Ok, I'll just go ahead and make an Elminage thread now about translating them all! (Into English)

[aweigh]

Helly MrRichard999 Courtier Dorarnae Deuce Traveler Viata Comte Siveon Shackleton Emmanuel2 desocupado hackncrazy Mustawd Dorateen
Here is my first attempt at her dialog: I simply overwrite the japanese characters/sentences by typing over that in English. Nothing more done, nothing more needed. OR SO I THOUGHT....

- ok, that turned out like pure dog shit. I'm going to post pics of how I fixed the text from going outside of the box (you have to insert "line breaks" after every specific amount of 'spaces'/i.e. 1 lenglish letter = 1 space and then you insert the hexadecimal codification: 1B 0D and then begin counting again the required spaces/letters and then again another 1B 0D, etc, etc.

- (Pictured below) Here is how Rose's greeting now looks like in-game with my first attempt at using the line breaks; and yes i completely forgot to use a LINE STOP hexadecimal for the very last sentence of her dialog and instead i kept on using one more LINE "BREAK" (two completely different uses) and that is why the very last sentences runs on so long; in any case the difference is notable:

(Pictured below) still looks bad, right? ok, i touched it up one more time:

DING DING DING DING DING DING WE HAVE A WINNER. Now, obviously I'm not saying that would be final cut dialog (although I did translate her very simple dialog completely accurately utilizing a simple japanese electronic dictionary that has look-ups for kanji and katakana and also has a Strokes system); but I think I got every single thing from her japanese text: In the japanese she says the weather is great, and then she says that the Inn's lunch dishes are equally as "neat" as their famously "neatly tended" FUTONS. (???). Yes, she says that; then she finishes by name-dropping the 1st dungeon's Enemy/NPC of interest a so-called Kokorooki.

I motherfucking edited out the lunch dish and futon stuff and fucking made this bitch be concise and hit all of her talking points without coming off as stilted or coming off as each sentence divorced from the others. Yeah, I'm awesome.

Elminage 2 gives you exactly 20 wspaces, i.e. 20 english letters from beginning of left-wall of the dialog box and the 20th "spot" is just touching the right-side wall of the dialog box; this means that spot 21 and 22 have to obligatorily be filled with the hexadecimal numbers 1B and 0D so as to make the line STOP and then ALSO CONTINUE parsing the line immediately placed in the code right after the line break hex operators.

...yes, i know, it is absoluely mind-blowingly insane that to translate the NPC dialog this is the level of work involved. I know, I know...

 

[aweigh]

MORE PIX that are in the other threads:

Now for pics of everything else i've been translating that is *not* character dialog; i.e. shit that does not require me to count 21 "spaces" and inserting a hexadecimal line break while slowly going mad....

 

[aweigh]

NOW IN CASE U WERE WONDERING "HEY WHAT ABOUT THE MMENU COMMANDS! THEY'RE TEXTURES!" relax dude I just plan on ripping the ones from E: Original and replacing the japanese menu textures in Elmi-2 w/ the English language ones from E: Original. I've already done it ebfore and it worked 100% flawlessly!

THAT is a screenshot of my Elmi-2 party inside Beth's Bar (or Beth's Tavern, but spacing issues do not permit using the word Tavern...) and as you can see instead of having yellow-tinted menu-textures in japanese the game is running w/ the blue-colored menu-textures commands from E: Original. Starfish did not move ANYTHING around and did NOT introduce anything "new" that would otherwise fuck up the order of the commands; as such this means using the menu-textures from E: Original is 100% fine ! They're just colored blue.

 

[aweigh]

finally, one last batch of screen-caps for now:

 

[aweigh]

...i konw this specific game is a pipe dream as long as i'm donig this by myself. realistically speaking there is no possible way i would ever be able to finish all of the game's script counting spaces and inserting line breaks and line stops; and that's even putting aside whether or not the actual translation is good or bad, in fact that's kind of the most simple part of this insane attempt.

a REAL localization team doesn't translate an RPG the way I am doing it or the way MrRichard999 has done it (in his case he spent a lot of time counting "spaces" in the Wizardry Chronicle text dialogs in order to insert that game's corresponding hexadecimal operators (line breaks); so yeah, he knows exactly how insane what i want to do is going to be. Chronicle featured barely a FRACTION of the insane amount of text inside an Elmimage game.

