Hey, I'm a total newbie to this stuff, and this forum, although I've been lurking for a while. I'm currently learning both hexadecimal and Japanese, and eventually hope to be able to translate un-exported Japanese games, or maybe imported games with horrible existing translations 'cos man those bug me.

I mean, that isn't why I'm learning Japanese, but it might be a neat hobby to have later. Just sayin'.

In the meantime, I was wondering something pretty stupid about the Japanese version of Harvest Moon DS Cute (it's the same as HMDS but you play a girly girl!). I've been playing the US game on and off all year, and only just learned you can't actually lesbian-marry the mermaid in the English language version. Natsume or whomever decided we're all homophobes over here so that dubious honour is reserved for the J version.

(I'm a woman, just on the offchance that it makes this post less creepy.)

So I was wondering... would it be remotely possible for me, or someone, to dump the script to the English HMDS Cute and somehow patch it to the J version? I have no idea how different the scripts/tables are but it's exactly the same game with only the text and font changed (and lesbian marriage) so it can't be that different, surely? I mean, the values would be different with the number of kana/kanji but if I could overwrite all that somehow...?

If it's possible, I'd like to try. It might be a good practise job for real romhacking, and I don't think I want to marry the mermaid quite enough to manually re-translate the entire damn game, at any point in the future.

If it isn't possible, then... meh, lame. Oh well, thanks anyway for wasting your time with me, I'll probably be posting on here about other games later so it's not like I got the account for nothin'.

Yeah, don't know what ASM work is, so probably safe to say I can't do that thing.

And it's not that I want this one feature so goddamn bad, it's more that I would rather like to have it and at the same time I'm trying to learn tralslation hacking, so I thought the script importing might be a practice project I could mess with over a few months. Or something. Figuring out how to dump scripts, create patches, etc. Maybe I'm being overly ambitious too early?

Yeah, I got the impression the programmers just made a very minor edit, like lazily removed/changed the marriage trigger or whatever, because you can still get the lesbian love points (LLP) and romantic cutscenes, you just can't activate the wedding. Wouldn't surprise me if the relevant cutscenes and scripts etc were all still actually there, just inaccessible ingame.

Although even if I did figure out how to put these scene back in I'd rather do the English-to-Jap script dump, since it's kinda why I'm doing this in the first place. It's not so much about lesbian mermaids as it is about learning this horrible hexidecimal crap as it relates to Japanese text. I can read kana veeery slowly and I know many of the more common words, but I'm nowhere near 'translate an entire game' level, so already having a translation already on hand is very helpful.

Thanks for the advice!