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I stumbled across this rom while messing around with fce for the xbox. I was surprised to see an english game get translated into japanese. Those wacky folks over in Japan decided to make a fool of me yet again. This is a completely different game than the port that NA got.

They saw it fit to completely redo the graphics. Probably most noteworthy is the fact that each room now only takes up one screen. There's no scrolling. The graphics are a bit more, well, Japanese. It's not anime or anything, but all the characters seem to have a bit of a corporate mascot art style to them.

The mansion is laid out the exact same way as any other version. The items are where the items belong and they do what they're supposed to do.

Considering that my room mate/translator and I know just about all there is to know about this game, we figured it would be a simple hack. In all honesty, it is. There are a couple of quirks to it, but it's nothing too hard. Unfortunately, we both are lazy and don't have much free time...

7:21 PM 10/16/2005
This isn't really a news update since this is the first time I'm uploading this page, but I suppose I'll go over a few of the quirks that I mentioned.

First, the game uses only hiragana. This is particularly odd because most of the game's items are not Japanese and would normally be written in katakana. Rather than including a katakana font, they just use hiragana to spell out how it would have looked in katakana. It's very awkward to read.

Second, the game decided not to use a newline character. Instead, everything has a byte defining the length of the line (or pointer text) followed by the line. It wasn't too hard to figure out, but I've never seen a game do it like this before. It forced me to write my first script dumper/inserter. I used php to do it, since that was what I had been programming in recently (and because Feidian is so awesome).

As far as progress is concerned, some of the item names are translated, but none are inserted. The commands menu is translated and hacked (as best I could do...).

Nothing yet. I might release the table file and item name dumper eventually.

Here's some random screeshots of the game:

• The title screen. Notice all the characters.
• The menu in Japanese.
• The menu in English (yay!).
• Just inside the mansion.
• In the kitchen with Edna.
• In the dungeon with Edna. It's a bit cramped.
• Dr. Fred and Sandy in the lab cutscene.
• Green Tentacle!