But fine, whatever, let's leave that aside for now: as i was saying real localization teams have coders on staff, and others who may or may not also be coders who also have experience with coding and scripting and their purpose is to develop CUSTOM TOOLS (i.e. a small program that, an example here being.... that automatically goes through the entire game .ISO / .ROM and intelligently scans for specific file types such as .zips, .ogg's, .csv's, etc, use your imagination here; and then it extracts these files and now the localization team has the complete and utter "luxury" of not having to use a hexadecimal enviroment in order to translate game text.

they can, for example let's use this very game Elmi-2; this hypothetical team would not be inserting 1B and 0D every 21 "spaces"... no, they would be manipulating the game's text files and the game's .CSV documents and the game's spreadsheets and the game's dungeon text files and basically EEEEEEVERYTHING would be instantly accessible by virtue of the translation being not an class course in how to count 21 spaces, but rather professionals working with source text documents, editing them, translating them, and then giving them to their programmer/coder to have him or her Re-Insert those "text files" back into the game and voila, presto chango it is in another language then!

they would not need to "play test" much of anything because when you have the actual source document in hand it is amazing how granular things get.

EDIT: Elminage: Gothic stored all of its game text in a big amount of .CSV, .DOC and .WZA documents (i.e. "text files") but their publisher apparenly skimped on the publishing aspects most people don't know a lot about: they sihpped it with the industry common container archives .BRA; and it was only a matter of a few days before the first few Gothic players immediately whipped out .BRA scripts so as to extract all of E: Gothics files.

THAT little program, called BRAunpacker, is exactly what i always use whenever I mod or edit Elminage: Gothic. The difference that having access to powerful tools is isimply too big to even be something that is in the same activity IMO. hex editing is fucking awesome but it is most definitely fucking SHIT if your life goal is to single-handedly translate a japanese blobber that has an insane, INSANE amount of shit you will be translating via hexadecimal until you die slumped over in front of the computer.

However for SMALLER games, like Wiz Empire 1 and 2 and 3... it is absolutely a great method to translate them because they're much smaller in scope and they usually don't have so many goddamn moving parts that it becomes relatively simple for 1 person to know everything about how the game can be translated/reverse engineered.

Ironically I once BEGGED the quick BMS creator to please make me a QBMS script for extracting all of the files inside elminage 1 and 2 and 3 and he actually came through and made me onw that works FLAWLESSLY. what's the problem?

he nevver wrote me one that let me RE-INSERT the translated text files back into the games LOL

 

[Courtier]

So since ppsspp turns out to allow replacing textures on its own, is it now possible to make a prepatched menu-patch .iso?

 

[Courtier]

Spoiler

working...sort of?

 

[aweigh]

Courtier

Download this .zip chock full of the most common-use E: Original menu-textures (3mb): https://firedrop.com/a9d8bda4128addd787deb44a7974c8b3

1. Launch PPSSPP.
2. Go into Settings -> System -> Developer Tools
3. ONLY ENABLE THE OPTION THAT SAYS "REPLACE TEXTURES". LEAVE THE THE ONE THAT RIPS THEM DISABLED.

4. Load the game Elminage 2.
5. Now go back to Dev Tools and ENABLE the option "RIP TEXTURES". Yes, I know, Bear with me.

--Now this will immediately create inside of the PPSSPP folder something new within the MEMSTICK folder--

6. Leave Elmi-2 running if you want; and go peek inside MEMSTICK and you will see a folder with the header numbering for the game Elminage 2. I think it's 4885 or something like that.

7. Enter that folder and you will see another folder titled simply "new". This "new" folder will by now be chock-full of any textures that appeared on screen while you were playing Elminage 2 as soon as you enabled "RIP TEXTURES" option.

8. Pay no mind to them, what we wanted was for PPSSPP to create that Texture folder and that "new" folder which are linked to the specific game.

