Ouch. Have you found the game's font yet?

If this is your group's first time ever translating a game, then let me make a recommendation: back away for the moment. A first-timer tackling a PS2 game with no prior hacking experience (or programming experience for that matter) is going to run smack into some very high, very thick walls.

You should get acquainted with the basics. I recommend you try looking into projects on SNES, GB/C and GBA: these platforms are all very well-documented, with numerous utilities, and as most fan translation work is done for games on these platforms, you should have little difficulty finding help. (I would also recommend NES, but Japanese NES games use a myriad of different memory mapper systems which makes NES hacking a bit more difficult. Plus, in many cases it's impossible to circumvent the obvious screen space restrictions by hacking a proportional font into the game, simply because of the way NES titles handle graphics.)

Whatever you choose, you should download and get acquainted with Tile Molester. It's a Java-based utility with some stability issues, but it can handle virtually any uncompressed graphics format you throw at it. This is how you find graphics data in games, such as fonts.

If you can discover how the game's font is laid out, you can apply that knowledge to decoding the game's script.

EDIT: The first few bytes spell out "[SCRIPT]" in ASCII (or Shift-JIS, for that matter). The rest I can't figure out (it's not Shift-JIS, and it's certainly not ASCII, either), but that "FE FF FD FF" sequence looks like an end tag or some such.

Anything is possible. It just takes a metric buttload of time, cursing and effort. Much less if you've got experience with what you're attempting.

Okay, let's try this again. Seeing "[SCRIPT]" in ASCII gives me hope that the whole thing is in a standard format. First, download this:

http://www.romhacking.net/docs/sjis.zip

This is a table file. Imagine the script file you're wrestling with as a colossal cipher where everything has been encoded in hexadecimal. This table file is the cipher key...well, more accurately, one of a nigh-infinite number of possible cipher keys, but a very likely possibility to my reckoning.

Next, you want this:

http://www.romhacking.net/utils/WindHex.zip

Open your script file in WindHex. There's two parts to the display: the left-hand side displays the raw hex (which you should be familiar with) and the right side displays that hex "translated" via the currently loaded table file. WindHex defaults to ASCII encoding, so "[SCRIPT]" should be visible at the top...but nothing else yet. Now select "Open Table File" and load up the unzipped sjis.tbl. "[SCRIPT]" should still be visible, but now you'll probably have a lot of gibberish on screen: press CTRL+D on your keyboard (or just select "View Text Data As Unicode") to switch the display to Unicode mode.

(Note: when I use WindHex, this has the side effect that the text display font inexplicably shrinks to nigh-illegibility. The quick fix I've discovered is to go to Option/Set Font/Text Font and just click "OK" when the font selection box comes up.)

If you see any Japanese characters at all, it's working. Scroll through and see if you can't find anything that makes sense. If you can, congratulations. If you can't...unfortunately, that means the script isn't encoded in Shift-JIS format. (Or it's compressed, an unlovely situation.)

I'm not sure what to think, having never heard of this game before, but "The Story of Ears and Tail" makes me wonder. >_>

I'd guess they're character names: "Mimi" means "ears", and "Shippo" means "tail".

(I remember a rabbit on "The Adventures of the Little Koala" being named Mimi. I'm betting that's one name that was the same in the original Japanese version. Also note one scene in Shenmue, where the little girl agrees that "Mimi" is a good name for the cat in a way that sounds like a non-sequitur in English. And any Inuyasha fan is familiar with a certain pipsqueak fox spirit.)

EDIT: Ah. Boxart, courtesy of GameFAQs.



Erm...something makes me uncomfortable about this boxart. (On a side note, now you know who Mimi and Shippo are.)

(And for those who try to find this game on GameFAQs, naturally the information was all put in by someone who can't read Japanese to save their lives. Just browse PS2 games starting with "P"...it's "Pyua Pyua" something, near the bottom.)

Good, then I want it  :angel:

On an ironic note, I made that Wiki entry...

Also, that box art wasn't the release box art. I really need to scan the release one. It's a bit less disturbing than the pre-release one.

((And as you probably already know from the Wiki entry, their names aren't Mimi or Shippo, it's Hinata, Tobari(The two on the box) and Miwa, who isn't a 耳っ子））