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This was my first real rom hacking endeavor. I found out about the game from its NSF rip and was shocked to find out that there was an untranslated Square game still floating around the Internet. I was bored and felt like learning more about the NES, and my room mate had taken a few Japanese courses and wanted something to work on, so we decided to try and translate this beast.

Oh man was that a dumb idea.

This game has so many idiomatic phrases and strictly Japanese jokes that it is a real challenge to come up with a translation that makes any sense. It's far from impossible, but it isn't something that someone like my room mate (at the time) should have been trying to translate. He's much better with the language now and could probably get the thing translated if he had enough free time and motivation.

Since this was my first real rom hacking attempt, I ended up gaining most of my skills by tinkering with it. The result was a sort of hodge-podge of hacks thrown together that made the game somewhat readable. This learning hack of mine was lost, however, when I somehow forgot to backup my Rom Hacking folder before a reformat. I don't mourn the loss of the hack, but I do miss having the log I was keeping of it. It could have been quite helpful in making a faq of some sort. Luckily, the actual translation work that had been done was transfered via email at some point, so that part remained safe.

I didn't want to give up on this game, so I had to start over. In a way, it was a good thing, since the current hack is much more professional. Mainly, I am using DTE instead of squishy tiles. The screenshots show a lot of cavespeak, but that is because I haven't bothered fixing those parts up yet. I've been more concerned in getting the various lists in the game (items, character names, etc) translated and getting their pointers back into position.

This is the closest thing I've got to a finished hack, and it is still in a sort of neverending progress. I know it can be annoying to read a project page and see that it's still in progress, but hasn't been updated in over a year. Trust me, if you work on something like this, you'll understand why that happens and why it is not the same thing as an abandoned project.

6:43 PM 10/16/2005
Got this project page uploaded. Woo. Technically, I'm still working on the various lists in the game. I believe I am on the last one and I think I didn't quite get the pointers right. Once that is fixed, I should be moving on to menu text and menu restructuring.

Nothing yet, suckers. You won't see a release for a while, probably.

Here's some random in-game screenshots. It's very messy, but I've got the menus memorized anyway. PNGs ahoy!

• Obligatory Title Screen shot
• The overworld. Watch your little men walk from castle to castle. Wee!
• The map screen, when scrolling isn't fast enough.
• A fight. It's all about mashing on the A button.
• Using a monster to take care of some Goblins.
• Speaking of Goblins...
• The goblins make your monster more powerful if you beat them.
• There's also a monthly event and shop every minute or so.

Speaking of mosters, here's a picture of all of them.