9. DISABLE THE OPTION FOR RIPPING TEXTURES!

10. ENABLE THE OPTION FOR REPLACING THEM!

....and to finish this: Now simply unzip all the E: Original textures I linked you inside the 4885 folder, BUT NOT INSIDE "new". Get it?

(the game's numbering is something close that, just in case you think i'm being precise.)

11. Relaunch PPSSPP and make sure it's in OpenGL (although it works w/ d3d too but i prefer OpenGL and MAKE SURE THE OPTION FOR RIPPING TEXTURES IS OFF.

ANY textures that are placed inisde a game's texture-folder, but OUTSIDE the "new" folder; these textures will override the ones that are inside "new".

I think this specific step-by-step i just wrote , while technically it is all correct, you still need to first RIP TEXTURES from Elminage 2 so that you can RENAME the E: Original ones (placed inside the Elmi-2 game's texture folder, but outside of the "new" folder); rename the E: Original textures to the corresponding names from the Elmi-2 textures.

I *think* you can simply chuck the E: Original textures inside the Elminage 2 game's texture folder and It should simply override whatever the fuck is in htere, but what i don't know is if the "new" folder is EMPTY if the textures waiting outside will be triggered or not.

Worst-case scenario you'll have to spend 10 mins w/ rip textures option enabled and accessing all of the Elmi-2 menus you want PPSSPP to rip; then turn off the ripping function and proceed to profit by renaming your already safe and sound E: Original textures w/ the name from the MATCHING TEXTURE, i.e. obviously the point is to rename Original's battle menus with the name PPSPP gives to Elmi-2's battle menu textures... i made this all sound unbelievably more complicated than it is, trust me

Playing elmi-2 w/ english-language menus makes a WORLD OF DIFFERENCE. it's incredible how huge the feeling is while playing. My next post is going to be a brief "route" you can take to do some of the easier quests in Elmi-2 and with an aside explaning them. They're not very complicated really in fact i'd say they're LESS complicated than the quests in E: Original.

YOU don't need me to really give you any pointers at all; just read the EVENT LIST / Event Log section in the japanese wiki and that will basically tell you all you need to know in terms of where to go! However the dungeons in Elmi 2 are like 2x the size of the ones inOriginal and are mostly more devilish, have more traps, and in fact the 3rd dungeon the Wetlands you can 100% get stuck if you enter willy-nilly ! enemies are more tough and this is a good thing and there is tons more loot: there are 100 more items than in Original (elmi 2 has 704 items total vs E: Original's 600-something). there are more dungeons and maps than there are quests! Again, unlike Original; they lowered the number of quests to do and instead almost tripled the amount of dungeons/maps to explore.

I think it was a good call.

 

[aweigh]

i have no idea how you produed those effects hahaha. Just follow my steps, the post is long and wordy but the actual steps are retardedly simple.

**I can't stress enough that you should swing by the japanese wiki for Elmi-2 and go look at the event log. For example there is a fucking fantastic Dream World you can access by renting the "Economy" class room in Rose's Inn; but this event only triggers if you first go to one of the other Towns and talk to a specific character.

Link is here: https://translate.googleusercontent...8.html&usg=ALkJrhhnhhNJi5n1pFFlwzcx0z0snhaT-Q

Stuff like that! There is also a Rival party in this one as well but this time they are all God/Angel-type races and they... will.... FUUUCK you up. I ALWAYS just flee from them. Like Dorarnae said and I have said as welll: combat is MUCH tougher than the combat in E: Original. MUCH tougher. (Of course not as tough as Gothic shenanigans; but respectable shit).

the thing i took notice of is that there's less emphasis on doing quests and the main thrust is simply to just go and explore all those dungeons. If i remember correctly there are 19 dungeons... which is fucking insane.

