm kind of hoping for easier ways of editing this to become available down the road but it's probably not going to happen. That being said, I might go to a vanilla rom anyways and transfer what I've done over to it just in case. Editing text through Hex is harder than I thought. That, and I have to save the rom every single edit I do, check to see how it looks ingame, and then redo if I need to. It's a tedious process. It would be nice if I could see my edits in realtime.