To further the "exploration" here is a nice list of all enemies in Elminage 2 who are carrying weapons and armor worth stealing and a note explaining in which dungeon the enemy is located (it is basically a huge list of all the enemies who have shit you can steal on them and where to find them... very handy): https://translate.googleusercontent...C.html&usg=ALkJrhhIPz53GqQlw-WZ_cQ0enPuHjp1WQ

Lastly, the dungeons are WAY trickier. I actually lost a party first time I entered Wetlands area because it is full of chutes that drop your party into a nether-region of the map where the enemies sudddenly are 15 LEVELS higher than the ones above-ground.... and guess what? I was fresh out of any spell or any item or anything that would teleport me out of there and I could not physically reach the area/stairs leading to the surface because it is a twisting maze of ups and downs and every encounter was like 20 levels over my party.

i actually had to PAUSE their adventure and spend 7 hours levelling up a RESCUE SQUAD, mang, and then I DIOMANTED like a fucking boss up in those Wetlands and rescued my original party. That is the only time i have ever had that experience it was fun

Link to the jp wiki author giving his thoughts on the many possible good party/class/race combinatoins, but that is more for beginners not for you; however in this same page he gives some very important advice that you might not read elsewhere (among many other tips and tricks and some outright SPOILERS here and there such as how to create an Innocent char with all 3 magic schools, but anyway...) his single most important advice is: enter every place, and talk to every single NPC sometimes more than once, as this will always trigger something if that something is in need of triggering: https://translate.googleusercontent...9.html&usg=ALkJrhi5xh-RmswMoleW6BETDTboEDR5SA

TL;DR Elminae 2 dungeons are NOT afraid of dumping your party thru a 1-way door right into demon-ville and if you're not prepared and are angry that you were given now arnings then... git gud. All that said there are so many fucking dungeons in Elminae 2 i haven't even played half of them, hah. Could be the others are just lame and boring!

 

[Courtier]

yah I'm on it, it's because they are not named appropriately so I have to rip the shit and rename the E:O shit

 

[aweigh]

Lastly, a link to the most comprehensive section of the entire wiki which is the the "Capture" section; it is called that beause it is simply the most important facts/tips/dungeon directions/etc taken straight from the printed strategy guide for the game... and in japan they call strat. guides by the name of "(Game) Capture Book".

So this following link is where you will want to go when you need to do something esoteric, like for example when you eventually find all 6 divine items (this time it's items you're searching instead of rings; game functions exactly the same get fame find shit) you will absolutely need to read the "After Clear" section of this Capture List in order to even begin to access the post-game, which is much ,much longer and more involved than the post game in Original.

https://translate.googleusercontent...5.html&usg=ALkJrhjZi9yQWwciOinJa-6AYujPmkS0jg

In the immortal words of Dorarnae when i told him i was playing Elminage 2 while back: "Ah there are so many dungeon too many"

 

[aweigh]

Oh, neat easter egg which i realized all by myself: the Queen from Elminage 2 is obviously modeled after the Ancient Princess from Wizardry Empire

 

[Courtier]

That's a bit better.

After ripping I'm seeing a LOT of textures needing replacement, some of them having multiples which all need to be replaced or the same button won't show up in multiple screens. There are a bunch different from E:O, which will need to be fixed manually. Also for some reason sometimes it reverts back to the defaults after coming back from a menu, and when I edit one of the images it won't pick it up anymore.

 

[Epsilon]

I applaud your efforts, sadly I don't understand a word of japanese myself.

 

[Dorarnae]

がんばれ

 

[Severian Silk]

I WANT TO PLAY EVERY GAME IN ALL CAPS FROM NOW ON!!!

 

[aweigh]

the reason i always use ALL CAPS when i translate some game text is because working inside a hex editor is very time consuming and there is a lot of shit that is small that you can miss so i prefer having ALL TRANSLATED TEXT IN CAPS because IT HELPS ME IMMEDIATELY KNOW THAT'S WHAT IT IS.

IT'S ALSO FASTER TO TYPE WITH CAPS LOCK ON AND TAKING THE TIME TO USE SHIFT TO ALTERNATE UPPER/LOWER CASE TAKES TOO MUCH TIME WHEN YOU'RE LITERALLY TYPING THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF WORDS.


EDIT: funnily enough the actual game in question, elminage 2, is also ALL IN CAPS: THE JAPANESE CHARACTERS DO NOT EXIST IN LOWERCASE.

:D

 

[aweigh]

Courtier

Go to Saimaru Harbor and speak to everyone there, and one of the NPCs whom I believe is the one called Daisho (90% sure) will give you two quests:

The first one is to battle the boss Bat x5 times (he's a crafty fucker) and the Boss Bat is holed up deep within b2f of the Roipesu caves. Watch out tho, make sure your party can handle the b2f of Roipesu Caves...

The 2nd test of strength the Daisho gives you is going to Proficiency Wetlands and fighting the boss of the "nether version" of the area map. Be careful!

Go to the town of Isufarudo and talk to everyone, and someone from the "lounge" area will give you quests. The first one of which is to go to the Van Snowfield map and get Snow Berries, you need to get them 3 times and locations are random.

The reason the innkeeper Rose is sad is because she loves going to the foorest but it is being terrorized by a Taranti, soe she wants you to go kill it.Go to Highbury Forest and when you find her you can get her to stop her shenanigans by getting her a Rorufan flower (smae flower from Elminage: Original) and it's found in another map inside the same forest. Bring it back to the Taranti (that's her name!) and then talk again to the innkeeper Rose.

What else... the Daisho's wants a Unicorn horn and that is found by tangling with a rare Unicorn in the Churro Lands map.

 

[aweigh]

Oh, yeah, another easy quest I remember off-hand is there is a Leprechaun in Highbury Forest whose treasure was stolen by bandits. The bandit encounter is easy enough.

When you have completed any five quests, talk to the priest inside the starting city's Temple and he will give you a quest. He wants you to slay the undead boss of the Maidori Cemetery map. (not easy).

I can't remember how you get it but you can get an "Umbrella" simply by speaking with someone from one of the towns and if you then go to Rose's inn in the starting City and rest in her "Economy Room" (not stables, not Royal) randomly you will get transported to a beautiful dream world.

The dream world was my favorite of all of the maps and you can ONLY GO ONCE. It is very tough so make sure your party is well prepared for tough fights and some of the best loot that can be STOLEN from enemies is inside the dream world map.

In any case, make sure to read the Event Log from the wiki for concrete details. I just wanted to post some of the quests I distinctly remember.

Oh! I remember another one: in Saimaru Harbor somebody in the Wharf will talk at you, and what this person wants is for you to bring them Special Ancient Water from... the Proficiency Wetlands. I do believe the illustration of the person was even designed as to look like somebody suffering from extreme heat/sweat, heh.

 

[Dorarnae]

Oh, yeah, another easy quest I remember off-hand is there is a Leprechaun in Highbury Forest whose treasure was stolen by bandits. The bandit encounter is easy enough.

When you have completed any five quests, talk to the priest inside the starting city's Temple and he will give you a quest. He wants you to slay the undead boss of the Maidori Cemetery map. (not easy).

I can't remember how you get it but you can get an "Umbrella" simply by speaking with someone from one of the towns and if you then go to Rose's inn in the starting City and rest in her "Economy Room" (not stables, not Royal) randomly you will get transported to a beautiful dream world.

The dream world was my favorite of all of the maps and you can ONLY GO ONCE. It is very tough so make sure your party is well prepared for tough fights and some of the best loot that can be STOLEN from enemies is inside the dream world map.

In any case, make sure to read the Event Log from the wiki for concrete details. I just wanted to post some of the quests I distinctly remember.

Oh! I remember another one: in Saimaru Harbor somebody in the Wharf will talk at you, and what this person wants is for you to bring them Special Ancient Water from... the Proficiency Wetlands. I do believe the illustration of the person was even designed as to look like somebody suffering from extreme heat/sweat, heh.

you can return to it(dream world) in new game +. so you can fight all npc(or most of them, not sure)...
was easier in elminage 3, it was a normal map where you could fight all npc(even isabel from elminage)

 

[aweigh]

 

[aweigh]

 

[aweigh]

Courtier Helly MrRichard999 Siveon Dorateen Deuce Traveler Mustawd

wanted to post some pics that are basically "proof of concept" (getting the hang of how the dialog is strucured in elminage 2)

(and these following pics are BEFORE i started counting character spaces to the hexadecimal; otherwise text goes off to the right. Curiously enough I am 100% certain that the japanese devs had this problem as well because the japanese text, specifically the character dialog in elminage 2 is structured in super-duper bizarre ways. It's written/formatted completely and totally different than the japanese dialog text in Elminage: Gothic, for example. My guess is that they simply never planned on the game being in any other language so they just shit out the entire fucking script in a god-awful mess of formatting)

I already fixed the spacing on that old woman's dialog. BTW, i'm uploading a picture of the japanese word for "Oi!" so nobody thinks i'm making shit up; they did indeed have that female shop-owner greet the player with SPECIFICALLY the british "Oi!" (i assume british). Yes, I found that mighty weird as well. Like, they had to fucking spell the fucking greeting out letter by letter just so they could have her say Oi, heh.

EDIT: a few more pics, some from the 3DS version of Elminage: Gothic:

So, as promised, here is the shop-owner saying "Oi!" in japanese.

Here's some pics of the monster name translation / spell names / weapons, armors and items translation that i've done on the 3ds remix edition of elminage: Gothic... (to be honest it was very simple stuff. Not exactly "copy/paste" buuutt all of the english material for the game is already done, so yeah, it was basically "copy/romhack/paste")

and this is my #1 tool for this stuff:

EDIT x2: btw, I've begun the process of re-writing everything i've done on Elminage 2 that I did in ALL CAPS and turning everything into proper accentuation and punctuation (Bigletterfirst-then-widdle-letters)

looks much better. When Helly has time to help me translate the wiz-empire 1 dialog texts i'm going to change that one as well from ALL CAPS into normal human writing style when I start editing the dialog.

NOTE***: i just wanna point out that elminage 2 is way too massive to ever be translated by 1 person (in this case, me) who is basically doing it because it is enjoyable and it is a great way to finally learn how to at least read jap-runes. That's basically what I really want.

Seriously, the .BIN file that contains the elminage 2 game text script (and It only contains the npc dialog!) is simply retardedly massive. It's like 3-4 times the length of Elminage: Gothic, to put it in perspective.

 

[aweigh]

Dorarnae

BTW, if you, uh, "gift me" a copy of the japanese PC version of elminage: Original I am more than happy to do the same romhack-copy/paste job i'm doing on the 3DS version of elminage: Gothic.

I'd also LOVE to see how the japanese dialog text was formatted for the japanese PC version of E: ORiginal. I want to spend an entire day, hell probably 2 or 3 days straight just sitting down in front of my PC squinting at side-by-side windows of e: original PSP and e: original PC version open in my hex editor and trying to see if i can spot stuff like what was changed and where and see if i can actually end up figuring out why.

(like, in elminage 2 PSP version an NPC character's name is nigh-impossible to translate via brute-force hex editing because it's fucking steeped to the bunghole in hexadecimal operator characters which royally fuck shit when you replace them with other shit, like say, an english word-- and they did not do this, as an example, in elminage: gothic for pc there is absolutely none of that assholery present and i imagine it has to do with difference of working w/ hand-held versus a proper machine.)

I'd love to see what they changed for the pc port of E: Original in terms of how they re-arranged the original japanese text from the jap version of the PSP version of the game. I've learned a LOT by studying side-to-side the english ver. of E: Original with the jap ver. of E: Original, just endlessly poring over shit that will never be useful in life.

I've also been spending time going over the entire E: Gothic japanese NPC dialog and attempting to translate it MYSELF first, and THEN double-checking what the english translation was that made it into the game.

I'm not knocking the translation, on the contrary, it was prolly 1 single guy working for peanuts and he did a fucking awesome job but he 100% decided to work himself a little bit... less, because the e: Gothic japanese dialog text is much more flowery than what was localized into english.

(Example: in the final moments of e: Gothic the "woman", you know who, asks you tentatively something and then upon hearing your answer breaks down into sobs and gives you an item. In the japanese text she comes off as more fragile because her first dialog is a stutter, trying to ask who she is and where she is in broken words; after your answer she literally falls to the floor in and cries, quite literally as the use of the word/act of crying is specifically written in the jap text-- in the english localization it was written as a very matter-of-fact description, i.e. "She listens to your answer and before beginning to sob you are handed an item"-- super-duper different in spirit from the jap text but, of course, 100% accurate so it's still very good. Just goes to show how much something can change just from changing crying to sobbing i guess.)

(just wanted to point out that comparing existing translations is very helpful).

EDIT x3: something the localization "team" (still believe it was 1 dude) did on E: Gothic is that they took the original jap NPC dialog script and "rewrote" it using 90% only Kanjis with very, very little hiragana. I went and compared the "rewritten" kanji dialog from the localized translation script of E: Gothic w/ the original japanese text from a jap version of E: Gothic and, no, they didn't change anything that matters, but they definitely streamlined it. And i don't say that as a bad thing: it's exactly what i would need to do w/ the elminage 2 script. That shit is bananas and needs to be completely "rewritten" and streamlined in order to further an, in the end, much more accurate english translation.

I really am quite impressed w/ the translation on E: Gothic and E: Original (more so w/ the E: Gothic translation).

 

[aweigh]

TOOK the "help_text" file from the PC ver. of E: Gothic and just fucking rammed it down the 3DS .ROM's throat, heh. It has been surprisingly benign romhacking a compressed .3DS game but, i'm excited for tools to start appearing for extracting... that thing i did the copy/pasting the english-language "help_text" file from one version to the 3ds version it's downright retarded the way I did it by editing the entire .ROM. It's like using a broom to hammer a nail, heh. But whatevs.

monster names, item names, spell names, and now i'm on to the "help text" (i.e. feedback text) and then on to the battle text and then i'll start fiddling around with the same method of "copy/pasting" via romhacking the english-language dialog from the PC version. it's gonna be tricky cos the japanese text in the 3ds .ROM is fuuuucked up, super compressed super shit to work with and it's instantly obvious there is no way the english sentences will fit in the space they used. That's where "tools" would come in handy via being able to extract all the seperate container archives inside the game and work directly with the "script" files (they're usually a .BIN file).

It definitely has plenty of new stuff (i already ripped apart every file inside the 3ds rom) there's 250 new items which are all mostly the animal-type enemies' weapons (claws +1, tentacle pods, stuff like that; in E: Original that stuff was mostly for the party's Brawler, especially some swag dragon claws)-- While I approve 100% with bringing back their old way of speccing armor pieces in their wizardry empire games (low-def armor usually had bonuses and that bonus was usually increased THACO, i.e. the "to-hit" chance; it made choosing each character's armor pieces very fun and very tactical); I do think they kind of went off the deep end with the huge accuracy bonuses they gave to stuff, such as the +2 on the Obi sash, something which immediately trivializes the game's 1st dungeon as any half-assed party wearing Obi sashes will never miss and stuff. I'm not saying a game should be "punishing": i'm saying the game was already extremely well-balanced. It was EASILY starfish's most balanced RPG ever in every facet: itemization, enemy encounters and enemy design, dungeons and dungeon/maze creation and navigation; a Wizardry-inspired spell system that, because it is a straight copy, works PERFECTLY; almost perfectly balanced classes and races to the point where even after hundreds and hundreds of hours of playing E: Gothic on PC i am still marvelling at just how expertly the itemization and the balancing curves throughout the game were implemented. I've yet to play a game where races had such seemingly "small" differences yet managed to perpetually remain irrevocably important decisions for the player during char-gen: in a lesser game the fact that a Dragon-newt has 22 STR and a Dwarf has 20 STR would not matter whatsoever, but in E: Gothic not only do those 2 final points matter... but they also don't mean either one is better than the other. Anyhoo, having said all that having plenty of fun navigating the new dungeon floor maps. I'm hoping against hope they really went all out and put in some REALLY crazy new floors in the big, important dungeons, hehe. I hope

btw, what other awesome games does CITRA run well? i.e. games that are not whiz-bang 3D, basically like Elminage wihch is barely moving pictures.

EDIT: oh, and Dorarnae, what is the code that you can enter in the far-right menu screen on the World Map left-to-right "menu tabs" ?????

I know there is one of them that's for loading pictures or something for portraits, but the last option simply straight up asks you to enter a long ass password.

what is that about?